Word: spanishing
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About 400 people gathered in the Spanish town of Jabugo's Plaza of Ham for a gala dinner. They ate outdoors beneath an almost full moon, as candles flickered on tables draped with heavy cloths, flamenco guitars thrummed in the background, and liveried waiters served plates of seared tuna and beef tenderloin. But for all that elegance, no one stayed seated for long. Along the edges of the plaza, a dozen of the country's most renowned ham cutters (yes, there is such a thing) carved off glistening slices of jamón ibérico - ibérico...
...officials opened the congress with a manifesto that called on national and international authorities to "avoid adopting measures that unnecessarily hurt the pork sector." (Needless to say, the statement referred to the virus as H1N1, not swine flu.) A few days earlier, Russia had banned the import of Spanish pork products in response to the relatively high number of swine flu cases in Spain. For Anatoly Gendin, a reporter covering the conference for a Moscow-based culinary magazine, the ban is simply a measure of caution. "It's not always easy to explain the fine details [of the virus' spread...
...Indeed, congress participants across the board saw little cause for concern. "There's no reason to worry," said Manuel Mayner, whose company, Sepinum, is working with the Spanish government to launch a Ham Route which will guide tourists past some of the country's best ham-producing farms. "We've had hysteria surrounding influenzas before and nothing happened. We'll survive this one too." Even restaurant critic José Carlos Capel, who sparked the conference's biggest controversy when he lambasted the ham industry for its lack of transparency, is sure nothing will displace the product's primacy...
...that young people are contracting it and they are getting sick. In the small Mexican town of La Gloria, where the virus appears to have originated in early February, H1N1 infected over 61% of the under-15-year-olds in the community. That's worrying because the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed up to 50 million people, was particularly virulent in the young...
...Once the document and its objectives had been thoroughly watered down, it was of little wonder that leaders such as France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown all found more productive things to do rather than attend the EaP launch summit. (Watch a TIME video with Gordon Brown...