Though scientists had long assumed there existed a link between food and health, it was only after the discovery of vitamins during World War I that nutrition would develop into a quantifiable science. It was now realized that the quality of food was even more essential than quantity in preventing malnutrition. The interwar period witnessed a surge in nutrition research. As with other Western sciences, nutrition was considered universally applicable. The League of Nations developed international standards for recommended daily calorie and vitamin intake. The transmission of this knowledge to the colonies did not result in an improvement in the health of the indigenous poor. France paid scant attention to nutrition in its interwar colonial policy, instead focusing on the prevention of famine. By demonstrating its capacity to feed starving populations of the Levant in the wake of World War I, France was able to convince the League of Nations to grant it the Mandates for Syria and Lebanon. French food policy in Syria was centered on agricultural output and the emphasis on hygiene in food production. Nutrition science was spread to educated Syrians via schools and the local press, which encouraged women to serve vitamin-rich foods to their families. The reading public was able to afford such foods, many of which had long been staples for Syrian households of means, but they were out of reach for the majority of the population. By World War II, France’s mise en valeur in Syria had largely failed, and the threat of famine loomed. In June 1941, British and Free French forces overtook Vichy-led Syria. As Free France lacked funds and manpower, British troops established a shadow government. Even after food supply had stabilized, Britain’s mission in Syria grew. Though Syria had been promised independence during the 1941 invasion, the tentacles of empire were longer than ever. One of the areas of focus was the expansion in the cultivation of protective foods, particularly soybeans and ground nuts. It was not a coincidence that soy had become a big business in the U.S., which could provide experts, seeds, and surpluses, in spite of growing evidence of the detrimental effects of soy on soil. This paper will examine how nutrition science was disseminated in Syria under both French and British rule and how it was received, alongside the intersection of nutrition and British and American wartime competition to gain influence in Syria after the war.

Yemeni Jewish migration to Palestine/Israel began as early as the 1880s, and continued until recent years. Throughout this period, Yemeni Jews employed strategies to maintain connected with Yemen, and to resist assimilation, while also working to integrate into Israeli society. This paper interrogates Yemeni Jewish cultural practices to ask what they, as sites of memory, can tell us about Yemeni Muslim-Jewish relations, Yemeni Jewish identity, and the construction of a shared Muslim-Jewish Yemeni diaspora. Focusing on two cultural forms, foodways and the performance of traditional Yemeni songs, this paper argues against the common understanding that 1948 marked a rupture between Middle Eastern Jews and their countries of origin. Instead, it highlights both adaptation and continuity in Middle Eastern cultural practice in Israel. Moreover, following James Scott and Robin Kelly, it argues that Yemeni Jewish cultural practice produces a hidden transcript, which critiques the hegemonic Zionist narrative of Jewish history. For example, idealized descriptions of culinary practice in Yemen and nostalgia for Yemen expressed in song call into question the ideas of negation of diaspora and the ‘redemption’ of Middle Eastern Jews so important to Zionist ideology. At the same time, however, evident in these Yemeni Jewish cultural forms are new constructions of Yemeni identity and its relationship to the state of Israel. While these challenge aspects of Zionism and connect Yemeni Jews to a broader Yemeni diaspora, which includes Jews and Muslims, they also integrate the Yemeni Jewish community into an Israeli framework and, for the most part, embrace Israeli identity. Thus, diasporic difference is manifest in opposing understandings of Yemeni identity, as Yemeni Jews largely claim Israeli-ness, and many Yemeni Muslims define authentic Yemeni-ness in opposition to Israeli identity. This paper examines foodways and music as cultural forms that continue to link Yemeni Muslims and Jews, highlighting both cultural change and preservation. It also examines how Yemeni Muslims and Jews use narratives about Yemeni Jewish culture differently, producing different constructions of Yemeni identity and its place in the modern Middle East.

For diasporic communities, food functions simultaneously as a cultural connection to a distant homeland and a unique entryway into the local host community. Restaurants, in particular, offer migrants and their descendants the opportunity to both reproduce past traditions and establish an entrepreneurial foothold in a new context. As more migrants join existing diasporic communities, and as new generations are born into, and interact with, the local host space, multiplicities of culinary representations emerge. In long-term diasporas, the interactions between these representations can be well observed given the variety of claims to “real” or “original” version of a particular cuisine. This notion of contending assertions of authenticity drives the central question of this article: How are authenticity and cultural identities navigated/negotiated in the diaspora by individuals with a variety of temporal and spatial connections to a physical and symbolic homeland and the local host community? I explore this question within the context of the Arab community in Chile. Chile hosts the largest population of Palestinians in diaspora outside of the Arab world, and the migratory history between the two regions exemplifies the movement of culture and ideas across immense temporal and spatial distances. This study is based on 100 hours of ethnographic observation in restaurants, grocery stores, and other food spaces in addition to 30 interviews with cooks, store owners, and local residents living in six Chilean cities during the summer of 2018. Based on this research, I argue for layered authenticities— contending that within a market for food culture, multiple claims to authenticity and attempts to authenticate cuisine are in a constant state of tension, coexistence, or harmony with one another.

In the last 20 years, historians have significantly advanced our understanding of African slavery in the Ottoman Empire and its legacies for the descendants of African slaves in Turkey, known as Afro-Turks. However, little is known and about their unique foodways, that is, the culture, traditions, and history of the food of the approximately 1.3 million Africans taken to Ottoman lands in the nineteenth century. Enslaved Africans the world over brought their dietary preferences with them. Whenever possible, these traditions were maintained, as food acts as symbolic link to a homeland left or lost, and past to present (Carney and Rosomoff 2009). This paper examines the foodways of Africans in the late Ottoman Empire with particular reference to those of Izmir. It focuses on their annual festival, known as the Calf Festival, which involved spirit possession, dancing, and a large feast. After detailing the myriad of festive foods, this paper examines one soup, bazine, which is described as a dish attributed solely to the Africans of Izmir in local newspapers and memoirs from late nineteenth century, as well as in recordered interviews with Afro-Turks conducted in 2008 by the Turkish Historical Foundation (Tarih Vakfi) to which I have been given unprecedented access. As Afro-Turks are in the midst of (re)discovering and their unique history, this soup thus acts as a distinct cultural marker: knowledge of its preparation demonstrates one’s importance as a conduit of community history. This paper contributes to the growing body of evidence which shows that African women, as both cooks and religious leaders, were central to maintaining African identity in Ottoman lands. Likewise, it adds to the literature on the food history of Izmir which focuses on the Greek (Cretan) and Sephardic influences in local cuisine. It also expands our understanding of the African foodways north across the Sahara, and demonstrates that food migration is not simply unidirectional out of the Middle East, but into as well.

This paper considers the political, temporal, geographical and social trajectories of an utterly mundane yet semiotically rich food product in Egypt over the course of the 20th century, processed, canned beef, also known in colloquial Arabic as “bulu beef.” The name “bulu beef” most likely derives from the English nickname for the boiled, canned corned beef which was a staple of British military rations, “bully beef.” Canned beef was first introduced into Egypt by the British military in the late part of the 19th century, and was seen by the English a quintessential imperial good: a means to ensure the vim and vigor of British troops abroad and provide a ‘taste of home’ in far flung colonial ports. With the advent of mass tourism to Egypt, canned beef became more available in parts of Cairo and Alexandria frequented by foreign communities. By the 1930s and 1940s advertisements for it began appearing in the Arabic popular press and canned products were often described in magazines as increasingly available, if expensive imported goods. With the advent of Arab Socialism, the meanings of bulu beef began to shift as the Nasser regime began promoting the consumption of canned food manufactured by Egyptian factories as a healthy, affordable, nationalist addition to the Egyptian diet. Middle class Egyptian housewives, who the state charged with the particularly important role of ensuring the success of socialist economic planning, were instructed by women’s magazines on how to cook bulu beef, where to find it and assured them that this modern product was as nutritious as fresh meat, often in short supply in the Arab socialist economy. Interestingly, these imperial and national histories appear to have been supplanted in the popular imagination by the meanings canned beef took on in the 1980s and 1990s as a product associated with Infitah and, later, its corruptions. Novels and films relate stories of spoiled canned beef as symbolic of the flood of imported yet substandard goods into the Egyptian marketplace after economic liberalization, depictions which left their residue in popular memory. Oral histories reveal the persistence of such narratives even as they indicate more complicated understandings of bulu beef as a marker of class, gender and generation.