Open any cookbook celebrating the Mediterranean and you will find the same story. Sun-bleached villages. Grandmothers rolling dough under lemon trees. The olive groves, the wine-dark horizon, the simple life. It is a beautiful story. It is also a lie of omission.
I learned to cook from my teta in Beirut, and I learned to cook from absence. She would tell me what a dish tasted like before the war, and I would try to rebuild it from her memory and whatever we could find in a displaced kitchen. The food we made carried the weight of everything she survived. But you would never know that from reading most food writing about our region. The Mediterranean has been stripped of its politics, its blood, its borders—and the food writing that claims to celebrate it has been complicit in that erasure.
The Comfortable Myth
Mediterranean food writing, at least in English, has largely been written by people who encountered the sea as tourists. The genre was shaped by Elizabeth David’s 1950 classic A Book of Mediterranean Food, written in gray, rationed England as a kind of sun-drenched fantasy. David had lived in Egypt, Greece, and Italy, but her book was not really about those places as they existed. It was about what postwar Britain wanted to believe existed: a place where life was slow, ingredients were pure, and every meal was an act of communion rather than survival.
That template stuck. For seventy years, food writers have returned to it. The Mediterranean became a mood, not a place. It became the thing you escape to, not the thing people have fled across. And so the cookbooks pile up—beautiful, well-intentioned, often deeply researched—and they tell you about the za’atar, but not about why za’ater cultivation in the Galilee became a political act. They tell you about the fish, but not about who is allowed to fish and who is not.
What the Sea Actually Carries
The Mediterranean is the world’s deadliest border. Since 2014, more than 26,000 people have died or gone missing trying to cross it, according to the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project. These are people from Syria, Libya, Eritrea, Afghanistan—places where the same sea that we romanticize in our cookbooks has become a graveyard.
But the politics of the Mediterranean are older than the current refugee crisis. This sea has always been a contested space. Phoenician traders, Roman fleets, Ottoman navies, colonial powers carving up North Africa and the Levant—the history of the Mediterranean is a history of who controls the water and who gets pushed to the margins. Every dish we now call traditional was shaped by those power dynamics.
Consider the tomato. It arrived in the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century, brought by Spanish colonizers who had stolen it from the Americas. It was not a natural part of our cuisine. It was an artifact of conquest. The same is true of peppers, potatoes, corn—staples we now associate with a timeless, ancient way of eating. There is nothing timeless about them. They are the culinary residue of empire.
Fish and Fleets
My grandmother used to make sayadieh, a rice and fish dish from the Lebanese coast. She would tell me about the fish markets of Tripoli before the civil war—piles of red mullet, the call of the vendors, the way the whole city seemed to eat from the sea’s bounty. But she never told me that the fish stocks collapsed because of overfishing by industrial fleets. She never told me that Lebanese fishermen were being outcompeted by European trawlers operating under agreements that prioritized European markets over local livelihoods.
The Mediterranean’s fish are political. The FAO reports that over 80% of assessed fish stocks in the Mediterranean are overfished. This is not a neutral fact. It is the result of policies that privilege industrial fishing operations over artisanal fishermen, that privilege export markets over local food security, that privilege European Union agreements over the sovereignty of North African and Levantine coastal communities. When a food writer tells you to simply buy fresh fish at the market, they are asking you to participate in a system without naming what that system is.
Olive Oil and Empire
Olive oil is perhaps the most romanticized ingredient in the Mediterranean diet. And yes, the olive tree is ancient. It grows in poor soil, it survives drought, it lives for centuries. The olive tree is a survivor, and I understand why people love it.
But the olive oil trade has also been shaped by power. During the occupation of Palestine, olive groves were destroyed as a matter of policy. In the West Bank, Israeli settlers have uprooted and burned olive trees belonging to Palestinian farmers—trees that were those families’ livelihoods. The olive harvest in Palestine is not a pastoral idyll. It is an act of resistance. And yet most olive oil sold as Mediterranean comes without that context. It is sold as a lifestyle product, a health supplement, a luxury. The people who tend the trees are erased from the bottle.
Even within Europe, the politics of olive oil are sharp. The European Union subsidizes olive production in Spain, Italy, and Greece, creating a market that undercuts producers in Tunisia, Morocco, and the Levant. The Mediterranean diet, as it is marketed, is a European diet. It is not our diet. It is not the diet of the people who actually live on the southern and eastern shores of the sea.
The Refugee Kitchen
I want to tell you about a kitchen I know. It belongs to a Syrian woman named Amira, who I met through a community kitchen project in Beirut. She was from Aleppo, and she made muhammara—a roasted red pepper and walnut paste that is sharp, sweet, and deeply red. She made it in a rented apartment with a two-burner stove, using walnuts that had been sent by relatives in Turkey and peppers from the overpriced market downstairs, and she made it because tasting home was the only way she could keep hold of home.
Amira is one of millions of displaced people in the Mediterranean region. Their kitchens are not in cookbooks. Their recipes carry the weight of war, of loss, of starting over without a country. When food writing refuses to engage with displacement, with borders, with the violence that forces people to cook in exile, it is refusing to engage with the very thing that gives this food its meaning.
I am not asking every food writer to become a war correspondent. I am asking for honesty. When you write about a dish, write about what it survived. Write about who is still cooking it and where and why. Write about the fact that the woman rolling dough in that sun-bleached village might be rolling it with hands that remember a different kitchen, a different country, a life that was taken from her.
Why Writers Stay Silent
There are practical reasons for the silence. Publishers want aspirational content. Readers want escape. The market for cookbooks demands beauty, and beauty, we are told, does not mix well with politics. A writer who points out that the Mediterranean diet was built on colonial extraction is not going to sell as many books as one who tells you to drizzle more olive oil and think happy thoughts.
There is also fear. The politics of the Mediterranean are entangled with some of the most volatile conflicts in the world. Write about Palestine and you will be called biased. Write about North African immigration to Europe and you will be called political. Write about the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus and you will be called a provocateur. The easiest path is to stay silent, to stick to the recipe, to let the reader believe that the Mediterranean is just a diet and a view.
But silence is a choice, and it has consequences. When we divorce food from politics, we are not being neutral. We are taking a side—the side that benefits from erasure. We are saying that the comfortable story matters more than the true one.
What We Lose
When I cook sayadieh, I taste the coast my grandmother described. But I also taste the absence—the fish that are no longer there, the market that no longer exists, the city that was broken. That absence is part of the dish. It is part of what makes the dish worth knowing.
Every Mediterranean recipe carries this kind of depth, if you let it. The preserved lemons of Morocco carry the weight of a trade history that connected Fez to Seville. The pastilla of Andalusia carries the memory of a Jewish, Muslim, and Christian convivencia that was destroyed by expulsion and inquisition. The raki on a Cypriot table carries the weight of an island still divided. These are not footnotes. They are the text.
I want food writing that honors the full weight of what we eat. I want us to stop pretending that the Mediterranean is a spa and start admitting that it is a sea—stormy, contested, and full of stories that deserve to be told. I want us to cook with open eyes.
The table we set should hold everything: the beauty and the loss, the flavor and the fight. That is what the food survived. That is what the food is.
Frequently Asked Questions
Isn’t food writing supposed to be about pleasure and celebration?
Pleasure and politics are not opposites. Knowing what a dish survived makes it more meaningful, not less. My grandmother’s sayadieh tastes better when I understand the coast it came from, the pressures that shaped it, and the woman who carried its memory through a civil war. Celebration without context is decoration. Celebration with context is reverence.
How can I make my own food writing more politically aware?
Start by asking questions. Where does this ingredient come from, and who controls access to it? What history does this dish carry? Who is cooking it now, and under what conditions? Read beyond cookbooks—read history, read journalism from the region you are writing about, and talk to the people who actually live there. Let the recipe be a doorway, not a destination.
Doesn’t adding politics to food alienate readers who just want a recipe?
Some readers will always want a recipe and nothing else, and that is fine. But many readers are hungry for context. They want to understand what they are eating, not just how to make it. The most powerful food writing has always carried political weight—from Jessica B. Harris’s work on the African diaspora to Diana Kennedy’s insistence on documenting Mexican cuisine on its own terms. The readers who leave were never your audience. The readers who stay will stay because you told them the truth.