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Food and Power in the Middle East and the Mediterranean PRACTICAL CONCERNS, THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Nir Avieli Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Rafi Grosglik Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Introduction

DOI: 10.2752/175174413X13589681351250 Reprints available directly from the publishers. Photocopying permitted by licence only © Association for the Study of Food and Society 2013

In May 2008, a group of Israeli chefs, sponsored by the Israeli food producer Tzabar1 dished up a plate of hummus weighing some 400 kg, setting a Guinness World Record. In October 2008, Fadi Abboud, the then president of the Association of Lebanese Industrialists and later the country’s minister of tourism, announced that Lebanon would sue Israel for violating its culinary copyrights: “By marketing Lebanese national dishes such as hummus and tabbouleh2 as its own … Israel was costing Lebanon tens of millions of dollars per year” (Lichfield 2010). Abboud explained that Lebanon’s case would rely on the “feta cheese precedent, whereby a European court granted Greece the sole right to use feta in the name of the cheese it produced” (Lichfield 2010). The Lebanese apparently failed to find a pertinent court, as their complaint was never filed. However, the issue was important not only economically, but also symbolically, deeply enmeshed in perceptions of national identity and national pride. The Lebanese therefore decided to respond to the Israeli challenge by setting their own Guinness record with a dish containing no less than 2000 kg of hummus in October 2009 (Ariel 2012). The Israeli response was swift: in November 2009, 80 kg of meat, 12 kg of salad and 10 kg of flour were cooked and stuffed into a giant pita, 3 meters in diameter, so as to set the Guinness record for the world largest Meorav Yerushalmi (Jerusalem Mix): a dish of chicken and internal organs grilled with onions and

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seasoned with turmeric, garlic and cumin, served in a pita with salad and tahini (sesame paste). This dish, reputedly invented in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda municipal market, is a classic market dish made from leftovers and a popular local specialty. While this was not hummus, Israeli media reports made it clear that this was yet another maneuver in the evolving hummus war. Channel 2 News, the nation’s leading news broadcaster, begun its report of the event by stating: “While the Lebanese ‘stole’ [in the original] our Guinness record for the world largest hummus plate, Israel decided to fight back [lehashiv milhama] with a feat that the northern neighbors could hardly duplicate: the world’s largest Jerusalem Mix” (Adler 2009). The headlines in the popular Walla News website were even blunter: “Another Victory for Israel: Record in Jerusalem Mix” (Walla News 2009). The futility of the endeavor did not pass unnoticed. As Al Arabia, the Palestinian news website, commented: “They should have no trouble getting their concoction of 200 kilograms (440 pounds) of mostly chicken innards recognized by the Guinness Book of Records—no one has ever attempted it before” (Al Arabia News 2009). Nevertheless, the Guinness record for the largest Jerusalem Mix did not satisfy the Israeli side. In a surprising twist, Ibrahim Jawadat, an Israeli Palestinian3 from the village of Abu Gosh, and the owner of the well-established Hummus Abu Gosh restaurant, announced that by doubling the Lebanese record and preparing a plate containing no less than 4000 kg of hummus, “we are restoring the state’s honor.”4 Abu Gosh is an interesting place. The village boasts dozens of restaurants specializing in Palestinian food such as falafel, tahini, taboule, and of course, hummus. These food venues cater mostly to an Israeli Jewish clientele, making Abu Gosh one of the Palestinian villages most frequented by Israeli Jews and, as a consequence, one of the most prosperous ones. Though many Israeli-Palestinian villages feature similar restaurants, Abu Gosh is exceptionally popular among Israeli Jews because its dwellers are considered “good Arabs,” and for two reasons. The first is historical: in 1948 the village head (mukhtar) cut a deal with the Hagana (the pre-state Jewish Defense organization) leaders that his village would remain neutral in the armed conflict in return for Jewish protection. The less known part of the story is that although Abu Gosh villagers remained neutral and even assisted the Jews, many were deported at the end of the war along with dwellers of neighboring Palestinians villages, and were allowed to return only thanks to a civil campaign headed by prominent Jewish figures. In her ethnography of Abu Gosh, Rebecca Stein (2003) quotes several villagers who recounted bitter memories of their relations with the Jews and stressed the fact that despite their collaboration with the Jews, most of the village lands were confiscated. Her informants made a point, however, of concealing these negative sentiments from their Jewish customers, so as to ensure the longstanding image of the village as a safe place for Jews. The second reason for Abu Gosh’s popularity among Israeli Jews has to do with the widespread belief that Abu Gosh is a Christian village, and as such, safe (or, at least, safer) for Jews. While the village’s Christian image is exacerbated by its

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Notre-Dame Church, a large Benedictine monastery and the extremely popular Abu Gosh Festival of Liturgical Music, the Central Bureau of Statistics records that 99.9 percent of the village residents are Muslim (Central Bureau of Statistics (2009). Abu Gosh’s popularity as the “Hummus Mecca” of Israel is thus based on a set of false assumptions regarding its dwellers, their religion and their relations with the Israeli state and its Jewish citizens. Ibrahim Jawadat himself is an interesting figure as well. According to media reports, he left Israel as a young man, possibly because of financial debts, to join his brother in the United States, but after winning millions in the Illinois Lottery, returned to Israel where he set up the Hummus Abu Gosh restaurant as well as other businesses and established himself as a successful businessman (see Goldshtain 2006; Israelity Blog 2010). Thus, we have here a Palestinian Muslim from a village that Israeli Jews believe to be Christian and Jewish-friendly, announcing that he will restore the nation’s honor, temporarily lost in the hummus war with Lebanon. Inevitably, this situation piqued our interest and on January 8, 2010 we headed to Abu Gosh to witness the attempt at making a new Guinness record for the largest hummus plate. The dynamics of the event were unexpected indeed. While the media rhetoric (some of which we heard on the radio while driving to Abu Gosh) was clearly “national” and even nationalistic, expressed in terms such as “us,” “the Lebanese,” and “our national dish,” the atmosphere in Abu Gosh was different. To begin with, the village was decorated by its own municipal flags and not by Israeli flags. “Localness” was also the main theme in the speeches, which highlighted the role of the Palestinian citizens of Israel as potential mediators between the Jewish citizens of Israel and their Arab neighbors. An important and unusual feature of the event was the fact that it was bilingual. While Hebrew, Arabic and English are the official languages of the state of Israel, Arabic is often frowned upon and avoided in events that are not solely Araboriented. But here, the hosts made a point of using both. The event was led by Zuhair Bahloul, an Israeli Palestinian journalist often ridiculed by Israeli Jews because of his highbrow Hebrew. “Israel Idol” singer, Palestinian Miriam Toukan sang Israel’s Eurovision winning song Halleluiah in Arabic and in Hebrew). Ibrahim Jawadat’s bilingual speech further highlighted the “Abu Gosh localness” nature of the event. He repeatedly stressed that the event was taking place in Abu Gosh (and did not mention the state of Israel as he was quoted doing in interviews in the national, Jewish controlled, media) and that hummus is a traditional local specialty (that is, Palestinian and not Israeli). But his main argument was that “Israeli Arabs are the bridge to peace in the Middle East.” He recounted how Jewish, Arab and Western leaders such as Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Jimmy Carter and Anwar Sadat5 met at Abu Gosh and negotiated peace over a plate of hummus, and he called for further meetings and peace talks between Jewish and Arab leaders in Abu Gosh. Oddly enough, January 8, 2010 was the warmest day ever recorded in the Israeli winter, with temperatures soaring to 30 °C. As January is usually a cold and cloudy, no precautions were made to deal with the heat in terms of shading and refrigeration.

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We reached Abu Gosh early, just prior to the arrival of a large truck labeled “Salatey Micky” (Micky’s Salads—Jawadat’s Jewish business partners). Boxes of prefabricated commercial hummus were downloaded from the truck and their content dished into a huge satellite dish, borrowed from the neighboring Neve Ilan satellite center. The satellite dish was placed on a weight and placed on a high ramp. Standing next to the workers, we could not help but notice the acrid odor of the hummus, which seemed spoiled. As the day progressed and the temperatures rose, we kept thinking about the hummus in the dish, exposed to the blazing sun and increasing heat. We knew that it was sour to begin with and had no doubt that the sensitive paste was quickly putrefying. At that stage, access to the ramp was denied and it was not possible to asses the state of the hummus. However, though it was promised that the hummus, along with thousands pitas, would be shared among the spectators once the record was set (a promise that attracted many of the spectators according to their own semi-joking testimony), the hummus was not apportioned and no explanations were made for this change in the program by the managers of event or in later media reports. Dozens of men in white aprons and chefs’ hats were moving busily among the crowds. When we asked a few of them what they were doing, they explained that they were actually waiters from some of the local restaurants, invited by the organizers to walk around wearing cooking attire. They admitted what we already knew: they didn’t prepare the hummus. Indeed, some of the people we watched construct the hummus stage in the morning we recognized as having changed their clothes and donned chefs’ hats just before the beginning of the event. Once the record was confirmed by Guinness representative Jack Brockbank, the song “Od Yavoh Shalom Aleynu (Salam)” (Peace shall be bestowed upon us), which includes the Arabic word Salam (peace) and is thus bilingual to a certain extent, was played. At the same time, blue and white balloons (the colors of Israel’s flag, which were absent from the event until that moment) were released into the clear skies to the sound of cheering and clapping Jewish and Palestinian onlookers. We approached the Guinness representative and asked him whether he knew that the hummus was commercially made. He responded swiftly; “of course I know, but it was the same in Lebanon … no claims were made that the hummus was handmade.” Driving home, we could not help but reflect on the irony of the event: a Palestinian of Israeli citizenship sets out to save the nation’s face by preparing the largest ever plate of a dish of his own ethnic culinary heritage, which had recently become a highly contested marker of identity claimed by both Arabs and Jews. He does it in a village whose Palestinian-Muslim identity is purposely blurred for commercial reasons, and uses commercial hummus, produced by a Jewish company. But most disturbing was the metaphor itself: Ibrahim Jawadat suggested that peace in the Middle East was best negotiated over a dish of hummus in the liminal setting of a Palestinian-Israeli village, and urged further dialog within the same setting. The hummus however, was smelly and rotten, thus reflecting accurately

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though obviously unintentionally, the state of peace in the region: the hummus was foul, putrid and unappetizing, just like the peace process in the Middle East. The analysis of the ways in which power works within the culinary sphere in specific geopolitical contexts is the main theoretical project undertaken by the contributors to this special issue. Let us therefore turn to a brief discussion of the theoretical approaches that address the interface of food and power.

Food and Power

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Food is a prominent means of power. While access to, and control over, large amounts of nutritious and expensive fare are blunt manifestations of prestige, supremacy and potency (Sahlins 1963, 1976; Bourdieu 1984; Mintz and Du Bois 2002), regulating the food intake of others or preventing them from eating altogether is the utmost form of coercion (Richards 2004 [1932]; Douglas 1966; Counihan 1998). Lappe and Collins (1986) thus argue that hunger is the absolute sign of powerlessness. Food is also a means of cooperation, mutual assistance and partnership (Wilk 1999). In instances where food is distributed or donated, power is enacted “not through force and the ability to deny, but through giving, through the obligations created by giving and through the influence wielded in the act of giving” (Counihan 1999: 46). Food sharing (commensality) is therefore highly regulated across societies and cultures and is routinely embedded in complex sets of rules and rituals (Counihan 1999: 48). Foodways may also negotiate, subvert and challenge existing power structures, undermine power arrangements and depict alternatives (Watson 1997; Watson and Caldwell 2005; Belasco 2007 [1989]; Cwiertka 2007; O’Connor 2008; Avieli 2009; . Klumbyte 2010). Clark (2004) argues that “eating is a cauldron for the domination of states, races, genders, and ideologies and the practice through which these discourses are often resisted,” while Belasco (2007 [1989]) coins the term “countercuisine” to emphasize modes of culinary defiance. While these links between food and power are well acknowledged, their sources and dynamics are hardly understood or agreed upon. Up until recently, the culinary sphere was perceived as trivial and unworthy of serious scholarly attention (Mintz and du Bois 2002; Belasco 2002, 2007). Foodways were, in the main, presented as reflections of existing power structures: passive mirror-images of actual power relations (Richards 1937, 1939; Evans-Pritchard 1982, Levi-Strauss 1966, 1970, 1973, 1987; Douglas 1966, 1975, 1984; Tambiah 1969; Sahlins 1963, 1976). Since the mid-1990s, as the research into food and society developed, scholars paid increasing attention to the generative powers of the culinary sphere and acknowledged culinary systems and practices as arenas and processes that produce power (Goody 1982; Mennell 1985, 1989; Bourdieu 1984; Mintz 1985) and where differing discourses of power compete for hegemony (Ohnuki-Tiernei 1993, 1995; Caplan 1997; Watson 1997; Counihan 1999, 2004; Sutton 2001; Wilson 2006). In recent years, food and power have conjoined in a new anthropology, sociology and history of food that focus mainly on three salient issues: food safety, food globalization and the culinary politics of identity (Belasco and Scranton 2001; Lien

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and Nerlich 2004; Watson and Caldwell 2005). While food safety and the globalization of food are embedded in complex power networks, the power dimensions of the culinary construction of identity are central to the articles presented in this special issue.

Identity Projects that deal with the culinary politics of identity (Narayan 1995; Pilcher 1998; . Caldwell 2002, 2005; O’Connor 2008; Klumbyte 2010) essentially develop French gastronome Brillat Savarine’s famous aphorism “tell me what you eat and I shall tell you who you are” into a set of elaborate and sensitive insights regarding contrasting and, at times, competing facets of national, regional, ethnic or gender identities that are conveyed by different food items, dishes and modes of eating. An intriguing distinction exists between studies that deal with the identity embedded in the “exotic” foods of marginal peoples, in post-socialist foodways and in Western culinary arrangements. When it comes to the former, anthropology’s traditional subjects, attention is mainly paid to the ways in which specific dishes and eating modes represent competing facets of national or ethnic identity (Narayan 1995; Pilcher 1998; Cusac 2000; Ashkenazi and Jacob 2000; Howell 2003; Avieli 2005a, 2005b; Cwiertka 2007; Rosenberger 2007; Abbots 2008). In the post-socialist context, the subject at hand is often the modernization of the production of specific . food items (Dunn 2004; Mincyte 2008; Ries 2009; Klumbyte 2010). When studying Western culture, however, a key emphasis is governmental and institutional debates over brand rights of specific lucrative food items in specific (mainly, EU) regions (Hinrichs 2003; Leitch 2003; Winter 2003; Castellanos and Bergstresser 2006; Cavanaugh 2007; Blue 2008; DeSoucey; 2010). This distinction is possibly the outcome of prevailing academic power structures, based on imagined dichotomies such as tradition vs. modernity, private vs. public or rationalism vs. emotionalism.

Power Most of the research on the interface of food and power adopts explicitly or implicitly the Foucauldian stance, at least as a theoretical departure point. “Power,” argues Foucault (1980: 89) “is neither given, nor exchanged, nor recovered but rather exercised, and only exists in action.” Power is not a thing nor control over things, but a network of non-egalitarian, dynamic, multidirectional relations (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 183). The definition of power as a multidirectional set of relations is both a critique and an expansion of Gramsci’s approach to hegemony. Gramsci (2004) conceived of power not as sheer force applied through institutional violence (or in Gramsci’s terms—the power of political society) but as a condition/trait/gift of specific social echelons, who utilize it so as to maintain their privileged status through control of the media, the education systems, the economy and other non-violent institutions (or in Gramsci’s terms, the power of civil society). While Foucault too was interested in non-violent social institutions, he understood power as a quality of the system and advocated that power is not a limited resource available only to specific social actors or groups, but omnipresent and multidirectional.

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Foucault also highlighted power’s generative capacity: as opposed to the Weberian perception of power as violent and destructive, Foucault argued that power relations produce knowledge, which, in turn, reshapes the relations of power in a dynamic loop that produces new knowledge which, in turn, reproduces new power relations (Foucault 1989). Power is also generative in that it always entails “resistance”: another set of relations and practices that work their way up; a form of power that emerges as a consequence of power (Scott 1985). The articles in this issue are informed by these three premises: that power is a dynamic set of relations; that power is a quality of society and exists everywhere; and that power has generative capacities. The task of the researcher of power is therefore to map these relations, identify the social actors involved in these relations and expose their strategies for producing, enforcing, resisting and subverting power. Specifically, the articles in this issue expose the conditions that allow for culinary production of power, explain culinary reproduction of power and facilitate culinary resistance.

Food and Power in Israel

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Five of the six of the contributions in this issue deal with Israel. The Israeli culinary sphere is extremely varied, vibrant and dynamic, and Israeli society is often likened to a pressure cooker (sir-lahatz), the outcome of high-speed, high-intensity processes of migration, modernization and nowadays of globalization. As power and power relations are so central in Israel, the scarce anthropological and sociological scholarship on Israeli foodways inevitably refers to power and power relations. Both Kalka’s (1991) analysis of middle class “coffee events” and Shapira and Navon’s (1991) essay on a Tel Aviv café describe subtle negotiations of power between hosts and guests, which surround food and beverages in the first case and social relations and spatial arrangements in the second. Sered’s (1995) insightful article addresses the ways in which elderly oriental women (Mizrahiyot) in Jerusalem amass social and religious status through feeding their relatives, to the extent that they are believed to influence divine decisions and even “coerce” God into treating their relatives favorably. More recent scholarship addresses various aspects of power within the Israeli culinary sphere more explicitly. Ram (2004) discusses McDonald’s as a form of American culinary imperialism and points to the ways in which it is resisted and manipulated in Israeli McDonald’s venues. He also suggests that falafel, Israel’s “national dish,” is a contested artifact, a means of Israeli colonization and a hub of Palestinian resistance (cf. Raviv 2003). Efrat Ben Ze’ev (2004) describes the way food helps displaced Palestinian refugees in their attempt to construct and preserve memories of Palestine. This act of “eating and remembering” appears to be an act of protest against Israeli colonization and the Jewish-Israeli rendering of the landscape. Tene (2005) and Rozin (2005), in their contribution to Kleinberg’s (2005) pioneering project on the emergence of Israeli cuisine, write on gender and cooking from a historical perspective and show how through official and private institutions the nascent Israeli society and state imposed culinary arrangements and preferences that represented a specific social order, apparently Western, modern

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and scientific but actually Ashkenazi (Jews of Eastern European origins) and dismissive of the cultures of immigrants from Muslim countries. Gvion (2005), in the same volume, describes the recent expansion of the Israeli culinary horizons and the inclusion of both Mizrahi (“Eastern,” a term invented in modern Israel for Jews of North African, Middle Eastern and Balkan origins) cuisine and that of other cultures as a consequence of the multidirectional challenging of the hegemonic Ashkenazi culture. Writing on the culinary practices of Palestinian women living in Israel, Gvion (2006) celebrates resistance. Her ethnography shows how these women’s cooking, based on gathering, shopping for scraps, “expanding” restricted budgets and “augmenting” staple starches with minimal amounts of meat and a lot of work, is perceived by themselves and by their family members as a strategy for negotiating, subverting and even achieving tiny victories over the Israeli state and the Jewish majority. Stein’s (2008) analysis of Jewish-Israeli visits to—and consumption in— Palestinian-Israeli culinary destinations exposes the strenuous relationship and repressed feelings hiding beneath tables laid with hummus, falafel balls and fresh pita bread. Each of these studies sheds light on a specific segment of the Israeli culinary powerscape. Our hope is that this issue will expand these studies by addressing explicitly the operation of power within the Israeli culinary sphere and by exposing the ways in which specific cooking modes, dishes and eating arrangements partake in the negotiation of differing facets of varied social aspects in Israel.

The Papers One of the most striking aspects of the articles presented here is the way food practices are indicative and reflective of power and power relations in the Middle East and especially in Israel and neighboring countries. Each of these studies sheds light on a specific segment of the “culinary powerscape” of Israel and of other Mediterranean societies: food and migration, power relations between class categories of class, gender and ethnicity and their reflection in the culinary sphere, interaction between the global and the local and other struggles related to structural and technological changes. In the first article, Galia Sabar and Rachel Posner focus on the practice of “eating and remembering” as a way of coping with refugees’ varied and complex realities. In the (scarce) anthropological and sociological scholarship on Israeli foodways, the issue of “food and memory” has been conceptualized as an act of protest, especially in reference to the Israeli colonization and to Jewish-Palestinian power relations (Ben Ze’ev, 2004; Gvion 2006). Sabar and Posner, however, provide an important contribution by illuminating the ways “eating and remembering” is used by Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers within their daily physical and psychological struggles for survival. They describe how these refugees, who were being forced to migrate, rush to build what they term “culinary safe havens” as soon as they arrive in their new asylum place. In sharp contrast to Sabar and Posner, who focus on foodways related to people located in a state of concern for their mental and physical survival, Dana Kaplan

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explores the eating habits of the Israeli elite. While the category of social class has been described by sociologists such as Ulrich Beck as “hazy” (or in Beck’s terminology, a “zombie category” [Atkinson, 2007]), Kaplan identifies new culinary practices used by westernized elite groups in Israel to construct symbolic class boundaries and a sense of distinction. Using the setting of festive foodstuffs in new middle class weddings, she points to the “simple taste”: an aesthetic disposition that constitutes eclectic openness towards former “highbrow and lowbrow tastes,” and towards “other” cuisines. Her article demonstrates the ways in which food is used in cultural struggles and in negotiations about social boundaries at times when significant changes take place in Israeli cultural hierarchies. The article also demonstrates the role of food and eating in the establishment of neoliberal discourse and its mundane expressions in westernized Middle Eastern societies. While Kaplan points to the stylish meanings attributed to “other” cuisine, Rafi Grosglik and Uri Ram analyze the sociological meanings of the arrival, absorption and changes in “exotic” and “other” cuisines in Israel. Focusing on the case of Chinese food in Israel, they reveal how different patterns of Israel’s culinary globalization have manifested. They argue that in the interface between the material and symbolic levels, the transformations of Chinese food in Israel indicate its different structuring, corresponding to the changing effects of global processes and the tastes of different social categories. Chinese food serves as a prism for unpacking the concept of cultural globalization and its expressions in westernized societies such as Israel. Contrary to the common view, which identifies the globalization of Israeli society solely as “Americanization,” Grosglik and Ram argue that globalization also takes the form of an ethnic-national process, of McDonaldization and of a hybrid-cosmopolitan process. The former two articles discuss cultural aspects of globalization. Gisela Welz brings interesting insights from the study of political economy, culture and bureaucracy together with research on globalization. By exploring loukoumi (a candy also known as “Cyprus delight”) and halloumi (a cheese made from goat and sheep milk) Welz describes how local food products in the peripheral European region of Greek Cyprus are transformed into “commodity heritage,” a term introduced by European Union’s quality label program. “Commodity heritage” is an example of the contemporary demand for national recognition in an era of transnationality (from both cultural and economic reasons). Transnational heritage regulation, such as the EU’s “origin foods” program is exemplary of heritage production which re-articulates the link of an artifact with a specific group’s history and territory within a framework of legal standards and global institutionalized control. This construction of what Welz terms “nationalized heritage” works to exclude groups of producers who are considered external to the national project. She argues that the EU program is deployed in Cyprus to the advantage of largescale industrial producers and facilitates the homogenization of regional diversity in favor of an ethnicized national heritage. While Welz’s article considers present-day methods of “heritage manufacturing,” Tamar Novick investigates early-modern food production. In a richly detailed article, which focuses on honey production and beekeeping, she picks up arguments

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concerned with socioeconomic and cultural dynamics of power in the context of European colonialism at the turn of the twentieth century. She explores the ways in which metaphors shaped the ways technologies were appropriated to recreate the “land flowing with milk and honey” in Palestine/Israel. Arguably, this biblical notion became an inspirational and legitimizing force for environmental, economic and ultimately political change. Furthermore, this combination of modern European technologies combined with biblical metaphor was a crucial component in justifying intensified European settlement in Palestine. This connection between praxis and symbolism related to the land of Palestine/Israel is also apparent from reading Nir Avieli’s article. Focusing on the relatively new ritual of barbequing meat by most Jewish-Israelis celebrating the nation’s Independence Day, he outlines the complex meanings attributed to this practice. By revealing several socio-historical narratives which are part of the discourse that accompanies this ritual, he points to the national meanings of roasted meat. According to Avieli, roasted chunks of meat symbolize “refined chunks of ‘Israeliness,’” embodied by the Jewish citizens. By barbequing meat during the Israeli nation’s Independence Day, participants ratify and reproduce some key cultural elements in Israeli identity: the question of power versus weakness, the wish to hold on to territory while facing the realities of “dense frontier” and the constant struggle over space in the region. Thus, this collection of articles brings together the writings of different scholars who offer a variety of perspectives on the critical analysis facing food and power in Israel, the Middle East and the Mediterranean, as well as promising directions for future research for those working in the field of food and society.

Acknowledgments The articles presented in this issue were first presented at the International Conference on “Food, Power and Meaning in the Middle East and Mediterranean,” held at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, in June 2010. We wish to thank, Prof. Uri Ram, Prof. Yoram Meital, Prof. Carole Counihan and Prof. Penny Van Esterik for their support and advice throughout the project. The faculty and graduate students at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University were collegial and generous and their contribution was substantial. Lisa Heldke and Ken Albala, the editors of Food, Culture & Society, were enthusiastic and encouraging throughout the process of compiling the text and their assistance is appreciated. Nir Avieli is a senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, BenGurion University of the Negev. Nir is a cultural anthropologist interested mainly in food and in tourism. His book, Rice Talks: Food and Community in a Vietnamese Town, presents a culinary ethnography of the central Vietnamese town of Hoi An. He has conducted further ethnographic research in Thailand, India, Singapore and Israel. He is currently writing a book titled, Food and Power: A Culinary Ethnography of Israel. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, BeerSheva 84105, Israel ([email protected]).

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Rafi Grosglik is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He holds a master’s degree in sociology and anthropology. Since 2008, he has been researching the cultural field of organic food in Israel. His dissertation deals with the cultural globalization and sociology of Israeli culinary culture. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel ([email protected]).

Notes 1 Tzabar (sabre in Yiddish) or prickly pear, is used in modern Hebrew to denote Jews born in Israel, as Israeli Jews tend to describe themselves fondly as prickly from outside but sweet and soft from within (Almog 1997). Paradoxically, the cactus is actually a foreign plant, a recent arrival from the New World, introduced to the region by Palestinian farmers prior to the beginning of Jewish immigration. As a consequence, Sabres grow nowadays mainly on the ruins of Palestinian villages. This culinary symbol is therefore multi-vocal and evokes both the endorsing self-perception of Israeli Jews and the memory of the displaced Palestinians. 2 Middle-Eastern Arabic salad traditionally made from bulgur, tomatoes, parsley, onion, olive oil and lemon juice. 3 The Palestinians who remained in the territory of the newly established state of Israel after the 1948 war were granted Israeli citizenship. 4 The Nonstop Radio 103FM interview with Ibrahim Jawadath (“Owner of Abu Gosh Restaurant Aims to Break Lebanese Guinness Record”) is available from: http://www. 103.fm/programs/Media.aspx?ZrqvnVq=ELLMGD&c41t4nzVQ=EG (accessed January 25, 2013). 5 He also mentioned Lord Bernadotte as one of those negotiating peace over hummus in Abu Gosh. A Swedish diplomat, Bernadotte was the United Nations Security Council mediator in the Arab–Israeli conflict of 1947–48 and was assassinated in 1948 by the militant Zionist group Lehi (“Israel Freedom Fighters”). It is inconceivable that Bernadotte had hummus in Abu Gosh.

References

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