Project Description

Noah’s Pudding in the CUHK & NYU Joint Culinary Symposium

Posted on 3/1/2012

Noah

EVENT DETAILS

On the January 3rd Anthropology Department of Chinese University of Hong Kong and The Global Food Cultures Program of New York University jointly presented the symposium “Culinary Tourism: Communication, Learning and Adventure” in CUHK Chung Yu Tung Building. PI (Formerly known as ACDC) also took part in this very speacial event about culture with presenting a specific Turkish dessert: Noah’s Pudding.

All the speakers; Casey Lum, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication at William Paterson University (USA); Sidney Cheung, Professor and anthropologist, whose current “knowledge transfer project” is designed to develop touristic resources from within (and for) the local neighborhood in Sheung Wan; Wantanee Suntikul, Assistant Professor at the Institute for Tourism Studies (Macau), specializing in the social, political, and environment aspects of tourism planning and development, community-based tourism, and intangible heritage safeguarding; Daisann McLane, award-winning journalist and Director of a food and travel consulting company called Little Adventures in Hong Kong gave very remarkable and interesting speeches.

Pearl Institute has also been invited for a presentation of a special Turkish dish: Noah’s Pudding (Ashure). Among the speeches before the break time Mehmet Soylemez, on behalf of the PI made a brief presentation of the significance of this dish. As in his speech Prof. Casey Lum claimed food as a way of communication, Mr. Soylemez explained how the tradition for this very specific dish also resembles dialog. Since Noah’s pudding is a common culture in Islam and Christianity from Middle East, and the story behind of the pudding which is based on the day of the Noah’s Ark settled on to dry land which is again common for all the Abrahamic religions. That background made the pudding as a tool for dialog in Turkey. Thus the tradition became as making and distributing the Noah’s Pudding to friends, neighbors etc. regardless of their ethnic or religious background. In that sense the presentation and distribution of Noah’s Pudding in this symposium made a big sense.

As in the Q&A section it has seen that the attendees like very much the symposium and Noah’s Pudding also made big remark on the symposium.

Finally the best reflection from one of the MA students in CUHK was showing that Noah’s Pudding is in fact a way for dialogue and inter-cultural understanding: “I will learn how to do Noah’s pudding, because of the distribution to friends, neighborhood tradition. After that I will do this tradition myself in the next Chinese New Year”

January 3rd 2012, CUHK 

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