Portugal trying to claim the Mediterranean Diet
It appears that Portugal is trying to claim the Mediterranean Diet, at a meeting in Azerbaijan, as an intangible cultural item. This is strongly and directly linked to the Algarve because the Portuguese delegation will be made up of representative of the ministry of Agriculture as well as the Tavira council, and they will argue the case and claim the lifestyle diet for the Algarve.
The UNESCO meeting in December will be taking place in Baku, Azerbaijan and it will stretch from the 2nd to the 7th of December. One of the items relevant to Portugal is its shortlisting for inclusion on the list of intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
This action was spearheaded by the Tavira council which named itself a ‘representative community’ and then applied to present the Mediterranean Diet to UNESCO in March 2012.
Their submission of the Mediterranean Diet is a rather solid one with signs pointing towards the fact the the Algarve and Tavira may be celebrating the end of year holidays with the inclusion of the Mediterranean Diet in the World Cultural Heritage list, at least according to Jorge Queiros from Tavira, one of those responsible for the application to begin with
To its credit, the Tavira council has been working all this time towards this goal, in February of this year having organized an exhibition title ‘What is the Mediterranean Diet?’.
The overarching goal of the exhibition was to show the multiple dimensions of this concept, where culture and the ancient Mediterranean lifestyle mix, creating an intangible cultural heritage which has been passed from generation to generation through various social and religious aspects, such as sacred foods and their symbolism, products from the sea and from the land which then support a diet of excellence which is recognized by the WHO – World Health Organization.
