The World in Words 53: The language of food: a food greeting in China, a food fight in Cyprus, and Slovak dumplings

How would you prefer to spend your evening…memorizing Russian declensions and conjugations…or chowing down on some pelmeni and shaslyk? Let’s face it, sampling another culture’s cuisine is a whole lot easier than learning a foreign language. But food and how it’s viewed from one culture to the next is far from simple. Is it to ward off starvation, or to show off sophistication? We take a cooking class in Beijing that draws on recent Chinese history. Then we go to Cyprus, where local Turks and Greeks are claiming sole ownership of the dishes both love. And then, what happens to the simple Eastern European dumpling when capitalism replaces communism? It gets garnished with sprig of parsley and costs ten times as much.