Rhymes full of flavour

The oldest Turkish restaurant , Istanbul, is in the bohemian quarter of Berlin with a part-French name - Savignyplatz. It is a fitting place to meet Hong Kong poet Leung Ping-kwan to reflect on how cultures influence each other.

Leung refers to a newspaper report that the kebab has become Berlin's most popular fast food in less than a decade. Not typical Turkish lamb kebab - Germans traditionally don't like the smell of lamb - but veal or chicken.

Similarly, in London supposedly, tandoori chicken has become the favourite 'British' flavour - not the dish I know from India, but a more tangy hybrid.

Leung says the blending, borrowing and assimilation of food is a metaphor for Hong Kong culture, where the original ingredients of Chinese and Western culture are recognisable but something new and more modern is produced.

In his poem 'Eggplants', Leung writes: With what mixed feelings, I wonder, your parents had followed the flux of emigrants and crossed the wide seas Their vocabulary becoming infiltrated with hybrid fruit, new vegetables Their tongues slowly getting used to foreign seasonings Like many of their generation, everyone began to drift away From a centre their appearance changed. But now and then From shreds of something here and bits of Something else there we discover a vaguely familiar taste Like meat and skin cooked to a mush, gone apart Back together again: that taste of ourselves, extinct, distinct Last month at a major gathering of international writers at Berlin's House of World Culture, Leung's poetry reading entitled 'The Politics of Vegetables' attracted more than just the Sinologists, students and poets who usually attend such events.

Food, Leung believes, is a language that everyone can understand. And food, like society and politics, is always changing.