Travelling to make television programmes means I have some unusual food memories. In Pasto, Colombia, I was taken to a restaurant where I chose my meat for the evening from a cage of white rats. It tasted perfectly good - like rabbit.

Many foreigners imagine that Latin American cuisine is spicy, but Chilean food, on the whole, is extremely bland: salt, vinegar, mayonnaise, and more salt are the four basic condiments. Black pepper is conspicuously absent, and not only from the food - it is also rarely available even on request.

There's nothing very exotic about classic Chilean street food. Imagine a hot dog hidden beneath an explosion of mayonnaise and ketchup. Cost? Twenty-five to 30 pence. This is the completo, an all-purpose solution to breakfast, lunch or, once, the curiously English teatime snack enjoyed by Chileans of all ages.

Food Quotes