How Borders Changed What People Ate and What They Forgot

My grandmother, born in Jaffa in 1929, could not read a recipe. She never needed to. Her hands knew the exact pressure to crimp a sambousek, the precise moment when the onions for mujadara turned from translucent to gold. She carried her kitchen in her body, a living archive of a Palestine that no longer exists on any map. When she died in Beirut in 2003, she took with her the exact proportion of allspice to cinnamon in her family’s kibbeh—a ratio that had survived Ottoman tax registers, British Mandate food shortages, and the Nakba itself. What she could not survive was the border that kept her from the lemons of her childhood.

This is not a metaphor. This is political economy on a plate. Borders do not simply divide land; they sever relationships between people and their foodways. They decide which seeds travel and which stay behind. They create new national cuisines while criminalizing old ones. They turn the remembered taste of a village olive into an act of nostalgia—or resistance.

In the Eastern Mediterranean, where I trace my own fractured lineage, the 20th century carved borders through kitchens. The fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Sykes-Picot agreement, the creation of Israel, the Lebanese Civil War, the Gulf conflicts—each redrew maps and, in doing so, rewrote recipes. Some dishes crossed borders and were claimed by new nations. Others were left behind, preserved only in the memories of those who could no longer go home.

The Cartography of Taste: When Maps Redraw Menus

Consider the humble za’atar. In the hills of historic Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, wild za’atar (a variety of oregano, often mixed with sumac and sesame) grew abundantly. Families would forage it together, dry it on rooftops, and blend it with local sesame seeds and sumac berries. The mixture was as tied to the land as the olive trees that produced the oil drizzled over it. After 1948, Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled from their villages lost access to those hills. The za’atar they now buy in plastic packets in Amman or Beirut or Dearborn is often imported, sometimes from Turkey or Jordan, its flavor a ghost of the wild herb that once grew between the rocks of the Galilee.

But the loss is not just sensory. In 1977, Israel declared wild za’atar a protected species, making its foraging illegal. For Palestinians within the Green Line and in the occupied territories, picking za’atar became a criminal act. A 2014 report by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem documented how nature reserves and military firing zones, which together cover nearly half of the West Bank, restrict Palestinian access to land where wild herbs like za’atar and akkoub (a thistle-like plant) traditionally grew. The report notes that these restrictions are part of a broader system of spatial control that limits Palestinian livelihood and cultural practice. The za’atar on the plate is no longer just a condiment; it is a record of enclosure.

Then there is the question of ownership. In 2019, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on a controversy surrounding Israeli food companies marketing za’atar as an “Israeli” product, often using Palestinian-grown herbs without acknowledgment. The za’atar blend, deeply rooted in Palestinian and Levantine culinary tradition, becomes a site of what scholars call “food nationalism”—the appropriation and rebranding of indigenous foods by settler-colonial states. The dish does not simply cross a border; the border crosses the dish, renaming it in the process.

The Partitioned Pantry: Ingredients as Political Subjects

Borders do not only affect foraged foods. They reshape entire agricultural systems. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which established the modern borders of Turkey, severed Kurdish and Arab communities from their traditional grazing routes and wheat fields. The fertile plains of Upper Mesopotamia, once the breadbasket of empires, were divided among Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Each new state imposed its own agricultural policies, its own preferred wheat varieties, its own trade tariffs. The freekeh—smoked green wheat—that had been a staple of the region became subject to import duties, its movement across the new borders suddenly illegal or expensive.

In her book Food, Development, and Politics in the Middle East, economist and food policy expert Eckart Woertz traces how post-Ottoman borders disrupted traditional food systems. He writes that the new nation-states prioritized cash crops for export over subsistence farming, replacing diverse local grains with high-yield monocultures. The result was not only a loss of biodiversity but a loss of food sovereignty. Communities that had grown their own wheat for centuries became dependent on imported grain, vulnerable to global price fluctuations and state control.

This vulnerability was weaponized. During the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), militias besieged towns and cut off food supplies. The 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut, for example, lasted 70 days and caused severe food shortages. In her memoir of the war, Beirut Fragments, Jean Said Makdisi describes the transformation of food into a military tool: “The siege was a war against the stomach. Bread became a luxury, meat a memory.” The recipes that survived the war were those that could be made with whatever was available—lentils, bulgur, foraged greens. Dishes that required fresh meat or imported spices became impossible, their tastes fading from collective memory.

The Diaspora Kitchen: Memory as Ingredient

When people cross borders, their food crosses with them—but it does not arrive intact. The Palestinian diaspora, now numbering over 6 million, has recreated the cuisine of historic Palestine in refugee camps, in Gulf cities, in European capitals, and across the Americas. But the ingredients are different. The water is different. The olive oil—if it is available at all—is not from the family’s groves near Nablus or Ramle. It is Tunisian, or Spanish, or Californian. The dish is the same, but the taste is a translation, not the original.

This is not a story of simple loss. Diaspora cooking is also a site of creativity and resilience. The Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi, co-author of the cookbook Falastin, has spoken about how his mother adapted recipes after the family was displaced in 1948. She used local Jordanian ingredients to recreate the dishes of her childhood in Jaffa, inventing new combinations that became, over time, a distinct diasporic cuisine. The dish remembers, even if the ingredients have changed.

But there is a darker side to this adaptation. When a cuisine travels, it can be stripped of its political context. Hummus, for example, has become a global supermarket staple, sold in plastic tubs next to pre-cut carrot sticks. In this journey from the souks of Damascus and the kitchens of Beirut to the refrigerated aisles of Tesco and Walmart, hummus has been depoliticized. Its Palestinian and Levantine origins are erased. It becomes simply “Mediterranean,” a marketing term that evokes sunny holidays and healthy eating, not displacement and occupation. The border that hummus crossed was not just geographical; it was a border of meaning.

Contested Dishes: Who Owns the Recipe?

No discussion of borders and food in the Eastern Mediterranean can avoid the question of ownership. Certain dishes are claimed by multiple nations, each asserting a proprietary relationship to the recipe. Hummus is the most famous example, but there are others: falafel, tabbouleh, kebbeh, baklava. These foods are not just meals; they are symbols of national identity, and the fight over their origins is a proxy for deeper political conflicts.

In 2008, the Association of Lebanese Industrialists petitioned the European Union to register hummus as a Lebanese product under Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status. The move sparked outrage in Israel, where hummus is also considered a national dish. The Israeli food manufacturer Sabra responded by lobbying against the petition, arguing that hummus is a regional food with no single owner. The controversy, widely covered in international media, revealed the stakes: for Lebanon, claiming hummus was a way to assert cultural sovereignty against a neighbor it considers an occupier. For Israel, it was a way to normalize its presence in the region by embedding itself in the local culinary landscape.

But the loudest voices in this debate often drown out the people who have the deepest claim to these foods: the Palestinian farmers who grew the chickpeas, the Palestinian women who perfected the recipes, the Palestinian refugees who can no longer access the lands where these ingredients were grown. When states fight over food ownership, they are fighting over a heritage that was never theirs to begin with. The true owners are often the displaced, the stateless, the people for whom a recipe is not a flag but a memory.

What Was Forgotten: The Silences in the Archive

For every dish that becomes famous, dozens are forgotten. The Eastern Mediterranean of the early 20th century was a region of extraordinary culinary diversity, shaped by centuries of trade, migration, and empire. The Ottoman Empire, for all its flaws, was a space of relative culinary fluidity. Ingredients and techniques moved freely between its provinces. After its collapse, the new nation-states imposed not only political borders but also culinary ones. They created national cuisines, selecting certain dishes as representative and discarding others as foreign or backward.

What was lost? The Jewish communities of Iraq and Syria, for example, had developed distinct culinary traditions over centuries, blending local ingredients with kosher dietary laws. When these communities were expelled or fled in the mid-20th century, their foodways were scattered. Some dishes survived in the diaspora, preserved in family cookbooks and community gatherings. Others disappeared entirely, their names and tastes unrecorded. The same is true for the Armenian communities of Anatolia, the Greek communities of Alexandria, the Kurdish communities of northern Syria. Each displacement erased not just people but their ways of eating.

This erasure is not accidental. Nation-building projects often involve the deliberate suppression of minority cultures, including their food. In Turkey, for example, the state long denied the existence of a distinct Kurdish cuisine, classifying Kurdish dishes as “regional Turkish food.” In Israel, Palestinian food was often rebranded as Israeli, erasing its origins. These acts of culinary nationalism are not trivial; they are part of a broader project of cultural erasure that accompanies political domination.

The Political Economy of the Plate

To understand how borders change what we eat, we must look at the political economy of food. The Eastern Mediterranean is a region of stark inequality, where access to land, water, and markets is shaped by power. Israeli settlements in the West Bank, for example, control significant water resources, leaving Palestinian farmers with limited irrigation for their crops. According to a 2022 report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the occupation costs the Palestinian economy billions annually, with agriculture among the hardest-hit sectors. Olive trees, a symbol of Palestinian rootedness, are regularly uprooted by settlers or destroyed by the Israeli military, severing not just a source of income but a connection to the land that spans generations.

In Lebanon, the 2019 economic collapse and the 2020 Beirut port explosion devastated the food system. The Lebanese lira lost over 90% of its value, making imported foods—which constitute a large portion of the Lebanese diet—unaffordable for many. In response, some Lebanese turned to traditional, locally grown foods, reviving interest in dishes like moujadara (lentils and rice) and wild edible plants. But this return to tradition was born of necessity, not choice. It is a reminder that food sovereignty is not just about cultural pride; it is about survival.

What We Carry Forward

So where does this leave us? In kitchens across the diaspora, in refugee camps, in the homes of those who stayed, the work of remembering continues. Every time my mother makes maqluba, she tells me about the pot my grandmother used in Jaffa, the one she had to leave behind in 1948. The recipe is a witness statement. The ingredients are a map of loss.

But there is also joy. Food is not only a record of trauma; it is a practice of resilience. When we gather around a table, we are not just eating. We are testifying. We are saying: we were here, we are still here, and we will not forget. The borders that tried to erase us have failed. The taste remains.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do some dishes become national symbols while others are forgotten?

National cuisines are constructed, not natural. States and cultural elites select certain dishes to represent the nation, often based on their ability to be standardized, marketed, and distinguished from neighboring cuisines. Dishes that are too regional, too associated with minority groups, or too difficult to commodify are often left out of the national narrative. This process is deeply political, reflecting who has power and who does not.

How does food appropriation differ from cultural exchange?

Cultural exchange involves mutual respect and acknowledgment of origins. Food appropriation occurs when a dominant group takes a dish from a marginalized group, strips it of its context, and claims it as its own, often while the original creators are still denied rights or recognition. In the Eastern Mediterranean, this is most visible in the Israeli appropriation of Palestinian foods, where dishes like falafel and hummus are marketed as Israeli while Palestinians are dispossessed of the lands where these foods originated.

Can food really be a form of political resistance?

Yes. For displaced and occupied peoples, preserving and cooking traditional foods is an act of resistance against erasure. It maintains a connection to lost lands and asserts cultural identity in the face of oppression. When Palestinian refugees cook musakhan in a camp in Lebanon, they are not just feeding their families; they are insisting on their right to exist as a people with a history and a homeland. Food is never just food.

What can I do to support food sovereignty in the Eastern Mediterranean?

Learn the histories behind the foods you eat. Support Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, and other regional farmers and food producers directly when possible. Advocate for policies that protect the rights of displaced and occupied peoples to their lands and resources. And when you cook these dishes, honor their origins—name the people and places they come from, and resist the erasure that turns political food into generic “Mediterranean” cuisine.