 Good evening. Good evening, everyone. I'm Valerie Amos. I'm the director here at SOAS and I'm Absolutely delighted to welcome so many of you This evening for our SOAS centenary lecture and a very warm welcome to those watching from around the world We're live streaming tonight's lecture on Facebook The SOAS centenary lecture series features lectures by high-profile individuals on Subjects that are very close to the SOAS mission We've already welcomed for example Wally Soyinka and Forrest Whitaker and we'll be hosting others as part of the series including Hina Jelani and Muhammad al-Baraday My job is to tell you a little bit about SOAS before we move into the introduction of tonight's very special guest Here at SOAS we are very proud of our diversity with students from over 130 countries We see ourselves as being about building bridges across cultures and communities With a global perspective at the very heart of our approach Our history and events such as this one tonight Demonstrate the important space that SOAS provides for debate discussion and Asking the challenging questions about how we look at our world and That is why for our centenary year we've launched a campaign called questions worth asking For us it's important that our students and academics can keep on asking and indeed answering Today's most pressing questions For example, is there a solution to the world's refugee crisis? What happens after war? Should we all speak the same language? What makes a global citizen? Will there ever be equality? For a hundred years we've been asking searching questions and through this campaign We're seeking further support for our work for example So that we can Have students from around the world who without scholarships for example could not afford to come to science for academic projects and for endowed posts for making sure that we put the student experience Right at the heart of everything that we do and you can learn more about our campaign by going on to the SOAS website So as dot ac dot uk slash questions So let me turn now specifically to tonight We have a newly founded so as student and alumni led social enterprise stories on our plate Which is using food to challenge the marginalization of refugees living in the United Kingdom Central to stories on our plate is a culinary training program for refugees Aimed at overcoming the many barriers refugees face to entering careers in the food and catering industries Celebrating our differences through the shared experience of sharing food Underlines the stories on our plate philosophy And it's a key part of tonight's lecture food is culture And you can find out more of the work of our students and our alumni They will have a stall upstairs in the Brunei suite after the lecture a Couple of final practical things before I hand over Please turn your mobile phones to silent We want you to tweet like mad, so we don't want you to turn them off, but please turn them to silent and When you do tweet and note, I say when not if Please use the hashtag So as 100 I'm now going to hand over to dr. Klein who's the chair of our food studies Center Who is going to introduce tonight's? Very special guest, so put your hands together and give a rousing welcome to Claudia rodin Claudia rodin's first cookbook a book of Middle Eastern food was published in 1968 at the time She'd already been living in England for over a decade Born in Cairo in 1936 she was raised there until the age of 15 In a predominantly French speaking, but polyglot Sephardic Jewish family with links to Aleppo and Istanbul She completed her schooling in Paris and then London where she studied as a martin school of art Following the 1956 Suez crisis and the war between Egypt and and Israel The family had to leave Cairo and her parents too came to live in London a Book of Middle Eastern food Draws heavily on recipes shared by family members and friends living in exile in England and around the world as well as on library research and field research in London among people from all over the Middle East it Was as Claudia later writes in a revised and expanded edition of the book a labor of love written by a young woman and Thralled by her discoveries of her own lost culture The book soon became a bestseller and was described by the renowned American cookbook writer and early television chef James Beard as a landmark in the field of cookery its success has been followed by five decades of cookbook writing research and promotions of culinary scholarship her many often multiple award-winning books include Mediterranean cookery which was published in 1987 in connection with the BBC television series Mediterranean cookery with Claudia Rodin The food of Italy first published in 1989 The book of Jewish food an Odyssey from Samarkand to and Vilna to the present day first published in 1996 Tamarind and saffron favorite recipes from the Middle East from 2000 arabesque some to his food from Morocco Turkey and Lebanon from 2005 and most recently from 2012 the food of Spain Throughout her work Claudia Rodin combines subtle reflections on personal experiences and family histories With meticulous wide-ranging historical and ethnographic scholarship Through her recipes and culinary ethnography She explores the complex histories of migration and settlement Unities and diversities connections ruptures and reconnections that have shaped the that have shaped the people and Cultures of the Middle East the Mediterranean and Europe Through the media of food and words Claudia Rodin invites readers cooks and eaters Not just to learn about these histories of division and connection But more profoundly to taste them and smell them to make sense of them And in this way to make them a part of their own life experiences This invitation is reflected and warmly responded to in an anonymous readers Amazon review of a new book of Middle Eastern cuisine a revised version of Claudia's first cookbook And I quote I am a Turkish woman and most of the recipes Rodin explains in her marvelous book are no strangers to me I have been living abroad now for many years Every time I open Rodin's book. I can smell my grandmother's kitchen Here is a personal. Thank you to Claudia Rodin for me Ma sha Allah 41 times as we say back home Claudia Rodin was awarded a so as honorary fellowship in 2012 In an interview conducted for the occasion Professor Denise Cundiotti of so as declared It would be fair to say that Claudia Rodin by opening a window on patterns of Conviviality and cuisine in the Middle East has done more for an understanding of the region than most area specialists She has used history oral narratives and interviews to build a phenomenal Corpus of knowledge on the Levant the Mediterranean and beyond in a way that illuminates cultural continuities and the circulation of people and ideas She has also popularized her work through numerous high-profile Media appearances and her service on important boards such as the Prince Klaus fund for culture and development in the Netherlands She is a celebrity in the best sense of the word Using her high profile to promote deeper understanding of Middle Eastern cultures Ladies and gentlemen director It is a great honor and immense pleasure to welcome this evening's so as centenary lecturer Claudia Rodin. Thank you Thank you Valerie for inviting me to speak Thank you Jacob for the very kind introduction and thank you all for coming I'm honored and very happy to be associated with so as and the center of food studies I get to hear about the wonderful work that's going on and I can come to some of the events I Was asked to speak about the role of food in culture Everything I was a bit scared when I was asked Because I felt I'm not an academic Anyway, I can from what I hear it's my experiences that I'll be talking about as well but I Start by saying everything to do with food from Agriculture animal husbandry hunting and fishing to the way we cook and eat is culture and Cooking is especially important because it impacts on everyday life for everybody Taste is the most personal of our senses, but it's acquired and cultivated in society Our comfort foods can reveal our provenance and ethnicity or religion Ideology aspirations and even our place in society Taste is Yes Well food is about sustenance and pleasure, but it's also about Hospitality and conviviality and creating bonds between people I come from a society where to entertain a guest is the greatest joy and where Hospitality and offering food is an all-important part of life Among the happy memories of my childhood in Egypt In Egypt other times when we sat on long extended tables the grown-ups on at one end the children at an other and At the other and when we did the rounds visiting relatives on festive occasions We arrived in the house and found everybody of the extended family Sitting in a large circles we kissed everybody and depending on the time of day We were served Turkish coffee with spoon jams meses or pastries. I realized that recipes What the recipes was about roots and identity when I first started collecting them It was in 1956 when the Jews had to leave Egypt suddenly on mass after Suez I was an art student in London and my parents arrived as refugees We were inundated with family and friends passing through on their way to other homelands Everyone was exchanging recipes in a desperate kind of way Give me your recipe for lahmabeah jean. Please your kippenei. Yeah, you're homeless The date preserve. I might never see you again. It will be something to remember you buy Some took out little handwritten notebooks and we sat down together to go through them in Egypt we would never have given me a recipe nobody would There hadn't never be there hadn't been any cookbooks But recipes were jealously kept in families and not given away except with at least one or two mistakes But now we all wanted to preserve something that had made our lives happy in on you In what was a vanished world? It was such a strange thing of thinking we'll never see Egypt again, and we'll never see each other again Now the recipes were a mixed bag Because Egypt had been a cosmopolitan society with many minorities and the Jewish community itself Was a mosaic of families from all over the Ottoman Empire and beyond My grandparents came from Aleppo and Istanbul the women who gave me the recipes said they were always from their mothers or their grandmothers and They would say from Aleppo from Izmir. She was from Istanbul She was from Tunis or Baghdad or Livorno And now these recipes were their badge of identity and they were very proud of them They also added bits of information and stories How as children they were given the task to make listen alas for these are birds tongues Here we call them also. I made them on Sunday And it was all as children. They were given the task to roll tiny bits of pasta as over ovals Of dough between their fingers Some somebody told me do you know How in the Jewish quarter we put the Pants of broad beans of full medames and hard-boiled eggs to cook in the ashes of the fire at the public Baths on Friday night and collected them on Saturday When years later, I eventually put the recipes in a book I wrote in my introduction that the book was the joint creation of numerous Middle Easterners Who like me are in exile either forced or voluntary and it is that it was the fruit of The nostalgic longings for and delighted savourings of a food That was the constant joy of life in a world so different from the Western one And I added that the saying the dancer dies and does not forget the shaking of his shoulders applied to us Actually that saying came from a collection of sayings and Proverbs that my uncle Musa was collecting While I was collecting recipes It was melodramatic, but it had impressed me now the French writer Edgar Morin and Jew from Salonica explained the importance of food for his community in his book Vidal Elysia Vidal and his people Gastronomy he wrote is the kernel of a culture and that for Salonica's For Salonica's pastelikos is the kernel of the kernel For some he said pastelikos is all that is left of their culture Actually pastelikos are little pies filled with minced meat and fried onions cinnamon and allspice and The same lady who gave me the orange cake gave me the recipe for pastelikos She was my my sister-in-law's grandmother Now every community has their own pastelikos When I visited my aunt Yvette in Los Angeles She always immediately opened the freezer and brought up keep a sambu second Baba Rannoush and and she just said Well, that's what we're having of course every time now these are the foods that millions of Syrian refugees year and for today Now to refugees and immigrants food is a link with the past It's that part of their culture that survived the longest Passed on from one generation to another kept up when clothing language and music have been dropped It's also the way that an immigrant community Insinuates its culture in a new homeland because cooking does not require capital Different groups of immigrants to this country have brought great gastronomic Enrichments London once Not the best place to eat. I My I was good. I had written an awful place to eat But my son-in-law told me you can't say awful, but just now Valerie told me you can't say awful Because she was here in the 60s and it was It was gray and beige and it didn't have any taste. It was very limited and in the canteens at art school and my brother's Medical school. It was worse than awful. I have to say well Because it's all changed we can say this now now London is is the Is a gastronomic capital of the world where every type of restaurant is represented The Indian and Chinese meals have long been part of the English way of life We are now used to Lebanese Turkish Greek Mexican and many other types of meals including sushi and the Middle Eastern Mese Chicken Tikka Masala was the nation's most popular dish Eclipsing fish and chips until the much hotter Jalfresi became the new favorite a Recent survey relieved revealed that 41% of British households have hummus in their fridge Now, of course, it's not the real More about it later modern English Menus in restaurants and gastropub's are full of bulgur and couscous now for Ikea Tahini pomegranate molasses Harissa and preserved lemon a multitude of spices rosewater and chili Yes Well, we've made all these things our own and use them to create something uniquely ours a Fusion cuisine that represents the interweaving of cultures Now food connects us not only with family and society, but with history and geography I became aware that dishes had history behind them 60 years ago when I asked a librarian at the British Library For Arab cookbooks. He told me to come back next day when he would have found something for me There was nothing contemporary But he gave me a handwritten list of publications. He could show me on medieval Arab gastronomy One was a 1939 translation of a 13th century Culinary manual found in Baghdad by Professor Arbery. He had added poems of the time celebrating food Another was an analysis of a culinary manuscript of the same period Found in Damascus by the French Marxist Orientalist Maxime Rodinson when he was stranded there in Damascus With a French army during the Second World War He used it to explain a court cuisine and a society that Existed more than 700 years before it became his PhD thesis There was also a Spanish translation from the Arabic of a Mach Rebi and Alusian culinary manuscript I was enthralled. I started to entertain friends to medieval banquets Many of the dishes had similar names similar combinations of the ingredients and spices and similar techniques and those I was hearing from people of Then those that I was hearing from people leaving Egypt I was thrilled to find a recipe like the one my aunt Regine gave me for treya Chicken with pasta flavored with a mix of spices And it had the same name as the one in Damascus in the Damascus manuscript. Actually, uh, this recipe was Taken up by by Nigella Lawson in a television in her first television series and she said It came from the book of Jewish food and She said it was one of her favorite recipes So there it's how food passes now not just doesn't take a hundred years to come But it comes quite quickly Now it may all this made me feel that my family had extended roots into an exciting imagined past When I told the cousin in Paris that I found Maxime's medieval study Uh, he said Maxime was a friend of his and he was coming to London Actually, my cousin was Eric Roulot the journalist Who specialized in the Middle East now? So when Maxime came to London, I invited him to dinner and I cooked several dishes that featured in the Damascus manuscript to please him He said he didn't like this kind of food at all He disliked courgettes And or and aubergines and he didn't like lamb and he didn't like the spices or any of the flavor So But he and he explained that he was born into a communist working class Russian Jewish family in Paris and his tastes he said were formed then He said he liked the things like lungs for instance the kind of thing the poor ones at in Paris Now when my three children left home all at the same time I decided to leave on the same day I couldn't bear to stay at home alone and to travel all around the mediterranean in search of food I went a l'aventure I tasted everything I could and asked everybody I met What they had what region they came from what their parents and grandparents did and cooked It gave me a reason to accost people In a pension in a restaurant on a bench and to engage them in conversation People were glad to talk about their food to a stranger In that in those days it was very unusual for people to go and and accost people about food Nowadays what I hear from all my young colleagues everybody's doing it I mean they go and accost all the vendors in Marrakesh Asking them for the recipe as well. Well, the kind of experience I would have On a train in Italy for instance I asked a woman sitting near me What her favorite dishes were and Could she give me the recipe and how she cooked them soon the whole Carriage was coming around From other parts of the train and they were saying that's not how I cook it So I was I just wanted there at that time if I would ask somebody in in London on a train or in How what they cook they would think I was mad and move away But I think nowadays It's not like that and maybe people will all come and say that's how I cook it Because things have changed Now I started with a few contacts and was introduced and passed on to others People in Marrakesh said I have a cousin in fares One in Casablanca. Do you want to go there? I was often invited home to watch people cook Sometimes by strangers There's a certain intimacy in the kitchen that you don't have when you are entertained in the living room When it's quite formal we exchange personal stories Uh now this is an advice to Anthropologists who want people to speak to them Go in their kitchen rather than in the living room Part of the pleasure of researching food for me has been getting to know people being part of their lives for a moment And enjoying the special conviviality around food I had glorious dishes and discovered a world where I felt at home And the Mediterranean became the focus of my work ever since The countries around the Mediterranean are very different There are forests and deserts mountains bays and islands with different histories and cultures Eastern and western Christian and muslim But the regions bordering the sea have a lot in common Often more often more in common with each other than with other regions in their own countries When you drive towards the sea It feels at a certain point that you've opened the door into another world The sky is different the light and colors are different the vegetation and architecture are different And there is a certain way of being and living that is familiar I can say sometimes the way to smile The jokes you have All kinds of things that Well, it's I won't describe now That you recognize the Mediterranean climate allows for an easy going outdoor life for al fresco eating Food festivals street foods and markets. You see some similar produce olive oil olives all these things in the markets Preserves goats and sheeps jesus circuitery Great bundles of herbs Piles of spices the same fruit and vegetables And seafood and the same meats cuts all the offals as well Also, you see clay pots pastels and mortars skewers the custom of Well, the kind of ways of of eating Is also similar the custom of serving an assortment of little dishes with drinks is a feature of life And the meal is a place of interaction Where people talk and it's convivial Now Spaniards say their Mediterranean regions are an area of allegria de vivir Unfortunately, it's not exactly joie de vivre at the moment Every country has its own cuisine And there are difference between town and country and from one town and village to another But you can see similar dishes from one end of the Mediterranean to the other The brandard of salt cod in In Venice is the same as that of Provence and Catalonia The chicken cooked with grapes of Spain is the same as one in Tuscany The octopus stews of Greece and Provence are the same There are broad bean purees Everywhere and aubergine purees as well A tomato sauce with fried onions and garlic is the signature tune of the entire Mediterranean It's really uh for me, uh, I Well, it's the incestuous history with the same occupies and settlers From the Phoenicians Greeks and Romans to Arabs and Ottomans and many other things As well as an intense maritime traffic and trading activity between all the port cities that shape the cuisines around the sea So well every little bit for me what is interesting was every little bit of the Mediterranean has its own culinary stories Italy's great regional diversity is a legacy of the country's division until unification A century and a half ago into many independent foreign states Each with its own history culture and cooking tradition Italian food is also An example of the way cooking reflects life as it was once lived Because that's why I was asking everybody. What did your parents do? What did your grandparents do? Uh many many of the people I lived said that they They were from families of 10 And who lived on the land actually So many people said they were a family of 10, but they only wanted one child And while I was there was listening on the radio and and there was a uh always at that period program saying It was becoming a country of singles People wanted to stay single Because they had enough of all these 10 children families but Well, no because then they became hugely nostalgic of the 10 children families In Tuscany until the 1960s Before peasants abandoned the land for factories A system of sharecropping prevailed by which peasant farmers lived on estates as tenants and cultivated the land Giving half the produce to the landlord as rent Estates were large and divided into fields each housing a family community Peasants were busy all the year growing wheat maize or rice vegetables and fruit Wine was made on every estate and in many also olive oil I have to say neither the wine nor the olive oil was any good It's great now, but that's what they all told me But every farm kept pigs rabbits and poultry and bred a few calves They made cheese and cured pork Uh when the system Of sharecropping was abolished and landowners found themselves without workers They sold their properties cheap to people from Milan and Rome and to foreigners who use the farmhouses as holiday homes Entrepreneurs from the north came to farm in a modern intensive way with tractors and machinery. Thank you The old agriculture of intermingle vines mulberries and olive trees on the hill slopes. It is called promiscuous agriculture With little patches of wheat maize and pulses where the large families of tenants had spent their days Fighting their way through the entanglements to pick everything by hand Were replaced by a single crop industrial agriculture Country life changed dramatically Uh, but the drastically but the dishes that were born in the old life never disappeared And they are now very much in fashion A few small farmers continue in the archaic way of varied mixed Mixed cultivation and their bit of landscape has remained like the background in renaissance paintings Spaniards like Italians are passionate about their cuisines and passionate about their terroirs The late catalan writer Josep Pla has a beautiful way of describing cooking. He said it was the landscape in a saucepan He was talking about catalonia Which has many very distinctive styles of cooking of the sea of the mountains and and of the valleys As well as the cooking of the Barcelona bourgeoisie Who I must admit is more French than Spanish But the ghosts of the past are also there in the saucepans and on the plates Spanish food is full of clues about the country's past But when I told people I was researching the history of their food Hoping to get some information about what they thought was the history of their food Uh, whereas in italy people love telling stories about how a dish came to be in spain I realized that it was a very sensitive subject An olive oil producer in Cordoba Volunteered that there had been a long controversy about Spanish culture Was it roman or was it arab? After a lot of argument. He said it was decided that it was roman At a dinner in Madrid the hostess Antonietta said You have to know claudia that we are of roman and visigot stock She was angry. She said at the way foreigners always noted Always notice moorish architecture Did you see the roman aqueduct in segovia? For centuries the country had wiped out its muslim and jewish past from national memory But now the legacies of the once huge populations of muslims And significant minority of jews had become a matter of interest and fascination fascination to chefs When I visited el molino a restaurant and central of gastronomic research Outside granada where they held courses on the history of spanish food I asked about its origins. What did they say? And and I was told arab and jewish And I asked for an example They gave roast pork And I and then they explained when they converted to christianity They cooked pork in the way they cooked lamb which was to rub it with cumin seeds Now once I went and had the roast belly of pork at finos And there are cumin seeds in the crackling in the cuts So now you know why cumin seeds are there because there are never anywhere else in pork But when I ate berenchenak con miel Fried aubergines with honey in the town of priego de cordoba The chef came and sat with me and I asked him about it And he told me about siriab A Kurdish lute player from the court of harun al rashid in bagdad Who joined the court of cordoba and introduced new music and also new ways of cooking Other chefs in andalusia also mentioned siriab as did flamenco musicians Priego is on the ruta del califato the tourist route of muslim spain So a few restaurants are bringing out the old dishes That have Well more ish as they call it more ish influence Now there's another tourist route in spain It's a camino se farad through areas once inhabited by jews before the expulsion in 1492 Some of my ancestors came from spain my grandmother Eugenia Alfondari who was from istanbul Spoke a medieval spanish called ladino with her friends. Their names were toledano Cuenca carbona león burgos curiel Their dishes had Spanish names and they believed that their ancestors had brought them from spain The way people cooked in spain the ingredients they put together their little tricks their turn of hand So many things were to me mysteriously familiar A flavor an aroma triggered memories and emotions. I never knew I had It's surprising how dishes can appeal directly to the emotions Food like music can touch you and make you cry In december, I was in amsterdam for the awards ceremony. I'm sorry. I'm going from one place to another but it seemed to To Work into what I wanted to stay about culture Now in december, I was in amsterdam for the awards ceremony of the prince clouds fund for culture and development I had written the lodation for kamal musawak and an entrepreneur and food activist In from lebanon. He calls himself a food activist, but now a lot of people are food activist Who started the movement that helped small-scale farmers and artisans Runs farmers markets and food festivals as well as educational programs for schools and catering courses for refugees In his little beroute restaurant called towelette each day a different home cook Usually a woman from a different part of lebanon prepares the specialities of her region and community There are now other towels a few other towels that operate in the same way I have opened elsewhere in lebanon. I received their menus every week by email from kamal I met kamal when we were both judges in a couscous competition in san vito lo capo in sicily now the joint winners were A palestinian and an israeli and they were called up in front of television vision by a b-list actress And and a whole lot of music to hold up the trophy together Everyone was happy now Kamal was my host when I was researching the food in lebanon He took me on excursions to visit artisan producers in mountain villages He stopped we stopped in zahle in the bekaa valley where according to legend the special character of the lebanese mesi was born I was a guest on his tv program with two palestinian women from a refugee camp from an They had an organic peasants cooperative in the south of the country They brought baskets full of fresh produce including lentils on the plant and wild herbs and And wild plants of different kinds as well and they also brought specialties for us to taste A borgo salad with a homemade tomato paste a porridge of wheat and yogurt Lebanon is a tiny country with many different ethnicities religions cultures sunni and shiai muslim drus syrian christian maronite greek orthodox armenian Still hostile and suspicious of each other after their long and devastating civil war But it is also a country with strong traditions of Hospitality and conviviality where gastronomy is an important part of culture and cooking tradition Are linked with identity history and culture Uh, well Being camal around camal Well, I have to say that camal uses that For as his inspiration. He uses all these factors and and and This characteristics For his own mission Now being around him was an extraordinary lesson about the power of food to bring people together and make them feel loved and valued To celebrate identity at the same time as build bridges The farmers markets or places where people from different ethnicities religions and classes Socialized without fear of violence and where farmers get a fair price While forming ties with each other and their customers The towelette restaurants celebrate the culinary diversity of lebanon and bring people from embattled And marginalized communities together camal's message is make food not war It is politics through gastronomy in a revolutionary kind of way At the gala dinner in amsterdam Attended by the dutch royal family Syrian women Refugee who were refugees in lebanon and in holland cooked part of the gala dinner for 300 people They made dishes like kibbeh stewed with quince the kind of dishes that you don't get On standard restaurant menus There was great excitement in the kitchen And they got a standing ovation. Is that what you call When people Clap when the chefs of lead at the end they got a standing of ovation Now a year ago in february I attended another gala dinner at the chiran palace in istanbul Now that was to celebrate the invitation by unesco to the city of gazi anteb To to be part of their creative city's network in the field of gastronomy Despite what the city is going through with possibly 400 000 syrian refugees in their midst and isil fighters passing in and out It had just inaugurated an institute of gastronomy The mayor of gazi anteb said they wanted to protect their famous gastronomy And that their institute at their institute they taught women Disabled people and syrian refugees how to cook professionally Women are not normally accepted in the all male professional kitchens of turkey Erdogan was there He spoke loudly about the terrorist threat and turkeys enemies. They had just been a bomb uh He praised gazi anteb for sheltering so many refugees and congratulated them for their gastronomy But he said that many other histories in turkey Also had great food We were served Dishes of gazi anteb. They are very like those of a lepo But very hot with lots of chili pepper The city was once part of syria My great-grandfather was a young rabbi there before he became chief rabbi of a lepo Gazi anteb is the capital of baklava. By the way, when I was there, I said that my my Rabbi my great-grandfather was a rabbi there And so I have been invited to come and inaugurate the synagogue or it's already Being refurbished, but they needed to do an event But and to bring my my family along Now during the sit dinner I was sitting next to charles perry an american who writes about medieval midi middle eastern foods Three pastry makers from gazi anteb came to thank him for the articles He wrote about them in the l8 times 20 years ago. They still had it pasted up Then someone came to say that erdoğan wanted to speak to charles We were all just And he put on a tie somebody lent him a tie when he came back. He said that erdoğan asked him Do you like baklava? Now in 2010 Food was officially recognized by unesco as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity When they put the gastronomic meal of friend of the french on their list They then had a traditional mexican cuisine A japanese cuisine and the mediterranean diet Diet here me they mean everything around food As endangered cultural treasures that needed valuing and safeguarding I have to say something a little secret that It was the the catalan my catalan friends who have been lobbying for years to have their list of recipes Catalan recipes Included in the intangible Heritage cultural heritage of unesco, but spain has continually stopped them And so they started lobbying instead for the mediterranean diet Because they feel very much that catalonia was the queen of the mediterranean in in in the medieval times, but for a long time it continued To have a huge influence as a as a trading nation, but also it is they who introduced the The tomato sauce fried onions and garlic Well in the last 30 years The mediterranean area has seen the reason why it's endangered and needs some safeguarding Is that in the last 30 years the mediterranean area has seen dramatic changes in social and economic structures The industrial industrialization of agriculture and food production and also globalization Once people cooked what their parents cooked and recipes and techniques were passed from mother to daughter today Even in italy mama no longer spends all day cooking in the kitchen And italians search on the internet for recipes Like they do here Now cuisine traditional cuisine are a fragile living heritage that can easily be lost But does it matter if traditional cuisines are lost? Well, I've been thinking about that in most countries it matters for tourism since part of the pleasure Today of visiting a country is the local food It matters to economies because countries can make easily can more easily sell their traditional products It matters to the world because of the loss of cultural diversity It matters to the local inhabitants because it reinforces their identity Gives them pride and dignity Even the most avant-garde chefs in various novel Who do who practice various novel cuisines who deconstruct and create new dishes Now they are saying they are inspired by their mother's cooking And traditional cuisines by their roots and history and they use local products Local ingredients When I interviewed the late revered Catalan chef Santi Santa Maria He said cooking has to be about sentiment As well as technique and that without ideology It is simply a matter of manual skills and technology His ideology he said was rooted in the life of his peasant family and the progressive politics of his youth He quoted the painter Juan Miro to be universal Miro had said you have to be local The reference points of Santi Santa Maria Of his cooking he said whether memories of his grandparents generation and medieval Catalan cookbooks a lot of chefs say that they looked at old cookbooks and in spain And in italy too they look at medieval cookbooks, but more so in spain Now food in spain is about local patriotism During the Franco regime regional cultures were suppressed and artisan products were discouraged in favor of mass industrial ones That could feed the population cheaply When people fell free to celebrate their regional heritage Organizations formed to preserve their culinary heritage by recording recipes 900 recipes were collected in Catalonia 600 in the Balearic islands of Mallorca and Menorca 900 in Galicia and so on And producers rushed to obtain The origin Denomination of origin for their wines their olive oils their hands their secretary Their cheeses their beans their honeys their lentils their cows their pigs and capons Now come to us The way we cook and eat in Britain has changed for the better When I first came to London in the 50s and 60s Well, it was limited and plain It was also a taboo subject that caused embarrassment Being a chef ranked as the lowest type of job The only time Families went out to dinner in a restaurant was to celebrate a birthday Now interest in food has exploded Cooking is glamorous chefs are venerated Eating out is one of the most popular leisure activities And cooking competitions are the most watched television programs We have a new exciting and vibrant food scene with passionate cooks and artisan and a social elite That has become connoisseurs of food and wine The majority have never however live on ready-cooked meals Granted they're better than they were before And on fast food Now we have an our culinary culture Our elite culinary culture is a global culture It's innovative and subject to constantly changing fashions Chefs are the driving force that create Fashions and inspiration comes from California, Spain, Norway, Italy and our own ethnic cuisine Once grand restaurants were safe if they offered French cuisine Now they have to keep abreast with what is fashionable And food producers are on the lookout for the next big thing Which also has to be organic sustainable ethical seasonal and healthy I won't say clean We follow the fashions and we try to cook like chefs We adopt superfoods and forage foods And we are concerned with health and weight now vegetarianism and veganism or mainstream But the last global trend it seems are to revalue home cooking And our mother's cooking and to cherish regional cuisine It's a response to globalization And it has to do with nostalgia for an old life and a fear of losing cultural identity By the way, those Italian internet sites that I've looked at are full of people's grandmas recipes And sometimes you see a video of grandma cooking As cookery writers, we are used to being asked not me, but everybody else is here Asked to send recipes that are original and different Now, lately, we're asked to for our mother's recipes and I keep being asked for my mother's I've run out of them And to describe our childhood kitchens and their smells Now romantic nostalgia has a smell In Spain, it is the smell of chorizos hanging in attics and in kitchens In much of the Mediterranean, it's of the tomato, onions and garlic frying in olive oil For me, the smells of crushed coriander and garlic frying in oil And also the mingled smells of chicken, turmeric, lemon and garlic Well, that was my mother's chicken sofrito on Friday night When people phone to book a 250-pound tasting menu at Heston Blument Alfatt Dock They are now asked you to name dishes Remembered from your childhood so that they can personalize your dinner And take you back to your childhood before whisking you into the future Now, can any of you afford to see what they make of your memories? Now, have you noticed, just to end, that now food is associated with love Many products are said to be made with love In America, a pot of yogurt, I got, was said to be made with love from milk From cows of a special breed raised with love on fresh grass Now, that was something Now, just I picked up today from Marks and Spencer's New Spring promotion Is entitled Made with Love The gastropub seafood casserole, the beef bourguignon, the beetroot ravioli, the sishu All of these are made with love Now, I have to tell you what you cook yourself For somebody that you care about For your friends is a great way of really showing love I recently participated in a Dutch three-part TV series Entitled Love in Times of Thermal I was filmed making food for asylum seekers with volunteers at the West London synagogue Which they do every Saturday We all sat together at long tables It was how we ended up sitting It was really heartening to see the love the volunteers put into their cooking And a pleasure and moving to see how their spice lentil soup, vegetable couscous and yogurt cake were appreciated Actually, we got a standing ovation Of course, food can also be used to coerce and discriminate To emphasize differences and ethnicity, religion and social status And to separate one group from another In France recently, when schools in areas where local councils were dominated by the Front National They refused to offer an alternative meat dish when pork was on the menu So it was seen as Islamophobic and anti-Semitic Now, just my last word is there is an Arab saying If you have shared food with someone, you can never betray them as you have sealed your relationship before God There is something about eating together that creates a bond It can be used to create community Claudia, thank you. That was an absolute tour de force. I'm tasting like mad From talking about childhood days, right through your travels, through so many extraordinary countries But also linking that to some very contemporary issues in terms of migration Refugees and that sense of loss Which people partly try to deal with in terms of sharing food and recipes So thank you very much for an extraordinary lecture And can I invite everyone to join us upstairs for our reception? But before you do that, let's give another rounding