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It’s another one of those weeks where everyone is posting on Instagram.
Several months ago, I wrote about Gaza and the pervasive idea that food brings us together. While the focus was on celebrity chef Jose Andrés and the murders of a dozen World Central Kitchen employees by Israeli forces, I included an excerpt from Yottam Ottolenghi’s foreword of Falastin, by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley, in which he references Jerusalem:
“The job was complicated, politically, since we had to put aside the harsh reality of the occupation of the West Bank. But it was a labour of love: love of ingredients, love of our city, love of our families and childhood memories. Through our friendship, helped by a ‘healthy’ distance of 3.6000 kilometres separating London from Jerusalem, we told a story that was pure deliciousness and joy.”
Yottam Ottolenghi, for the uninitiated, is an Israeli-born British chef and restaurateur with eponymous restaurants across London and a series of smash hit cookbooks. When people visit me in the city, Ottolenghi is the second-most requested restaurant to visit, after Dishoom. If you’re not familiar, I hope you’ll take my word for it that he’s very famous, along with his business partner Tamimi, for popularizing a sort of vaguely Levantine, bright and vegetable-forward style of cooking that had countless middle class mothers scanning Waitrose aisles for sumac and pomegranate molasses. His global influence is undeniable.
One key feature of the Ottolenghi brand is that Ottolenghi is Israeli and Tamimi is Palestinian; they both hail from Jerusalem, albeit different parts. They never say the word apartheid but some of us will! In 2012, the pair published Jerusalem, a cookbook presented as "a modification of the Israeli versus Palestinian nationalist narrative," and instead a celebration of the commonalities between the two through the lens of food.
At the time, I asked what it meant that such a book, predicated on the idea of food bringing people together, was only possible through putting aside “the harsh reality of the occupation of the West Bank.” That seems relevant to me!
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It’s been a terrifying, cataclysmic week for Gazans. It’s obviously been terrifying and cataclysmic for a long time, but an uncomfortable reality of an interconnected-and-overloaded world is that something as all-consuming as a genocide can simmer in the background for those overwhelmed or uninterested. This week, an apocalyptic warning by UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher that 14,000 babies would die without intervention in 48 hours served as a flashpoint. The UK Government has suspended trade deal talks with Israel and done some strong wording about the current humanitarian crisis, despite providing material and rhetorical support for everything that led to it.
Read It is Always Worth Speaking Out by Michael Rance
Most people I know in the London food and hospitality scene are sharing an open letter titled, “The UK food industry says NO to starvation as a weapon of war.” The bigger names listed as signatories are exactly who you would expect them to be, those who have been steadfast in their support for Palestinians these past 85 weeks. Here is the link to sign.
Separate from this open letter, Yottam Otolenghi took to Instagram to make his fourth total public comment on the current siege of Gaza:
“As someone whose life and work have been shaped by food - by the way it brings people together, by its ability to nourish and heal - I am heartbroken by what is happening in Gaza right now. I never imagined this could happen.
The use of food, or withholding it, as a tool in conflict is something I cannot stay quiet about. No person, no child, should go hungry as a result of war. The blockage and recent attacks and the devastating consequences they are having on daily life - on access to food, water, and basic dignity - are unconscionable.
I speak as someone with deep ties to the region, with family in Israel, and with a profound belief in the humanity of all people, Palestinians and Israelis alike. This isn’t about sides. It’s about lives. And the right of every human being to eat, to survive, and to live without fear.
My heart goes out to all those suffering. I stand with those calling for an immediate stop to the fighting and for unimpeded access to food and aid for civilians.
Food should never be a tool in war. It should be a bridge.”
I said this on Instagram yesterday, but this is certainly the least equivocal of four statements (I mistakenly only gave him credit for three). And yet, still a testament to the power of words to say everything and nothing.
My only technical point is that it’s a little funny to say “this is something I cannot stay quiet about” about something that you’ve been very, very quiet about. How many weeks out of the last 85 have been marked by a complete stranglehold on food entering Gaza? How many have been marked by the burning of crops, the bombing of aid vehicles and food distribution points? Or by the killing of chefs cooking emergency meals?
What strikes me about this statement, however, is just how enduring the “food brings us together” myth remains, despite it all. Food should never be a tool in war. Okay, well it is, now what?
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Alicia Kennedy wrote a great piece earlier this month on anti-intellectualism in food media.
“The visceral nature of eating means that it can never be serious in the common imagination, and this might be key to mainstream food media’s anti-intellectualism: too necessary, too everyday.”
This sentence has been in the back of my mind as I ask myself, why is the bar on the floor for one of the most famous purveyors of Levantine cuisine, who continues to profit off of Palestinian stories, recipes, and ingredients? Why is Jose Andrés on some studio lot getting the Martha Stewart treatment when he should be facing some sort of tribunal for the sea pier bullshit?
The idea that food brings us together is inherently consumptive. That a mutual affinity for pomegranate molasses can trump politics, even if politics is a clever way of saying an enormous power imbalance, a violent occupation, or even a genocidal siege. Just make sure you buy the good pomegranate molasses.
And that’s an anti-intellectual premise. It requires you to, as they did in Jerusalem, “put aside the harsh reality,” whatever that may be. Very little grappling going on.
It’s a challenge for so many particularly in the food industry because consumption is at the heart of the work. The necessity of eating makes buying food feel like it isn’t consumption, but it is. Chefs may donate a portion of proceeds or host a fundraising evening and writers may share links to Palestinian products like olive oil, dates, and spices.
And so many of us are making these calculations that feel meaningful within the parameters of our own daily lives where yes, food does often bring us closer to others. I cook in a community kitchen on Fridays and none of us at the helm of the main dish really eat meat, and so we’re grappling with what it would look like to use less in a way that balances the needs and desires of the community we serve. It’s a tough, ongoing conversation that requires frankness from all of us.
What does real solidarity look like, beyond platitudes about sitting down at one long table or whatever? What does real solidarity require of us, beyond consuming better things? 🫒
Appreciate this and all the other pieces linked in here. I’m a cook at a nice restaurant in a big US city, and I think about this a lot - “this” being the politics of food, and the way almost everyone tends to act like it’s pure magical unifying force. Food is an essential material need, in the same way water and shelter is. Yeah, I think tech bros on their Soylent grind are fucking weird, but sometimes food really is just fuel. Sometimes it’s a lever you work in order to make someone else do what you want. Winning a siege almost always boils down to cutting off someone’s water and food. Disrupt their supply lines! This is millennia old military strategy. Food is magic, because so many people haven’t actually gone hungry, and so don’t realize that it is also power. One of the world’s most solvable problems is making sure everyone eats, and it remains because its main problems are deeply unsexy supply chains, prudence/redistribution, and getting people to care when they themselves are comfortable.
One reason I’m a cook is because I do believe in food - it feels good to me, to have the direct output of my work every day being people getting fed. That’s morally sound. Until I complicate it with the fact that in order to pay rent I usually take a job that only feeds certain people, those with money to burn and an interest in the novel. Or I see the ecological cost - the animal and plant life wasted every day as processing byproduct or gluttonous over-ordering or old mise from dishes not moving fast enough. I’m lucky enough to work in a spot where there’s a focus on supporting local farmers, fishers, etc, but I’ve worked in more remote places with less access that required hauling truckloads of things grown very far away to us, most days of the week. One spot does collabs with nonprofits that delivers meals to people in need, and their main fundraiser each year is a gala of elaborate food, nothing like what they deliver, that people pay through the nose for in order to, I assume, hobnob?? Flaunt their wealth/generosity?? Flex their access to dozens of chefs cooking something special, just for them?? Because of course you can’t just donate your money without asking someone to dance for it first. The way food moves through the world is the same way any extension of power does.
I’ll cut myself off there, touched a bit of a nerve (lol). Again, really enjoyed this and the other bits linked - many interconnected thoughts put intelligently and well.
Another thing. Ottolenghi served in the IDF for three years. That was a choice of a coward. Hummus isn't going to stop the genocide. Courage or Israelis refusing to serve is the gesture we need not IG Posts.