What makes a dish a \u201cnational dish\u201d? What is your country\u2019s national dish? Can there be more than one? Can countries share a national dish?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After a pretty long book I\u2019m not sure I\u2019m any closer to knowing the answer to any of these questions. I read about a lot of foods, but I also got a great big helping of sociology, history, and politics. Of course the foods we eat are enjoyed in the shadow of these big issues – but shouldn\u2019t eating be a non-political act? I don\u2019t think that people should be adamant about where the dish comes from or what ingredients are required – if it is delicious and we share it together then it is mission accomplished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe I am naive but it felt like the author went looking for controversy here, and spent a lot of time, money and effort to visit various countries on what seems like a fool\u2019s errand. Was she hoping to get everyone to agree on something? You can walk around a big city and find people to agree or disagree with whatever facts you\u2019d care to throw out there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I just would prefer to hear the history of a dish and learn how it came to be, in all its variations and regional differences. I know that some countries have invested political capital in the idea that a dish is unique to that country, but maybe the author would have benefitted from starting from a point before that political statement was made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I enjoyed the book overall, but some of these points kept coming back to me and it was a little frustrating after a while. However the extremely well-written epilogue on borsch and the conflict between Ukraine and Russia was some of the best writing of the whole book. More like that, please!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next I am reading Racing the Light by Robert Crais.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What makes a dish a \u201cnational dish\u201d? What is your country\u2019s national dish? Can there be more than one? Can countries share a national dish? After a pretty long book I\u2019m not sure I\u2019m any closer to knowing the answer to any of these questions. I read about a lot of foods, but I also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-3623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-Wr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}