Some competitions are won by a narrow margin. If the last six months are any precedent, the contest over hummus won’t be one of them.
On May 8th, Lebanon carved its initials into the immortal Guinness Book of World Records for the second time in less than a year with the most hummus ever assembled in a single place.
The record amount, initially claimed by Lebanon last October but snatched across the border by Israel in December, has grown exponentially as the competition between the two countries has escalated.
Israel’s December record of 4,090 kilos more than doubled Lebanon’s initial amount of two tons, and Lebanon’s May rebuttal sets the figure at 10,453 kilos.
A day later, on May 9, Lebanon set the record for most falafel assembled, weighing 5173 kilos, which equals approximately 10452 dozens.
“We could have done 12 tons,” said Chef Ramsi Choueiry, who presided over both of Lebanon’s record-setting events, “but the specific amount [10,452 kilometers is the square-area of Lebanon] reflects the core philosophy of this event: that hummus is quintessentially Lebanese.”
The contest has been part of an aggressive bid by Lebanon to win international recognition for what the Association of Lebanese Industrialists call a “misappropriation” of the dish by other Mediterranean countries — and by Israel in particular — which export billions of dollars worth of the dish under the name hummus, the Arabic word for chickpeas, first used by a Lebanese manufacturer in the 1950s.
On May 8, under the direction of Chef Choueiry, 300 apprentice chefs attacked vats of chickpeas, tanks of olive oil and crates of lemons in an industrial fervor that would have brought a tear to Henry Ford’s eye. One by one, teams of apprentices dumped their brimming tubs into an enormous ceramic bowl — the world’s largest, designed by architect Joe Kabalan, earning the country another world record — while the numbers on a giant digital scale climbed skyward.
“This is really fantastic,” said Jack Brockbank, Guinness’s representative adjudicator who witnessed the record. “Lebanon has well and truly re-earned its place in Guinness.”
Whether reclaiming the Guinness record plays into Lebanon’s hands in its bid to register ‘hummus’ as a protected food — marketable under that title only if it is manufactured in Lebanon — the stunt has caught the world’s attention, with international news services from Britain’s BBC to the China-based Xinhua running the story over the course of last month.
