No Reservations in my dreams
I've been watching Anthony Bourdain's show with Kevin at night while we eat dinner, and yesterday I watched a couple older episodes on my own. He goes to really neat places, shows you some of the culture, tells you a little of the history, and then unerringly heads for the most delicious food available. I've seen him in South Boston and Macau, in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, in the more obviously foodie Spain, as well as in terrifyingly poor Haiti, in the mythic Amazon, and in beautiful, historic Cuba. Wherever he goes, he opens himself up to the people and experiences, and is happy to continue proving that most people are very nice, and that most of what people proclaim delicious, Bourdain enjoys equally. The Saudi Arabia trip was special in that a viewer wins the opportunity to show him around their destination of choice, so a woman who is a filmmaker in S.A. (and has a license to do so without a man present!) invites him to her house, and takes him to all kinds of places to have as many exotic meals as can be arranged. It might not be Anthony's first bite of lizard, but it's hers, and of camel, too. Milk fed baby camel is apparently mild and delicious. Who knew?
I had a dream last night that Italy had a long tradition of raids on far flung regions of their own country, in order to steal examples of their best dishes, and bury them deep in the earth, both to alter their flavor and consistency, and to preserve the gastronomical history of Italy. Italian men in the dream dug up one of these huge vessels and pulled out the rack to show me what I thought of as a baby aurochs that had been roasted and stewed in a giant clay pot until the bones were as articulated as a chicken's. The people showing it to me were as proud of the original dish they'd stolen---proof of their good taste, as it were, in meat and in having been born Italian---as what they'd turned it into. They saw what they were doing as self-serving raiding and cooking in the short term, but in the service of humanity, and Italian reputation, in the long run. They knew that there would be some pots of food buried in the earth that no one dug up to eat in even the medium term, and they would be there for archaeologists to discover, so they might learn something about the regional cuisine of Italy.
Yeah, that's got nothing at all to do with colonialism :)
I had a dream last night that Italy had a long tradition of raids on far flung regions of their own country, in order to steal examples of their best dishes, and bury them deep in the earth, both to alter their flavor and consistency, and to preserve the gastronomical history of Italy. Italian men in the dream dug up one of these huge vessels and pulled out the rack to show me what I thought of as a baby aurochs that had been roasted and stewed in a giant clay pot until the bones were as articulated as a chicken's. The people showing it to me were as proud of the original dish they'd stolen---proof of their good taste, as it were, in meat and in having been born Italian---as what they'd turned it into. They saw what they were doing as self-serving raiding and cooking in the short term, but in the service of humanity, and Italian reputation, in the long run. They knew that there would be some pots of food buried in the earth that no one dug up to eat in even the medium term, and they would be there for archaeologists to discover, so they might learn something about the regional cuisine of Italy.
Yeah, that's got nothing at all to do with colonialism :)