Hummus. Seriously.

Today we went to see Lebanon break the world record for the biggest plate of hummus. I'm so glad we didn't miss this event. I was reading an article about it the other day. Apparently, Israel won the world record last year and that annoyed the Lebanese enough to motivate just about every restaurant, caterer, culinary school, or food producer in the Beirut area to contribute a huge amount of the stuff too this event. Because hummus is Lebanese. Period. They even made an impressive/massive dish to hold, chill, and weigh it simultaneously. WOW! I don't actually know how many kilos of hummus you have to amass to break the record, but the dish was able to hold, weigh, and chill up to 3 tons (!!!) of it. They certainly pulled out all the stops for the world record.

Not that you can tell from my picture, but the atmosphere in there was crazy-excited. In the screen Matthew and the girls are watching, you can see half the hummus-chefs - the white blob on the screen is a mass of hummus-chef humanity - all uniformed. The remaining hummus-chefs were on the side of the room opposite the giant hummus dish, and part of that (the red/orange thing) is also on the screen. The chefs were chanting and pounding on the tables and it was a delightful racket if there ever was one.

Perhaps I was delighted by it because really, very truly I love this fight and how it's playing out. I would like nothing more than for the nature of the struggle between Israel and Lebanon to someday be nothing more than this. It could be like the thing France/Britain have, where both countries believe that the other is completely insufferable but wouldn't dream of taking up arms in a conflict. That's what I see in this, in sports, in increased communications between civilians on both sides of this boarder and other troublesome boarders. I see an opportunity to trade violence for good-natured rivalry. I want them to uniformly chortle into their coffees about the imbeciles on the other side of the boarder, to weep with laughter telling jokes about their closest neighbors, to hang their heads in shame when the other beats them at soccer, to mock long and loud the others' claim to the origins of hummus. All this, instead of ever dreaming of taking up arms in a conflict.