Hummus Wars Heat
Up
by Walt
Giersbach
JERUSALEM
(AP) - Israel has taken the upper hand in the
newest Mideast conflict, one in which bullets are
replaced by chickpeas. Using a satellite dish on
loan from a nearby broadcast station, cooks in a
town near Jerusalem whipped up more than four
metric tons of hummus, the chickpea paste that is
a staple – and an almost religious mania
– for many in the Middle East.
Israeli cooks,
dancing the hora past the Wailing Wall, have
doubled the previous record for the world's
biggest serving of hummus, set in October by
cooks in Lebanon. That record broke an earlier
Israeli record and briefly put Lebanon ahead.
An unnamed
spokesperson for the U.S. State Department said,
“We’re concerned now that the Iranians
are plotting to fill a football field with hummus.”
“Football” is what other nationalities
call soccer. In an unguarded moment of government
wit, he concluded, “We don’t know what
song they’re singing, but they might hummus
a few bars.”
Mahmoud
Admadinejad, the embattled president of Iran,
challenged by political opposition as much as by
his height, called the Israeli cook-off a
“hallucination” and a “myth.”
“There is no such thing as hummus, but if
there were then the Revolutionary Republic of
Iran would pitch our entire economy into making
enough hummus to cover Teheran to the depth of
one meter.”
United Nations
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon asked “What is
hummus? Mashed up chickpeas. These nations are
like little children. Next thing, they’ll
ask us to send more peas-keepers to the
Middle East.”
Hummus is a
concoction made with uncooked chickpeas or
garbanzo beans, lemon juice, garlic and cumin. It
is blended and then eaten. Raw. On a pita, if any
are lying around, or on tortilla chips.
The Israeli
satellite dish is still filled with hummus and
residents are complaining about missing
“American Idol.”
World’s
largest hummus or abject foolishness?
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