National Bitter Melon Council

New Market Initiative

July 22 - July 30, 2005

Bitter Melon Week explored the idea of community and how community can be created through difference and foreignness using Bitter Melon as a featured ingredient. Bitter Melon Week offered an opportunity for restaurateurs and community members alike to go to each participating restaurant, try the Bitter Melon dish, collect its recipe card, and go to an exhibition space at the Mills Gallery to assemble the collected cards into a book.

Although grown in large quantities in the South End, Boston, Bitter Melon was unfamiliar to most, if not all of the restaurants in the South End. Inviting every eating establishment (and by every, we really DID mean every single one!) to incorporate Bitter Melon into their cuisine, we hoped that this universally new flavor would instigate a moment of unity across local cultures and cuisines. Unity through bitterness!

Incorporating dishes using Bitter Melon was a novel experience for everyone – chefs, restaurant staff, and restaurant patrons alike. The process of creating a new dish with Bitter Melon, and serving it to guests, became a mechanism for the entire community to come together through one shared experience – that of difference. In this way, Bitter Melon highlighted this similarity and in order to establish a basis for community.

Bitter Melon Week was not a competition to find out who can make the best Bitter Melon Dish. It was a social, community-building collaboration manifested through participatory acts by all the individuals who visit restaurants and food businesses in the South End. By inviting as broad an involvement as possible among the eating establishments in the South End, we hoped to create an alternative model for engagement and association among the small businesses in that neighborhood.

Read the article about the Bitter Melon Week on the Boston Globe