Living where I do (on the east London/Essex border), I would no longer consider any food as being "ethnic". There is such a diverse mix of food shops and restaurants locally from Polish to eastern European, Asian to West Indian, Italian to Vietnamese, Greek to French, Thai to Cypriot, and even a Brazilian restaurant, as well as fusion restaurants and you can buy, cook or eat almost anything. How different it was in the 1960s when I was a teenager. The first time I had ever eaten any authentic foreign food was when I went to stay for a few weeks with a penpal in what was then a tiny village in Austria in 1964. The food was to die for - all those lovely cakes and the "sharing food" we had at lunch time. I had never had wild rabbit before (ours came from the hutches in the shed at the end of our garden!), and as for the beer (my parents would have had a fit!). This was closely followed by trips to Italy (Rimini, Rome, Vatican City, and all points inbetween), Switzerland (Montreux, and also a trip to Stresa in Italy), and back to Austria but this time instead of the lakes near Salzburg we went to another tiny village high up in the mountains east of Innsbruck). In 1969 I went to work in Germany (near Stuttgart) in a small town which was a mix of Turkish, Greek and Yugoslav communities. We could also buy French cheeses in the market. While I was there, I went to work in Greece as well for a few weeks (combined holiday/job). It was such a learning curve. I had never had goats cheese or sweet peppers or watermelons or octopus before, and I had never ever lived in a place that had no mains electricity, gas or water supply. The only time we had meat in that Greek village was when the donkey disappeared! I came home the following year and moved to Brixton in south west London where there was a large West Indian community - you could buy practically anything in Brixton market, which incidentally is in Electric Avenue, the one made famous in the song of the same name by Eddie Grant. After that I moved back to Hornchurch and the foodie experience came to a full stop - you couldn't even buy peppers, let alone goats cheese. My extended family is now a mix of English, Irish, Scottish, Greek, American, Peruvian and Ethiopian, with a smattering of Indian and even Palestinian along the way. Apart from the German influence of when I lived in Germany, my late cousin lived in Bahrain and then Saudi Arabia from the 1950s, finally settling in Spain a couple of years before his recent death. I even went to school and later with a girl whose father worked for the Shah of Persia and started investigating Persian/Iranian food. I have worked in various hospitals for a mix of Sri Lankan, Sudanese, Iraqi, Tibetan and Pakistani doctors as well as all sorts of nationalities in the nursing and admin staff, all of whom used to bring in food for me to try. I have cookery books and recipes from all over the world and try recipes from them on a regular basis, apart from having my own folder of favourite recipes. I can't possibly count any of these as being "ethnic" as they are all types of food which I would normally eat. In fact I have even been known to eat English food on occasions
