The event, organized by the Global Education Office in collaboration with the Division of Enrollment Management, featured teams from Japan, China, Iran, Bangladesh, India and the Czech Republic participating in the live “Iron Chef”-style competition for superior cuisine.
Team Japan won the competition, while the team from Czech Republic placed second and the Iranian team was third. The team from China took the people’s choice award.
“One thing that we enjoy about this event is that it is students preparing food from their countries, teaching us about their cultures, and that is what we are all about here: for people to share their cultures,” said Mary Anne Saunders, special assistant to the president, who is responsible for global initiatives on campus.
Saunders said organizers hoped the attendees learned a lot about the cuisines of these six countries and also learned a little bit about their cultures.
“One of our major goals is to get our domestic students from New Mexico or around the United States to be interested in expanding their horizons,” she said. “We want to encourage our domestic students to study abroad.”
The idea of sharing and having a bilateral relation is very important, she said.
“Many New Mexican students would not have the opportunity to study abroad even if sometimes they wanted to because they might have to work or they might have family responsibility,” Saunders said.
The Saunders family is interested in cooking and cuisines from around the world, and that helped UNM come up with the idea of international cooking competition, she said.
“When I came here (last year), we arranged our first international cook-off,” she said. “We expected just a few students, and there were nearly four hundred, so we knew it was popular.”
The international students would be proud that they managed to share their cultures with our domestic students, she said.
“When we first got information about the event, we decided to participate in the competition. We wanted to let international students taste authentic food from India,” said Varun Reddy, a graduate student at the Department of Computer Science.
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The Indian team cooked Vegetable Biryani, made of rice, potatoes, beans, carrots and Indian spices, he said.
“Winning apart, we wanted to let everyone enjoy our national food,” he said.
This was an amazing event for students to learn about different cultures and to become aware about diversity on the campus, said Vital Mazor, a history and theatre major.
If any students are interested in studying abroad, they should visit Global Education Office, Saunders said.
“The Global Education Office will be happy to let them know how they can do that at a lower cost,” she said.
Sayyed Shah is the assistant news editor at the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at assistant-news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @mianfawadshah.
