The Gaza strip. It’s an area of the world which most often makes headlines due to violence and unrest. However, one of the most recent stories to emerge from the region involves organic farming, a 10-year plan to develop sustainable farming being introduced by Hamas, and an approach to peacemaking via gastronomic delights.
A new cookbook, The Gaza Kitchen, written by Laila El-Haddad, an author and activist who was born in Kuwait, raised between the Persian Gulf and Gaza and now lives in Maryland and Maggie Schmitt, an American writer, explores these topics in an effort to shed a light on the region, situated between Egypt, Israel and the Mediterranean, which is often, perhaps too-often, mentioned only in connection with war and strife. But this new book insists there’s more to the story — and perhaps also seeks to put a human face on the people of the area.
The story behind the book
“Once upon a time, Gaza was known for its citrus trees and its extraordinary seafood, the smell of jasmine in the evening. No longer: now it is hard to find any image of Gaza that does not reek of death, destruction and deprivation. And yet despite the siege, the bombings and the political turmoil that surrounds them, the people of Gaza continue to live and to create their small share of beauty and grace wherever they can. One of these places is in the kitchen,” Schmitt writes.
She visited Gaza in 2009 and wrote an article published in The Atlantic entitled “Eating Under Siege.” The piece focused on how Israel’s severe restrictions impact the food people have access to in Gaza and what they eat.
In researching for the story, Schmitt discovered very little online about local food in Gaza. She did find several columns from El-Haddad’s blog which became a book, “Gaza Mom.”
The two met in person in Gaza, then continued with a correspondence via email and phone. They also made a journey together in 2012 when the Rafah border crossing to Egypt opened, where they met people who had been displaced for decades and were actively preserving a sense of identity through cuisine. They funded their endeavor in part through crowd-sourcing website Kickstarter.
Researching recipes, history and politics
Schmitt and El-Haddad’s journey led them to visit the homes of many families throughout Gaza in their quest to capture recipes for soups, breads, salads, main dishes and drinks — but the duo also unearthed a host of information on how those in the region cope with strict sanctions denial of some of life’s most basic necessities such as food and water.
About 450,000 live in the region. Most of Gaza’s inhabitants are Muslim, although there is a Christian minority. Gaza has a very young population with roughly 75 percent of its inhabitants being under the age of 25.
“For us, describing life in the homes, family economy, households, was really important,” says Schmitt, “because that side of the story in Gaza is almost completely unknown and underrepresented.”
The Gaza Kitchen is more than just a cookbook, it doubles as a primer in Modern Middle Eastern politics and includes sidebars on U.N. food rations, electricity and water shortages, Israeli limits on trade and restrictions on fishing.
“Gaza was once famous for its fish,” El-Haddad and Schmitt write. “Now the Israeli Navy limits Palestinian fishing boats to just three nautical miles from the coast. Violations are punishable by violent harassment, boat seizure, arrest and gunfire.”
A ceasefire which was reached by between Hamas and Israel following a period of unrest in November 2012 also carried with it an increase in the fishing limits off of Gaza’s shores by six nautical miles, however that is still short of the 20 set by the Oslo Accords two decades ago.
However, an Israel reinstated a three-mile limit on March 21, in response to rockets fired from Gaza during President Obama’s visit. No word has been given on how long the three-mile limit will be enforced.
“We like to say that when you’ve entered someone’s kitchen, when you’ve tasted their food, it’s harder to bomb that person,” El-Haddad says. “You begin to think of them as human beings.”
Hard work pays off
The cookbook is garnering attention from a variety of sources from the Huffington Post to Time magazine, which last week heralded the new book as “a new cookbook and that chronicles the role of cuisine in Gaza as tools for both sustenance and resistance.”
The book is winning praise for humanizing both the land and the people of Gaza, whom often show up in writing only as mere statistics.
“Third- and fourth-generation Palestinian refugees, who make up the bulk of Palestinians in the modern-day Gaza strip, really held on to the very specific food traditions of their villages, down to how they would finish a stew,” El-Haddad told NPR. “Someone from the village of Beit Timma might finish their stew with fried onion, never garlic. Whereas someone from Gaza City would add dry red peppers, or generally add a lot of heat. And that would never be the case with the fahaleen, those from the farming, interior areas.”
The book’s appeal has been noted by such notables as American adventurer-chef Anthony Bourdain, who says its “an important book … old school in the best possible meaning of the term,” and London-based Mediterranean food author and historian Claudia Roden highlights the importance of cooking to the area¹s cultural identity. “Food writers today often invent recipes or create their own twists to make cooking easier,” she says. “True, some ingredients may be hard to find, but El-Haddad and Schmitt have presented Gazan cuisine exactly how it actually is.”
Many of the dishes featured in the book also are served on Israeli tables too, to which the authors note that perhaps food is one way to encourage co-existence.
“Talking about food and daily life is an effective way to show the human side of conflict and do our part to construct real solutions,” concludes El-Hadad.
On a side note, the author of this article can’t wait to get into the kitchen and try out some of the recipes, and also plans to give a copy of the book to her mother (who has a vast collection of cookbooks from Julia Child to Joan Nathan) for Mother’s Day.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect on Mint Press News’ editorial policy.