If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.

The line is a blunt admonition to travelers: meaningful travel requires openness rather than judgment. By listing common points of cultural friction—food, etiquette, religion, and ordinary social contact—the speaker argues that refusing engagement turns travel into mere displacement, not encounter. The implied ethic is one of humility and curiosity: to enter another place is to accept, at least provisionally, its ways and to meet its people on their own terms. The closing “you might better stay home” frames cultural avoidance as a kind of self-imposed isolation, suggesting that fear and contempt impoverish both the traveler’s experience and cross-cultural understanding.