Cuisines of poverty as means of empowerment: Arab food in Israel

Abstract

This paper suggests looking at cuisines of poverty as practical and political systems practiced by urban and rural Palestinian citizens of Israel. It is an important and interesting case study within which political and economical considerations govern and enhance the development, change, and acceptance of culinary knowledge. Cuisines of poverty operate in two simultaneous arenas. As systems of practical knowledge, they repeatedly center on the ability to maintain the traditional kitchen, turning it into a tool-kit out of which information is recruited upon need. Simultaneously, cuisines of poverty reveal the inter-connection between the culinary discourse and the political one. It is where issues such as access to land, national and ethnic identity, and means to participation in the dominant culture are of major concern. The analysis of cuisines as operating on two complementary discourses contributes to the understanding of the relationship between food and the arena of power.Liora Gvion, PhD, is a qualitative sociologist. She studied at SUNY Stony Brook, USA and is currently a senior lecturer at the Kibbutzim College of Education in Tel Aviv, Israel and at the Department of Clinical Nutrition at the Hebrew University. Her major interests are the sociology of food, second-generation immigrants, eating disorders, and the relationship between food and ethnicity. Cuisines of povertyFood scarcity and food deprivation are major problems in

Narrating Modernity and Tradition: The Case of Palestinian Food in Israel

“…Cookbooks, written by either immigrants or minorities, turn ethnicity into reservoirs of practical knowledge, meant for the integration of their culinary knowledge within the boundaries of local cooking. In other words, when immigrants and minorities think there is a potential clientele for their food, they are willing to disseminate their culinary knowledge in a form and content that is potentially appealing (Inness 2001;Gvion 2002Gvion , 2006 Memories of food among migrants and minorities further promote the writing of "nostalgia cookbooks" (Sutton 2001a) or "cookbook memoirs" (Bradenstein 2002), which thematize memory rather than cooking as their central raison d'etre. These books show how authenticity, loss, and nostalgia are conceptualized among migrants.…”

“They Just Say Organic Food Is Healthier”: Perceptions of Healthy Food among Supermarket Shoppers in Southwest Baltimore

“…“Soul food,” for instance, was born from African‐Americans’ history of slavery and segregation (Kittler and Sucher ). The cuisine uses ingredients that were available in times of great scarcity, such as leftover pieces of meat that white plantation owners did not want, to create a strong and vibrant culinary tradition (Gvion ; Henderson ; James ). Cooking customs of several places, including West Africa, influenced soul food (James ).…”

Las motivaciones para la participación voluntaria en comedores comunitarios del Estado de México

“…En este sentido recurrimos a Gvion (2006), quien observa que la alimentación y la preocupación por los alimentos no pueden considerarse independientes de la economía doméstica y de la división del trabajo en el hogar, en donde las mujeres son agentes centrales para la formación y preservación de las prácticas gastronómicas que desarrollan y sostienen las cocinas de la pobreza. El autor señala que se requiere entender la comida no sólo como un bien económico, sino también como un bien cultural y social, por lo que las cocinas de pobreza proporcionan estudios de casos interesantes para entender la relación entre pobreza, cultura y poder.…”