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.
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” (“Family styles in the Arab society in Israel.”) In R. Hochman (ed.),
(Jews and Arabs in Israel) (pp. 161–168). Jerusalem, Israel: Ackademon
(They Were Falahs). Tel-Aviv, Israel: Hakibbutz HameuhadAcknowledgements
I would like to express my deep gratitude to the scientific committee of the Poverty, Food, and Health in Welfare conference, held in Lisbon, Portugal in 2003 for providing me with the opportunity to present a much earlier version of this work. Moreover, I would like to thank five anonymous reviewers and Laura B. DeLind, a very dedicated editor of Agriculture, Food and Human Values, for their detailed reading of the manuscript and their thoughtful comments, which helped to improve the manuscript significantly. Finally, I am very grateful to Yolande Gottdiener, Doug Springate, Nancy Fliss, and Rottem Rosenberg for being willing to read a number of versions of this paper for me.
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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.
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Gvion, L. Cuisines of poverty as means of empowerment: Arab food in Israel. Agric Hum Values 23, 299–312 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-006-9003-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-006-9003-7