Sydney's Greatest Secret

Here it is. The big one. The food blog.

Whenever I have traveled anywhere in the past, whether it be to a new city an hour away from home or to a different continent, the question I always get upon my return is, "What was the food like?" Well, let me tell you a story.

Early in 2016 I decided to go vegetarian. What does that mean exactly? It means I didn't eat meat. Period. Eggs, milk, honey, etc. were all still part of my regular diet. The point was, if you had to kill an animal to get it, I was not touching that. My reasons were varied, but the short story is that I watched a documentary in my Media Literacy class about the mistreatment of animals raised for slaughter. I thought, "Hey, that's kind of messed up," so I stopped eating meat as my own way to advocate for ethically raised meat.

Flash forward to the summer of 2016 when I'm in Paris, France. I went in vowing to abandon being vegetarian. I did. For about a week. I ate the shrimp and chicken my host mother put on the table, but when it came to providing food for myself, it was back to being vegetarian. It turns out I just was not used to eating meat, and I wasn't mentally prepared to dive back in.

When I got home and began my serious preparation for my journey down under, I realized just how important meat was to the traditional Australian diet. I mean, come on, their national food is basically just a pie stuffed with lamb, beef or pork.

Anyway, as I realized what I was about to get myself into, I began to reintroduce meat into my daily meals. But, as is usually the case, there was a problem. I don't like red meat anymore. Let me be perfectly clear. I can eat red meat. The human body does not start to reject something just because it hasn't eaten it in a while. That's the brain.

But I digress. The point is, I can eat red meat, and sometimes I even like it. However, steak is rarely in my list of cravings. After eating my first kangaroo steak and deciding it was definitely not for me, I got a little concerned. I'd been researching for months about this country, and everything I found led me to believe that BBQ, kangaroo steak, and meat pies were the only truly Australian food.

Boy, were they wrong.

This country...this beautiful country with its endless strange birds that scream at you from the treetops has an affinity for a certain cooked bird that saved me from fear of regressing to Asian food to seem cultured. It's called the chicken burger.

But, wait, Sarah, isn't that just a chicken sandwich? In all honesty, yeah, pretty much, but these babies are everywhere. Every burger joint in this shining, sweaty city has a chicken burger option. Macca's (McDonald's) has a chicken Big Mac. And if we're being honest, it's not just burgers. It's wraps. It's pockets. It's pies. It's baguettes. These people put chicken in literally anything that you could consider bread, and it is Sydney's greatest secret.