Culture - what we do around here

Culture

well the chilli world tour is over for another year. more or less. and it doesn't seem that the significance of the chilli and its ubiquity is celebrated as much as it ought to be. Even in Portugal, which is known to have spread the chilli around the world, we didn't actually run into my chilli in Portuguese cuisine, except piri piri sauce with barbecued chicken.

 An  interesting point that Grette found on a Yale site was that the chilli really came in to the USA via people from West Africa who were brought in as slaves (they had clearly been early adopters of the chilli when it arrived with Portuguese traders) rather than by encroaching over the border more organically from its indigent home in Mexico.

One of the joys of this journey was to kind of come to grips with how seriously married people can be to their food. Comparisons, which I am so inclined to make, are insidious. And I know that. Thoughtful rational view would remind me that the typical Australian cuisine is extraordinarily rich in its diversity which ranges from various immigrant communities keeping the faith with their heritage to the innovative fresh food fusion that draws on Asian and European ingredients.   And that the take away food culture is fairly common across the developed world.

But what I noticed in all three countries we visited was both a loyalty and pleasure that people we came across took in their food.  And in that context, while the Middle East and Africa and Asia in all its diversity embraced the chilli with gusto, the Spanish and Portuguese, who distributed the chilli world wide, didn't take it on in the same way; the occasional piquancy of patatas bravas of Spain and the kick in Portugal's piri piri not withstanding. Rather they just took what they wanted from the capsicum family  and made pimientos a feature of everyday pub food - meals, tapas and all that. ie Capsicums. Red and green. Lots and lots of them. Skinned red peppers with tuna. Whole baked green peppers with grilled meat and chips. Strips of red and green capsicums in all sorts of salads. Peppers stuffed with minced pork and prawns, or bread and fish. Chillies in a sense, but not as we know them.

This 2013 leg of the chilli world tour has been big  in terms of culture: the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Berbers, the Arabs and the Catholics; leaning and hearing different languages; social and economic pain in a post industrial world and the cultural impact of that; writing things on walls; dance, song and ceramics. How people live together. As well as the food. Knowing who you are by the food you eat and how you eat it..

Finally - talking about cultures around the globe -  the different cultural difference I've noticed this trip is the gap between Qantas and Emirates when it comes to aeroplane music. Qantas has a kind of world music - including Shakira, Martha Wainwright, Paca Pena, Herb Albert. Emirates have a massive bunch of music tracks from Addis Ababa, West Africa, South Africa, Iran, South America, India, all around the world.  Great sounds to travel by.