Last week, in the time-honored tradition of tired teachers everywhere, the official Spanish department of Catalonia threw a food-from-around-the-world party. Each student was assigned to write a recipe – thereby practicing the imperative case (boil this, chop that) – from his or her homeland, and then bring some of the food itself to class. So it was that I was looking around a room laden with fried rice and meat pies at 10 am one Thursday morning.

Getting to that point wasn’t easy. For people from Japan or France, choosing a food from home is easy. For me, not so much. My initial idea of s’mores was shot down, even after I had commandeered about 8 minutes of class time to explain what marshmallows were, when the teacher realized that cooking them would require an open fire. Peanut butter and jelly was rejected as too embarrassing, and fried clams would have become something of a logistical headache. Finally, after commiserating with people from Canada, England, and Ireland (poutine, cake, Guinness beef stew), we learned that the teachers had neglected to do the required pre-potluck math – had we each made a dish, we would have had 4 to 6 times as much food as we could have eaten – and we would be combined into one, big Anglo-Saxon cooking team. We settled on a very easy flourless chocolate cake that, given that it contains little aside from eggs, butter, and chocolate, is probably French.

What else was there? If you followed the crowds, you would find hand rolls from the Japanese contingent, a duck salad from some French guys, and spring rolls from Thailand. There was less of a wait at Germany’s confused attempt at pad thai and the other “American” entries: spanikopita and salmon with ginger and soy sauce.

The Iranian man who is constantly asking me why I don’t just attack Sharon, who continues to kill women and children, and why I (I am the US, the US is me) insist on working for international Zionism and oil made some sort of meat balls, which went great with the tahini that an Israeli woman had brought in specifically for that purpose. It was not clear whether their entry was the kind of STATEMENT that makes social studies teachers glassy-eyed, or simply a Middle Eastern meat dish that required sauce.

What was clear, however, is that Russian cuisine has a way to go before it can compete with shrimp fried rice, or even the instant chocolate pudding offered by Germany II. “Russian Salad” is a frightening mix of canned meat, peas, and corn in enough mayo to outfit an entire church picnic. It comes out looking like a sort of Jell-O mold, with mayonnaise in place of the Jell-O, and, generally, tends to look just like that after the party is over. Even at noon, when the Austrians had opened the wine and the Brazilians had commandeered the sound system and started dancing, when everything else except for the array of former Soviet bloc meat pies was history, the Russian Salad remained a gleaming dome of dressing.

Many people asked for the chocolate cake recipe, and no one had a thing to say about America one way or the other. This is something we forget, I think, as we grouse about “The French” and think they care what we call pommes frites. The stupid things are from Belgium, anyhow.

Day to day, people just don’t care where we’re from. Ok, fine, the Iranian guy cares. But he also has plenty to say about how there are too many gay people in his chosen profession – makeup artist – and in Spain in general. He thinks it ought to be illegal, like it is in Iran. Is this how we want to be acting?

Most people that want to talk about America don’t think for a second that we should necessarily be lumped in with our leaders. And even if they meet Americans who do agree with Bush, they treat the conversation as just that: a conversation, not a one-last-chance opportunity to get on the right side. Perhaps Europeans have a clearer sense of the dangers involved in being afraid to oppose what your country’s leader is doing, or a sharper ability to tell when patriotism or religion are being used to advance a political agenda that might not make any sense without a grounding in some sort of inexplicable faith.

Do people want all the soldiers home safely, as soon as possible? Of course. Do they like Iraq’s government any more than they like North Korea’s? Of course not. Do they equate it with edging towards the forces of evil to question their President’s motives, given that it is likely that he will profit from ties to corporations that are in line to get contracts to rebuild Iraq after the war? No to that, too. It’s just asking questions, stating opinions, talking about current events.

So maybe there is something to learn from International No Lesson Plan Free Lunch Day, after all, and it certainly isn’t the recipe for Russian Salad. It’s that people were clearly able, on a day in which we had to put a little sign with our home country in front of us on the table, to separate people from ideas and governments and see the world with a little of the nuance that has been so absent from the negotiations and coverage leading up to the war. And, as if that wasn’t enough, France didn’t mind that I swiped their cake recipe.