Beyond Hummus and Falafel: Social and Political Aspects of Palestinian Food in Israel

Preface to the American Edition

Preface to the American Edition A couple of months after my book came out in Israel, I received a phone call from a Palestinian journalist who works for a major local television station. “We need to talk,” he said in a tone I could not interpret with certainty. Having done many interviews as part of my research, I tried to get a sense of what the conversation was going to be about. He was, after all, the first and only Palestinian journalist who had expressed interest in my book. More than being concerned about the nature of our talk, I was curious. A number of blog comments written by Palestinians in reference to reviews of my book were quite critical, to say the least, about the fact that a Jewish woman “dared writing about our food,” as they put it. “We are tired of being folklorized and looked down on,” said others. It made me feel uncomfortable. I had not intended to folklorize Palestinian food culture nor to look down on it while also capitalizing on it. If there was one thing I was proud of, it was my success in detaching Palestinian culinary knowledge from its folklorized version and constructing its narrative in a way that included all its complexities and hidden political dimensions. “Why did you want to talk to me?” was my first question to the Palestinian journalist when we finally met. He looked a little uncomfortable as he told me that, upon receiving my book from a Jewish friend, he, too, had bristled at the idea of his culinary narrative being written by a Jewish scholar. He was tired of being an object of scienix x | Preface to the American Edition tific investigation, of being observed by outsiders, especially those who claimed entitlement to the land he felt was his. The friend, I was told, promised he would buy the journalist dinner at a good restaurant in Tel Aviv should he still think, after reading the book, that the author had offended either the Palestinian people or their food culture. “I was looking forward to having this dinner,” the journalist explained, “but about halfway through the book,” he continued with a smile, “I had to admit that I, too, had fallen into ethnocentric pitfalls.” When I asked what made him change his mind, he said, “Your interviewees told you things we never tell Jews, and you did not hide it from your readers. You just brought the reality straight to their faces.” I do not think I have ever been moved by a reader’s comment as much as I was moved by this observation. This particular compliment made me aware of the various attributes that, I believe, make this book important for both Israeli and American readers. When I first started researching the Palestinian kitchen in Israel, I encountered a lot of resentment—mostly from political activists, but also from some colleagues, both Jews and Palestinians, who questioned the legitimacy of my study. Many of them felt it was not proper for a Jewish Israeli woman to penetrate the Palestinian kitchen. “Their cuisine is for them to study” was a sentence I heard throughout my fieldwork. No answers were given to my questions: Why is it okay for Jews in general, and Jewish men in particular, to study Palestinians ’ political views, voting patterns, incomes, or educational achievements —but not their culinary culture? Why would my study encourage the appropriation of Palestinian dishes, while studies on marriage or family patterns were not seen as an obstacle to women’s mobility or a questioning of their virtues? To this day, I am not sure what caused these reactions. Was it my determination to touch on the topic of food—a topic many scholars see as frivolous and unworthy of sociological investigation? It was only recently that I realized the reaction was something more than the general disrespect food scholars often encountered. In fact, for many Palestinians food was far from frivolous. Palestinian food and eating habits were one of the few topics Jewish scholars had not touched on, and thus food represented one dimension of life over which Palestinians had total control. As I proceeded with my study, I came to understand that social, political, financial, and gender issues lay behind daily food practices, and that food revealed social relations, tradition, pride, and resistance, Preface to the American Edition | xi all put in a...