This paper examines aspects of Syrian collective memory of the Great War with a focus on the catastrophic famine that, together with other war-time calamities (locusts, epidemics), decimated the civilian population. Born out of a toxic mix of causes, the famine cast a deep shadow on the home-front experience and came to be remembered in images that range from the quotidian to the horrific. Many of the remembrances are articulated in the language of a war-time menu that includes blue bread, banana peels, corpses, and children. Many of the tropes involve animals: monkey-like children and creepy-crawly adults too weak to walk who are reduced to eating animal feed and grass as well as animals of the wrong species such as locusts, rats, cats, dogs, and horses. Starving Syrians did not have the exotic choices afforded Parisian elites who, under siege in 1870, “ate the zoo” (Rebecca Stang). Rather, many Syrians became the zoo. Yet, as was the case in Paris, starvation gave rise to a remembered cuisine of desperation that was accented by class, gender, and sect and elaborated in the backward gaze of nationalism. In this paper I analyze the ways in which animals are used to convey the “disproportion and incommensurability” of the experience of the famine (Gilsenan) and the role they play in the construction of identity. My sources consist of a kitchen-sink of genres and include scores of memoirs and histories as well as novels, plays, poetry, and zajal written between 1916 and 2008. I use food as a lieu de memoire to organize this extensive cultural production. This project contributes to deepening our understanding of the civilian experience of the Great War in Syria by exploring sources never tapped before (including poetry and zajal translated by the author) and suggests a novel way to analyze discourses of identity during and following the war. Additionally, it offers a concrete way (a Noah’s ark, so to speak) with which to navigate the wide and contested flood of memories and a lens that invites comparative work on the home-front experience of war in other places and other times. It draws on parallel work on the European experience of famine and the home-front (WWI Germany) and is informed by scholarship on collective memory as well as cultural (and food) history.