Borders are not just lines on a map; they are recipes interrupted. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the mandates, republics, and military frontiers of the 20th-century Eastern Mediterranean took its place, the region’s kitchens were carved up along with its provinces. A dish that once moved freely between Aleppo, Beirut, and Jerusalem suddenly needed a passport. An ingredient that grew on one side of a new boundary became a smuggled memory on the other. This article is about how those borders changed what people ate—and what they forgot. It is about the political economy of the table: the tariffs, the population exchanges, the sieges, the refugee camps, and the cookbooks that quietly recorded loss. For the diaspora, food became a witness statement. For those who stayed, it became a ledger of what was no longer available. This is not a story of fusion or celebration. It is a story of rupture, adaptation, and the stubborn persistence of taste.
The Map on the Plate
Before the 20th century, the Eastern Mediterranean was a web of trade routes, religious networks, and imperial administrations that did not always match the neat borders we see today. A cook in Damascus could source sumac from the hills of what is now southern Turkey, olive oil from the coast of what is now Lebanon, and rice from Egypt without crossing a single international boundary. The Ottoman millet system and the capitulations with European powers shaped commerce, but the kitchen remained a space of regional continuity. Recipes traveled with merchants, pilgrims, and seasonal workers. A stuffed vegetable dish in Thessaloniki might be called yaprak sarma; in Cairo, mahshi; in Jerusalem, dolma. The differences were local, not national.
Then came the borders. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, the partition of Palestine in 1947, and the independence of North African states in the 1950s and 1960s redrew the region. Each new line created a new set of legal and economic realities. Tariffs made some ingredients expensive. Passports made some cooks illegal. Population exchanges moved people but not their orchards. The result was a culinary map that no longer matched the ecological or cultural one. A dish could become “foreign” overnight, even if it had been cooked in the same kitchen for generations.
The Population Exchange and the Lost Gardens
The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey is one of the clearest examples of how borders changed eating. Under the Treaty of Lausanne, around 1.2 million Greek Orthodox Christians were forced to leave Turkey, and about 400,000 Muslims were forced to leave Greece. They were allowed to take movable property, but not their land, their trees, or their animals. The result was a rupture in agricultural knowledge. Greek refugees from Cappadocia and Pontus arrived in Greece with recipes for pastourma, kavourmas, and tsoureki, but without the specific climate, soil, or livestock that made those dishes what they were. Turkish refugees from Crete and Macedonia brought olive cultivation and tobacco skills, but the Aegean coast of Turkey was not the same as Crete. The exchange did not just move people; it severed the relationship between a recipe and its terroir.
In the kitchens of refugee settlements in Piraeus or Thessaloniki, women adapted. They used local greens instead of the wild herbs of Anatolia. They replaced one type of wheat with another. They learned to make do. But the memory of the original dish remained, often as a story told to children: “In Smyrna, we used to make it with this.” That sentence—”we used to”—is the sound of a border entering a recipe. It is the first step toward forgetting, because the next generation may not know what “this” was.
What Borders Did to Ingredients
Borders do not just separate people; they separate ingredients from their sources. In the Eastern Mediterranean, many staple foods were produced in one region and consumed in another. When a border cut across that supply chain, the ingredient became scarce, expensive, or politically charged.
Take sumac, the deep-red spice that gives many Levantine dishes their sour note. It grows wild in the hills of southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria. After the Turkish-Syrian border was formalized in the 1920s and 1930s, trade across it became subject to tariffs, smuggling, and periodic closures. For cooks in Aleppo, sumac from just across the border became more expensive and less reliable. For cooks in Gaziantep, the same spice was suddenly a domestic product. The border did not change the plant; it changed who could afford it and who could call it their own.
Similarly, olive oil from Palestine was a major export before 1948. After the establishment of Israel and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, olive groves were destroyed, confiscated, or left untended. Palestinian olive oil became a symbol of loss and resistance. In refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan, families who had once pressed their own oil now depended on UNRWA rations of imported vegetable oil. The taste of their food changed. The memory of their own oil became a political statement. Today, Palestinian olive oil is sold in diaspora markets with labels that name the village of origin—a direct challenge to the border that erased it.
The Siege and the Substitution
Borders are not only lines on land; they are also blockades. The Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) and the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 created conditions of extreme scarcity. Cooks in West Beirut learned to make bread from a mixture of wheat, barley, and even ground lentils because flour was scarce. The dish mujaddara—lentils and rice with caramelized onions—became a lifeline because it required no meat and could stretch small amounts of oil. But the siege also created new dishes born of necessity. Kibbeh made with potato instead of meat, tabbouleh with more parsley than bulgur because bulgur was unavailable, and sweets made with carob instead of chocolate. Some of these substitutions became permanent, not because they were better, but because they were what people could afford after the war. The border of the siege entered the recipe and stayed.
In Gaza, the blockade since 2007 has had a similar effect. The Israeli restrictions on imports have limited the availability of many foods, including fresh fish, certain spices, and cooking gas. Gazan cooks have adapted by using solar ovens, clay pots, and whatever vegetables can be grown in the narrow coastal strip. The dish rummaniyya, a lentil and eggplant stew with pomegranate molasses, has become a symbol of Gazan resilience. It is made from ingredients that can be grown locally, without imports. The border is not just a line around Gaza; it is a list of what can and cannot enter the kitchen.
The Politics of Naming
When a dish crosses a border, its name often changes—or becomes a battleground. The contested dish known as hummus is the most famous example. Lebanon and Israel have both claimed it as a national dish, and in 2010, Lebanon set a Guinness World Record for the largest plate of hummus, explicitly framed as a response to Israeli claims. The dispute is not really about chickpeas and tahini; it is about who has the right to define the region’s culinary heritage. The border between Lebanon and Israel is a military line, but the hummus war is fought in kitchens, restaurants, and international media.
Similarly, the dish called dolma in Turkey, dolmades in Greece, mahshi in Egypt, and yalanji in Syria is a single culinary tradition that has been divided by national borders. Each country now claims it as its own, and cookbooks from each nation present it as a national treasure. The truth is that the dish predates all of these nations. It belongs to the Ottoman world, which was itself a patchwork of ethnicities and religions. The borders that created modern nation-states also created the illusion that each dish has a single national origin. In reality, the dish is a record of movement, not ownership.
The Cookbook as a Political Document
Cookbooks are not neutral. They are edited, funded, and published by people with interests. In the 20th century, national cookbooks became tools of state-building. The Turkish government published cookbooks that emphasized Anatolian dishes while downplaying Arab, Kurdish, and Armenian influences. The Israeli state promoted a national cuisine that blended Ashkenazi and Mizrahi dishes, often erasing the Palestinian origins of foods like falafel and hummus. The Greek state published cookbooks that presented moussaka as a purely Greek dish, ignoring its Ottoman and Arab roots. Each of these cookbooks was a border drawn around a kitchen.
But there were also counter-cookbooks. Palestinian cookbooks, such as Christiane Dabdoub Nasser’s Classic Palestinian Cookery, explicitly document dishes from villages that no longer exist or are under Israeli control. Armenian cookbooks written by descendants of genocide survivors preserve recipes from towns that were emptied in 1915. Sephardic Jewish cookbooks from the diaspora record dishes from Thessaloniki, Rhodes, and Alexandria—cities where those communities were destroyed or displaced. These cookbooks are not just collections of recipes; they are archives of loss. They are witness statements.
What People Forgot
The most painful effect of borders is not what people changed; it is what they forgot. When a community is displaced, the first things to disappear are the everyday foods—the ones too ordinary to write down. A refugee family may preserve the recipe for a holiday dish, but the daily bread, the simple stew, the way of preserving vegetables for winter—these are lost because no one thought they needed to be recorded. They were too obvious. But after a generation in a new country, the obvious becomes the forgotten.
In the Greek refugee settlements of the 1920s, women who had made trahana—a dried mixture of wheat and fermented milk—every autumn in Anatolia found that the climate and milk in Greece produced a different result. They adapted, but their daughters learned the adapted version, not the original. By the third generation, the original was a story, not a practice. The same happened to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. The dishes of their villages—the specific way of making freekeh, the wild greens gathered in spring, the cheese made from sheep’s milk in a particular valley—were replaced by the standardized foods of the camps. The border did not just take their land; it took their taste memory.
Forgetting is not always passive. Sometimes it is enforced. In Turkey, the Armenian and Kurdish culinary traditions were suppressed for decades. Armenian dishes were renamed or absorbed into Turkish cuisine without acknowledgment. Kurdish cooks were discouraged from using their own language for foods. In Israel, Palestinian dishes were often presented as Israeli, with the Palestinian origin erased. This is not forgetting; it is erasure. The border is not just a line; it is a policy of silence.
The Diaspora Kitchen as a Site of Memory
In the diaspora, the kitchen became a place where forgetting could be resisted. Immigrant families in Detroit, Marseille, Sydney, and Buenos Aires recreated the dishes of their homelands, often with substitutions. The Palestinian diaspora in Chile makes hummus with local chickpeas and olive oil, but the recipe is still called by its Arabic name. The Lebanese diaspora in Brazil makes kibbeh with beef instead of lamb, but the shape and the spices remain. The Greek diaspora in Australia makes spanakopita with frozen spinach, but the memory of the fresh greens from the village is passed down in stories.
These diaspora kitchens are not museums. They are living spaces where the border is negotiated every day. A grandmother in Montreal may insist on a particular brand of sumac from a shop run by a Syrian refugee. A father in London may drive across the city to buy za’atar from a Palestinian grocer. A daughter in New York may learn to make maqluba from a YouTube video because her mother never wrote down the recipe. The border is present in all of these acts—in the longing, the substitution, the insistence on authenticity. The diaspora kitchen is a witness statement, repeated daily.
What Borders Cannot Take
Despite everything, some things survive. The taste of za’atar—a blend of wild thyme, sumac, and sesame—is so tied to the land that it cannot be fully replicated elsewhere. Palestinian refugees in Jordan still gather wild thyme in the hills, even though the hills are not the ones their grandparents knew. The smell of orange blossom water in a Lebanese kitchen in Paris is a direct link to the orchards of the coast. The sound of a coffee grinder in an Armenian home in Los Angeles is a memory of a kitchen in Aleppo or Beirut. These sensory details are not easily erased by borders. They are carried in the body.
But survival is not the same as continuity. A dish that survives in the diaspora is not the same dish that was cooked in the village. It is a translation. The border has entered it, even if only in the form of a missing ingredient or a changed technique. The question is not whether the dish is authentic; it is whether the dish remembers. And if it remembers, what does it remember? The answer is often a story of loss, adaptation, and stubbornness. That is the story this blog is committed to telling.
FAQ: Borders, Food, and Memory
Why do borders change what people eat?
Borders change what people eat because they interrupt the movement of ingredients, people, and knowledge. A border can make an ingredient expensive or illegal, force a cook to leave their land, or cut off a community from its traditional markets. The result is substitution, adaptation, and sometimes forgetting. The kitchen is not separate from politics; it is one of the first places where politics is felt.
What is an example of a dish that changed because of a border?
One clear example is kibbeh in the Lebanese diaspora. In Lebanon, kibbeh is traditionally made with lamb, bulgur, and spices, often baked or fried. In Brazil, where many Lebanese immigrants settled in the 20th century, lamb was expensive and less available, so cooks used beef. The shape and spices remained, but the meat changed. The dish is still called kibbeh, but it is a Brazilian-Lebanese version, shaped by the economic realities of the diaspora.
How do cookbooks help preserve food memory across borders?
Cookbooks can act as archives of loss. When a community is displaced, the everyday dishes are often forgotten because no one wrote them down. Cookbooks written by refugees or their descendants can preserve those recipes, along with the stories of where they came from. They are not just instructions for cooking; they are witness statements. They name the villages, the ingredients, and the people who were separated by borders.
What is the difference between adaptation and erasure in food?
Adaptation is when a dish changes because of new conditions—a missing ingredient, a different climate, a new audience. The change is acknowledged, and the original is remembered. Erasure is when a dish is taken, renamed, and presented as if it had no previous history. This often happens when a dominant group absorbs the food of a marginalized group without acknowledgment. Adaptation is a negotiation; erasure is a theft.
This article is part of a series on the political economy of Mediterranean food. Next: the role of UNRWA rations in shaping Palestinian refugee cuisine, and what the ration card remembers.