Children in Rome suffer from "ethnic food"
The new mayor of Rome, Alemanno, says that the previous administration is responsible for inflicting "ethnic food" on school children.
Apparently, the children refused to eat it, and those that did had "stomach aches"!
It sounds funny, but I can envision it being a serious issue in Italy, where plenty of people have never had anything more "ethnic" than ... well actually plenty of people I know there have never even had (westernized) Chinese food, let alone Indian, Thai, Japanese, Mexican or much of anything else. One of my wife's relatives, who shall remain anonymous, saw the delicious sushi that she had prepared, took a bite and spit it out! A former colleague of mine had Chinese for the first time in his life at a company dinner - and spent the whole time making comments about how strange and bizarre everything was. I've had friends lined up to go out to dinner who suddenly lost interest when the group opted for Japanese instead of a pizza. Italian food is certainly great, but sometimes it's disheartening to see just how distrusting and fearful people are of anything different. Luckily, not everyone is that way (my wife not only appreciates foreign food, she's quite good at cooking a variety of things - lucky me!), and things are changing, albeit slowly in some cases.
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 03:19
1 comment »
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By Emanuele about 12 hours later:
Good point!!
Have you seen Jamie Oliver in Italy (the series and the book)? Not just Italians don't want even to try foreign food but not even food the way it's cooked in another region, sometimes. That's why egiptians that come to Italy don't make kebabs but pizzas (and really way, imho).
That was the case for me but now I really appreciate japanese food, falafels, curries and chinese yam chas. We cook stirfries and stay away from expensive, and generally bad, italian restaurants.