The Fifth Annual Taipei Traditional Food Festival starts today through Sunday at Hope Plaza (
The annual event provides an opportunity for food connoisseurs and newcomers to Taiwanese cuisine alike to taste a broad spectrum of traditional Taiwanese cooking. The food festival will also showcase the latest trends, recipes and innovations in the Taiwanese food and beverage industry.
Fruit, a staple of the national diet, will take center stage at this year's festival. The Taiwanese love of fruit is seen in the diverse selection of fruit products to be displayed and sold, including fresh seasonal fruit, fresh fruit drinks, fruit yogurt, fruit ice and fruit vinegar.
All these products will be available to try at a special fruit-themed pavilion set up at the food festival. A number of DIY cooking stalls will let participants learn how to make Taiwanese snacks such as herb jelly (
Besides eating, organizers of the three day festival have planned many interactive culinary activities including competitions to see who can peel fruit the fastest and a fruit juice drinking contest as well as educational booths.
According to the festival's organizers, the fruit theme is in tune with the government's efforts to promote a healthy lifestyle after the country's recent experience with SARS. "In traditional Taiwanese cooking, we don't really use fruit, and we are hoping that this festival will encourage more people to incorporate it into their daily cooking," Jian Zheng-tong (簡正通), chairman of the Taipei Cooking Arts Exchange Association, said.
Hope Plaza is located at 49 Bate Rd Sec 1, Taipei near the Guanghua Computer Market. Activities will take place between 2pm and 9pm today, 10am and 9pm tomorrow and 10am to 6pm on Sunday.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located