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Over the weekend, Lebanon shattered three food-related Guinness World Records: Largest plate of hummus (over 2 tons), largest plate of tabbouleh (nearly 4 tons), and largest plate in general. (I liked the headline over this news brief in the Washington Post Express this morning: “Tragically, Giant Pita is Overlooked.”)

Between this and the 500-pound kibbeh (a snack made of minced meat and bulgur wheat) which earned Lebanon a world record earlier this year, you could be forgiven for calling the country obsessed with setting records. But this is no mere hobby; it’s a culinary campaign—specifically against Israel, the previous hummus record holder—to establish national ownership of these foods and the economic potential they represent. The name of the recent event says it all: The “Hummus and Tabbouleh are 100 percent Lebanese” festival. Neal Ungerleider has a good post on this topic at True/Slant.

Last year, the head of the Lebanese Industrialists Association told the media that his group planned to sue Israel for “stealing” hummus and other dishes (though as far as I can tell, no lawsuit has materialized), citing the precedent of feta cheese, a food name that the European Union has ruled belongs exclusively to Greece. And then, of course, there’s France’s champagne and Rocquefort cheese, Italy’s Parma ham and Parmesan cheese, and hundreds of other food products with “protected designations of origin” under European Union rules. (India’s Darjeeling tea could be next.)

What do you think, should a country or region be allowed to lay exclusive claim to particular foods or food products?

I depend on coffee for my morning caffeine, but I prefer the more delicate flavor of tea when I need an afternoon warmer or a mild pick-me-up. The various international rituals and accoutrements of tea I’ve encountered in my travels are also part of its appeal for me: I loved how, in Turkey, every social or business transaction began with some steaming çai served in a graceful little glasses on a silver tray, and that I never entered a home in Ireland or Great Britain where a kettle wasn’t immediately put on to boil for some milky tea.

A silver Italian teapot, circa 1840. Photograph courtesy of Fowler Museum, UCLA

So, during a recent visit to my hometown Los Angeles, I was interested to catch an exhibition at UCLA’s Fowler Museum called “Steeped in History: The Art of Tea“. Aside from seeing some beautiful artifacts, including teapots, tea caddies and Japanese netsuke, I absorbed enough historical tidbits to ace a tea category if I ever make it onto Jeopardy.

For starters, I learned that steeping didn’t become the preferred method of preparing tea until the Ming Dynasty in China, which began in the 14th century. The ancient Chinese compressed tea into cakes, then shaved off portions to boil in water. By the 10th century, during the Song Dynasty, powdered tea, which was whipped with hot water using a bamboo whisk, became popular.

According to Chinese legend, an emperor named Shen Nong discovered tea nearly 5,000 years ago, when the wind blew some leaves into his kettle of boiling water.

During the Ming era, Xü Cishu wrote a tea manual called Chashu, which listed appropriate times to drink tea. These included “When bored with poetry,” “After tipsy guests have left,” “When skies are overcast,” and “In perfect weather.” In other words, anytime.

Tea was introduced to Japan during the early Heian period (794–1185) by monks who returned after studying Zen Buddhism in China. The traditional Japanese tea ceremony was formalized in the 1500s, and was believed to offer a path to enlightenment through everyday gestures performed “in mindful awareness of the present moment.” At first performed solely by men, the role eventually became associated with women.

An alternative, less formal ceremony called Senchado emerged later. It was based on the wu wei principle of “yielding to the stream of life rather than working against it.”

Europeans didn’t start drinking tea until the 17th century. It caught on first with the Dutch, who were the only traders allowed to enter Japan after it enacted a closed-door policy in 1639, and even they were only allowed as far as an island in Nagasaki harbor.

No place today is more associated with tea drinking than the United Kingdom, and the exhibition devotes some space to both English tea culture and to the political ramifications of the kingdom’s former imperial practices in India, where most of its tea was grown, and in the American colonies—where, of course, tea-related taxes and restrictions eventually helped spark a revolution.

Steeped in Tradition: The Art of Tea continues at the Fowler through November 29.

Vegemite on toast, courtesy Flickr user StephenMitchell

The Australian snack spread Vegemite, a yeasty brown goop, is one of those taste sensations—like cilantro—that inspires either fierce loyalty or disgust.

I know it has a lot of nutritional value, but personally, I can’t think of anything less appetizing than “a food paste made from yeast extract.” (Well, maybe aspic; I’m with Colin Flynn there.)

So I was bemused to read recent news articles about the “storm of complaints” that erupted from the Australian public when Vegemite’s maker, Kraft Foods Australia, announced plans to make a new “cheesy” version of this odd food product. It wasn’t necessarily the new product itself that bothered people (although my first reaction was amazement: There IS something less appetizing than yeast paste! Yeast paste mixed with cream cheese!), it was the new product’s name: Kraft proposed naming it iSnack 2.0. (Wow, something even less appetizing: Yeast paste mixed with cream cheese and named after an inedible electronic device!)

After polling some 30,000 consumers, Kraft has since settled on a new name: Vegemite Cheesybite, which beat out Smooth, Snackmate, Vegemate, Vegemild and Creamymate. (The company apparently did not consider a few of the more creative names suggested by some online commenters: “Veg-I-Mite-Not,” anyone? How about “Vegemort, the snack which cannot be named?”)

“We have been overwhelmed by the response from the public; it clearly demonstrated your passion for this brand,” Kraft writes on the Vegemite web site. (It almost sounds like they were surprised to realize people liked it, too!)

I know, I know…I really should try the stuff before I knock it. But there’s a very similar product called Marmite in England, where I studied abroad in college, and if it didn’t have a label I would have sworn it was some sort of industrial glue or solvent.

Have you tried Vegemite (or Marmite)? Did you like it?

Oh, and just for fun:

Today’s guest post comes from a fellow Smithsonian staffer, Surprising Science blogger Sarah Zielinski, whose recent vacation included a visit to the Great British Cheese Festival. We are officially jealous. —Eds.

Sampling at the Great British Cheese Festival. Photo by Sarah Zielinski.

Samples of Lyburn Stoney Cross cheese. Photo by Sarah Zielinski.

Somewhere around the 40th or 50th sample, I hit the metaphorical wall. No more, I thought.

It was a sad discovery: Yes, you can eat too much cheese.

I was munching my way through the cheese tent at the Great British Cheese Festival with a friend a few weeks ago. We had decided to go to the festival for three reasons: It’s held on the grounds of the amazing Cardiff Castle in Wales; Cardiff is where Doctor Who and Torchwood are filmed (we’re both fans); and we love cheese.

We arrived on Saturday evening and quickly fulfilled our geeky sci-fi desires, leaving Sunday for castle touring (it was truly spectacular) and cheese.

We started in the drink tent, where there were a couple dozen kegs of apple ciders, a few perries (pear ciders), and a good selection of beers. Half-pints of cider in hand, we set out for the two tents of British foods, where vendors sold fresh Welsh meats, baked goods and ice creams. But we quickly moved on to the main attraction.

My friend later told me that she first thought the cheese tent was too small. She was wrong. There were more than two dozen cheese makers set up behind tables and refrigerated cases, each of them offering tastes of two to eight cheeses. We moved around the tent, pushing through the crowd to grab samples for each other.

There were blue cheeses that ranged from strong to stinky. A fresh and light caerphilly. A smoked cheddar that tasted like I was sitting beside a campfire. Wensleydale, like Wallace and Gromit eat. And cheddars with whisky, with cranberries, with ginger.

At one point, a young woman with a large tank on her back walked up and offered us small cups of fresh whole organic milk. It was the best milk I’ve ever tasted.

The "cheese tossing" contest outside Cardiff Castle. Photo by Sarah Zielinski.

A few samples short of completing the circuit, I had to admit that I had reached my cheese limit. We made our purchases (a caerphilly, a blue, a plain cheddar, the cheddar with ginger, and some fresh butter) and headed back outside, where something called “cheese tossing” was taking place.

Fortunately, that was not a euphemism for the consequences of overeating—it was kind of like a water balloon contest. Two people stand close to each other and throw a log-like cheese (actually, a stand-in synthetic cheese) back and forth, taking one step back between each toss. The record from last year was over 50 feet, but no one we saw got close to it. Throwing cheese around is surprisingly difficult, as my friend and I discovered when we tried it ourselves.

Later that week, we also discovered the recovery time for “too much cheese.” Thankfully, it’s only about three days.

The McRice burger, as found in McDonald's in Asia. Courtesy Flickr user selva.

There’s a classic scene in the beginning of Pulp Fiction, when John Travolta’s character tells Samuel L. Jackson’s character that, in France, you can buy a beer at McDonald’s, and that they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese a “Royale with cheese.”

He could have kept going, as a photo gallery of McDonald’s menu items around the world on the Food Network site and the occasional viral e-mail attest: In Asia you can get a McRice Burger, with a chicken or beef patty sandwiched between rice cakes instead of a bun. McPoutine is on the fast-food menu in Quebec, where the regional midnight snack of choice is french fries smothered in cheese curds and gravy (I live about two hours south of Montreal, and our local A&W stand also sells fries with cheese curds). The McTurco is, predictably, the regional offering in Turkey—two burger patties with hot pepper sauce in a fried pita, the McDonald’s take on a kebab. The phenomenally successful business’ international modus operandi seems to be: Take the regional specialty, try to recreate it using mostly ingredients already used in other menu items and slap a “Mc” onto it.

I’ve never been a fan of McDonald’s (except for their french fries, which I indulge in about once or twice a year—and no, I haven’t read Fast Food Nation and I don’t know what they add to make the fries so tasty, so don’t ruin it for me) or fast food in general. But, occasionally, when in another country, it’s interesting to see not only a culture’s haute cuisine but what locals eat when they’re on the go. Even before McDonald’s and other chains went global, most cultures had their version of fast food, if usually on a more mom-and-pop level.

Britain and Ireland have fish and chips. In Scotland, where I lived briefly, the chippers also sold battered (and deep-fried, of course) sausages. (Here’s a question for the nutritionists: if a battered sausage is deep fried in canola or olive oil, does the good cholesterol counteract the bad cholesterol? I’m guessing no.) Italy has panini and pizza, though it’s nothing like the slices familiar to most Americans. In Holland, raw herring with onions (followed, I hope, by some Altoids) is a favorite fast food.

But the golden arches is, by far, the most dominant player in the global fast-food market. A stunning visualization of the chain’s ubiquity, at least in the United States, is a map posted on the blog Weather Sealed that shows the distribution of McDonald’s locations. Blogger Stephen Von Worley created the map to determine the “McFarthest Spot.” He concluded that a point between two tiny hamlets in the Dakotas, 145 miles by car to the nearest Mickey D’s, was the winner (or loser, I suppose, depending on your perspective).

I am proud to report that my home, the Adirondack Park, rated a mention for its “McSparseness.” These 6 million acres (unusual among state parks for including both private and public land) contain, as near as I can determine, a total of 5 McDonald’s.