I made a flying visit to Paris last week. Actually, I went by train, and who doesn’t love a long train journey? You get to idle away a few guilt-free hours, staring out of the window, reading the paper and drinking coffee. All with no sense of urgency. Such small pleasures are rare these days.
Rarer still is finding anything decent to eat while in transit. The travelling public is the target audience of every junk food purveyor, and even the train buffet offers no respite from their efforts. If you want to eat real food, you have to pack your own.
That is an easy enough task, if you are willing to invest a little time in the preparation. You’ll also need a nifty little cool bag, to complete the aura of anorak you can expect to exude. But who cares? Remember when you’d go on school bus trips with your home-made sandwiches, and have the whole lot scoffed before the driver had even started the engine? There was – and still is – a lovely thrill of anticipation when travelling with little parcels of food.
So with that in mind, here are six items that made it into my cool bag, and why.
1. Rolled up slices of smoked, wild Alaskan salmon (along with half a lemon)
Wild Alaskan salmon is bright orangey-pink. It looks like a classic case of gawdy over-dye, but the colour is entirely natural and it’s due to a carotenoid called astaxanthin, which the salmon obtain from their diet of shrimp and krill.
Astaxanthin is an antioxidant that has been widely studied for its health-promoting effects on vision, skin, immunity, and the heart, as well as for its anti-inflammatory, antitumor and antidiabetic properties.
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