تغذية الصمود: مائدة الطعام الفلسطينيّة وتضميد جراح الأجيال

Mary Farah, who started cooking meals for her children in a small kitchen in a remote village in Lebanon after being forcibly expelled from Jaffa in 1948, turned food into something more than just sustenance. The story of Mary Tanous-Farah and her children centers the kitchen table as a transformative space for healing trauma, fostering communal resilience and intergenerational transmission of traditions and hosting diasporic political resistance through the production of Palestinian food and the vocalization of the Palestinian cause. The Farah family centered the profound benefits of connectivity for trauma healing around the kitchen table, which stood as an ancestral refusal of colonial nomenclature and a space of belonging, acceptance, expectation, and readiness. Mary turned the kitchen table into a “remembrance environment” where memories are shared between families and communities through culinary traditions and eating practices, thereby counteracting the experience of forced displacement. The culinary heritage Mary passed down to her children now stands as a testament to the homeland – a story skillfully woven into Johnny’s, Jeanette’s and Suha’s culinary artistry in Lebanon. The Farahs’ journey weaves together the strands of “refugeedom,” reclaiming Palestine from beyond borders and Israeli colonization and appropriation. The Farahs kitchen table became an epicenter of recovery and safety that allowed them and their community to reconstruct identity and belonging amid the chaos of forced displacement. The Farah family’s history is therefore the story of how a meal summons a cause.