Cooks for Peace Contest. 2022 edition

The Puglia Chef Academy, in partnership with “Jewish Heritage Puglia” and Green Italy Experiences is organizing the next edition of “Cooks for Peace Contest” in Ostuni on October 3rd 2022. Chefs from different countries will cook together to show how different ideas can be peacefully discussed at a dining table !!

 The Puglia Chef Academy is looking for amazing recipes. Send us your favorite recipes in the following categories:

Breads, Main Dishes, Greens and Sides, and Desserts.  The deadline to receive recipes is July 30th, 2022. You can enter as many times as you wish and in as many categories as you wish. But each entry must be separately sent to pugliachefacademy@gmail.com  as a WORD attachment. They will need the following information:     Name, Email address, Telephone number, Address, Age, Name of Dish, Category entering,   Recipe, 25 words describing the dish, a photograph of how it is served.

  • All entries and photographs become the property of the Puglia Chef Academy.
  • Winners will be announced on October 6st, 2022.
  • Winners will be invited to attend a ceremony to be held in Ostuni.

This project is a joint venture between the Puglia Chef Academy and Green Italy Experiences. Our aim is to bring together the cuisines of different countries as a way of communicating different cultural identities as well as facilitate the much needed transition towards more sustainable consumption patterns...

These hands-on programs are designed to both instruct and celebrate the value of food culture in promoting understanding of diversity, brotherhood and compassion by hosting chefs of various backgrounds. We will discuss themes such as the wish to return to a more natural lifestyle, distancing from materialistic lifestyles, and reverting to a more meaningful moral life. Infact, organic consumers refuse a passive role in the food system. Taking an active role may enable them to resolve the alleged contradiction between environmentally responsible behavior and a satisfying life… Furthermore, the importance of food in our individual lives raises moral questions from the debate over eating animals to the prominence of gourmet cookery in the popular media. During the award ceremony on October 3rd our guests will discuss the above mentioned issues including our obligations to those who are starving; the value of the pleasure of food; food as art; our duties to animals; and the moral virtues of hospitableness and temperance…

Food Philosophy

Food brings the world together. We hold seminars combined with cooking courses in partnership with the Puglia Chef Academy and Green Italy Experiences. The experience of cooking together helps illuminate a part of the world different from our own.

This is a variation on an old idea that turns up a lot in feel-good documentaries and on the agendas of well-meaning foundations. If only Israeli and Palestinian children could play together in the same orchestra, all the differences would melt away.  Something similar has been organized by  the TV show “Breaking Borders,” where journalist Mariana van Zeller and the chef Michael Voltaggio team up to travel to parts of the world where intractable tensions dominate life. They bring together representatives of various sides of a festering conflict, and Mr. Voltaggio serves them a grand dinner featuring local dishes. The hope is that good food shared in a hospitable setting might help enemies find common ground. In the TV show, Ms. van Zeller is engaging and succinct as she summarizes the conflicts in the trouble spot of the week, and Mr. Voltaggio is amusing as he takes a crash course in the local cuisine and visits street markets to buy his ingredients. Their first stop is a gimme: The premiere finds them inviting a Palestinian book store owner, a two-state-solution advocate and several Israeli settlers to dinner in the West Bank.