How Food Is Weaponised as a Tool of Settler Colonialism
Food is political. Divya Ravindranath argues that while food can humanise, creating spaces of trust and vulnerability over a shared meal, It is also a powerful tool in nationalism and an effective form of propaganda. It has historically been weaponized as a tool of settler colonialism, as is evident in the ongoing Israel-Palestine war. As dishes labeled Israeli grow increasingly popular in the West, their Palestinian counterparts — and, by extension, Palestinians themselves — sink out of view; rendered invisible.
Sambar, a lentil or dal-based curry that is associated with South Indian cuisine and considered a part of the south’s cultural fabric, has origins in Maharashtra. It is Maratha ruler, Sambhaji, who is credited with creating the stew. Clearly, there is some incongruity when sambar is claimed ‘authentically’ South Indian. In the grand scheme of things however, it could be argued that the south’s connection with sambar does not depend upon the place of its creation, as much as it does upon the usage, consumption and cooking style of the curry in the region ever since. Its evolution within the region, with each state coming up with its own variant of the curry (spicy in Tamil Nadu, sweet in Karnataka), has automatically made it an indicator of South Indian identity.
Cuisines, by definition, are born out of a group of people sharing common ancestry or cultural ties within a defined geography. This can be understood in two ways: one as having distinct cooking techniques, flavours, dishes and ingredients — authentic to the community it is discussed in; and the second, as a socially constructed concept that may not always be purely authentic to the community it serves. But to what extent does authenticity matter?
Consider now, Kedgeree, a popular British breakfast consisting of fish, rice, eggs and specific spices. Is the dish authentically British? Not quite. Kedgeree was directly inspired by India’s legume and rice-based dish, khichri. During Colonial rule, a milder, meatier version of khichri was made, fitting under the Anglo-Indian culinary banner. This made its immigration to Britain’s social sphere fairly convenient. With both sambar and kedegree, we see that the notion of authenticity itself is debatable and ultimately subjective. While it could remain a fairly harmless point of discussion too, there are cases when ideas of authenticity get manipulated to produce something far nastier.
Case in point, Israel and Palestine.
Although the exact identification of the former’s cuisine has always been complicated, it is internationally perceived as a ‘melting pot’ of cuisines. However, this ‘melting pot’ narrative is not just inauthentic to the dishes themselves, but is also actively damaging to the communities of Palestine; it dismisses Palestine’s culinary influence entirely, glossing over Israel’s history of colonialism and the ongoing genocide. Cultural diffusion is, after all, different from cultural appropriation; recognising Israeli cuisine as a product of appropriation is one way to question the exploitation, and the statehood on which it is built.
Pitim, for example, is known as Israeli couscous in the West. It is used in salads, or as an accompaniment to grilled meat and fish.* But before it was pitim, it was maftoul — Palestinian couscous. The traditional process of making maftoul is long and arduous. Bulgur, or hard winter wheat berries, are boiled until they are on the verge of bursting, then sundried, and finally cracked. They are soaked in water, coated in wheat flour and manually torn into smaller pieces to become couscous. But today, maftoul is manufactured, produced, sold and consumed as an Israeli dish in the West. Countless restaurants and food blogs will refer to hummus, kebabs and falafel as Israeli cuisine, and cookbooks published in Israel will refer to these traditional Arab dishes as ‘Israeli’, without any acknowledgement of their Palestinian roots or flavours.
Pitim | Image by Lynda Balslev
Food is Identity
But why is this cultural exodus even conducted? To answer this question, we must first recognise the utility a cuisine brings to its people. After all, food brings people together in a way that no other social element does; it has the power to transcend superficial barriers exponentially. My relatives may not always see eye-to-eye on politics, but they will always sit together to share a cup of tea or a plate of vadas. My mother will make murukku and pickles from scratch to send it over to my homesick sister in the US, and I will want a vada pav each time I come back to Mumbai. Because that’s what food does — it ties people together under a shared sense of identity and love that is so mundane, it is often unrecognisable. I don’t know who I’d be if I didn’t have filter coffee every morning; my father would not feel like himself if he forgot his mother’s kadhi recipe; and I don’t think I’d recognise my friend if she stopped cracking eggs over her ramen.
We are what we eat. While eating habits are bound to change, we expect the choices around moulding our identities to rest in our own hands. Palestinians do not own this perogative.
When Zionists began their immigration to Palestine, they found it easiest to ‘adapt’ Palestinian cuisine with Jewish influences in a way that forged a connection to a land that they were strangers in. And so, traditional Arab flavours and cooking methods centric to Palestinian livelihood and memory were imitated on a personal and institutional level. On the personal front, many Israeli chefs began psychologically disassociating from the Palestinian cooking methods they were using, by staying away from the controversy of calling them explicitly Palestinian foods. On an institutional level, Israel’s Agriculture Ministry passed laws that declared za’atar and akkoub — famous Palestinian herbs, ‘wild and endangered’. This law made its possession and cultivation a criminal offence and took away a major source of livelihood for Palestinians. This kind of imitation severely limits Palestinian expressions of identity, choice and existence.
Culinary Colonialism
In the conduction of its culinary colonialism, Israel achieves two very significant things: one, it normalises a pattern of genocide and colonialism. When the history and recipes of traditional Palestinian dishes are modified within the Israeli context, the world is fed an image of Israel as a ‘harmless, fluid mesh’ of cultures (re: the melting pot narrative). This is more specifically achieved by writing about food from a perspective that frames it as a communicative, bridging tool between the two disputing communities. In Jerusalem, a cookbook co-authored by a Palestinian and an Israeli (Sami Tamimi and Yotam Ottolenghi), for example, hummus is not an Arab dish appropriated by Israel, but is instead a medium for a dialogue that, if employed in the right way, can lead to a peaceful and collaborative exchange. The Zionist project comes across as less threatening when such social narratives are built around the element of food.
Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, co-authors of Jerusalem
Second, it weaponises food. By excluding Palestine from the conversations around food, Israel limits quite literally, their access to food. The World Food Programme states that the number of people in Gaza facing catastrophic hunger has doubled, and that the choices that face Palestine currently are to be either surge or starvation. This food insecurity creates a space for violence against civilians. This is clear with the fairly recent instance of the Gaza flour massacre, where a group of Palestinians trying to gain access to flour were fired upon by Israeli forces and convoys. Aid workers from the World Central Kitchen were killed by Israeli strikes in April, when they were in the process of delivering food to starving Gazans. There are so many more cases like these, ones that create opportunity from Palestine’s inhumane starvation, to conduct more genocide.
This is not to say that there aren’t hopeful instances of food as acts of resistance. In a home where Palestinians are forced into cantons, left isolated and vulnerable to imprisonment by Israel — the slow and mundane labour of cooking becomes a method of reclaiming lost time, control and access. An Instagram post by a UK-based news site called Middle East Eye featured a Palestinian food blogger named Hamada Shoo. The post featured a video of him using aid packages to cook himself a meal. He is seen opening the box, taking out its contents, and making a sandwich. The video is captioned “The Golden Sandwich, made with 95% ingredients, 5% with love and resilience.” Another post by the same account shows an injured Palestinian minor named Youssef receiving treatment in Geneva. His wounds are the result of a bombing, and he is having his first real meal in months in the video. But his instinct is to share the burger with his doctor. More and more reels on my feed have started showing Palestinian dishes, either meal recipes or restaurant recommendations in major cities.
This is how food makes for a powerful assertion of identity. Palestine’s struggle and battle, however, extends beyond an individual kitchen, it is a larger fight for cultural survival and the right to exist in one’s own land. Finally, it is incredibly easy to forego the very real and human involvement of suffering when it comes to this War, but stories of Hamada or Youssef keep the small acts of resistance alive, and as viewers, we are finally forced to acknowledge real-time genocide and feel the discomfort as we sit miles away, doom scrolling on our phones.
Divya Ravindranath is a recent graduate from Ashoka University, gearing up to soon pursue her Masters in Food Studies. She is also a dancer, and binges reality TV in her free time.
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