When Food Doesn’t Taste Like Home

How occupation and war have severed the people of Gaza from their culinary history. Written by Doha Kahlout. Translated by Katharine Halls. Illustration by Narmeen Hamadeh.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Each Monday we publish a different piece of writing related to food, whether it’s an essay, a dispatch, a polemic, a review, or even poetry. This week, Gazan writer Doha Kahlout reflects on how Palestinians’ relationship with food has been shaped by occupation and war. We are publishing the essay both in its original Arabic and as an English translation by Katharine Halls. This essay is the first in a series on Palestine and Lebanon commissioned by Vittles in collaboration with N.A. Mansour, and is preceded by a brief introduction to the series.

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It is almost impossible to write about food when Palestinians in Gaza are being starved by the Israeli state. English doesn’t even hold the capacity to illustrate in a single word what happens when one human entity forces another to starve, as a deliberate act, as a weapon. But the Arabic language does: Tajwi3. 

It is almost impossible to write about Palestine. It’s hard when Palestinians in Gaza have died as they record and document genocide and yet are not being considered reliable sources on their own history and present. When Palestinians are not asked to speak, but instead, careerist experts who parachute into Palestine, both literally and figuratively, are instead asked for their objective opinion. 

But we Palestinians are still talking about food: to each other and to others, including our Lebanese siblings. Food represents a means of control enacted by white supremacy on the global majority, including indigenous peoples. Conversations about control of food are woven throughout our everyday interactions. This series on Palestine and Lebanon thinks about how food is used by Palestinians and how it is used against us. But in many ways, the writers presented over the next few weeks are all thinking beyond food: as much as they document Palestinian and Lebanese experiences as genocide rages, these writers are thinking about action. As you read the first installation in this series, by Doha Kahlout, I urge you to think about the ways you have not been acting for Palestine: What have you not tried? Can you try it? How will it serve the end of genocide and with it, form part of our collective liberation?

—N.A. Mansour

When Food Doesn’t Taste Like Home

How occupation and war have severed the people of Gaza from their culinary history. Written by Doha Kahlout. Translated by Katharine Halls. Illustration by Narmeen Hamadeh.

في ماضي جدّتي، التي وافتها المنيّة وهي تحدثنا وتصوّر لنا مدى صعوبته، كان الطعام مغمسّاً بتعبٍ مستمر، حين كانت الزراعة هي أفضل سبل الحصول عليه. الرجال والنساء يعملون أياماً كاملة في سبيل تأمين المحاصيل الزراعية في موسمها. عندها تستذكر جدتي تجربة زراعة بذرة، اختبار التربة، العناية المستمرة بالشجر، الحصول على مواد التسميد المطلوبة، توفير الماء لسقي النبات، معرفة أوقات الجني. علاوة على ذلك، النساء يبدأن صباحهن بجمع الخشب للحصول على شعلة نار لكلّ مطالب الحياة، بين تسخين المياه للاستحمام، غسيل الملابس والأواني، تحضير الطعام، هل كانت النساء تشعرن بالتعب؟ لجدتي كانت تلك أحب الأوقات، لأن الارتباط بالأرض كان كبيراً، لأن الحياة كلّها تعتمد خيرات تمدها الأرض بها

Click here to read this essay in Arabic. Note that the English translation has been edited, and the texts differ from each other as a result.

My grandmother had a hard life. She spoke of it often. She grew up in the city of al-Majdal under the British mandate, and lived through the Nakba as a young woman and new wife. Back when she was young, food was seasoned with effort and fatigue, because the most sensible way to obtain it was to grow it yourself. A good harvest (her family cultivated everything from olives and tomatoes to oranges, grapes, and figs) required months of hard work: sowing the seeds, testing the soil, taking constant care of the trees, obtaining fertiliser, watering the orchard and the crops. Women of her generation began their days by gathering firewood, because cooking food, and boiling water for bathing and laundry, required a fire. Surely you must have been exhausted, I said to her. But my grandmother loved those days because of the strong connection to the land – life depended on what it had to offer. Her cheeks would flush when she talked about ‘country oranges’. Nothing she ate later in life could compete with the taste of those oranges she would pluck from the tree, sitting down in the shade to savour them right there and then.

For my grandmother, these memories sprang to mind whenever we served a meal. Bread entailed a journey back in time. She never tired of telling us how bread – so precious to her that she always likened it to gold – was made in her day, describing how the sound of the mill grinding the wheat made her feel peaceful, how the flour that came out was like gold dust. She swore that even water tasted better back then, when life required you to lift your own hand if you needed something.

Amid these memories of the land’s generosity, any mention of the occupation would conjure up a nightmare. Orange season ended when my grandmother’s children were expelled from the land that she and my grandfather had lived on. Irrigation water was cut off, the soil was poisoned, and harvests were confiscated. She told me she sometimes used to silence her children’s hunger by turning the mill even when there was nothing to grind, keeping them occupied with its fruitless sound until they grew weary and fell asleep. Yet though my grandmother lived through times of scarcity and fear of famine, the mention of food always sent her back to a single place and time: the land of her youth.

This, then, is the Palestinian experience: one thing always reminds you of another. What you eat when you are running from death, or imprisoned in the occupation’s jails, may be food, but it does not taste like home. Food may be there in every situation, but it is different each time. When you live on your land, you eat what it offers you; when you are forced to leave for a place you do not know, you eat things you never would have imagined. Ever since Palestinians were expelled in 1948 and forced to live on arid, barren lands, they have had to rely on aid from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). In the decades that followed, Palestinians have often subsisted on mere morsels, eating whatever meal can be cobbled together from what UNRWA provides – usually beans, chickpeas and other pulses – for days on end. For farmers who previously spent their lives eating fruit and vegetables fresh from the land, this in and of itself was a war upon them. There are people for whom the word ‘food’ now means nothing more than the clench in their heart when they take a few bites of whatever preserved food they can get hold of beside the tent which is their home.

My generation – who grew up in the shadow of successive wars on the Gaza Strip, house raids, killings, and checkpoints in the West Bank and across occupied historical Palestine – has its own set of associations with food. Tomatoes remind us of alayit bandora, which is often the last meal of the fida’i. For Gazans who have lived through five wars since 2008 – the most recent of which is still ongoing – certain foods arouse intense antipathy, because we have been forced to eat them for so long when nothing else is available. We are sick of tinned food and the meals we’re forced to make with them – we call them war meals – which are nutritionally poor yet rich in humiliation and grief. We’re enraged by the effects of malnutrition we suffer. We hate the sight of bread coming out of the oven after months of grinding corn and animal feed each day to produce a single round that tastes as if soaked in blood.

Even preparing a simple meal entails constant indignities. Cooking over an open fire blows smoke everywhere, covering the dishes and utensils with soot the colour of the present. Nothing is clean, and the food is bad no matter what it is. We choke down each mouthful with tears of frustration and anguish. Warm memories of feasts shared with family and friends contrast with a collective wasting-away under conditions of famine. Children die of hunger. Adults grow sicker and sicker.

Then there are the political prisoners who have lost everything and who have no home, not even a tent, and no food to keep them going. On occasion, my uncle speaks about the relentless suffering of imprisonment. He distinctly remembers the food he was given: lentils, beans, mujaddara – well-loved Palestinian staples. But in prison they were prepared so badly, and served with such relentless monotony, that the prisoners grew to hate them. He was certain that the prison authorities deliberately made the food taste bitter as a strategy to make prisoners lose control, first over their bodies, and then their minds. Hunger strikes have long been the prisoners’ tactic of refusal and resistance against the occupation, with prisoners subsisting on nothing but salt and water until their demands are met. Samer Issawi broke records by going on hunger strike for 266 days to protest his illegal detention without trial, successfully securing his release in 2013. Khader Adnan, meanwhile, went on hunger strike multiple times but died in his prison cell after eighty-seven days without food. This is what food means to a Palestinian prisoner: suffering kneaded with bitterness. If my uncle is ever served those prison dishes now, memories of hunger and weakness rush through him so intensely he loses his mind.

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Has it occurred to you that you might one day eat the leaves off the trees? Years ago, I remember seeing a news report about threats to food supplies that would impact global health in the near future. One thing I remember in particular is that people would be forced to eat leaves due to famine. I always imagined that moment, alternately finding the prospect utterly implausible and yet also expecting it as an inevitability. By the beginning of 2024, more than 350,000 people in the northern Gaza Strip were living in a state of famine. Truckloads of food and medical equipment have been sent, but the occupation authorities prevent most of them from entering. If you want flour you have to chase aid lorries for days to get it, which is itself a risk: since last October, more than a thousand people have been killed while seeking food aid or waiting at distribution points. Some countries delivered aid by air and, desperate after months of famine, Gazans eagerly chased this bounty from the sky, following the parachutes wherever they fell. People died gasping from exertion, some fell from great heights, others were crushed when pallets of food landed on them. They died still hungry and desperate.

Gazans have taken to eating uncultivated chard, a wild plant that grows in wetlands. Mulberry leaves replace vine leaves in the famous rice-stuffed dish waraq ’inab (or waraq dawali). Lemons are boiled with no more than a little salt to transform them into a meal. At times when nothing else is available and the hunger is unbearable, people have turned to plucking leaves from trees, resulting in numerous cases of poisoning, some fatal. Gazans have been forced to eat the inedible, fulfilling the prophecy I saw on TV all those years ago.

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Food, for Palestinians, is our history. We have been deprived of both. The people of Gaza have survived astonishingly difficult circumstances that have robbed us of choice and made despair and need the organising principles of life, testing our resilience and resourcefulness again and again. We are forced to fight for ordinary, simple things. The struggle to eat is just one of many that Palestinians face, but like those other struggles, its solution is clear: freedom and return. Our dream is to live, freely, in our homes and on our land, to build a history we can share with our grandchildren, to sit beneath orange trees we have planted with our own hands and to taste the fruit of our labour.

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Credits

Doha Kahlout, 27, is a writer and Arabic teacher. Her poetry collection Likenesses (Tariq Publishers) was released in 2018, and she contributed several poems to the anthology Gaza, Land of Poetry (Arab Institute for Research & Publishing, 2021). In addition to writing for various websites, most recently she has contributed to the anthology At Zero Line (Tibaq Publishing, 2024). You can donate to Doha’s crowdfunder here.

Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator from Cardiff. Her critically acclaimed translation of Ahmed Naji’s prison memoir Rotten Evidence was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. Her work has appeared in Frieze, The Kenyon Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The Common, Asymptote, and others.

Narmeen Hamadeh is a Palestinian artist and third-generation refugee. Her art honors and highlights her deep-rooted love for her Palestinian homeland and heritage. Although she has never lived in Palestine, it has always lived in her. You can find her on Instagram here.

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