I am sure you will have been as delighted as I was to learn that la cuisine française, the French tradition of bang-up meals, convivial families around the table, the proper placing of cutlery and glass, has joined the Mediterranean diet and flamenco as a part of UNESCO’s ‘intangible world heritage’, the . . .er, less visible (say than the pyramids of Gaza or Stonehenge) part of what should be recognized as invaluable to our universal culture.
Over the years, I have had the pleasure of meeting many of the distinguished gentlemen who work at UNESCO. In fact, you bump into them pretty much everywhere. It is, after all, a pretty cushy job, and there are several posts available for each and every country, however uncultivated or unscientific it may be. Our own rep is Mr. David T. Killion; Kazakhstan’s is the mayor of Altana. Mr. Killion’s qualifications reflect his passion for legislative drafting in Congress; of our Kazakh, rather less is known. The Venezualan rep is Ms. Jennifer Josefina Gi y Laya, who is also the Bolivarian Minister for the People’s Power for Education.
These are largely working pols, God bless them. It is down below that the plums are distributed: the translation, the conferences, the working groups, the sub-contracts and arcane sub-divisions. One such was the acronymic group (French member, the appropriately named Yannick Vin) that met recently in Nairobi to deliberate.
Most of UNESCO’s sites are, as well know, as dead as those celebrated in Ozymandias:
‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
. . .boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
So, I fear, are these new, intangible ones. The last traditional French meal I ate (then with my French wife) was over a partage. The family property having been sold, what was left was to be redistributed, and argued over, at a crowded table. Such meals and such a cuisine are still to be found, but at a Parisian brasserie as lately as this summer, most diners watched the TV. How many French restaurants still have, by the Cashier, the boxes in which regular diners’ napkins were preserved from day to day?
Great efforts are made in Italy (and far fewer in places of catastrophic eating like Greece) to preserve the varieties of the Mediterranean diet, the ingredients simple and good. But it does require effort: to find or produce.
As for flamenco, the less said the better. The authentic stuff probably died at about the same time Garcia Lorca, an aficionado, was killed. Oh, there are still Sevillian ladies about to twirls their skirts and clack their castanets. But like most of my life, such expressions of culture as part of daily life are long gone and UNESCO cannot but despair.
Perhaps it should take up causes that can be salvaged? Paper bags in markets, books that don’t fall apart on reading, ocean liners, railways that go everywhere, marriage itself, thrift, respect?
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Lahti
7 months ago
Agreed, but there are those of us who do remember that familial meal around the formal table. In my case it was Sunday's at my grandmothers, which meant that we were treated to boiled meat, boiled vegetables and conversation that when at it's best or at least most interesting elevated itself from the mundane to absolute treacherous - someone was always battling it out with someone else. These are fond memories now only because those people are no longer alive and my children love hearing about how my strange Catholic family. Now, my husband and I make a to embrace the important meal. This Thanksgiving we will be cooking with friends, not potluck, but all of us in the kitchen together, eating, drinking, and conversing and later sitting around a table, sans television, eating on our nicest collection of plates by no means are we wealthy but we have managed to collect a few nice pieces, and real linens not the paper kind, discussing - I can't say what as our topics are so varied - poetry, literature, philosophy, soccer - whatever, and our young children will participate because they don't know any other way. Perhaps it is my own desire to believe that not all is lost in this world or in those things that few of us still find worthwhile and so I am hopeful that by doing these things I save myself, but I also pass these things onto my children. Hope is an absolute necessity when you have young children. I hope your Thanksgiving finds you at that lost meal that no longer exists, for it's in these moments when memory and reality touch that life is most elevated.
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