The Nine-Day Wonder: The Vegetarian Festival of Phuket, Thailand
9-17 October 1999
The Phuket Vegetarian festival is an astounding transient inversion of a town's dining landscape. For nine days, The Dietary Underground surfaces. The entire center of a town becomes its operational headquarters and the dominant dietary paradigm is benched on the sidelines while The Underground executes its brief subversion of the status quo.
What's Available Here: The festival is described in many travel books and Internet sites that feature the sensational displays of devotees: fire-walking, blade-climbing, body-piercing and others. But in these times of ubiquitous computer imagery, visual reality has been thoroughly undermined. As a result, for some of us, deeds of daring have been stripped of their former appeal. Now more than ever, James Thurber's remark rings apt: "Seeing is deceiving. It's eating that's believing". So this description of the festival instead features The Food. Isn't that what a vegetarian festival is all about?