Food: THE VESSEL OF UNITY
There’s nothing that brings people together like food. It’s the vessel that helps introduce people from different backgrounds. n BY RONY CAMILLE / PHOTOS BY ROBERT ORTIZ (unless otherwise indicated)
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ne of the many experiences I had during my teen years in southern New Hampshire as a transplant from Montreal was sampling the foods from different countries — Egypt, Jordan, Jamaica, Kenya and South Korea — that family friends would make. In return, my mom would offer up dishes from her native Haiti. This kind of personal
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sharing is why food is unique in its ability to make the big, diverse world smaller and more approachable. There’s a universal harmony at work when you introduce someone to a traditional dish or a piece of produce in the supermarket that is foreign to them but not to you. For me, the delight is introducing some of my friends to marinated red snapper, poultry with epis (Haitian
green spice) or giving them a sampling of the traditional Haitian New Year’s Soup Joumou — a pumpkin squash soup to commemorate the Haitian liberation from the French. When my family first settled in New Hampshire in the mid-’90s, sourcing ingredients was challenging for some dishes. While local grocery stores would have some items, our family would often
