Nowadays, claiming that hummus and falafel are Israeli dishes merely inflames Palestinian passions rather than encouraging people to sit down together at a table and enjoy some together. In our own time food has, as Heine tells us, even become political, with Zionists, who felt that a new country needed a national dish, appropriating hummus and falafel. Food can also be used, as it was in the Mughal Empire’s kitchens, to demonstrate one’s social standing or power, and court chefs down the ages were constantly inventing new dishes to highlight their ruler’s glory and prestige. Food represents hospitality, too in some cultures (notably Arab), one is required, by the unwritten laws of hospitality, to feed even enemies, and once they sit one’s table they must be left unmolested. We in rich countries understand food not as a privilege, but the nearest thing we have, along with shelter, to a basic right, and when people are deprived of it through poverty, misgovernment or famine we respond, or should, with such things as soup kitchens (which seem, as Peter Heine tells us, to have originated in the Middle East) or food aid.įood is, after all, one of the common threads which bind all human beings together, and a prolonged lack of it can do serious damage to our humanity. There’s a rather ungrammatical saying which goes “sometimes I eats to live, but mostly I lives to eat.” That’s why we have cookery books we love to eat and we love the things that go along with eating, namely social interaction and sheer sensual pleasure.įood can also put us in touch with other cultures without our having to leave home and brave the unpleasantness of modern air travel.
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