2026/07/01 by Nevine Abraham, Michal Rose Friedman · 1 voice
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Social Sciences · #Culinary Culture and Tourism #Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies #Organic Food and Agriculture
paper · doi:10.5325/pir.3.2.0002
openalex publication_date 2026/07/01 · openalex created_date 2026/07/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Abstract This article critically examines culinary spaces in Palestine and Israel as sites of reimagining national identities through territorial connection, ancestry, and competing claims over definitions of localized distinctiveness of food (terroir). These acts of reimagining are set against a backdrop of contested landscapes and power disparities. We approach this topic through on-site visits and interviews we conducted between 2019 and the spring of 2023. In Israeli culinary spaces in Tel Aviv and Philadelphia, we interviewed chefs and culinary curators engaged in reconfiguring the parameters of Israeli cuisine for local and global consumption while attempting to embrace multiculturalism. Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, our interviews included Palestinian culinary artisans who reinscribe Palestinian sovereignty and heritage through food, even as Israeli-imposed restrictions, escalating land dispossession, and violence threaten their culinary businesses. We argue that the personal, familial, and institutional narratives we documented in the foodways of Palestine and Israel illuminate intersecting yet incompatible national culinary reimaginings. From Israeli culinary narratives attempting to transcend underlying structural barriers that exclude Palestinians to imperiled Palestinian culinary businesses in the occupied West Bank, these foodways reveal the very structures of power imbalance and erasure that underlie the violence of these partitioned territories.