Food has nearly always been a draw for the great world’s fairs. When they weren’t gawping at the brand-new Eiffel Tower, visitors to the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris ate a reported 400,000 oysters daily. The humble hot dog, ice cream cones, Juicy Fruit gum, Dr. Pepper, Pabst beer and even popcorn all made their international debuts at expos in the United States. I still remember begging my dad to buy us musk-ox burgers at Expo ’86 in the Northwest Territories pavilion; somehow we wound up at the enormous floating McDonald’s called the McBarge.
Yet Expo Milan, which opened last month and runs through to Halloween, is the first of the world’s fairs to be focused entirely on food and drink; its theme is “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life.” Which maybe sounds more high-minded than it really is. Expo Milan is a glutton’s paradise; one of the best parts about a visit here is the grazing.
There are more than 150 restaurants, bars, food trucks and stalls at the Expo site. Italy alone accounts for somewhere north of 40 of them; in one area, run by the Eataly grocery and restaurant company, there are kitchens from 20 different regions of Italy. So you can snack on a cannolo filled with ricotta, artichokes and cured mullet roe from the Sardinian restaurant, follow it with fried olives from Marche, a plate of lasagna from Emilia-Romagna, a whole burrata cheese from Puglia and a few slices of the savoury chickpea flapjacks called farinata, and then wash it all down with a glass of sparkling Franciacorta from the Franciacorta booth, as I did one gloriously filling day, before heading to “Vino, A Taste of Italy” and its 1,300 wines.
The Brits have fish and chips and Pimm’s cups, the French baguettes, the Mexicans tacos, the Belarusians latke-like draniki and tonsil-scorching firewater and the Argentines ridiculous amounts of meat. The Americans brought the likes of hamburgers and lobster rolls, which they serve from a collection of food trucks. (Better still is the pop-up James Beard American Restaurant in downtown Milan.)
The Belgians, bless them, hand out cookies and chocolate, and bring in a different chocolate maker daily to do demonstrations, but make you wait in separate lines for Belgian fries with mayonnaise (these are pretty excellent) and Belgian beer, and then another line to get the deposit on your beer glass back. This tells you everything about Belgium that you’ll ever need to know.
If that’s not enticement enough, the water fountains at Expo Milan offer a choice of sparkling or still.
They also grow food at this Expo. Everywhere around the site there are demonstration gardens. The Thais planted rice paddies around their pavilion; the “coffee cluster,” which groups nine coffee-producing nations, has coffee plants; the French planted a magnificent plot of fruits, vegetables, grains and (of course) grapevines; the Americans planted a living, mesmerizingly beautiful wall of 41 different heirloom vegetable varieties. The Kazakhs planted nothing that I can recall, but wear bright clothes and do a lot of folk dancing while looking like their lives are at stake.
Canada, meantime, snubbed this Expo. Everywhere you turn, people ask with pained expressions, whatever happened to Canada? (The Conservative government cancelled Canada’s $25,000 membership in the Bureau International des Expositions in 2012, purportedly as a cost-saving measure, and also refused to support Edmonton’s 2017 Expo bid, and Toronto’s bid for 2025.)
“Oh, Canada has no food culture or agricultural goods of any note, or ideas about how to feed the world,” I joked, just once. I introduced myself as an American from Rhode Island from that point on.
There is more to this fair than gluttony. There is also naked jingoism, ethics-washing (the Coca-Cola “pavilion”), hang-wringing, do-goodism and occasional profundity.
Slow Food’s pavilion extols the virtues of microfarming, heritage seeds and small-production wines and cheeses, which are available for the tasting; the Dutch pitch the glories of entomophagy (that’s a fancy name for bug eating), seaweed (“Eat Weed Live Long,” a sign outside Holland’s “weedburger” truck announces; they’re pretty tasty) and genetic engineering.
The French pavilion is architecturally breathtaking, a cathedral of bent wood and swooping archways, but spiritually it’s all smugness and trinkets. Among its many messages: France has a low obesity rate. Yay France!
More than anything, however, this Expo is an incubator for sublime little interactions and experiences, for fleetingly exquisite moments, for the sorts of things that happen when the whole world (or at least a lot of it) shows up in one place with its best face on. I can’t tell you what they are; you’ll find your own. Here in no particular order are some of the best places to start.
1. The most profound of the displays here is called Pavilion Zero, after the United Nations goal of ending hunger globally. In one of its most arresting areas, an enormous wall of video screens broadcasts food and beverage commercials from around the world as market tickers scroll past displaying commodity food prices. It’s beautiful and unsettling and deeply fascinating; a person could spend hours with the food commercials alone.
2. Get lost in a meadow. The United Kingdom pavilion is all about bees, and culminates in a Buckminster Fuller-ish “hive” that blinks and buzzes in response to the goings on in a real hive back in Blighty. That’s nice and all, but the wildflower meadow and orchard out front are the real attraction; there are nooks where you can hide away under the riot of blooms, the buzzing of insects, and the lazy, high-summer scent of flowering clover. This is landscape architecture at its magical best.
3. Go Dutch. Where most of the countries here invested in fancy architecture, the Dutch went minimalist, with a series of superb little food trucks and a youthful, party-in-Amsterdam vibe. You can get a Beemster cheese sandwich, mini pancakes, beer, beef stew or ginger-apple-beet juice here. That weed burger, meantime, which gets its nutrition largely from seaweed, might just prove to be one of Expo 2015’s more lasting innovations.
4. Allavita! The acrobats, aerialists, clowns, dancers and daredevils of Cirque du Soleil are in their usual stunning form with this moving outdoor production that is at least loosely built around food. There’s something at the root of the production about a seed and a plant and a loaf of bread and some sort of friendship; what you’re likely to remember are the impeccably choreographed athleticism and antics. By the end, your neck is sore from staring up, your voice is hoarse and your heart is racing; as the sound of Pavarotti’s Nessun Dorma rises – this is Italy, of course it ends in opera – you may find you have something in your eye.
5. Fly a jumbo jet in the Etihad and Alitalia pavilion. There are two simulators here and the experience is utterly immersive. Yes, I know it has nothing to do with food, but who doesn’t want to pilot a 747? Book in advance online.
6. Climb through Brazil. There’s little more to Brazil’s pavilion than a hangar-sized steel frame and a sloping, jouncing cargo net suspended inside it, which you half-walk, half-climb through to get from one end of the pavilion to the next. There are plants underneath that you’re supposed to stop and look at, but nobody looks at the plants. The cargo net is too much fun.
7. Bee active. The first 80 per cent of Germany’s pavilion is a miasma of failed audio-visual technology and harangues on backyard organic gardening. But the last 20 per cent is weirdly fun: It’s a live show with a plucky human beatbox and a guitarist, who cajole the audience into jumping and dancing and making barnyard animal sounds, all in celebration of bees.
8. Dance for a bit. The United States pavilion is staffed by a platoon of student ambassadors – outgoing young college students in preppy Brooks Brothers jackets and Ray-Bans. A few of them were blasting English and Italian pop hits on the rooftop deck one day and got up on a stage to dance; mobs of Italian school kids quickly joined them. It’s become a thing; you can’t help but grin like an idiot and shake your hips. I’ve never seen cultural diplomacy quite so infectious or fun.
9. Vino: A Taste of Italy. There are 1,300 open bottles here from seemingly every Italian wine region, and an army of sommeliers to guide you along. It isn’t cheap: €10 (nearly $14) gets you a nice glass to keep and three tastes. I asked one of the sommeliers which three wines she’d pick if she had the run of the place. She looked shocked, and grateful, that somebody would ask her such a thing. I marched behind her with my glass in hand, drinking as we went along.
10. Eat through Italy at the Eataly food cluster. There are 80 new dishes each month from a rotating cast of Italy’s major regions (there were 15 represented when I went), plus counters devoted to wine, beer and aperitivi, as well as another that’s all about cured Italian meat. With a menu this wide with different kitchens (as well as cash desks) for each of the regions, a meal here demands a game plan. But if there’s a better place on this planet to gorge through Italy, I’ve never found it.