Ramadan

October 11, 2005

The Dutch text on this poster inivtes non-muslims to join in a post-sunset dinner with their muslim neighbours during the month of Ramadan. Someone was absolutely using their noggin and Amsterdam is now host to this wonderful initiative called the Ramadan Festival. Muslim families have generously opened their homes for each evening’s break-the-fast Iftar meal in order to allow greater understanding of Islamic culture and faith during the holiday month. There is a slew of activities; lectures, debates (gotta have those lectures and debates!) on the subject of citizenship, culture, emancipation and the role of religion in secular society.

The Ramadan Festival website is informative including prayer times and the hour of each day’s sunset so that you know when you can resume tucking into the goodness! Via the website you can also sign up to receive break-the-fast alerts via text message on your celphone and register for the Iftar dinners. I of course signed up, and am eagerly waiting to hear from the organisation!

This year, Ramadan lasts until the 3rd of November. Get fasting!

http://www.ramadanfestival.nl/

technorati tags: Ramadan, Amsterdam, fasting

debra at 20:20 | Comments (2) | post to del.icio.us

Quandry: non locative comfort food

October 2, 2005

First things first, hats off to Auke Touwslager for inventing the term locative food on the 27th at the Food Design Symposium at the SMCS. For me this term pinpoints the quandry with which I am faced as a 3rd generation ex-pat. (With some folks it’s just baked into the genes.) Locative food is food that communicates location by its very nature. A truffle could communicate Occitania for example, and truffled eggs would seem to me out of place in Hawaii, Mongolia or Ghana, (unless things have changed drastically) but normal (although nonetheless special) in the Cevennes.

If we consider locally grown food to be desirable for our health, the health of the global environment and the health of the local economy, what do we do when we’ve transplanted ourselves to the other end of the planet and get a hunquering for non-local foods? Is eating a Pacific Rim style rice-bowl morally coherent as an inhabitant of the Netherlands? In an ideal world could we make choices about prioritising the import of certain non-local foodstuffs that we all think we need? My non-locative Dutch list would be:

coffee
rice (I have 7 types in my larder at all times, only 2 of these come from Europe)
soybeans and related products (my tofu and tempeh are produced within 2 km from my house, but the beans, where do the beans come from and are they GM?)
Occitanian wine
olive oil
sesame seed products (tahin, sesame oil, seeds)
most seeds and nuts
peanuts (and that Nectar of the Gawds called peanut butter)

According to the list above it seems that being a vegetarian in the Netherlands, would relegate me to eating quality lacking products made by culinarily handicapped hippies. The image above shows a version of my favourite rice-bowl dinner, of which only the beet leaves have been grown locally. Can non-locative comfort food be sustainable. Even as an enthusiastic porkatarian, I eat one heq of a lot of brown rice and soybeans.

debra at 11:40 | Comments (12) | post to del.icio.us

All I really really want is locative food

October 1, 2005

That is, food that tells me where I am and where it’s from by it’s very name and nature (without the use of an RFID tag). And all I really really want is to have one major train station and one major airport in one country that sells food that is not created by food product designers but by local people from local ingredients and reflecting the diverse local food culture already present.

Imagine Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport… Could the experience of Schiphol be enriched if you knew that this was the only airport in the world where you could exclusively buy locally grown and produced Dutch food and regional specialities? Was it already one and a half years ago that Doors of Perception and Urban Unlimited organised a cultural experts meeting for the city of Breda, a new node on the line of the High Speed Train. If I recall correctly, we recommended just this very thing.

The images above were taken within a period of 4 minutes. Friday afternoon, chip eaters abound at Amsterdam Centraal Station. Just imagine the possible effect on the environment and the state of agriculture and upon the local economy if these chips were made from a diverse range of local potatoes, fried in oil grown and produced locally. Imagine if you could order chips from a menu sporting 8 different kinds of potato! Imagine if the product of the finger fried potato embraced diversity.

And then there’s the mayo…
And the knowledge economy that could sprout up from bringing the local boutique producer’s products to the transportation hubs of the world…

Frites eaters: images of people eating chips taken on Friday September 30, 2005 from 16:23-27 at Amsterdam CS and on the train to Rotterdam.

debra at 9:53 | Comments (2) | post to del.icio.us