I called my aunt in Beirut to ask about my sitto’s freekeh soup. “You need the green wheat from the Hauran,” she said, like I should already know. “The kind that smells like scorched earth after a rain.” But the Hauran plain—that ancient basalt-soil breadbasket—is now cut in two by a border so fortified that the farmers who once hauled their harvest to Damascus or Amman can barely inch through a checkpoint. The wheat still pushes up through the stones. The recipe still sits in my aunt’s head. But the thread between them was snipped by a line drawn in a boardroom a hundred years ago. This isn’t a story about lost recipes. It’s about how borders—those tidy political fictions—have physically reshaped what we put in our mouths, how we name our dishes, and what we’re allowed to remember.
The Cartographic Knife: How Sykes-Picot Sliced Through the Pantry
We talk about Mediterranean food in the soft language of crossroads and coexistence—olive oil, za’atar, the communal hummus bowl. But the modern Mediterranean pantry is a child of partition. The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, which carved the Ottoman Arab provinces into British and French spheres, didn’t just mint new nations. It minted new culinary citizens. Ingredients that had drifted for centuries along trade routes and kinship lines suddenly faced tariffs, passports, and outright bans. The za’atar blend my grandmother remembers from her childhood in Safad—heavy with sumac from the Galilee, wild thyme from the hills, sesame from the Jordan Valley—became, after 1948, a contraband memory. The sumac still grows. The family that picked it now lives in a refugee camp in Lebanon, buying imported sumac from a Syria they can’t enter.
This is the edible legacy of the mandate system: a fragmentation not just of land, but of taste. The French mandate over Syria and Lebanon, and the British over Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq, introduced agricultural policies aimed at feeding metropolitan markets. In Lebanon, the French pushed silk and citrus for export, letting the subsistence wheat and legume farming that had kept mountain villages alive wither. In Palestine, the British Mandate’s 1930 White Paper restricted land transfers to Jews, but it also accelerated the dispossession of Palestinian fellahin from their ancestral fields, severing their relationship with indigenous crops like the Jaffa orange and the Baladi eggplant. The orange got rebranded as a symbol of Zionist enterprise. The eggplant became a refugee’s memory.
When the State Renames Your Lunch: Culinary Nationalism and the War on Shared Names
Borders don’t just block movement; they rewrite menus. One of the most potent—and frankly, absurd—consequences of modern nation-building is the weaponization of food names. Take the “Greek coffee” versus “Turkish coffee” standoff. The thick, unfiltered brew, made in a small pot called a briki or cezve, was just “coffee” across the Ottoman world. After the Greco-Turkish War and the 1923 population exchange, it became a linguistic battleground. In Greece, ordering a “Turkish coffee” turned into an unpatriotic act, especially after Cyprus. The drink is identical. The name is a political declaration. This semantic erasure is a kind of culinary ethnic cleansing, a denial of a shared, often Ottoman, past.
You see the same pattern all over the region. “Israeli salad,” a finely diced mix of cucumber, tomato, and parsley, is indistinguishable from the Palestinian or Arab salad that predates the state by generations. The name, pushed in Western cookbooks and Israeli tourism campaigns, effectively de-Palestinianizes a staple food, claiming it as a product of a new national identity. The fight over hummus—who makes the biggest bowl, who holds the Guinness World Record—is a proxy for a deeper struggle over ownership, authenticity, and the right to claim a cultural heritage that borders have fractured. The chickpea itself is apolitical. Its consumption is anything but.
This renaming spills over into whole categories of food. The term “Israeli cuisine” often subsumes dishes brought by Jewish immigrants from across the Middle East and North Africa. Fusion is a natural part of diaspora cooking, but the national label can obscure the origins of dishes like sabich (an Iraqi-Jewish eggplant and egg pita) or shakshuka (a Maghrebi dish of eggs poached in tomato sauce), presenting them as products of a national project rather than a complex, often traumatic, migration history. The border of the nation-state becomes a culinary washing machine, stripping ingredients of their specific, often painful, provenance.
The Forbidden Fruit: How Conflict Zones Starve a Cuisine
Beyond renaming, borders physically starve cuisines. The Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967, was once Syria’s apple orchard. The apples are still grown there, often by Druze communities now cut off from their Syrian families by a ceasefire line littered with mines. The fruit gets exported, but the traditional recipes that used those specific apples—the Golan apple knafeh, the slow-cooked lamb with apples and anise—are fading on the Syrian side, where the ingredient is no longer available. The cuisine becomes a ghost, haunted by a flavor that can’t be sourced anymore.
In Gaza, the blockade has systematically dismantled a fishing culture that stretched back to the Philistines. The Israeli navy restricts fishing zones, often to just a few nautical miles. The result isn’t just economic strangulation; it’s a culinary lobotomy. The large, deep-water fish that were central to Gazan celebratory dishes—the grilled grouper, the spiced fish sayadiyah—have been replaced by small, bony sardines and farmed tilapia. The recipes are remembered, spoken of by grandmothers, but they can’t be made. The taste of the sea, once a birthright, is now a memory of a memory. The dish becomes a story of what was lost, a culinary witness statement.
Diaspora’s Double-Edged Ladle: Preservation and Erasure
When people are displaced, they carry seeds, recipes, and techniques. The diaspora kitchen becomes a sanctuary of memory, where kibbeh nayyeh or maqluba is a taste of a lost home. But the diaspora also creates new erasures. A Syrian refugee in Berlin might find the exact seven spices for her grandmother’s kibbeh, but the lamb is from New Zealand, the bulgur from a Turkish supermarket, and the air doesn’t smell of Aleppo pine. The dish is preserved, but it’s also transformed. It becomes a document of displacement, a recipe that testifies to the journey as much as the origin.
What’s more, the economic pressures of exile can force a rupture with the past. Palestinian olive oil, once the liquid gold of a peasant economy, is now often a luxury import in the diaspora, replaced by cheaper alternatives. The ritual of the olive harvest, a communal act that bound villages together, is reduced to a label on a bottle. The food is there, but the political economy that gave it meaning is gone. This is a quieter kind of forgetting, not through prohibition, but through the market’s indifference to memory.
The Archive in the Recipe: Reading a Dish as a Political Document
If we read a recipe not as a set of instructions but as a historical text, what does it tell us? Take msakhan, the Palestinian dish of sumac-spiced chicken and onions on taboon bread. A traditional recipe from the Jenin area might specify baladi chicken, a local breed, and sumac from the hills around Nablus. The dish is a map of a pre-1948 landscape, a declaration of a peasant economy rooted in specific soil. A modern version, made in a Chicago suburb with supermarket chicken and imported sumac, is a document of exile. The recipe hasn’t changed, but its meaning has been completely inverted. It is no longer a celebration of place but a lament for it.
This is the work of a culinary historian of the Mediterranean: to treat the recipe as a witness statement. The ingredients list is a census of a particular village’s agriculture. The method reveals the technology of a household—a clay oven, a communal grinding stone. The serving suggestion—to eat with hands from a shared platter—encodes a social structure. When a border cuts through that village, the recipe becomes a testimony to what was severed. The dish that once fed a community now feeds a memory, and the act of cooking it becomes a political act of remembrance, a refusal to let the map dictate what is forgotten.
FAQ: The Politics of the Plate
Why does it matter what we call a dish like “Israeli couscous”?
Names are not neutral. “Israeli couscous” is a marketing term for ptitim, a wheat-based product invented in Israel in the 1950s as a rice substitute during a period of austerity. Calling it couscous links it to a North African tradition, but the term obscures its specific history and, more importantly, can be used to overwrite the actual couscous traditions of Palestinian and other Arab communities. The name is a small but significant act of culinary nationalism that erases the foodways of the displaced.
How did the Lebanese Civil War change the country’s food identity?
The war (1975-1990) didn’t just destroy infrastructure; it scattered communities and broke the chain of oral transmission for many regional dishes. Beirut’s reconstruction favored a glamorized, marketable “Lebanese cuisine” for tourists and the diaspora, often simplifying or standardizing dishes. The subtle, hyper-local variations—the specific spice blend of a mountain village, the unique cheese of a valley—were lost as populations were displaced and never returned. The war created a culinary amnesia, replaced by a national brand that is often a ghost of a richer, more diverse past.
Can a dish be a form of political resistance?
Absolutely. When Palestinians cook maftoul (a large-grain couscous) or za’atar bread, they are not just making food; they are asserting a connection to a land and an agricultural heritage that the ongoing occupation seeks to erase. When Syrian refugees in camps recreate the elaborate Friday lunch of their hometowns, they are resisting the dehumanization of displacement. The act of cooking and sharing a dish that carries a specific, place-bound history is a powerful refusal to be reduced to a statistic. It insists on a complex identity that borders cannot erase.
How do modern trade agreements continue to shape what we eat?
Free trade agreements often privilege large-scale, export-oriented agriculture, flooding local markets with cheap, subsidized imports. In many Mediterranean countries, this has devastated small farmers who grow traditional, climate-adapted varieties of wheat, legumes, and vegetables. The EU’s association agreements with southern Mediterranean countries, for example, have been criticized for undermining local food sovereignty. When a farmer in Lebanon can’t compete with imported Egyptian potatoes, she stops planting her family’s traditional variety, and a unique flavor, a specific recipe, and a piece of agricultural knowledge disappear. The border, in the form of a tariff schedule, quietly kills a cuisine.
What We Reclaim When We Cook
To cook a dish from a contested place is to enter a political argument. It is to take a side, whether you intend to or not. The simple act of seeking out a specific ingredient—the freekeh from Hauran, the sumac from Nablus, the olive oil from a grove in the West Bank—is a gesture of solidarity against the border’s attempt to sever the connection between a people and their land. It is a small, daily act of cartographic disobedience.
This is not about nostalgia. Nostalgia is a longing for a past that never truly existed. This is about memory as a form of justice. The recipes we inherit are not just instructions for feeding the body; they are testimonies, land deeds, and genealogies. When we cook them, we are not just recreating a flavor; we are reading a silenced history aloud. The border may have changed what people ate, but it cannot fully erase what they remember. The kitchen remains a site of resistance, a place where the map is redrawn with sumac and olive oil, and the forgotten are invited back to the table.