Free Food-A-Thon Finals: Part Two

Like Chevron ceding its Venezuelan oil fields to Hugo Chavez, I let the Quiet Storm have the Big Gas lunch to himself. Why miss out on crab cakes you ask? Because I prefer shrimp.

From the University Club, I walked a block and a half east on M Street to the Westin City Center, where the Center for U.S. Global Engagement was kicking off IMPACT ’08: Building a Better, Safer World, an “initiative to elevate development and diplomacy as priorities in American foreign policy.” The conference might have been about foreign policy priorities, but my priority was finding some free lunch.

I visited the Westin City Center during the day. This picture shows what it looks like at night.

There ain’t no party like a Center for U.S. Global Engagement party ‘cause a Center for U.S. Global Engagement party hooks it up. I arrived just as the morning session on the future of foreign assistance was letting out and was greeted by smiling faces in line for lunch. It wasn’t long before I was smiling right along with them as the smell of fresh basil and garlic hit me from a bowl of penne pesto.

Still sweating a bit from the walk, I was in the mood for something more refreshing than a plate of starchy carbs, but I needed look no further than the next item on the buffet table. There, surrounded by ice, stood a regal pot of heirloom tomato gazpacho.

I looked pretty sketchy taking a picture of this bowl of gazpacho in the middle of a buffet line. 

The gazpacho was just what I needed. In just one spoonful, the soup replaced the salty taste left in my mouth from finding the Quiet Storm at the University Club with a zesty amalgam of tomatoes, garlic, cucumbers, and yellow peppers. But as Frank Sinatra likes to say, the best was yet to come. Next to the gazpacho was a platter of Chesapeake shrimp. Or at least I saw a sign that said they were from the Chesapeake. Let’s just say that sign opened up my eyes…to a state of crustacean elation.

I did not film this video, nor do I endorse the actions of its producers. It is, however, relevant to our discussion of shellfish.

I loaded up on shrimp, gazpacho and a bit of the penne pesto, and took a seat at a table of youngish looking folks. A twentysomething man across the table whose nametag was emblazoned with the bold red word, “STAFF,” began to stare at me. I thought for sure my cover was blown. I could already feel his castigation coming: “You can’t just go strolling into a Center for U.S. Global Engagement conference like you own the place,” I imagined him saying as the sweat began to drip into my gazpacho. Then, with charm and a chuckle, he mused, “You sure like those shrimp.”

I nodded, my mouth full.

“I do too. I think I’m gonna run and grab some more.”

He returned with a plate of shrimp covered in cocktail sauce just in time for the lunch session: a foreign policy “roundtable” discussion titled “America's Role in the World: The Next Administration's Agenda.”

As we scarfed down our shrimp, we heard from New York Times columnist David Brooks, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal, and Eric Weiner of National Public Radio.

I know this is a supposed to be a blog post about food so I won’t bore you with too many talking points about soft power, hard power, and the new “smart” power. But I did find enjoy in particular Brooks’ argument that in our relations with other countries, “we need to not be political, but communal and cultural.”

Many of the higher-ups in the Bush administration disagree. Brooks said that one particularly influential member of the administration – “I can’t tell you who, but she [just speculating with the link] said” – told him she doesn’t believe in those “fuzzy culture arguments.”

But Brooks maintained that if we wish to spread democracy to certain parts of the world, we must first understand the culture of those parts of the world. In Brooks’ words: “You can’t create Thomas Jefferson institutions without first using Benjamin Franklin foundations.”

We at Campus Progress have been known to disagree with Brooks on many things, but I’m feeling him on all this talk of cultural understanding.

From left, Eric Weiner, David Brooks, Gerald Seib and Walter Pincus discuss America's role in the world while I gobble up shrimp.

Allow me to interrupt this digression with a description of dessert. Heaping helpings of decadent three-layer chocolate cake with a hazelnut tuile. Blackberry genoise tortes frosted with white chocolate ganache and garnished with chopped pistachios. And the dessert I felt ballsy enough to whip out my camera for while people behind me waited – and salivated – impatiently: A raspberry-caramel-chocolate pyramid which so sinfully delicious, I didn’t really catch much of what Walter Pincus had to say. I did hear him announce that “people like America and what it stands for; they just don’t want it shoved down their throat.” Well I like what my raspberry-caramel-chocolate pyramid and I like it shoved down my throat.