Madrid

final Patio. This one of Ainslie.

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.

Grette's photo of Madrid Skyline evening May 13, not quite so glorious where I am at the airport.

Fight, you are not alone

The other side of the crisis

On the fast train from Cordoba to Madrid, with one more night in Spain, I "read" - through an automatic web translator - an opinion piece by Jordi Soler in today's El Pais titled The Reverse of the Crisis. He reminds his Spanish readers of Orwell's  analysis of the positive benefits to community life in London during the second world war, ranging from growing, sharing and exchanging food and skills; to more reading (and more sophisticated reading) by bored soldiers at the front line and civilians deprived of other entertainment at home. Orwell argued that this response to hard circumstances encouraged a more thoughtful and community minded sensibility.

Soler suggested Spain's situation, while not as serious as the London that Orwell was writing about, also provided opportunities for a sophisticated, communitarian response: the other side or face of the Crisis could lead to a collaborative economics.

So reflecting on Australia, it must be fair to say we are not in a similar crisis, structural adjustment not withstanding. The focus on consumption in our consumer society remains pretty well undiminished. But we are picking up the economic and political rhetoric that seems to drive the dominant government responses to the crisis in this part of the world: We must pull our belts in. People on low incomes are too dependant on the state. A balanced budget is the priority before social well being.

The thing that unsettles me about this equation is we aren't being pitched together to make do creatively in Australia today, as arguably people were in London in the 1940s, or even people are in Europe today.   It looks like the language of hardship and striving might just be an excuse to narrow our thinking to self interest.

Patio in antique Cordoba