DC's Folklife Festival 2008

I went to DC this weekend to check out Amnesty International's Guantanamo exhibit. I didn't know that the Smithsonian folklife festival was going on as well, but it ended up being the more interesting of the two activities of the day.

Anyways, the AI exhibit had very few visitors and a lot of AI staffers. I hesitated because I'm always apprehensive about such situations (where the organizers of an event significantly outnumber visitors), but I decided to take a look at the cell since I had made the trip. I don't really know what I was expecting, but it was underwhelming. The exhibit was just a re-created jail cell with a staffer explaining the plight of those held at Guantanamo.

This year's folk life festival centered on Texas, NASA, and Bhutan. An eclectic mix to be sure; Bhutan ended up being the only part of interest to me. The NASA exhibit seemed to be more geared toward kids, and the Texas exhibit was boring.

Bhutan: Land of the Thunder Dragon

I started of by listening to a lecture on traditional Bhutanese archery. A few members of the royal family were on hand to demonstrate:



The lecturer waxed poetic about the finer points of archery, and how he believed bow-making to be one of the more skilled arts in the world. I listened for a while before moving on to the cuisine exhibit. There a crowd was listening to a mother/son pair discuss the food culture of Bhutan.



Chili and cheese, the national dish of Bhutan. Apparently, a New York food critic, Ruth Reichl, had declared that Bhutanese cuisine was the worst in the entire world. The son, a former monk, explained that Bhutan had many regions, and thus, many different regional cuisines, so it wasn't fair to lump all the regions together. But they wanted to show this one dish in particular because it was the one universal dish that was eaten across the country. Note that those are actually red hot chili peppers - the dish doesn't contain meat, as one might think based on the name. When asked if eating chili peppers would be very spicy, the mother replied that the cheese and spinach made the extreme spiciness bearable!

So the son began to speak again, and explained that meat was eaten very sparingly in Bhutan. It's a predominantly Buddhist country, and if meat is eaten at all, it would only come from an animal that died of natural causes - animals are not generally raised as food and slaughtered in Bhutan.



Congressman Brian Baird (flanked by the Bhutanese ambassador to the US and a member of the Bhutanese cabinet) was on hand to sample the dish -"it's like a red bell pepper, but with a thicker skin", and declared that Ruth Reichl was wrong in her assessment of Bhutanese cuisine. He even seemed to be right at home eating the rice (red rice is a prestige food) and chili with his hands - the preferred way of eating in Bhutan. I'd have tried it myself but the price tag of $9 for four chili peppers and a lump of simulation Bhutanese cheese (made from brie and cream cheese) seemed a bit exorbitant :p.