How many Caesar salads have you eaten in the past month?
And, if none, how many times have you seen the salad mentioned on a restaurant menu?
The salad’s creation is attributed to Caesar Cardini, an Italian immigrant who operated Hotel Caesar in Tijuana, Mexico.
The hotel still operates at the same location on the Avenida Revolución today.
The story goes that he invented the salad when a Fourth of July rush in 1924 had depleted his kitchen’s supplies.
Cardini, who lived in San Diego but operated his hotel and restaurant in Tijuana to avoid the restrictions of the Prohibition, tossed a salad with what he had left.
From there the "Caesar salad" — in the footsteps of the Roman general who gave his name to its creator — conquered the world.
There is little doubt that Cardini would have had different first name and we would have never eaten Caesar Salads if not for Julius Caesar who lived some 2,000 years earlier.
Today, when we discuss Roman civilization, Julius Caesar is one of the first names that is mentioned. His last name became synonymous with emperor.
The German word for emperor is kaiser and the Russians used to have a czar.
His first name gave us our month of July.
Here is the problem: Julius Caesar was a dictator. In today’s terms, he was a Vladimir Putin or a Xi Jinping. Caesar was the man who ended six centuries of the world’s first extensive experiment in democracy in the Roman Republic.
Why then would we admire Julius Caesar?
Instead, we should remember how well democracy in Rome functioned prior to his coup.
Caesar’s nemesis was Marcus Cicero who dedicated his life in the first century B.C. to saving democracy in Rome (I highly recommend the "Cicero" trilogy by Robert Harris on their epic conflict about the fall of the Roman Republic.)
We celebrate Caesar while Cicero is all but forgotten.
Today, democracy globally is under threat again.
Leaders with Caesar style autocratic aspirations are rising to power in many countries globally. We can learn from the collapse of democracy in Rome 2,000 years ago, that once the forces of populism are released, it becomes very difficult to contain them again.
It may very well be that democracy as we know it today is bound to a further retreat in present times.
But there is hope.
We can reinvent and reenergize democracy in a new structure that will reflect the will of the people much more accurately.
In his book "Against Elections: The Case for Democracy," Belgian cultural historian David Van Reybrouck makes the case for direct democracy without elected representatives who can be corrupted.
Such democratic transformation which the "elitist" Founding Fathers — keen on keeping illiterate masses far from government — never envisioned, may very well be the most effective response to populism.
In the meantime, I propose to rename the world’s best-known salad into "Cicero Salad" in honor of the man who stood for democracy and whose efforts deserve to be remembered.
Jurriaan Kamp is a California-based Dutch journalist, author, and entrepreneur. Kamp was born and raised in the Netherlands. He is known for his interviewing and interest in finding solutions for people and planet. Today Kamp produces and hosts the TV series "The Way Out," for Earthx TV and PBS Socal.
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