Note: the publish date is a bit off: it looks like we forgot to publish this almost a decade ago!
Chilean food is not very interesting until you get to the ocean. Almost every meal starts with bland white bread served with salsa and possibly butter. You can't order tap water: you have to pay 2 dollars for mineral water. One neat thing is that most places offer "natural juice". I put this in quotations though because we learned we had to be sure to ask them not to add any extra sugar in it. Normally these were blended on order and tasted great, although on one occasion it was obviously pre-made, possibly with artificial ingredients. On one occasion I got fresh-squeezed juice from a street vendor: she had a shopping cart with
For an entree there is always a choice of lomo (a slightly tough steak) or chicken. For a side there is usually mashed potatoes or fries although sometimes only white rice. You do get some other vegetables, but they are not as easy to come by and not always of great quality.
The one common Chilean cuisine that is interesting to a foodie is empanadas. You usually get some meat and vegetables mixed in a tasty sauce. Unfortunately we try to limit our bread consumption and empanadas are surrounded in dough.
My advice is to mostly eat as cheaply as possible inland and save up for the coast! The seafood is fresh and tastes great. There is an variety of seafood available, and this seems to lead to much more interesting dishes. See our Chiloe entry for writings about the great seafood there.
Nikki did a lot of cooking while we were in Santiago. We appreciate that we were able to easily buy liver and that the meat was good. We also found a butcher in Villarica that sold cheap pates, head cheese, and sausages. The regularly available pate was a horrible industrial blend with soy and other junk. The regularly available head cheese was decent. We found it challenging to buy good fresh vegetables. We opened a lot of avocados that already had portions going bad. We did find that with enough persistence one could usually find a store with fresher fruits and vegetables, but the default in Chile wasn't that great.
Breakfast in Chile is almost non-existent. It starts with the same tasteless white bread they always have, except you are going to get butter instead of salsa. There may be a small amount of cheese available that can be placed inside the bread and then microwaved. There is usually also a jam or marmalade. There is always tea and coffee, both of the instant variety. You can add some of their ultra-pasteurized milk and sugar to either. And that is it! They seem to be saving up for a big lunch. To me the worse part of all of this is that the places you stay at act like they are doing you a huge favor by providing this to you for free. You could easily transfer these items out of a refrigerator and into the microwave yourself and poor the hot water from a thermos. But they ask you at what time you are going to be eating breakfast, creating a burden on you for when to appear, and making you have to decide whether any of it is even worth it and how to explain to them that you would rather not eat their breakfast.
If you stay at a hotel that offers an american-style breakfast you can get eggs and lunch meat, and places catering to foreigners may also provide cereal. But if you avoid bread and cereal like Nikki and I, you will have little chance of getting a full breakfast.
Fasting until lunch is a good approach, but be aware that most places will only serve breakfast (if they are open) up until noon. Some of those restaurants might have a decent breakfast option, but you don't want to be in the position of being hungry and wondering around trying to figure this one out. Your best option is to stay at a Hostal where you have usage of a kitchen. I was able to use the kitchen at every Hostal we stayed at. Some didn't really want you in the kitchen, but you can at least microwave food. Most hostals advertise a community kitchen and will help you figure out how to use any kitchen equipment. Making your own breakfast when travelling means you can get up whenever you feel like it, and sometimes you are going to want to leave very early in the morning to get to your destination. It also means you have a cheap breakfast, that you can skip lunch if you are busy travelling, and that you won't feel as bad about spending more money on dinner. We would generally eat potatoes (which you can microwave if that is all they have) mashed with generous amounts of butter (which is sold everywhere, and keeps very well - it is fine to not refrigerate for a few days, particularly if you keep it away from any intense heat. We also ate eggs, which again do not have to be constantly refrigerated. In Chile, and in most other parts of the world you are likely to be buying eggs that are not refrigerated. We also ate avocados and fruit for breakfast, which generally don't require refrigeration. This may sound like a boring breakfast to some, but it is a 100% real food breakfast and it is filling (just eat more mashed potatoes!).
Eating meals in Chile is not that dissimilar from the U.S. The key difference seems to be that things are less rushed. A waiter will never bring you a check for the meal. The only time we didn't have to flag down the waiter for our check was when we asked for it when he brought the food out.
If you find some good (usually artisan, not from a store) dried fruit, snatch it up- it makes for a great travel food. We found some great artisan jerky in Patagonia, but generally you will have a hard time finding good jerky. We didn't find much in the way of nuts in Chile other than peanuts and perhaps some trail mixes. I discovered that Avocados make a great hiking food (
fairly compact calories) with a sturdy yet easy to open peel that don't go bad too quickly as long as you don't squish them.
Processed food is everywhere in Chile. There is highly refined bread at every meal. There are cafes that in addition to coffee and tea serve mostly just bread, cake, or juice (with sugar added unless you tell them not to). Every corner store in Chile usually has some real food (which you might not find in the U.S.), but much more processed food. You can't judge the volume of food eaten based on this: there is more processed food probably in large part because it isn't perishable. There were also a lot of stands selling nothing but processed food, and there is an equivalent of an ice cream truck - people that walk through parks selling ice cream out of a cooler.
It wouldn't be as bad if people just risked their health with junk food. The problem is that it also comes in a wrapper, and that wrapper ends up being litter, and Chileans seem to mostly ignore litter. An otherwise nice beach becomes unsightly. The other main item of litter was cigarettes.
There is a great deal more smoking in Chile than the US, and much less prohibition against smoking indoors. If you try to sit outside in a restaurant to enjoy the fresh air you are likely to instead encounter smokers nearby. And if you sit inside in a cafe, you may also encounter smoke.
Chileans seem to be a few decades behind the US in health. Chileans are catching up with Americans in their consumption of processed food. Although being slightly overweight is starting to be common, it is rare to see obesity. It is interesting to note that
Smoking suppresses appetites, increases metabolism, and the dramatic reduction of smoking in the U.S. could be a key reason why obesity in the US increased with such suddenness.
