On 22 September, Bernike Pasveer hosted a workshop about multicultural eating in the ‘Arab-Dutch Culture House’ in Houten, upon invitation of Ghazwan Yaghi, whom she got to know during her fellowship at NIAS, Amsterdam.
The evening taught that food has an amazing ability to spark splendid conversations (with the frequent use of google-translate), and to articulate and crumble sometimes very outspoken and stereotypical attributions of ‘otherness’.
During their stay as fellows at NIAS last year, it appeared that Ghazwan Yaghi and Bernike Pasveer shared an interest in food as a way of home-making. During the NIAS symposium on Contested Objects in April 2022, they organised a NIAS workshop together on the gastropolitics of food.
On 22 September of this year, Pasveer was invited to host a tasty workshop on multicultural eating, and what that would entail. For although we tend to assume that eating brings people together, and can bridge all kinds of differences, she thought it would be interesting to know more about how eating together works, and what kinds of bridges emerge and become articulated when we share food and stories about it.
The workshop brought some 40 people from various nationalities together. While seated at large tables and tasting appetisers from Syria and The Netherlands, they engaged in very energetic exchanges on what would be ‘typical’ dishes and ingredients, when (if at all) one would serve these, whether they would invite ‘others’ to their homes for a meal and what they would then cook, but also on whether eating habits had changed over the years, and whether they had come to embrace new dishes and eating habits.
