Olive Oil and Gasoline is my project to encourage people to travel, eat and cook with courage.  There is an amazing world out there full of amazing places, people and things to eat.  It isn’t the dangerous place that the media and governments would have us believe.  99% of people are good and will welcome you to into their country with a smile if you’re nice, respectful and have a reasonable capacity for intelligence.  Curiosity about the world is what got these countries populated in the first place by different groups of primitive humans millions of years ago.  It’s built into our genetic code to for some of us explore

There is something innately curious inside the human spirit.  Some of us are more than happy to live most our lives in the towns we grew up in.  Some of us are more than happy to travel to and fro all over the globe for no other reason than they believe that there is not enough time to see it all.  Like I said there is nothing wrong with staying where you’re comfortable but there is something to be said for those of us that seek out discomfort if it gets us some form of discovery.  Even if it’s only slight discomfort it takes effort, time and money to achieve this discomfort.  Why?  Because there is joy out there.  There is joy on the summit of a new mountain to you.  There is joy scuba diving off Komodo Island.  There is joy getting muddy and dirty on a single track in the jungle next to Tikal, that looks like another planet.  It hard but it’s so much fun. 

I can’t stop.  I’m fully addicted.  What I want to do is to help people get over any fears they might have about taking a risk and going somewhere new.

That’s what Olive Oil and Gasoline is.  A record.  A story.  A chef that thought he might be able to ride around the world, getting more and more comfortable with himself, comfortable never being in his home country and more comfortable with every new place he visited.  While taking in as much culture and information as possible.  I want to help people to feel less fear, less anxiety of what is out there.  It’s an incredible rock hurtling through space at over 100,000km/h so your life is already in peril sitting on the couch.  It’s fun out there and I promise it’s much safer than your imagination would have you believe.  We’ve been tricked into believing everyone is out to get us.

Brennan Dates