Forty years after she last held one, my grandmother could still taste Jaffa oranges. She’d describe them as heavy with juice, the skin pulled so tight it looked ready to split. But her voice always carried something else—a grief that had nothing to do with citrus. The orchards she remembered weren’t hers anymore. The land where they grew sat on the far side of a line drawn in 1948, a line that turned her family into refugees and those oranges into an export commodity for a new state. That’s how borders change what we eat. Not just by cutting off access, but by snapping the stories that give food its meaning.
I started this blog because I needed to understand how displacement reshapes culinary traditions—not in the abstract, but in the specific ways families adapt recipes when they lose their orchards, their spice markets, their clay ovens. The Mediterranean gets romanticized as a region of shared food culture: olive oil, flatbreads, grilled fish. But scratch that surface and you’ll find a history of rupture. Borders, both physical and economic, have decided who gets to claim ownership of certain dishes, who can afford to cook them, and who is forced to leave them behind.
This article traces how political boundaries—colonial partitions, post-independence nationalisms, modern trade agreements—have reshaped what people eat and what they remember. We’ll look at the Palestinian table after 1948, the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923, and the ongoing effects of EU agricultural policies on North African food sovereignty. These aren’t separate stories. They’re connected threads in a larger fabric of loss, adaptation, and stubborn preservation.
The Partitioned Pantry: Palestinian Food After 1948
Before the Nakba, the Palestinian kitchen was tied to the land in ways that are hard to overstate. Villages had their own wheat varieties, their own methods for curing olives, their own wild herbs gathered from the hills. The economy was largely agrarian, and most Palestinians lived in rural communities where food was produced, not just bought. The 1948 war and the displacement that followed destroyed that relationship. Over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled. More than 400 villages were depopulated and later demolished. The physical loss of land was also a culinary catastrophe.
Take za’atar, the wild thyme blend that seasons everything from flatbreads to labneh. Before 1948, Palestinian families gathered their own za’atar from the hills, each region producing a slightly different mix. After displacement, za’atar became a memory food—something you bought in packets, its ingredients imported, its connection to a specific hillside severed. The Israeli Nature Protection Law of 1963 made it illegal to pick wild za’atar in Israel, criminalizing a practice that had been central to Palestinian food culture for centuries. What was once a free, abundant herb became a controlled substance.
The loss extended to staple grains. Palestinian farmers had cultivated local wheat varieties like Hourani and Dabash, prized for their flavor and drought resistance. After 1948, these landraces were largely lost as Palestinian agriculture was disrupted and Israeli agricultural policies prioritized different crops. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) began providing rations to refugees: flour, rice, sugar, oil. These rations prevented starvation but also transformed diets. Dishes that once relied on fresh vegetables, wild greens, and whole grains gave way to meals built around subsidized white rice and refined flour. Nutrition declined. Culinary knowledge narrowed.
Yet adaptation happened. In refugee camps across Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, Palestinian women recreated dishes from memory, swapping ingredients when they had to. The maqluba of Gaza, with its layers of eggplant and spiced rice, might be made with whatever vegetables were available in a Beirut camp. The musakhan of Jenin, traditionally roasted with sumac and onions on taboon bread, might be cooked in a cramped apartment oven in Amman. These weren’t lesser versions. They were acts of preservation, a refusal to let the food disappear even when the land was gone.
The Population Exchange That Rearranged a Cuisine
In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne mandated a compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Roughly 1.5 million people—Greek Orthodox Christians from Anatolia and Muslims from Greece—were uprooted and resettled based on religious identity. The exchange was framed as a solution to ethnic conflict, but for the people involved, it was a violent rupture. They left behind homes, businesses, and entire food systems. What they carried with them were seeds, recipes, and the taste memories of places they’d never see again.
The culinary impact was profound on both sides. Greek refugees from Asia Minor brought with them a sophisticated urban food culture that transformed the cuisine of mainland Greece. Dishes like moussaka, pastitsio, and the use of phyllo dough in savory pies were introduced by these newcomers. The taverna culture of Athens, with its mezedes and ouzo, owes a great deal to the refugees from Istanbul and Smyrna. What we now think of as quintessentially Greek cuisine is, in many ways, a cuisine of displacement.
But the exchange also created absences. In Turkey, the departure of Greek-speaking Christians meant the loss of winemaking traditions in regions like Cappadocia. Certain cheeses, cured meats, and seafood dishes associated with Greek communities disappeared from local foodways. The exchange didn’t just move people; it erased entire culinary ecosystems. A village that had produced a particular cheese for centuries might find itself repopulated with people who had no knowledge of that cheese, who brought their own food traditions from a different climate and soil.
Some foods became politically charged. Baklava, for instance, is claimed by both Greek and Turkish nationalists as their own, but the reality is messier. The layered pastry existed across the Ottoman Empire, with regional variations in syrup, nuts, and technique. The population exchange hardened these fluid culinary boundaries into national ones. A sweet that once belonged to a shared imperial culture became a point of contention, each side insisting on its own version as authentic. The border didn’t just separate people; it separated their claims to history.
What Was Lost: Regional Ingredients and Techniques
The exchange also meant the loss of hyper-local knowledge. In the region of Pontus, on the Black Sea coast, Greek communities had developed unique preservation techniques for anchovies and collard greens. When they were forced to leave, that knowledge went with them, but it couldn’t be replicated in the different climate of mainland Greece. Some Pontic Greeks tried to recreate their dishes, but the specific anchovy species, the particular variety of kale, the humidity levels needed for fermentation—these were impossible to transport. The food existed only in memory.
This pattern repeats across the Mediterranean. When people are displaced, they lose the terroir—the specific combination of soil, climate, and tradition—that gives their food its character. They can recreate recipes, but they cannot recreate the ecosystem that produced the ingredients. The dish becomes a ghost of itself, haunted by what it used to be.
EU Agricultural Policies and the Erosion of North African Food Sovereignty
Borders don’t only displace people; they also restructure entire agricultural economies. The European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and its associated trade agreements have had a profound effect on what North Africans grow, eat, and can afford. Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria are all part of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, which has progressively liberalized trade in agricultural goods. On paper, this sounds beneficial. In practice, it has often undermined local food systems.
Take wheat. North African countries are among the world’s largest per capita consumers of wheat, much of it in the form of couscous and bread. Historically, the region grew hard wheat varieties suited to its climate. But under structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and 1990s, and later under free trade agreements, these countries were encouraged to shift toward export-oriented agriculture—tomatoes, citrus, olives—while importing soft wheat from Europe. The result is a dependency on imported grain that leaves populations vulnerable to price spikes. When global wheat prices surged in 2008 and again in 2022, bread riots erupted across the region. The border, in this case, is not just a line on a map but a set of economic policies that determine who eats and who goes hungry.
Traditional foods have suffered. In Tunisia, bsisa—a roasted barley and spice mixture once central to rural diets—has declined as barley cultivation has dropped. In Morocco, the diversity of local wheat varieties has shrunk, replaced by high-yield imported seeds that require more water and chemical inputs. The knowledge of how to grow and process these traditional grains is fading, held now mostly by elderly farmers. When they die, that knowledge dies with them.
The Olive Oil Paradox
Olive oil offers a stark example of how EU policies create winners and losers. The EU heavily subsidizes its olive oil producers, allowing them to export oil at prices below production costs. This has devastated olive farmers in Tunisia, who cannot compete with subsidized European oil flooding their own markets. At the same time, the EU imports Tunisian olive oil in bulk, bottles it under European labels, and sells it at a premium. Tunisian farmers get commodity prices; European bottlers capture the value. The Mediterranean diet, so often celebrated as a shared heritage, is in reality a site of intense economic inequality.
This is not a story of simple victimhood. North African farmers and food producers have found ways to resist and adapt. In Tunisia, some cooperatives have shifted toward organic and fair-trade certification, seeking niche markets that value their traditional varieties. In Morocco, women’s cooperatives producing argan oil have fought for protected geographical indication status, linking their product to a specific region and set of practices. These are strategies of survival, but they operate within a system that is stacked against small-scale producers.
Memory as Resistance: The Foods We Refuse to Forget
When borders erase foodways, memory becomes a form of resistance. Displaced communities preserve recipes not just for nourishment but as proof that their culture existed, that their villages were real, that their lives before displacement mattered. This is why cookbooks written by refugees and their descendants carry such emotional weight. They’re not just collections of recipes; they’re archives of loss.
Consider the Palestinian cookbook The Gaza Kitchen by Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt. It documents the cuisine of Gaza, a place under blockade where ingredients are scarce and cooking is an act of persistence. The book records dishes that are at risk of disappearing, not because people have forgotten them, but because the conditions required to make them—fresh fish, certain spices, reliable electricity—are no longer guaranteed. Each recipe is a small act of defiance against erasure.
Similarly, the Greek refugees from Asia Minor produced community cookbooks in the decades after the exchange, preserving the recipes of their lost homelands. These books served a dual purpose: they kept the food alive for future generations, and they asserted a claim to a culture that had been physically destroyed. The recipes often included annotations—”this is how my mother made it in Smyrna”—that transformed them from instructions into testimonies.
This is why I write about food the way I do. Not as nostalgia, but as evidence. Every dish carries the history of the people who made it, the land that produced its ingredients, and the political forces that shaped its journey. When we eat, we’re consuming all of that, whether we know it or not.
What Borders Take, and What We Rebuild
The Mediterranean is often imagined as a place of connection—a sea that joins three continents, a region of shared flavors and intertwined histories. That’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete. The same sea that carried traders and recipes also carried warships and colonial administrators. The same olive trees that symbolize peace have roots in soil that was stolen. To understand Mediterranean food, we have to hold both truths at once: the beauty of the cuisine and the violence that shaped it.
Borders changed what people ate by severing their connection to land, by flooding their markets with cheap imports, by turning their traditional foods into commodities for export. But borders also created new cuisines, born from adaptation and necessity. The Palestinian diaspora invented dishes that never existed in historic Palestine, using ingredients available in their new homes. Greek refugees enriched the culinary landscape of their host country. North African farmers are finding ways to protect their food heritage within a hostile economic system.
The question is not whether food can survive displacement—it can, and it does. The question is what gets lost along the way, and who gets to decide what’s worth saving. When we talk about preserving food traditions, we need to ask: preserving them for whom? Under what conditions? And at whose expense?
My grandmother never saw her orange groves again. But she taught my mother how to choose the best oranges at the market, how to candy the peels, how to make the blossom water that perfumed our kitchen every spring. She couldn’t give us the land, but she gave us the taste of it. That’s what borders can’t take away—the knowledge that passes from hand to hand, the flavors that linger in memory, the stubborn insistence that our food, and our history, matter.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did the 1948 Arab-Israeli war change Palestinian food culture?
The war and subsequent displacement severed Palestinians’ connection to their agricultural land. Over 400 villages were depopulated, and traditional practices like wild herb gathering and cultivation of local wheat varieties were lost. Refugees became dependent on UN rations, which shifted diets toward processed grains and away from fresh, locally grown foods. Dishes were adapted in diaspora communities, preserving memory but losing the specific ingredients and techniques tied to place.
What was the culinary impact of the Greek-Turkish population exchange?
The 1923 exchange moved 1.5 million people and transformed the cuisines of both nations. Greek refugees brought urban dishes like moussaka and phyllo-based pastries to mainland Greece, while Turkey lost winemaking and cheese traditions associated with Greek communities. The exchange also hardened national claims to shared foods like baklava, turning a fluid Ottoman culinary heritage into a point of nationalist contention.
How do EU trade policies affect North African food systems?
EU agricultural subsidies and free trade agreements have encouraged North African countries to shift toward export crops while importing subsidized European grains. This has created dependency on imported wheat, eroded local grain diversity, and undercut small-scale farmers who cannot compete with below-cost European exports. Traditional foods and the knowledge to produce them are declining as a result.
Can displaced communities preserve their food traditions?
Yes, but preservation often involves adaptation. Displaced communities recreate dishes with available ingredients, document recipes in cookbooks, and pass knowledge through generations. However, the loss of terroir—the specific environmental conditions that shape ingredients—means that some flavors and techniques cannot be fully replicated. Preservation is as much about memory and identity as it is about exact reproduction.