The Plate as a Political Map
When my grandmother left Haifa in 1948, she carried a single copper pot and a sprig of dried za’atar pressed between the pages of a family Bible. The pot still darkens on my stove every Sunday, but the za’atar—the wild, oregano-thyme hybrid that once grew on the hillsides of northern Palestine—has never tasted the same. Not because the recipe changed, but because the border did. The plant itself became a memory of a place she could no longer walk, a flavor that now arrives in vacuum-sealed bags stamped with a different country’s name.
This is the quiet violence of borders: they don’t just divide land, they sever the sensory threads that bind people to what they eat. In the Mediterranean, where food is often framed as a shared, sun-drenched heritage, the reality is far more fractured. Displacement, occupation, and the drawing of new nation-states have not only moved people—they have erased ingredients, outlawed dishes, and turned everyday meals into contested symbols. To understand Mediterranean food is to understand what was lost, what was renamed, and what people still cook in defiance of the map.
The Ingredient That Became a Crime
Consider the humble za’atar. For centuries, it was a foraged staple across the Levant, a wild herb that women and children gathered from the hills, dried, and mixed with sumac, sesame seeds, and salt. It was breakfast, a quick dip for bread with olive oil, a seasoning for labneh. But after the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent occupation of the West Bank and Golan Heights, za’atar became a protected species under Israeli law. Picking wild za’atar was declared illegal, with fines and even prison sentences for those caught harvesting it. The official reason was environmental protection, but the effect was to sever Palestinians from a food practice that was deeply tied to land, seasonality, and collective identity.
Today, za’atar is still eaten, but it’s often a cultivated, commercialized version, grown in controlled plots or imported from Jordan and Syria. The wild, regional variations—the slightly camphoraceous za’atar of the Galilee, the sweeter notes of the Hebron hills—are fading from memory. For diaspora cooks, the loss is compounded: they can buy za’atar in a jar, but they can’t teach their children how to recognize the plant by its silver-green leaves, how to pick it in the early morning when the oils are strongest. The flavor remains, but the knowledge of the land is gone.
When a Dish Becomes a Flag
Food nationalism is a peculiar beast. It takes something as intimate as a family recipe and turns it into a weapon of cultural erasure. Across the Mediterranean, dishes have been claimed, renamed, and entered into UNESCO bids as a way of asserting ownership over a history that is often shared, and just as often violently contested.
Take hummus. In the early 2000s, Lebanon and Israel engaged in a so-called “hummus war,” each trying to claim the dish as exclusively their own. Lebanon set a Guinness World Record for the largest plate of hummus in 2010, a move that was as much about culinary pride as it was about pushing back against what many Arabs saw as the Israeli appropriation of their food. But hummus, like so many foods of the region, predates modern borders. It belongs to a geography, not a nation-state. The chickpea traveled from the Fertile Crescent across the Mediterranean, and variations of mashed chickpea with tahini appear in Egyptian, Syrian, Palestinian, Lebanese, and Israeli kitchens. The fight over ownership obscures a more painful truth: for Palestinians, hummus is also a food of displacement, a taste of a home that many can no longer visit.
Similarly, the Turkish-Greek-Cypriot debates over coffee, delight, and stuffed grape leaves reveal how borders harden what was once fluid. Before the population exchanges of the early 20th century, a Greek Orthodox family in Smyrna and a Muslim family in Thessaloniki might have made the same dolmades, called them by the same name, and served them with the same lemon sauce. After the forced migrations, those recipes became nationalized, their origins obscured, their shared history a casualty of ethnic cleansing.
The Economics of Erasure
Borders don’t just change what we eat; they change who grows it, who sells it, and who can afford it. The Mediterranean diet, now a global brand of health and wellness, is built on an agricultural system that has been systematically dismantled by trade policies, land confiscation, and labor exploitation.
In the Maghreb, French colonial rule transformed the agricultural landscape. Traditional mixed farming, which supported a diverse diet of grains, legumes, olives, and vegetables, was replaced by monocultures of wheat and wine grapes for export. Algerian farmers, displaced from fertile lands, were pushed to marginal areas where they could barely grow enough to feed their families. The loss of food sovereignty meant the loss of food memory: couscous, the iconic dish of the region, became a food of necessity rather than celebration, its variations shrinking as ingredients became scarce.
In Palestine, the Israeli occupation has similarly reshaped what people eat. The uprooting of olive trees—over 800,000 since 1967, according to the United Nations—has not only destroyed a source of income but erased a cornerstone of Palestinian food culture. Olive oil is not just a cooking fat; it’s a medicine, a light source, a gift, a symbol of rootedness. When a family loses its trees, it loses the taste of its own land. The oil they buy in plastic bottles from the store is a poor substitute, a reminder of what was taken.
What the Diaspora Remembers
Displacement creates strange food memories. My grandmother, who spent her final years in a Beirut apartment, would describe the taste of the water from her village well. She said it was sweet in a way that no other water could be, and that it made the best bread. I never tasted that water, but I know its story. This is how food memory works in diaspora: it becomes a narrative, a sensory ghost that haunts the dishes we try to recreate.
In the Greek and Turkish communities displaced by the 1923 population exchange, certain foods became vessels for longing. The Pontic Greeks, forced from the Black Sea coast, brought with them the memory of anchovies and hazelnuts, of collard greens cooked with cornmeal. In Greece, they were often looked down upon for their strange foods, their unfamiliar ingredients. But they held onto those recipes, not just as sustenance but as proof that their homeland had existed, that their tastes were real.
Similarly, the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 carried their foodways across the Mediterranean, to North Africa, the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire. They preserved a culinary Ladino, a language of dishes that spoke of a lost Iberia: adafina, the slow-cooked Sabbath stew; bimuelos, fried dough soaked in honey; pastel di carne, meat pies wrapped in pastry. These foods became a movable homeland, a way to remember what borders had erased.
The Violence of Renaming
One of the most insidious ways borders change food is through renaming. When a dish crosses a border, it often loses its name, and with it, the history of the people who made it. Israeli food culture is a case study in this phenomenon. Dishes that were once recognizably Palestinian or broader Levantine—musakhan, maqluba, knafeh—are often presented as “Israeli” in international contexts, with no mention of their origins. This is not mere culinary cross-pollination; it is a deliberate erasure of Palestinian existence, a way of saying: this land was empty, this food has no history before us.
But the story is more complicated than simple theft. Jewish immigrants to Israel brought their own food traditions from across the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and these traditions mingled with the local cuisine. The Moroccan Jewish dafina and the Iraqi Jewish tebit are cousins of the Palestinian maqluba, all of them layered rice and meat dishes with roots in the region. The tragedy is not that these dishes coexist, but that the power imbalance of occupation allows one group to claim ownership while erasing the other.
What Borders Cannot Erase
Despite the violence of borders, food has a stubborn way of surviving. In refugee camps, in diaspora kitchens, in the memories of the displaced, the tastes of a lost home persist. They are adapted, substituted, and improvised, but they do not disappear. A Palestinian family in a camp in Lebanon might not have access to the same olive oil their grandparents pressed, but they still know how to make musakhan, even if the sumac is store-bought and the bread is not taboon. A Kurdish family in Berlin might not be able to find the same wild herbs, but they still gather on Fridays to make kutilk, the spiced bulgur patties that taste of a homeland that exists only in their longing.
This persistence is not just about nostalgia. It is a form of resistance, a refusal to let borders determine what is remembered and what is forgotten. When my grandmother taught me to make her lentil soup, she was not just giving me a recipe. She was passing on a geography, a history, a way of being in the world that no border could erase. The soup is simple—red lentils, onions, cumin, a squeeze of lemon—but it carries the weight of a lost village, a stolen land, a people who continue to exist despite every attempt to make them disappear.
What Gets Lost in the “Mediterranean Diet”
The global branding of the Mediterranean diet as a health trend has done its own kind of erasure. It flattens a complex, politically charged food landscape into a generic, apolitical lifestyle choice. The diet is promoted by nutritionists and wellness influencers as a simple formula: olive oil, vegetables, legumes, fish, and red wine. But this version of the Mediterranean diet ignores the colonial histories, the land dispossession, and the labor exploitation that made those ingredients available to some and not to others.
The Mediterranean diet was first described by American scientist Ancel Keys in the 1950s, based on his observations of eating patterns in southern Italy and Greece. But his study, the Seven Countries Study, focused on poor, rural communities whose diets were shaped by scarcity, not choice. They ate what they could grow or forage, not what was trendy. Today, the Mediterranean diet is marketed to affluent consumers who can afford artisan olive oil and imported feta, while the descendants of those original subjects may no longer have access to the same foods. In Greece, the economic crisis forced many families to abandon the fresh vegetables and fish that defined their traditional diet, relying instead on cheap, processed foods. The Mediterranean diet, as a brand, has become a luxury good, disconnected from the people who created it.
Reclaiming the Narrative
To write about Mediterranean food is to navigate a minefield of competing claims, erasures, and longings. But it is also to witness the resilience of people who have turned their kitchens into archives, their recipes into testimonies. The question is not just what we eat, but who gets to tell the story of that food, and what is left out of the telling.
When I cook my grandmother’s dishes, I am not just replicating flavors. I am participating in an act of memory, a refusal to let borders determine what is remembered and what is forgotten. The za’atar that now comes from a plastic bag still carries the scent of a hillside I will never walk. The olive oil, even if it’s not from our trees, still anoints the bread with a history that no wall can contain. This is the power of food in the shadow of displacement: it remembers what maps try to erase.
FAQ
Why is za’atar so politically charged in the context of Israel and Palestine?
Za’atar became a flashpoint because it is a wild herb deeply tied to Palestinian land and foraging traditions. After the 1967 occupation, Israel classified wild za’atar as a protected species, making its harvest illegal. While framed as environmental conservation, the law disproportionately affected Palestinians, criminalizing a practice that had been central to their food culture for centuries. The ban effectively severed a direct, sensory connection between Palestinians and their land, turning a simple herb into a symbol of loss and resistance.
How did the Greek-Turkish population exchange affect food traditions?
The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey forcibly relocated about 1.5 million people based on religious identity. This mass displacement ripped apart communities that had coexisted for centuries, taking with them their recipes and foodways. Dishes that were once shared across communities became nationalized: Greek refugees from Anatolia brought foods like bougatsa and pastourma, which were then absorbed into a homogenized Greek cuisine, while their origins in a multicultural Ottoman world were downplayed. The exchange didn’t just move people; it simplified a complex culinary map into two separate, “pure” national cuisines.
Is the Mediterranean diet really a traditional way of eating?
The Mediterranean diet as we know it today is a construct, based on mid-20th-century observations of poor, rural communities in Italy and Greece. It was never a single, unified diet but a patchwork of local eating patterns shaped by scarcity, seasonality, and agriculture. The modern, branded version—heavy on olive oil, fresh vegetables, and fish—ignores the economic and political realities that made those foods available. It also erases the food traditions of North Africa and the Levant, which are often excluded from the Mediterranean diet narrative despite being geographically and culturally part of the region.
How can diaspora communities preserve food traditions when ingredients are unavailable?
Diaspora cooks have always adapted, substituting local ingredients for the ones they left behind. But preservation is about more than exact replication. It involves storytelling, teaching the next generation the names and histories of dishes, and maintaining the rituals around food—the way bread is broken, the order in which dishes are served. Community gardens, seed-saving projects, and oral history initiatives also play a role in keeping food knowledge alive, even when the original landscape is inaccessible.