Transcriber: Beto Maya Reviewer: Tatjana Jevdjic
I am obsessed with food.
For me, eating is the most intimate thing.
In a sense, even more than making love.
When we sit in a restaurant,
we put food in our mouth, we eat food that stays in our body
and literally becomes who we are.
It's crazy, how without even thinking twice,
we bring the spoon into our mouth
and swallow food that was prepared behind the closed door of a kitchen.
We don't know who made it,
we don't know how it was made,
but yet, we swallow.
For me, it's as intimate as entering a dark room,
and making love with someone I've never met or talked to in my life.
(Laughter)
By the way, this is why open kitchen restaurants
became so popular in the past few years,
and they are here to stay.
So, for me the sentence, "We are what we eat,"
is a very literal one in the sense that we not only consume the food,
but also the hands of the person who made it.
My love story with food begins in my childhood.
When I was a child I was really skinny.
My grandmother Hanna, who lives right here in Jerusalem,
just a few meters away from here, used to make up endless stories,
to distract my mind, while she fed me.
Stories about "Lokshalach", which are Jewish noodles,
who get lost in the woods,
and about cookie soldiers marching in the Old City of Jerusalem.
She would also make me the sandwich with bread,
butter,
and thin slices of raw white onions and a little bit of salt.
And till today, when I am hungry,
I don't have Michelin Stars fantasies
about shaves of Beluga Caviar and white truffle.
When I'm hungry, I'm thinking: bread, butter, onions.
So, we all have a very intimate relationship with food.
One that's about memory, and love, and family,
and as much as we can try and rationalize it,
every recipe is a memory, inevitably.
But, we also have a dilemma here –
Scientists tell us that one of the greatest threats to our existence on this planet
is the way we consume and produce our food.
So, I would like to demonstrate this dilemma today
through the breaking of a very traditional, well know plate in Jerusalem:
The Tabouleh Salad.
Tabouleh Salad has been served on tables of Jerusalem
since the Ottoman ruled the area.
We have writings from the 19th century
showing tables in harems with the exact same dish that we eat today.
So let's look at the ingredients:
The parsley.
There's an old Arab say, that if you want to find yourself a good husband,
you better know how to chop parsley the right way.
So, chopping parsley the right way is actually not to chop it at all,
is to tear it up with your hands.
And if you do insist, or really need to chop it,
do it only one time with your knife.
Otherwise it will become black and soggy, and lose all its wonderful freshness.
What else, the garlic – Oh, here's an interesting fact:
Over 90% of garlic consumed in Jerusalem arrives from China.
It travels over 5,000 miles in order to get here.
You can just imagine the ecological waste, the pollution,
the nutritional value lost on the way – It's huge.
And what about the Tabouleh itself?
Tabouleh is bulgur.
Bulgur is crushed wheat, but wheat doesn't grow in Israel
and hasn't been for years.
Over 95% of wheat consumed in this country
arrives from Australia, from Canada and from the States.
So we have this dish, representing the kitchen or Jerusalem.
Everyone here knows it, we eat in Arab restaurants, in Jewish restaurants
though its main ingredients arrive from China and from Australia.
So if we insisted on using our eco-logic,
Tabouleh Salad would probably be extinct.
As a judge and MasterChef, I keep seeing how we define ourselves through food,
I see the competitors going back to the Shabbat Dinners, to the Holly Days.
The Moroccan becomes Chraime.
The Ashkenaz becomes chicken soup with a lot of dill.
The people of Jerusalem, make this green herby sour tahini
that could be recognized from miles as a Jerusalem version,
though its main ingredient, sesame, arrives from Ethiopia.
I keep seeing the competitors putting themselves in their pots and pans.
It's the only way how I can judge their food
and know who they really are.
The emotion, the memory, the intimacy, the power,
the strength that goes into one bite I take –
It is so strong.
So going back to our dilemma –
On one hand, us foodies – want to eat local, fresh seasonal food,
for the sake of our grandchildren,
but on the other hand, we don't want to lose our own childhood taste,
we don't want our grandchildren to forget where they came from,
a taste that connects us to our identity,
to our family, to our community.
So I thought about it, and I came to the conclusion
that the only way that we can maintain the taste of our memories,
is to bring the whole world inside our plates.
It's to allow the whole world to enter our kitchen.
So in this sense, and maybe in this sense only,
globalization allows us to stay unique,
to hold on to a grandmother's kitchen, but to also remember
that there are grandmothers in China and in Australia.
Thank you very much. (Applause)