Food in Middle Eastern literature and culture is a vast field, spanning from classical poetry to modern printed cookbooks. Yet classical and medieval material has received more scholarly attention than more recent sources when it comes to literary and cultural studies of food in the region. This presentation gives an overview of existing scholarship (with a focus on Arabic material) and suggests that a cultural studies approach could widen the scope of Middle East food studies in terms of both coverage and content. Between 1984 and 2001, critical editions of the major works of the medieval manuscript tradition of Arabic cookery books were published; in 2017 and 2018, two new translations in English of texts from this genre have appeared. Food-related scholarship focused on this era has not limited itself to cookbooks, however, and has much to offer scholars studying other periods. The study of medieval cookbooks, mostly written in Middle Arabic, highlights the need to look beyond “classical” Arabic texts when studying food. Work on the culture and history of everyday life has drawn from diverse genres, from legal texts like hisba manuals to medical and pharmacological texts to chronicles. How might these approaches be extended to shed new light on the relationship between food, culture, and society in the early modern and modern Middle East? ‘Ammiyya poetry, from the 17th century Hazz al-Quhuf to the political refrains of Ahmed Fuad Negm and protest music in the Maghreb, represents one possibility, as do the novels of Naguib Mahfouz and others who have fictionalized and dramatized social change and everyday life. Printed cookbooks first appear in Arabic in the late nineteenth century and continue to be produced today, but they are curiously understudied. The influence of the Galenic approach to medicine in the region offers a scientific framework for understanding food as it relates to medicine and the body, alongside modern nutritional approaches. Legal genres like fatwa collections span the classical and contemporary periods and provide insights into everyday concerns. And other media including magazines, radio, films food blogs, and television include a plethora of culinary material. Food, intimately connected to everyday life and expressed in a range of linguistic and cultural registers across the region, offers many new possibilities for cultural narratives: from those that attend to the longue duree––tracing continuity and change across epochs typically studied in isolation from one another––to investigations of the particularities of the local.

Colonial rule in the Middle East and North Africa did much to shape the food and drink of the region. Drinking and drinks were particularly fraught areas, drawing on questions of forbidden or permissible, and their parallels to other dichotomies (foreign-indigenous, colonizer-colonized, civilized-tribal, public-private). They were often important symbols of national, regional, and religious identities, and merchants and manufacturers of drinks likewise drew on national, regional, and religious symbols to sell their products. While the drinking cultures of the Middle East and North Africa have been subject to sporadic scholarly interest over the past three decades, the majority of these works have looked at the Ottoman coffeehouse to the exclusion of other parts of the region and other aspects of drinking. But the drinking cultures of the region involve a wide range of beverages and spaces: tea and coffee but also wine and beer, private salons, tea houses, milk bars, and taverns. The proliferation of public drinking establishments in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in conjunction with European encroachment and colonial rule, gives us an alternative vantage point from which to consider the Habermasian concepts of sociability and the public sphere. Drinking became a way to express different forms of identification. In turn, colonial and independent states intervened in the production, distribution, and consumption of drinks. How did colonial powers and postcolonial states rationalize their interventions in the world of drinks and drinking? How did various groups use drinking as medium for discussing political and social change in the region? I make the case for continuing to study the state’s role in shaping how people of the region drink and eat, and how the meanings they attach to their consumption are often made with specific reference to state interventions. Finally, I touch on how we as scholars locate “foodways” in state archives: how can we use bureaucratic and technocratic records to understand cultural practice?

My presentation involves the work of anthropologist Sidney Mintz and his enormously influential study of sugar on the development of food studies in general. I invite discussion on how his model of taking one food commodity and tracing its production, circulation and consumption can inspire food studies in the Middle East. I use olive oil from Palestine as a particular example of a way of conditions of a food production, which in the case of olive oil involves complicated relationships of persons with their trees as well as wider colonial relationships which affect the possibilities of production and the possibilities of circulation from point of origin into the global market. Olive oil is one of the foods is profoundly important in evoking memories of the homeland for displaced populations. As people move, they may bring their foods with them, or bring only their desires for the food they have left behind; both become powerful synaesthetic means of evoking memories of their former lives. The participants are invited to contribute their own thoughts on how food as a narrative hook can be used to explore both the politics and possibilities of movement, of food and of people. While Mintz’ political economy was very important in highlighting production and consumption as critically linked and necessary to understanding circulations of food, also central to anthropological discussions have been the way food plays into emotion, social interactions, kinship relationships, and moral evaluations. Using examples from my field research in Yemen and Palestine, I explore how food’s materiality and its capacity to act on the body in multisensorial ways profoundly affects memory and emotion. Roundtable participants can contribute examples from their own fieldwork or historical research about how historically and culturally specific concepts of love, generosity, and hospitality and their attendant moral evaluations, for example, can be expressed through food preparation, commensality, and circulation.

Food and cooking offer a unique lens through which to understand the highly cross-pollinated cultural environments in which migrants and their descendants live. In this contribution, I discuss the ways Middle Eastern cuisines have appeared in the mainstream culinary life of the United States over the course of the twentieth century. In particular, I discuss how cuisine became a mediating space between Middle Eastern immigrants and their host environments. Different forms of popular food writing, including not only cookbooks, but also lifestyle magazines, restaurant menus, travel guidebooks, and newspapers, contain a rich set of discourses that represent the Middle East to audiences in North America. I discuss the ways in which cultural authority and identity hybridity appear in these discourses, both for Middle Eastern migrant communities, and also for non-migrant Americans engaging in culinary tourism. Key questions include the geographic scope and the different labels used to describe this region in cooking literatures over the course of the last century, as well as the interplay of pre-modern and industrial tropes in describing food production and consumption in contemporary Middle Eastern nations. While it is easy to identify classic orientalist themes in this popular literature, riffing on sources such as Sheherezade and the Arabian Nights, there are also more subtle and nuanced culinary representations of the region. These include notably intra-regional national or ethnic segmentation, as can be seen in cookbooks for Armenian, Turkish or Iranian cuisines, as well as minority subcultures such as Sephardic cooking. Finally, I will also outline ways in which North American diet fads, such as vegetarianism and the Mediterranean Diet, have over the second half of the twentieth century appropriated culinary elements that originated in Middle Eastern contexts.

From Arabic to Halal: (Un)Marking Arabness in Dearborn’s Food Industry Things are getting confusing in Dearborn, Michigan. Strip clubs advertise halal chicken and dollar lamb chops, while hipster hamburger joints serve halal beef and turkey bacon without public mention. In the kitchens of local Arab restaurants, you’ll find Yemeni chefs serving up Lebanese food, second generation Lebanese offering Italian menus or sushi, and everyone vying to fire up the most decadent Iraqi kabob. As recently as the 1990s, Dearborn’s Arab food industry seemed obsessed with authenticity – wood fired ovens for the freshest bread, peasant women on prominent display making khubz marquq, mandatory of images of pre-war Beirut, and lamb carcasses ever present over the shoulders of halal butchers. Today, halal food has become ubiquitous and unmoored – so much so that it is advertised at McDonald’s and Little Caesar’s, used to attract students to charter schools, and promoted alongside Happy Hour at Mexican restaurants near mosques. Several local slaughter house compete to be the largest distributor East of the Mississippi, or to have the most diverse sampling of processed menu items. This project traces the origins of the halal meat industry in Dearborn (and the metro Detroit region) and explores how halal has become, in certain contexts, a surrogate marker of ethnicity in the city – one that enables Lebanese cuisine to blend into the foodways of other Arab migrants, to absorb and accommodate national food trends/tastes, and to appeal to a broad cross section of the local Muslim establishment. Anchoring a diverse halal marketplace, halal food in Dearborn has become as American as a burger with fries. I plan to explore the political contests that have accompanied the halalification of Dearborn both within the Arab community and between it and other Americans.