London Ninja

There are two ways to get food in London:

1. Takeaway
2. Eat-In

People do not mix the two in Europe. When you don’t finish you food, you don’t finish your food. It’s as simple as that. I learned this after asking for a “box” a couple of times after not finishing my food. The staff get confused when you ask to take your food to go. I’m not sure what there is to understand here. As a matter of fact, I was with a group of Dutchmen from work at Pizza Express, a chain of..you guessed it….pizza joints. It made complete sense to me: Big pizza + pizza joint = plenty of boxes to allow for taking your food home with you. Nope.

Everybody looked at me like I was crazy. Many jabs were thrown my way like:

“When you going to eat that?”
“Are you going to heat that up in the morning and eat it?”

One of the dudes straight up said “Wow. I’ve never seen that before.”

My reply was, “Dudes, I’m just trying to be carbon-friendly. You savages.”

I had decided that my answer to this would be that I’m an environmentalist, which I’m really not. I enjoy driving my V8 Ford Explorer and throwing all my stacks of paper and cans into a giant sweltering smoking bon fire to practice being able to make a 9-1-1 smoke signal in case I get stranded on a deserted island after a giant electro-magnetic sonic boom brings my plane down and I have to survive on an island full of polar bears, smokey ghostly entities, and a rogue clan that hunts the survivors for their children….but I digress…

I’ve tried to take my food to-go a couple of other times to a look of amazement and bewilderment. Really, it’s a look of WTF…as if I just asked for a serving of buffalo penis to be seared lightly with a lychee brioche. I don’t know if it’s just that everyone in the UK eats all the food they order, food in the UK is bad and therefore patrons don’t want to take it home, or if people here are just against putting food in a box. Regardless, I’m going to continue to take my food to go… I’m carbon friendly after all, you savage.