How To Get Politics into Food

Arabs manage to insinuate the Middle East Arab-Israel conflict into almost everything, including food.

There is something called Terra Madre.

As the NYTimes reports:

The event, first held two years ago, is produced by Slow Food, an international association that mixes food politics with culinary pleasure. The association, which now has 80,000 members in 100 countries, catalogs foods and techniques that are on the verge of extinction.

From last Thursday to Monday, more than 8,000 people turned the building that held the 2006 Olympic speed skating oval into a kind of culinary United Nations. Chefs and people who like to eat mixed with the people who actually farm, herd, fish or otherwise create the foods that represent what Slow Food is trying to promote.

Basque shepherds mulled over nomadic herding with Mongolian camel tenders. Indian rice growers mingled with Maine potato farmers. Fishermen traded tastes of wild Northwest smoked salmon and Sicilian Favignana bottarga. And everyone partied with the wild Louisiana shrimpers.

So, what's my point?

Read on:-

Thursday’s opening day ceremony featured a parade of flags from 150 nations. Iraq and Iran, two countries President Bush defined as part of the “axis of evil,” received some of the warmest applause, as did the delegation from Lebanon. The crowd also went crazy for the Peruvian flag bearer, but it might have been for the pink hat.

Later in the ceremony, Kamal Mouzawak, founder of the farmers’ market in Beirut — billed as Lebanon’s first — provided one of the most crystallizing moments. Beirut has lost almost all of its public gathering places, which makes the farmers’ market so vital, he said. Without a place to sell local products, farmers lose hope. And without local food traditions, people lose hope, he said.

“If you don’t dream, you don’t exist,” he told the crowd. “So let’s dream together.”

Amazing, eh?