Currently browsing posts about: Food-culture

I’ve been sent a copy of the Department of State’s Diplomatic Culinary Partnership Initiative. called “Setting the Table for Diplomacy.”

Its mission statement:

The Diplomatic Culinary Partnerships initiative builds on Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s vision of “smart power” diplomacy, which embraces the use of a full range of diplomatic tools, by utilizing food, hospitality and the dining experience as ways to enhance how formal diplomacy is conducted, cultivating cultural understanding and strengthening bilateral relationships through the shared experience of food.

I particularly like the idea of “using food as a foundation for public diplomacy programs to learn about different cultures and discuss important related issues such as nutrition, sustainability and food security.”

Yes!

Everybody eats.  This is my kind of diplomacy.

Jonathan Deutsch and Natalya Murakhver, editors, They Eat That?  A Cultural Encyclopedia of Weird and Exotic Food from around the World, ABC-CLIO, 2012.

The editors, both graduates of my NYU department, got their students, colleagues, and friends to write short essays about nearly 100 foods considered weird, at least by someone.  The list includes foods that are anything but weird in other cultures—seitan, durian, nettles, haggis, huitlaloche, vegemite, but also those hardly ever available to even the most serious eaters.  On that list I would put camel, cavy, iguana, and walrus flipper.  As for what I would eat, stinky cheese, yes.  Urine, no way.  The entries put the foods in cultural context and provide references.  Most come with recipes.  This book is fun.

Tracie McMillan, The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table, Scribner 2012.

McMillan followed the footsteps of Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) and went to work at low wage jobs.  She has plenty to say about how hard it is to do them and how little they pay; she provides balance sheets to prove it.  Like Ehrenreich, she’s a good writer and her stories are compelling.  Eating well in America, she says, is difficult—bordering on impossible—for people who don’t have much money.

Thanks to Fred Tripp for making sure that no serious foodie misses yesterday’s Wall Street Journal report on eating rats in Viet Nam. Here is the food system connection: Because so many Vietnamese birds were destroyed to prevent the spread of bird flu, people are eating snakes and cats instead. With these predators out of the way, the rat population has exploded and lunch seems an excellent use for them. Interesting idea. A barbecue stand in Washington Square anyone?