The Nation — October 30, 2017

26 The Nation. October 30, 2017

THE

FUTURE

OF

FOOD

nightmare. Like tens of thousands of others who’d

crossed the Aegean at that time, they were stranded in

Greece, waiting for the United Nations resettlement

program to send them on to other parts of Europe.

At first, the families who lived around the alley where

I interviewed them had no interest in meeting one an-

other, recalled Umm Ibrahim, the matriarch of the

group: “We were too busy grieving our bad luck.” They

lived in tarp tents for more than seven months and sur-

vived Greece’s scorching summer heat without electric-

ity or plumbing.

But then Umm Farouk, who was pregnant, devel-

oped a severe craving for Syrian warak enab: grape leaves

stuffed with spiced meat and rice, simmered in a lamb

broth with lemon and garlic. Umm Ibrahim and Umm

Shadi were also pregnant, and the three women bond-

ed. “It was like, ‘Where on earth were we going to get

those?’ ” Umm Ibrahim laughed, recalling her friend’s

pregnancy-induced hankering for one of the more labor-

intensive dishes in Syrian cuisine. But the women teamed

up and managed to make some, a real gesture of love.

“We’ve become like siblings,” Umm Farouk declared,

blinking back tears as she peeled cucumbers for the next

meal. “I haven’t seen my own flesh-and-blood siblings

for four years, and I rarely hear their voices. But if I go

more than two or three days without seeing Linda or

Umm Ibrahim, I feel like something is missing.”

It’s difficult to imagine these families becoming so

close in the absence of a culinary connection. Their sec-

tion of the camp is now set up to prepare and share meals

together, with two makeshift kitchens built at the back

of the alley. Each cooking space has two or three single-

burners, at least one of which is almost always occupied

by a pot with boiling chickpeas. The families pooled

their money to buy a blender and a panini maker.

I like to call the area the haara, a term in colloquial

Syrian Arabic that refers to a tight-knit neighborhood

street. In Syria, the families in a haara are often related,

or treat one another like close relatives if they’re not.

Despite the odd patchwork of families that made up

Ritsona’s haara, that’s exactly how they interacted. They

physically demarcated their section by throwing a tarp

over it—“to keep the rain and dust out,” Abu Ibrahim

explained. Stray balloons had floated to the top, rem-

nants of Linda and Salah’s wedding anniversary.

W

itnessing life in ritsona’s HAARA

was like taking a magnifying glass

to the new global Syrian diaspora.

Until the war ripped apart tightly

woven social circles and scattered

their members across the world, families and neighbors

stuck together, often living in the same neighborhood

for generations. The residents of Ritsona were able to

cobble together a semblance of the communities they’d

known back home. But once they were settled in new

countries across Europe, they would be too far apart to

re-create daily rituals like the sobhiyya, the cup of thick

Turkish coffee shared each morning, along with the lat-

est gossip, among neighboring housewives after their

husbands were sent off to work and the kids to school.

Even the technicalities of cooking are changing.

“It’s not just

the food

and its taste

that we

miss. It’s

the ritual

around

each meal.”

— Abu Ibrahim

Residents of the

haara sit down to

a meal in the shared

space between

their containers.