Middle Eastern cuisine today has become a fully globalized corporate phenomenon. One need only point to the rows of hummus, flavoured and “original”, in North American grocery chains to see this fact. However the voyage of Middle Eastern cuisine abroad is not simply the product of today’s corporate marketing. Rather it is the result of over a century of migration, which carried cuisines of the Middle East, along with its peoples, from the Arabic-speaking lands of the former Ottoman Empire and its successor states to Europe and the Americas. This paper examines the relationship between cuisine, memory and space among Lebanese migrant communities in North America in the second half of the 20th century. Food preparation and consumption shaped and perpetuated migrants’ memories of their homeland, in both private and public ways. In the private space of the home, food evoked the family’s links, past or ongoing, to the geographic space of the homeland. In the communal sphere, cuisine provided collective access to memories of home among members of migrant Lebanese communities, and, importantly, a means collectively to recreate and reenact those memories. As communities became more entrenched, food became a key means for presenting the far-off geographic space of home to a North American audience, particularly when communities attained the critical mass needed to support Lebanese grocery stores and restaurants. The case studies of particular grocery stores, delis or bakeries usefully illustrate the powerful links between cuisine, memory and space among migrant communities in North America. Commercial establishments such as “Adonis” in Montreal, “Sahadi” in NYC, and "Neomonde" in Raleigh NC all became hubs of the Lebanese migrant communities in those cities and the surrounding regions. This paper takes an historical approach in examining the role played by these establishments in anchoring community memories of home, reenacting those memories, and mediating them in the wider North American urban context.

In 2014, a group of asylum-seekers staying at a refugee center in the Italian region of Veneto refused to eat the meals they had been given for two days, calling for meals from their own countries. Critics labeled them ungrateful, pointing out that many of those entering the country do not have the resources to eat three meals a day. As the debate over the responsibility of caring for asylum-seekers in Europe rages on, Italy struggles to provide resources to the tens of thousands of individuals to which the government has granted asylum. Using primarily ethnographic approaches of participant-observation, in-depth interviews, and discourse analysis, this paper investigates the importance of food practices for refugee identities as they navigate the process of being granted protection in a country that is unable to provide legally guaranteed social services. This paper explores the ways that Middle Eastern refugee communities in Rome, Italy forge collective spaces of belonging through commensality and how alimental spaces act as points of congregation where varied memories of places and foods as ‘home’ converge to shape a larger social identity for Middle Eastern refugees in Rome.

By 1950, the vast majority of Yemeni Jews lived in Israel. Like all immigrants, they carried their foodways and food preferences with them. Some of these were highly resistant to change. Despite political barriers, Yemeni Jews insisted on importing foods from Yemen and preserved culinary practices in order to remain connected with their country of origin, and to assert ethnic distinctiveness. For example, after the establishment of the state of Israel, Yehiel Hibshush, a merchant from a prominent Sanani family, petitioned the government for permission to import samna (clarified butter) and a small dried fish called wazif from Yemen. This quickly brought him into conflict with State authorities and the Ashkenazi rabbinate, which deemed these items non-kosher because they were produced by Yemeni Muslims. Hibshush, invoking the memory of his ancestors, insisted that these items were kosher and essential to Yemeni Jewish life. He clearly did not understand migration, nor the establishment of the state of Israel as signifying a complete break with Yemen or with Yemeni Muslims. Migration, however, always provokes changes in foodways. Immigrants encounter new comestibles and cooking techniques, and their “traditional” ingredients may be inaccessible or expensive. Previously used methods of preparation may be difficult to reproduce in their new places of residence. In Israel, the government exerted pressure to alter aspects of Yemeni foodways as part of its “melting pot” ideology, and the Arab League boycott made importing foods from Yemen impossible. Soon the samna and wazif that Hibshush had been so insistent on importing fell out of common use. Using Yemeni Jewish memoirs and primary sources, this paper asks: 1. why Yemeni Jews deemed some food practices indispensable, while transforming or eliminating others; 2. how they’ve used memories of food in Yemen, and in Palestine/Israel during the first half of the twentieth century, to negotiate ethnic, national and diasporic boundaries, and 3. how these memories themselves have been reconstructed in the process. For example, how was Yemeni ethnicity created from the various local identities that would have been of greater importance in the period before migration? And how was a Yemeni Jewish cuisine created in this process? How have Yemeni Jews employed food memories to negotiate relations with other Jewish groups in Israel? How have food memories linked Yemeni Jews with Yemeni Muslims, and Palestinian Muslims and Christians, in some ways, while highlighting difference in others?

The link between class and food has been addressed in the influential work of Pierre Bourdieu, which shows a strong relationship between economic and cultural forms of capital and the types of food consumed and tastes acquired over time. Drawing on feminist studies and theories of new materialism, this paper seeks to expand Bourdieu’s analysis of the relationship between food, class, and gender. It offers ethnographic data from a low-income neighborhood in Cairo to analyze differences between “the taste of necessity” and “the taste of [relative] freedom” (or luxury). Living within close spatial proximity, families who manage to accumulate more material and cultural capital than their neighbors flag their distinction by the foods they prepare and consume. While continuing to share with their neighbors a basic “preference” for salty, starchy, fatty, and sweet food, families who can afford to do so display their financial abilities and cultural knowledge through the quantities of food served, the frequency of cooking and consuming meat, the aesthetics of their presentation, and the offering of foods that are considered luxurious (like fruit and sweet treats). In this context, the abilities of women become key to the materialization of changes in their families economic and social standing. Women not only shop, prepare, cook, and serve food. They also tell stories about what they cook, reactions to the dishes they make for their families, the foods they consume at different places and for different occasions, and the many “social dramas” that are the cause and/or result of making and circulating foodstuff. Through their labor and words, women are able to materialize the standing of their families in the neighborhood and highlight their shifting status and distinction. By addressing such changes and narratives, the paper tackles important questions related to food and taste: Which aspects of our taste are open for change and which resist new ideas and products? Which tastes do we continue to remember even after many years of training in the consumption of a variety of new foods? Why are we able to forget certain foods but continue to crave others even when we know they are not good for us?