One of the challenges of traveling is eating something resembling your usual diet. Coming from California, I have an advantage in the fresh produce department: the state has a long growing season, temperate climate and many farmers markets.

I get breakfast at my hotel each morning. From the start I have been serving myself tomatoes and mushrooms to mix with my scrambled eggs even though I would not normally eat either of those things for breakfast. It isn’t a bad mixture: I eat it because I am constantly stalking fruit and vegetables on menus.

On the first day, I also served myself some fruit salad, which seemed to consist mostly of green apples. Alas, they looked lovely because they had been doused liberally with lemon juice to preserve their color. Sour apples with sour lemon — no. I wondered why they hadn’t served them as a cooked compote. By the next day I had learned to pick the pineapple and grapes out of the mixture, leaving the apples behind. Yesterday I scored a single orange segment and this morning a bite-sized chunk of watermelon.

My first night here I dined out in town, choosing a French restaurant where I could get steak frites. I started with a cup of soup because it was tomato and red pepper soup, a basic puree that could have used a bit of cream to smooth it out. The steak and the frites (skinny, salty French fries) were delicious, but the best thing on the plate was a little mound of watercress drizzled with tomato vinaigrette. I could have eaten an entire plate of that.

I had dinner at the hotel last night because rain threatened and it is more than a mile to town and back. I had perused the menu in the bar and was leaning heavily toward Caesar salad to get all of that crunchy green romaine. When I sat down at the table, however, the server informed me that there were no salads. Why would that be? I have no idea.

I ordered pasta carbonara and asked if the side of vegetables listed on the menu was available. Yes, it was.

“What kind of vegetables do you have?” I asked.

“What kind of vegetables do you want?” was the answer. “Tomatoes? Onions?”

“Something green, please. Not peas. Green beans? Broccoli? Broccolini? Spinach?”

I got a lovely little bowl of green beans, broccoli and courgette (zucchini), which I don’t think of as a green vegetable. The chef threw in a little butter and some flecks of parsley.

My pasta came flecked with parsley as well, but so devoid of Parmesan that it wasn’t salty or sweet, but merely bland. I added pepper from the table liberally and made a note not to order carbonara here again. The shallow, flat bowl was full: a lot of pasta.

If I eat lemon tart, will the lemon count as a fruit? It came with dabs of orange curd and a tiny pool of raspberry sauce. I ate those, pushing aside the chocolate curls and something that looked like red confetti. In my opinion, chocolate curls do not belong on a lemon dessert — a wee puff of whipped cream perhaps, but less is more.

The ubiquitous vegetable here appears to be peas. English peas or garden peas are possibly my least favorite vegetable, although I like snow peas and sugar snap peas eaten raw. Once again, my Californian upbringing.

I haven’t yet resorted to hunting up a shop and buying things I can eat raw. In the days when you could travel with a pocket knife, self-styled picnics were easier.

How do you procure fruit and vegetables when you are traveling?