When food systems are put under pressure due to resource scarcity, informal economies arise that allow communities to cope with changes in food production or distribution. Beginning after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Iraq experienced some of the most severe economic sanctions every levied by the United Nations, including almost a complete embargo on foodstuffs and medicine. The Kurdish communities and their food systems in northern Iraq experienced the sanctions and coped in unique ways that have long term implications for local food systems and Iraqi Kurdish food ways. While some scholars have provided documentation of the consequences of those economic sanctions on the food system during the 1990s until now, there is less known about the coping mechanisms that producers and distributors used to survive that time period. Interviews with over 100 participants involved in various aspects of the Iraqi and especially Kurdish food systems provided data on topics including changes in food production strategies and changes in distribution strategies from people working in the public sector and the private sector in Slemani governorate, Iraqi Kurdistan. The qualitative data analyzed using grounded theory will build a conceptual framework that highlights unique Kurdish coping mechanisms in comparison to a more general illustration of how Middle Eastern food systems adapt to the pressures of economic sanctions and conflict. Specifically, families used three key practices to cope within the food system disrupted by sanctions. Gulechna was a form of gleaning only used in times of the most extreme financial hardship to collect wheat or other crops for processing into a flour to make bread. Smuggling occurred at all borders within the Kurdish region and increased community access to food but was especially high risk in the 1990s due to the presence of the Iraqi military and the prevalence of newly widowed women using the smuggling of food as a livelihood strategy. Partnerships related to crops and livestock shared the financial risk of agriculture across multiple parties with each strategy carrying its own term, including niwakari and sapan. While these strategies were specific to the Iraqi Kurdish food context of the 1990s, the general way in which these coping strategies evolved can be mapped onto other communities to help understand the relationship between economic sanctions, food systems, and conflict. This framework could be used by other researchers to understand similar, more current situations arising in other parts of the Middle East.