The Food Of Love - Part III

This is Mariam Hassan and Manuel Dominguez, her producer explaining about a stew that they are making, it really should be made with camel - but I couldn’t find any camel meat so she has made do with lamb.









I was standing backstage fascinated by their tattooed feet



Mariam is from the Western Sahara but Morocco has occupied this land since 1976 and the Moroccan security forces continue to treat the Sahrawis extremely badly, Mariam has found asylum in Spain but many of her compatriots have been stuck in Algerian refugee camps for 33 years now.

Morocco has built a wall across the territory it is laying claim to in the Western Sahara and Spain has in turn built a wall to keep out the asylum seekers

This review of a talk given last month by Wendy Brown discusses the astonishing number of walls that are going up all over the world.

The Food Of Love

In Real Life I’m a cook, these days I take short cooking jobs and fit them around the work going on at the production house. In my early cooking days I catered for pop stars and I still do quite lot of work with children, but it tends to be non-musical events. I am therefore, really excited, about  my job this weekend at WOMAD, a music festival set in a vast parkland strewn with people performing songs and dancing, I'm especially looking forward to seeing these people.






One of the performance tents has a stage set with a kitchen – artists, who are also performing on the larger stages, come here and cook something for the public who come to watch the spectacle - it’s like Food Art with music.


My role in all this? I am The Girl Who Shops; I get sent details of what the musicians want to make, I buy the ingredients, make sure they have enough of the right sorts of pots, and when the cooking gets going I might end up stirring a sauce while they toss pancakes.

My shopping list includes ‘crumbs of salt cod’, chorizo, smoked ham and ‘moong divide', the Food Events start with Cuban Chicken on Friday and end with a rock ‘n’ roll breakfast on Sunday evening (Kalua and Coco pops and a demonstration of the sort of meals you can make inside a hotel kettle).

the musicians often send accompanying notes, placing their choice of dish in context. Many WOMAD performers are in some way exiled from their homeland, Mariam Hassan is currently resident in Spain, she will be making a lamb dish from the Sahara, to finish she will serve 3 different sorts of tea, the first will be As Bitter as Life, the second will be As Sweet as Love and the third will be As Soft as Death.