When a border shifts, a pantry rearranges itself. The 20th-century Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa saw empires collapse, mandates rise, and nation-states carve themselves into existence—often with a pen in one hand and a ration card in the other. Food border politics is the study of how these new lines on a map reorganized kitchens, erased certain ingredients, and turned everyday meals into quiet acts of memory or assimilation. It sits at the intersection of culinary nationalism, displacement foodways, and ingredient extinction—concepts that matter here because every recipe on this blog is a witness statement from a family that crossed a checkpoint, lost a farm, or learned to cook with what the state allowed.
I am Yasmin Khoury, and I write from a kitchen that still tastes of the places my grandparents left. This is not a neutral history. Borders are not neutral. They are decisions enforced by armies, bureaucracies, and sometimes cookbooks. What follows is a look at how those decisions changed what people ate—and what they were forced to forget.
When a Line on a Map Erases a Spice
In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne formalized the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Over 1.5 million people were uprooted based on religion. They carried what they could—sometimes a sack of bulgur, a copper pot, a memory of a dish. What they could not carry were the ecosystems that made those dishes possible. The pastourma-making Armenians of Kayseri, the olive-oil traditions of Cretan Muslims, the specific wild greens gathered by Greek villagers in Smyrna—all were scattered. Borders didn’t just move people; they severed the relationship between a community and its food environment.
Consider mahleb, the aromatic spice ground from the seeds of the St. Lucie cherry. Once common in breads and pastries across Anatolia, the Levant, and the Balkans, its use contracted after the population exchanges. Greek refugees from Asia Minor brought their mahleb-scented tsoureki to the mainland, but the ingredient became associated with a lost homeland—a taste of mourning. In Turkey, the spice remained, but the communities that had perfected its use were gone. The knowledge of when to harvest, how to dry, and which breads to bless with it thinned. Borders don’t just stop people; they stop the transmission of culinary knowledge.
The Mandate Kitchen: When Foreign Rule Dictates the Menu
After World War I, the French and British mandates in the Levant and Mesopotamia didn’t just redraw maps—they introduced new economic logics that reshaped what people grew and ate. In Syria and Lebanon, French colonial policy prioritized cash crops like wheat and silk for export. Subsistence farming gave way to market dependency. Traditional wheat varieties like salamouni and hourani, adapted to local soils and rainfall, were gradually replaced by higher-yielding imported strains. The result? A slow erosion of the biodiversity that had sustained local foodways for centuries.
In Palestine, the British Mandate’s agricultural policies favored Jewish settlement and citrus exports, while Palestinian fellahin faced land dispossession and taxation that pushed them toward wage labor. The za’atar and wild thyme that women once gathered from the hills became harder to access as land was fenced off. A simple herb mixture—za’atar, sumac, sesame—became a political symbol. After 1948, Palestinian refugees in camps across Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan recreated dishes from memory, but the wild za’atar of the Galilee was gone. They substituted, adapted, and in the process, a new cuisine of displacement was born.
Nationalism on a Plate: The Invention of Culinary Tradition
New borders demanded new identities, and food was conscripted into the project. In the early decades of the Turkish Republic, state-sponsored cookbooks promoted a national cuisine that downplayed Ottoman diversity. Dishes with Kurdish, Armenian, or Arabic names were often renamed or claimed as purely Turkish. İmam bayıldı (the stuffed eggplant dish) was safe—it was already in Turkish. But kibbeh, beloved across the region, became a contested object. In Lebanon, it was nationalized as a Lebanese dish; in Syria, as Syrian; in Iraq, as Iraqi. The truth is that kibbeh predates all these states. It belongs to a geography, not a flag.
This culinary nationalism wasn’t unique to Turkey. In Israel, the state promoted a new “Israeli cuisine” that often erased Palestinian origins. Dishes like falafel and hummus were adopted and rebranded, while Palestinian cookbooks were published in exile, preserving recipes as acts of resistance. In Algeria, after independence from France in 1962, the government promoted couscous as a national dish—but the version served in state banquets was often a refined, urban interpretation that sidelined regional variations from Kabylia or the Sahara. Borders don’t just separate; they homogenize what’s inside them.
The Ingredient That Disappeared: A Case Study in Wheat
Let’s get specific. Before the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, the fertile plains of what is now northern Syria and southern Turkey grew dozens of local wheat varieties. Farmers saved seed, adapted to microclimates, and milled flour that tasted of a particular village. After the border was drawn, trade routes were disrupted. Turkish farmers in the Hatay region, annexed by Turkey in 1939, found themselves cut off from the mills in Aleppo that had processed their grain for generations. Syrian farmers lost access to the pastures where they had grazed livestock. The result? A narrowing of the wheat gene pool and a flattening of flavor. Today, organizations like the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute work to preserve what remains of these landrace grains, but much has already been lost.
The Refugee Kitchen: Cooking as an Archive
Displacement creates a particular kind of cooking—one where recipes become the only proof of a place that no longer exists on any map. In the Palestinian diaspora, the dish maqluba (an upside-down rice and vegetable dish) is more than a meal; it’s a geography lesson. The layers of eggplant, cauliflower, and rice recall the terraced hillsides of the West Bank. The act of flipping the pot is a small, daily defiance—a refusal to let the dish, and the land it represents, be forgotten.
In the Armenian diaspora, choreg (a sweet, mahleb-scented bread) is baked on Easter, but the recipes often include notes like “use the mahleb from the jar your grandmother brought from Aintab.” When the jar runs out, what then? The bread changes. The memory thins. This is how borders work on the body—not all at once, but in increments, as ingredients become unavailable and substitutions become permanent.
When the State Decides What You Eat: Rationing and Erasure
Borders are not just lines; they are systems of control. During the Greek Civil War (1946–1949), the government imposed strict rationing and used food as a weapon against leftist villages. Certain foods—like the cornbread and wild greens that sustained mountain communities—were stigmatized as “communist food.” After the war, these ingredients were associated with poverty and political subversion. A whole culinary tradition was pushed underground, and many foraged greens, like stamnagathi and vlita, only re-emerged decades later as gourmet items, stripped of their political history.
In Nasser’s Egypt, land reforms and state-led agricultural policies in the 1950s and 1960s aimed to modernize farming and achieve food self-sufficiency. But they also disrupted traditional food systems. The construction of the Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970, flooded Nubian villages along the Nile, displacing over 100,000 people. The Nubians lost not only their homes but their date palms, their irrigation systems, and their unique bread-baking traditions. In resettlement villages, they were given wheat flour instead of their traditional sorghum and millet. The flatbread kisra, once a staple, became a memory.
What We Forgot: The Silences in the Recipe
Every recipe is an edited document. What’s left out tells its own story. In my family, we have a recipe for mujaddara—lentils and rice with caramelized onions. It’s a humble dish, but our version includes a pinch of cumin and a drizzle of pomegranate molasses. When I asked my grandmother why, she said, “Because that’s how we made it in Haifa.” She left Haifa in 1948. The pomegranate tree in the courtyard, the specific variety of lentil from the market, the water from the well—all gone. The recipe is a ghost of that place, and the cumin is a small act of remembrance.
But what about the recipes we don’t have? The ones that were never written down because the people who made them were killed or scattered before they could teach anyone? The Armenian genocide, the Assyrian genocide, the Pontic Greek genocide—these were not just human catastrophes; they were culinary catastrophes. Entire food systems were destroyed. We will never know what dishes were lost when the Armenian villages of Anatolia were emptied. We have fragments: a mention in a travelogue, a spice blend in a market that no one can name. The silence is the loudest ingredient.
Reclamation Through Cooking
Yet, cooking is also a way to push back against erasure. In Beirut, the Armenian kitchen of Mayrig serves dishes based on recipes collected from survivors of the 1915 genocide. In Jerusalem, the Palestinian restaurant I’tim revives forgotten Galilean recipes. In Athens, the cookbook Romvi: Flavours of the Poli documents the cuisine of the Greeks of Constantinople, a community that has dwindled from over 100,000 to barely 2,000 today. These are not just restaurants or books; they are archives. They insist that what borders tried to erase, the plate can remember.
FAQ
How did the Sykes-Picot Agreement affect food in the Middle East?
The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement divided the Ottoman Arab provinces into British and French spheres of influence, creating new borders that disrupted centuries-old trade routes, agricultural systems, and community networks. Farmers lost access to traditional mills and markets, seed diversity declined, and certain ingredients became associated with “the other side” of a new border, leading to their gradual disappearance from local cuisines.
Why do some dishes have different names in neighboring countries?
Many dishes predate modern nation-states and were shared across the Eastern Mediterranean. After borders were drawn, governments often renamed dishes to support national identity-building. For example, a stuffed bulgur dumpling might be called kibbeh in Lebanon, içli köfte in Turkey, and kubbeh in Iraq—each country claiming it as part of its unique national cuisine, when in reality it belongs to a shared regional heritage.
What is culinary nationalism?
Culinary nationalism is the process by which states or nationalist movements use food to construct a unified national identity, often by claiming ownership of dishes, standardizing recipes, or erasing the contributions of minority groups. It can involve renaming foods, promoting certain dishes as “national,” and excluding the food traditions of marginalized communities from the official narrative.
How do refugees preserve their food traditions?
Refugees preserve food traditions through oral history, community cookbooks, and the adaptation of recipes to new environments. Displaced communities often form food-related businesses, restaurants, and catering services that keep traditional dishes alive. In camps and diaspora neighborhoods, cooking becomes a daily act of memory, with ingredients substituted but techniques and flavors carefully maintained as a link to a lost homeland.
What Comes Next: A Living Archive
This article is not a conclusion. It’s an opening. On this blog, I will continue to document the ways that displacement, empire, and borders have shaped the food of the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. Each recipe will be a witness statement. Each ingredient will carry its migration story. I invite you to cook with me, to read with me, and to remember that every meal is a political act—whether we acknowledge it or not.
Next, I’ll be writing about the olive oil routes of the Levant—how a tree became a border marker, a source of livelihood, and a target of war. Because if you want to understand this region, you have to follow the oil.