“We\u2019re taught that domestic life is not a ‘serious’ political topic, like war and peace, but the fact is that we spend most of our lives doing everyday things: at the dinner table, in the kitchen, washing dishes, grocery shopping, commuting. These things make up the fabric of our lives. Americans are curious about the texture of everyday life in the Middle East because they rarely get to see it. I wanted readers to feel like they were sitting around the dinner table with me and my friends, hearing what average people really say and really think, [where] the dinner table is the best place to find out.<\/p>\n
So much of what we see and hear about the Middle East focuses on what we call politics, which is essentially ideology. But when it comes to the Middle East, and especially the Arab world, simply depicting people as human beings is the most political thing you can do. And that\u2019s why I chose to write about food: food is inherently political, but it\u2019s also an essential part of people\u2019s real lives. It\u2019s where the public and private spheres connect. I wanted to show readers that the larger politics of war and economics and\u00a0U.S.\u00a0foreign policy are inextricably bound to the supposedly trivial details of our everyday lives. And now we have a series of Arab revolutions that began with bread riots and ended up toppling some of the region\u2019s most powerful dictators! So we\u2019re seeing that connection in a very concrete way.”<\/p>\n
That’s Annia Ciezadlo, whose book Day of Honey<\/a><\/em> is about food and war in the Middle East, in an interview<\/a> with Guernica<\/em>.<\/p>\n Although I have not yet had a chance to read the book — I am hoping to do so before classes resume at Duke — I’ve talked about Annia before, when discussing an article<\/a>\u00a0she’d written for Foreign Affairs<\/em> on how the Arab countries’ dependence on grain imports and food subsidies has precipitated the Arab Spring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “We\u2019re taught that domestic life is not a ‘serious’ political topic, like war and peace, but the fact is that we spend most of our<\/p>\n