The Need for Localisation

One of the most challenging part of writing and researching diversity - especially national and ethnic - is the need to be specific. The more vague, general and, theoretically, inclusive you are, the biggest the danger to be accused of misunderstanding and misleading the adequate definition of the topic you approach. 

My thoughts were pushed by a recent - with some academic notes - discussion I had on food. There could be specific criteria to declare a food tasty - education and cultural background being one of them - but when it comes to placing a food geographically, you can easily start a war. I am slowly slowly gathering more and more such testimonies - hopefully part of a book I hope to finish one day - one of the most famous - also because it has to do with an area which always burns - is the hummus war between Lebanon and Israel. As a final user, I might say that I love the hummus made by both Lebanese and Israeli cooks - although personally not a hummus lover because the food I grew up with was slightly different in taste and ingredients (call it bland, sometimes), but what exactly made a hummus to be made in Lebanon, respectively made in Israel is a matter of political choice, sometimes. 

Closer to home, the famous food appropriations of foods among the Balkan countries are less burning - right now - but in a small Serbian village might bring a lot of tensions if you label a food wrongly, as Croatian or Turkish. 

What you can really do in order to avoid such unpleasant political background to your plate - food to be enjoyed in a special ambiance and this is hopefully no big dispute about it - is to get into as many details as possible when describing a food. The details have to do with the special place where the meal was eaten and the very special details of the recipe. Some ingredients and ways to prepare might differ from a village to another and could be slightly altered from a family to another. Offering as many personal and individual details add a lot of zest to the recipe and the food story in general, as it opens up the ways to tell individual, subjective stories. 

The food love might lead to anthropological memories and could help recreate a world where table manners and customes as well as menus are part of individual narratives and histories. On the long term it can also create more enjoyable discussion about food besides setting up the world of fire for...a tasty bowl of hummus.