Venezuelan conflict feeds conversation

Behind a storefront painted like a colorful, hand-woven hammock on the corner of Highland Avenue and Baum Boulevard, employees at the Conflict Kitchen busily stuff Venezuelan arepas and wrap them in informational papers. La Cocina Arepas – Conflict Kitchen

Open 7 days a week from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

124 South Highland Ave.

www.conflictkitchen.org

Behind a storefront painted like a colorful, hand-woven hammock on the corner of Highland Avenue and Baum Boulevard, employees at the Conflict Kitchen busily stuff Venezuelan arepas and wrap them in informational papers.

Before biting into the meal, a customer unfolds its wrapper and silently skims the first line. “The arepa is the great democratic food — for rich and poor alike,” it reads.

The Conflict Kitchen, a take-out restaurant in East Liberty that only serves food from countries with which the United States is in conflict, now features cuisine from Venezuela. Like the kitchen’s two previous cycless, which featured food from Iran and Afghanistan, respectively, the Venezuelan concept will remain at the storefront for about four months.

Unlike take-out food that comes packaged in mindless chatter — advertisements, logos and promotional contests — the wrapper on Conflict Kitchen’s Venezuelan arepas contains headings such as “Chavez,” “Oil” and “Perception of U.S. Citizens.”

Under each heading are anecdotes and opinions on the topics from native and immigrant Venezuelans. The kitchen’s workers compiled the comments from personally conducted interviews. Conflict Kitchen’s creators, Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski, designed the informational wrapper. They hope that the restaurant will prompt customers’ discussions.

“Well, I don’t know if [the food itself] has to spark a meaningful discussion,” Rubin said. “But if you think about where most of the discussions you’ve had in your life have been, they’ve probably taken place around food in one way or another.”

Rubin finds himself surprised by how many people do read the wrapper. He said diners often feel they take away more than just a meal.

“I think people are ready and hungry for more information; they’re ready and hungry for more discourse and dialogue,” he said.

This past winter, during the kitchen’s Afghan cycle, kitchen employee Meg O’Malley experienced the death of a close friend who was serving in Afghanistan. Comments about the Afghan culture and people made by others at her friend’s wake shocked her, but also helped her solidify her reasons for working at the kitchen.

“I think it’s really important we try to understand the world better,” O’Malley said. “I think we have a responsibility as human beings to understand one another.”

Rubin said that although the kitchen sometimes receives criticism from both the far left and the far right, the Pittsburgh community has largely embraced its ideals, and he encourages public engagement and debate.

“Our goal is not to take a side on anything,” said Rubin, “but to try to create a space in our city in which we can stop for a moment and enjoy a culture and think about the politics that are at stake between our culture and theirs.”

Rubin and his colleagues contacted between 50 and 60 individuals for interviews through social networking. Compared to the last two Middle Eastern cycles, the Venezuelan iteration of Conflict Kitchen provided a challenge for its organizers in their attempts to collect a variety of opinions.

“Our most difficult part of the interview process was getting pro-Chavez supporters. It took a little longer,” Rubin said, referring to supporters of the country’s current president, Hugo Chavez. “Ninety percent of Venezuelans in the U.S. are against him, and we wanted to get a totality of opinions that exist.”

In addition to the information found in the wrapper interviews, customers can also learn about the conflict from the eatery’s workers, who are trained not just in preparing and selling arepas, but also in discussing the kitchen’s mission.

Employees are either CMU work-study students or, like O’Malley, community members or students interested in the project.

Aside from general geography, O’Malley knew little about Venezuela before starting work at La Cocina Arepas. As an introduction, she and other employees watched a PBS special called “The Hugo Chavez Show.” In September, they participated in a live radio broadcast with community activists in Caracas, Venezuela, via the kitchen’s neighbor, The Waffle Shop.

She noted that one of the most interesting things she learned from reading the interviews with Venezuelans was the cultural importance of beauty pageants.

“Women take extreme pride in their physical beauty,” she said. “They also had a women’s rights movement there, except feminists aren’t how you’d think of them here in America — empowered women, total equality with men. [Venezuelan women] want equality, but they also want to extremely display their femininity.”

It’s not just differences in culture that the kitchen attempts to address, but political and economic factors between nations as well. It wasn’t that long ago that former President George W. Bush and Chavez were sharing some choice words with one another, but the animosity stayed limited to words, not bombs.

“Our conflict in Venezuela is more based in ideology and political influence,” Rubin said. “The U.S. has a history and presence in many Latin American countries by overtly and covertly trying to create influence, supporting coups, elections and regimes.”

Elected in 1999, Chavez enacted a series of socialist reforms in Venezuela known as the Bolivarian Revolution, and has spoken out strongly against capitalism and imperialism.

But despite the rhetoric, relations between the U.S. and Venezuela have remained fairly civil in recent years. In 2005, Venezuela provided low-cost oil to poor neighborhoods in New York and Massachusetts.

“It’s a much more nuanced animosity and conflict,” Rubin said. “We are mass economic partners with Venezuela; they import a mass amount of oil to us. That’s the interesting paradox … it’s easier to take a stand against countries we don’t have an economic relationship at stake with in order to take the stance we do.”

And the workers running Conflict Kitchen are already considering the next countries they’ll explore. Rubin plans to continue with Cuba in the winter and possibly North Korea next spring.