Book excerpt: The Travel Tales Collection, Food & Drink, No. 7, February 2015, is part of Michael Brein’s Collections travel tales series and contains among the best travel stories from Michael’s huge collection of travel tales that he has gathered in interviews with nearly 1,750 world travelers and adventurers during his four decades of travel to more than 125 countries throughout the world. Travel Tales Collections are groups of very interesting similar travel stories of a kind on a variety of very specific travel subjects, themes, or countries, such as close calls, great escapes, pickpocketing, scams, safety and security in travel, Paris, Morocco, Mexico, and so on. Eventually, several hundred Collections on all sorts of specific travel subjects, themes, and countries will be available on all the major eReaders. The Travel Tales Collection No. 7 for February 2015, Food & Drink, includes Michael's own personal travel tales plus those of others of the sorts of food and drink—dining & eating experiences—that you can have in your travels. Of course, Michael's own food and drink stories are fairly unique to him, but somewhat similar things may happen to you. To Michael, eating and drinking has been sort of a paradox: On the one hand, you want what you ingest to be safe, reliable, and fairly known; on the other hand you want to try new things, which involves taking a little bit of risk. After-all, ‘you are (sort of) what you eat,’ and you ‘get’ what you eat or drink, often. Negative food and drink experience are almost always unsettling and rare surprises that do pop up now and again in your travels. Michael hopes the bad experiences don't happen to you. But if they do, hopefully, you're all the wiser for reading about them in these pages.