IT'S BEEN 30-ODD YEARS since I left its shores, but there are many aspects of the American Way that I still miss, such as New England's forests in October, and lightning bugs and possums, and the exquisite agony that comes to all fans of the Detroit Tigers. But mostly I miss corned beef hash.

Actually, it's not only that. My sense of food deprivation over those decades extends over a whole range of American gustatorial delights, including grits, Vienna sausages, creamed chipped beef ("SOS," and ask any relative who has been in the Army what it means) and bacon you can fry to a proper crisp.

The life of an expatriate roaming the globe loses a lot of its romance at the dinner table. Glamour goes down the toilet with the arrival of a steak that only hours before was a water buffalo that dropped dead of old age on a Saigon street corner, or the sheep's eyes that a Saudi sheik insists you munch on because you are just his best buddy ever.

Some years back, I settled in Britain, and there's much of the place that appeals. There's the warm beer you can use either to soothe your innards on a chilly summer's day or to drown slugs in the garden, and a national sport that has silly mid-off as a player position, and a sense of tradition that embraces even its traffic (the average speed of which in London was faithfully maintained in 1999, just as it was in 1899, at 11 miles per hour).

What does not appeal is much of its food. The Scots, for instance, glory in a dish called haggis, which consists of a sheep's stomach stuffed with its liver, heart, lungs and, for all I know, its toenails and bicuspids, plus oatmeal. The Welsh do unspeakable things with leeks, and the English peddle something called "bubble and squeak," a concoction of potatoes, cabbage and onions.

And in London, I've steered clear of anything that goes under the label of "meat pie" ever since I read about a Fleet Street barber named Sweeney Todd, who turned his tonsorial clientele into ingredients for next door's ye olde pie shoppe.

But in the food halls of Britain, there is nary a sign of proper victuals such as Vienna sausages (they have them in Vienna, a few hundred miles south in Austria, but they don't come out of a can so they don't taste right), or grits for whomping up into a feast with a can of red salmon, or corned beef hash for frying and topping with a runny fried egg.

Gastronomically speaking, I lived far better in Beirut, where between bullets and bombs I could dash down to the corner grocery and get all the corned beef hash I wanted. I could get the stuff back to my room, 607, at the Commodore Hotel and fry it on a hot plate (although I did get into a spot of bother over leaving circular scorch marks in the carpet).

British civilization gave us the Industrial Revolution and radar and tea bags and "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?" but cannot, at the dawn of a new Millennium, manage the import of a single can of corned beef hash. Remedial action must be, and has been, taken.

The spirit of Hands Across the Seas lives on, in the form of a network of sympathetic friends in America who now send me Care Packages - kind souls like Dottie Brooks in New York and Terry Wooten in Connecticut and Al Benn in Alabama and others who keep me supplied in goodies ranging from Moon Pies to Wick Fowler's 5-Alarm Texas Chili makings.

Some even travel to these shores, often risking the curious prying and occasional hysterical laughter from customs officials on both sides of the Atlantic to get their Care Packages to a beleaguered old ex-pat pal here. (It takes guts. Customs folk normally have the Gestapo's sense of humor mixed with the innate trust of the IRS.)

The latest were Texans Paul Harral and his lovely wife Harriet, who arrived a few days ago with a resupply of four cans of corned beef hash, six of Vienna sausages and a half-dozen packs of Wick Fowler's chili magic. My eyes lit up and my stomach said howdy, as the old song goes, and we repaired immediately to a pub for fish and chips all round.

Mind you, this cache has to be secreted away, out of the field of vision of my very English wife Elizabeth, who tends to ask awkward questions like, "What is this rubbish anyway?" and then rolls her eyes when I attempt to explain the rubbish - pardon, the food.

(Elizabeth hasn't forgiven the Americans for Spam, which I share with cats Teddy Bear, Ali Magraw, Currant Bun and Penelope when she isn't looking, and she hides the stuff way back in a cobweb-laced cupboard when visitors come a-calling. We trot out the American grub when she's out of aroma range.)

It is, in fact, the nature of ex-pats from all nations to lust for home-grown goodies once they are out of sight of their native soil. On behalf of an American pal in Brussels, I've journeyed all the way to Norwich, Connecticut, to buy five shirts because he insisted the shop there was the only one in the world that makes the sort he liked.

At various news agency bureaus, I have helped organize Care Packages of toilet paper and sanitary napkins for American co-workers in Moscow and deodorants for one in Tokyo. The British Broadcasting Corporation sends food hampers of turkey and fois gras and champagne to its journalists in places like Beirut and Cairo and Johannesburg.

Even governments get into the act. The British Foreign Office once used its "diplomatic pouch" system to get a supply of booze to its embassy in bone-dry Saudi Arabia. The "pouch" in this case was a piano.

Unfortunately, the "pouch" took a bit of a battering en route, and its contents were rather damaged. Which prompted a Saudi customs official to telephone the ambassador: "Sir, please to pick up your diplomatic pouch immediately. The piano has sprung a leak."

Presumably, the British now look the other way when shipments of sheep's eyes roll in from Riyadh. Every ex-pat needs a Care Package now and again.

Thought for the Week: If you must choose between two evils, pick the one you've never tried.

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