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Tommaso Basilico, 12, is helping his mother Claudia make traditional spaghetti in the kitchen of an average family in Rome. For him, a meal without Spaghetti is like a Chinese meal without rice.
"This is my favorite spaghetti, which is mixed with egg juice and bacon," Tommaso said with a smile. "Spaghetti is always the most delicious food for me."
He goes to McDonald's occasionally, but he loves the toys offered there rather than food.
Claudia said traditional Italian food like spaghetti, pizza and Italian braised rice accounts for some 70 percent of her family's overall food, although the family sometimes go out to try some Chinese or Japanese dishes.
There are more than 500 kinds of spaghetti in Italy and are combined with different sauces to form more than 1,200 different dishes.
The home-made Spaghetti transfers not only Italy's traditional food culture, but its ethics of cherishing family, generation after generation.
National DNA, or national characteristics, for children varies from country to country and gives more color to the world. It may be spaghetti in Italy, dancing in Kenya, rugby in New Zealand, Beijing Opera in China, and ballet in Russia.
Joseph Oginga, 15, is learning dancing in a training hall of a poor neighborhood in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.
When the drums sound in the hall, barefooted Oginga, together with other children, swiftly twists his body with wild and compact rhythms. Sometimes he skips trippingly, and sometimes claps with eyes closed. The dancing seemingly electrifies the air.
Oginga is learning the dance of the Luo ethnic group of Kenya. |
