A white tent, as large as a circus big-top and just as crowded, shakes and rustles to the boom of a loudspeaker. “Hummus!” a voice bellows through a microphone. “Hummus Lubnani!” The crowd cheers, claps, presses forward, and there, through the milling bodies, rises the ceramic contours of a giant bowl, as wide as a truck is long, its edge as high as a man’s shoulder. Around it throng an army in tall chef’s caps, stirring the bowl’s contents with giant wooden paddles. Every few minutes a chef pushes through to the bowl’s edge and empties an enormous basin of cream-like liquid into it. Below, the digits of a huge electronic scale climb through the hundreds. The scale clicks: 2,080 kilograms weight. The crowd cheers. “Two tons!” the loudspeaker roars. “Lebanon has just set the Guinness world record for most hummus ever assembled in one place!” Hummus — the unassuming
