In a Vietnamese soup shop in Seoul

At home I try to eat sustainably. When travelling I just try to eat. "Huh, I wonder what I just ordered... kitten noodle soup? Well, that's a shame. Pass the soy sauce."

Food's interesting because it's such a huge part of our lives and it's so easy to get wrong. For example, lots of Japanese and especially Korean food comes in a bunch of little bowls. Sometimes it's for mixing together, sometimes it isn't. You just have to know. Similarly, you just have to know whether you're supposed to eat with your hands or a fork, whether something is a condiment or an integral part of the dish, whether there's a big chunk of wasabi, chili or raw garlic sitting right there that you probably don't want to eat in one bite. And then, is it ok to slurp from the bowl? Can you double-dip? Can you ask for it without meat? With chips?

There's a good chance that you're doing something culturally weird, like ordering porridge for dinner or soup for breakfast. Or something disgusting, like tearing bread with your left hand in a country where the left hand is unclean. At any moment you're probably being rude, ridiculous or gross and people might not tell you. So it goes.

Lots of types of Japanese restaurant bring you food and a hot plate or stewpot and leave you to it. Wait, come back! I don't have basic life skills here. How do you do okonomiyaki again?

People tend to not get offended if you eat food wrong (probably apart from the poo-hand situation), because you're just an idiot foreigner who doesn't know how to behave. If you're polite and friendly, you can get away with it being part of your idiot foreigner charm and people are lovely about sitting down and showing you how to debone a fish or whatever. You really can cause offense through ignorance in other ways though. Tipping, for example. Tipping is the worst. Over here you don't do it at all (hurray!) but on the first day of my very first ever trip, I had a room go quiet when a restaurant owner held out the (very small) change and I picked up the coins from his palm. It was a keep the change sort of place, and you're supposed to know that. Try not tipping for drinks in the US and see how quickly you get served next time. Tipping is hard. They should hand out informational leaflets at airports.

The big thing you can do wrong here is put your feet in the wrong place. Shoes off at the door, slippers in the house, bathroom shoes in the bathroom. No slippers on tatami floors. Undoubtedly other rules that I don't know and have broken fifty times. At the hostel today I hovered outside until the guy came out to see why I wasn't coming in. "Should I take off my shoes?" "No, of course not! Shoes are ok here." Huh. It's all part of the mystery of travel, I guess.