One month ago we asked you, our visitors past, present, and potential to share with us the best dishes from your home country in alignment with World Food Day. This year, World Food Day falls on October 16th. Our goal was connect the team here at AMO to you and your culture, with food as the center point. Food as a way of uniting people is not a new idea. It has been patterned over centuries as outlined in our previous blog post ‘Food, A Foundation for Cultural Appreciation‘ and the article ‘The Joy of Food’ featured in National Geographic.

The Submissions

We received submissions of appetizers, main dishes, and deserts through social media. Some were dishes we were familiar with. But, many were items we have never heard of. As such, these required a bit of research on our part. With each submission, we investigated its origin and its composition of ingredients. In total, 57 dishes from 24 countries were submitted.

On Thursday, October 10, the AMO team gathered to celebrate your cuisine and culture. Choosing what submissions to make, buy, and share with the team proved challenging. Dietary restrictions and the absence of a stovetop and oven in the office kitchen forced us into flexibility (we did order a few dishes from local establishments).

The Menu

Eventually we settled on a diverse, but cheese-filled, spread. It included Thai papaya salad, falafel, arepas, cachapas, hummus and pita chips, tequenos, lumpia, baklava, and brigadeiro. We left the meal with full hearts and full stomachs,. This was good since we did a bang-up job on the brigadiero. Despite the absence of desert, our World Food Day was a success and we thank all those who submitted dishes!

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