Eating at Banquets

Today was the Arabic Language Institute’s end of year party.

There were little sketches, recitations and performances put by the students who had taken electives – the music elective sang or played ‘ud, the Qur’an and Bible electives read some of their favourite verses, and so on. My group did a short play with word games in colloquial Egyptian.

The gates to the banquet – tantalizingly laid out next to the entrance, and near my table – were flung open after the show. This was mandatory. Egyptians are a ravenous lot and won’t stay for long at any event once the food is served. I am told – for I haven’t yet been to one – that dinner is often served after midnight at Egyptian weddings for precisely this reason.

I have attended several banquets here (they are a favourite for group events, as in North America) and I have noticed three things.

First, Egyptians are as shy about ravishing the banquet as university students in North America. In Canada, all (except university students) hang back a bit from the buffet after the lids are lifted. No one knows just why, but something unknown causes North Americans to want to show that they’re not too hungry, that they’re a light eaters, or that they don’t need the food.

I’m not sure whether it is to be expected or if it is surprising that eating is shunned in an obese culture such as mine. It is a psychological phenomenon roughly equivalent to closing one’s eyes to hide. Weight is seen on the waistline, not the dinner plate. (Although if others never see you eat it might strengthen the case when saying “I never eat – it’s the curse of my slow metabolism”)

One American girl at our table wanted to go for more vine leaves but confessed she was embarrassed: “I don’t want them to think I’m a fatty.” She was thin as a rail. You wouldn’t hear an Egyptian say that, thin or not. (In fact, until today I thought that after about 1970 or grade 5, whichever came first, you wouldn’t hear a North American say “fatty” either).

I should say that this desire not be seen eating is only present in a certain class of North Americans. The Polaroids immortalizing those who a) managed to get their meal free at the 72 oz. steak place (by finishing it) or b) ate the most at Pizza Hut’s all-you-can-eat Tuesday caution me against over-generalizing.

In any case, there is no shame in eating here: the administrative staff swarmed the table like killer bees. The thirty of them could be found in the first thirty-five spaces in line, and I can assure you it wasn’t our politeness that let them go ahead.



Second, banquets are devoured incredibly quickly here. I consider myself, to my regret, a fast eater. I am also a big eater. But I do not rival the Egyptians with whom I have eaten at banquets.

I was generously invited to an end of year banquet of all Cairo Rotary clubs. The speeches seemed interminable. It was shortly after my arrival and about the only words I could catch were “giddan” and “yaani”. Imagine listening to two hours of speeches in which all you understand is “very” and what would translate into Canadian English as “eh.” (for non Canadians, it means something like: “you know what I’m saying?”)

Blah blah very blah blah, eh? (repeat, ad nauseam)

But I was happy to be there and take in this event. You start noticing the neatest little details when you hear people talk without understanding the meaning of the words. It is like music in a foreign language: as pure sound it takes on a different and purely esthetic quality. There are some compositions based on this principle – the sung portions are merely syllables, or consist of counting from one to one-hundred.

I have some recordings of such works by the Pearson College choir (of which I was sadly not a part) and they are very beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that they have moved me to tears. Actually, I have never cried listening to them, but rather than the music’s inability, it was my own that kept them from flowing. Socrates is the only man of whom I know who is said to have been able to move to tears in this way with speech alone. It is said that he was so expressive and rhetorical that he could cause a crowd to cry reciting to them the alphabet!

Perhaps by the time food was served at the Rotary banquet people were ready to leave, but I have never see a whole table of middle-aged people wolf down food so fast. Toward the end of the meal I reached for a plate of salad in the middle of the table. Before I could get it a waiter swooped in and carried it away. Sensing my disappointment, the Rotarian next to me called the waiter to have him bring it back. Embarrassingly, long after everyone else’s plates were cleared, the salad was brought back from the brink of garburator – for me. I didn’t know if it was worse to take it or leave it. So I took it.

I wondered why I ate so fast compared to most North Americans. I think these traits were acquired eating around the campfire and the table of cook-shacks in the Bush. The first axiom – big – is necessary because you enjoy the good meals while you can get them. The second axiom – fast – is a product of the first: you need to get down as much food as possible before others beat you to it, or you have to hit the trail. A good cook (and she is the best) will bury the table in rich dishes, but it still has a way of disappearing quickly.

Only in this context (speaking of how hunters, wranglers and cowboys eat) do I feel like can I quote Louis L’Amour without feeling like I am inviting the rejection of my whole message as fanciful. L’Amour always makes a point in his books where the characters go hungry of saying that those who haven’t eaten in a very long time eat slowly – not quickly – when food is put before them. I, like most, have never verified the truth of that proposition. But I can say that those who expect not to eat for a very long time eat quickly.

I never recovered from those first meals. I still eat every meal like a meal on hunter-change day, or as if it were my last (the latter simile being less accurate, but more accessible). And I cannot waste food – I physically cannot see food wasted. I would sooner eat to the point of pain and lie like a wolf, its belly physically swelled with meat, for three days in rest, than waste. In my mind it may be weeks before I eat again. Of course, this is especially ill-adapted to civilized life: when do we ever miss a meal?

Secretly, I confess to longing to miss one. Adaptation to hardship, strangely, is destructive in times of plenty.

Why do Egyptians eat quickly? It would be wrong to say that Egyptians – at least those at the banquets I’ve been to – run any risk of hardship. Yet there is a little remnant of it flowing in their veins. (A topic I hope to discuss later) Apart from that, I don’t know.

The Bedu, I should say (Bedouin is in fact singular), do not eat as the Cairenes do. When I ate with them in their gardens in Sinai, they would not themselves eat until we had completely finished our meal. I wasn’t sure why. Elizabeth told me that this was traditional hospitality: guests eat first and separately from the hosts, so that they may be offered the best food. Viewed in a certain way, I suppose, you might think the host does not wish to reveal their poverty by what they later eat. Although intended for the guest’s comfort, anyone not moved and put somewhat ill-at-ease by that combination of pride and poverty must have a very small hear indeed. Yet, it fosters something greater than comfort or pity: admiration.

I wondered, however, if the Bedu didn’t just keep different hours. By sundown after a day of hiking I was starved. They, on the other hand, are somewhere between the Spaniards and the Argentinians, and take their evening meal long after dark. Also, though they had had no foreign visitors in one month, I wondered if they didn’t prefer just to be alone. Conversation – difficult though it was at times with my Arabic – was an opening to our continued presence for a time; its cessation unmistakably invited us to retire to our corner of the Garden, leaving the family to eat together, alone.

Third constat re: banquets – important people get served at their seats. I can’t say that I know the buffet to be North American, or European innovation, but I have always thought it couldn’t have any other origin. And everyone knows: you get up and serve yourself at a buffet. A buffet at which you are served by waiters is only subtly different, and yet that seems to me to completely subvert its purpose and attractiveness.

This is one example of a large number of things that are so close but yet so far from home here in Egypt. Generally, imported things have that feeling to them. For you approach them with expectations: a sense of what they should, ought to, or must be. When experiencing something wholly foreign, I am unencumbered by the expectation that it be one way or another. On the contrary, it is sometimes disappointing when it is like something from home. All is new, and exciting to discover.

But when I am told: this is a banquet, and I see that it is not, it can be unnerving. This is why people often experience a greater culture shock in the seemingly familiar countries than in the vastly different ones. Consider Great Britain: they speak English, are white, and like beer, meat and potatoes. It looks like a match made in heaven for any North American. Upon discovering that the British are not like us at all, the shock is all the more profound for the lack of preparation and psychological defences erected against it. Thus, the traveler to Timbuktu is prepared for – and delighted by – the total foreignness of the place, whereas Americans in Oxford invariably (and annoyingly) complain incessantly.

Egyptian cafes provide a better example of what I mean than banquets.

They have some European cafes here, notably Costa Coffee. Mercifully, I haven’t seen a single Starbucks or anything with the word “Seattle” in it. (MacDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Hardees, however, are ubiquitous). There are also a number of Cafes, such as Cilantro, that are home grown but try to be European.

These places come close, but never quite succeed. They are missing that je ne sais quoi perfectionné par les Parisiens, mais jamais exporté. (One exception to that, I am told, may have been Beirut. But the past tense is obligatory in that sentence) It’s like a machine: you might program one to replicate every caress of the fingertip, flutter of the tongue and angle pelvis, but it could never make love. Rather than being warm, human and seductive, the experience is cold, mechanical and frequently unsettling.

At Costa Coffee, cakes are sold whole, rather than pieces. The price in the display case is for a whole cake. If you would like a piece, please divide this price by twelve, roughly. And the items under the glass are not actually for sale. In the great Egyptian tradition, they have been embalmed and sit permanently on display, giving you a shriveled and somewhat unappetizing (but highly durable) sense of what you might get brought out to you if you order a croissant.

The other day I ordered steamed milk at Cilantro (which was on the menu, lest I be blamed of making an unfamiliar request). After about five minutes the waiter came back: sir, we just want to make sure whether you want that steamed milk hot or cold. But hey, I’m glad he checked.

The biggest problem with the cafes is the omnipresence of the waiters. Many cafes seem to have a 1:1 ratio of waiters to people sipping coffee. They maddeningly open the door for you any time you come within a ten foot radius of it, inside our outside the café. If you so much as look in the window to see if a friend is there, or come down from upstairs to talk with someone you know, the three nearest waiters will spring into action and fling the door open, just in case. The very instant you finish the last drop of your drink (sometimes before) the cup is whisked away, leaving the distinct feeling that your every movement was being watched the whole time.

In order to maintain uniform quality, all of Cilantro’s food is centrally packaged (I am tempted to say manufactured). The sandwiches are the kind that come in triangular plastic boxes with expiry dates on stamped on them by the machine that seals them. The salads too. If you order one to stay, they dump it, head first, into a porcelain bowl. All the garnishes, nicely arranged on the top in the plastic container, find themselves buried under a mound of unusually pale romaine lettuce. You are left staring down at a salad that looks like it consists entirely of the base of the inner leaves of the head of lettuce, the ones that are left after you strip off anything responsible for the plant’s photosynthesis. It’s barely cafeteria food really, but it’s some of the most expensive of this genre you can find in Egypt.

In short, it’s sterile. But since most occidentals’ barometers are located in their (sheltered) duodenums, sterility is good.