PITTSFIELD — Hundreds of people convened Sunday morning to indulge in nearly 20 unique dishes from 14 countries at the Maine Central Institute’s annual international food festival.

MCI is a private high school that enrolls over 400 students, many of whom come to study from abroad. The food festival has become an annual tradition where both residents from near and students from afar get to exchange and share cultures, event organizer Cindy Swinton said.

“What better place to go than an often one-dimensional state like Maine, grab a hold of the international population, and have them share their home here?” Swinton said. “It’s really important for the students here, but it’s important for the faculty like myself, too.”

Though the event was scheduled to run from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., many of its cooks had served all their food by noon – a sign of both good attendance and good cooking, according to Swinton.

This was the first year Swinton organized the festival and its turnout was among the largest, as organizers estimated about 200 people attended the event.

The international food festival has grown and evolved over nearly 20 years to include more nationalities and accommodate more attendees, according to Tom Bertrand, MCI’s former dean of student life who helped organize the inaugural event in 2007.

He helped organize the first food festival after seeing similar events do well at other schools. Knowing MCI has a significant population of international students, Bertrand said it just made sense to bring a food festival to the school.

“It’s always been a special part of our school, having this much diversity in central Maine,” Bertrand said. “The event is a way for students to show a little piece of their culture and for people here to come try it out.”

Dishes from every continent save for Antarctica and Australia were represented. MCI students and staff served everything from South Korean kimbap to Peruvian arroz con leche.

Swinton, who was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Mississippi, was serving homemade brisket, jambalaya and cornbread at the festival. She ran out of brisket around 11:30 and had served all of her jambalaya by noon. For her, there are few compliments better than an empty plate.

“Oh, they’ve been talking about my jambalaya for years,” Swinton said, laughing. “I call it vibrational cooking. I know the ingredients and I just feel it out.”

Many students, staff and attendees said the event is more than an opportunity to eat good food.

For Al-Amin Machira, an MCI student from Tanzania studying aviation, the festival has helped him find a sense of community both in Pittsfield and at MCI.

Machira cooked several trays of crispy, barbeque and classic chicken wings with a team of friends in preparation for the event. The nearly 40 wings he had prepared were all eaten within 30 minutes, he said.

“To show my home food, to give people something new, it’s a really good feeling,” Machira said. “The food was all gone in 30 minutes. People loved it – I loved it.”

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