Important news from the Middle East:
Using a satellite dish on loan from a nearby broadcast station, cooks in an Arab town near Jerusalem whipped up more than four metric tons of hummus, the chickpea paste that is a staple – and a near-religious obsession – for many in the Middle East.
The cooks doubled the previous record for the world’s biggest serving of hummus, set in October by cooks in Lebanon. That record broke an earlier Israeli record and briefly put Lebanon ahead.
Hundreds of jubilant Israelis, a mix of Arabs and Jews, gathered around the giant dish in the town of Abu Ghosh near Jerusalem on Friday, many of them dancing as a singer performed an Arabic love song to the beige chickpea paste.
But note that these developments are not without geopolitical implications:
Lebanese tourism minister Fadi Abboud told The Associated Press that his country plans to beat the new record in the spring with an even bigger plate of hummus prepared on the border with Israel. “This way they can learn how to do hummus,” he said.
“We have no objection that other people do hummus but they should know that it is Lebanese. They (Israelis) should find a name other than hummus because this is a Lebanese name,” Abboud said.
Check out the photo at the linked article, too.
This giant hummus disk will destroy us all. They’ll keep building bigger and bigger hummus dishes until they destroy the earth. Stop the madness now.
Mmmmm….hummus. And pita, and tabouleh and kibbeh and the rest of it….
..and Americans should find their own name for pizza. Because it’s an Italian dish!
I want to bathe in that hummus dish.
Hummus is made by grinding chickpeas into a floor, usually by spinning them around with the blades of food processor.
That makes hummus a great way visualize world/whirled peace/peas.
“grinding chickpeas into a floor”
So that’s why Dervishes whirl.
I suppose it wouldn’t come out right if you substituted Morris dancers.
Now they just need to make a few tons of Tabouleh to go with it.
The food fight’s been going on for a while.
But I think the Turks and Greeks have had the most vociferous arguments to date.
John: or Armenians and Azeri arguments about dolma…