What can we learn from food to unpack complex social challenges?
By Louisa Mammeri, Regional Analyst at UNDP Regional Bureau for Arab States (louisa.nora.mammeri@undp.org)
I have been grappling with an unusual, perhaps unreasonable question: Through food, can we move beyond technocratic, high level, and often abstract representations of reality to surface and understand the day to day dynamics of communities?
In other words, how can we work with food to unpack complex social challenges?
We are certainly not the first to ask this, but at no point does this seem more relevant globally from a perspective of reinventing who we are at the United Nations and how we relate with the communities we strive to serve. Research has shown that while elites are eager to work with international organisations, citizens’ trust in these institutions is vanishing. With global polarisation on the rise and paralyzing internal governance structures, established international organisations need to identify new approaches to meaningfully engage with people and power.
Nowhere does this seem more relevant than in the Arab States¹. The region is highly dependent on the global food system, being among the most import-dependent locations in the world: A third of the world’s purchases of cereals are imported to the Arab States region — and the region represents 4 % of the global population. Egypt, as a case in point, is the world’s biggest importer of wheat and 80 % of it comes from the Black Sea region. With the war in Ukraine, the region has been hit hard. The price of wheat flour rose by 47 % in Lebanon, 15 % in Libya and 14 % in Palestine immediately following the start of war in Ukraine, adding an additional heavy socio-economic strain on the population.
While one of UNDP’s teams is already looking at the transformation of food systems and agriculture with the aim to improve productivity, profitability and sustainability from farm to fork, our starting point is somewhat different. Because food is so central to who we are, we wanted to explore how it could be used as a lens to better understand a range of social dynamics that affect trust, community relationships, individual agency, and conflict.
To understand this, we turned to the experts and met with chefs, artists, and entrepreneurs who are leveraging this relationship with food, summarizing these conversations through six key lenses:
1. Food and conflict transformation
2. Indigenous knowledge and health
3. Economic value creation and sovereignty through technology
4. Intergenerational relationships
5. Building trust
6. Food as a way to understanding ‘what is going on here’
Food and Conflict Transformation
Academic literature on gastronomy and social dynamics give us reasons to think that “food can be a tool in mediation, negotiation, and other conciliation sessions by meeting psychological, biological, physical, and hospitality needs”. Essentially, research finds that food
- signals commitment to pursuing improved relations (psychological);
- stabilises blood sugar levels (biological);
- offers opportunities for connection (physical);
- and brings a perceived outsider in (hospitality).
When Palestinian artist Mirna Bamieh from the Palestine Hosting Society curated a dinner experience last year, she gave a lot of thought to how she would set up the table so that participants would engage in a more meaningful exchange, beyond casual conversation. In fact, Mirna created different pieces of ceramics which would encourage movement and interaction across the table. For example, after attending an Amazigh pottery workshop in Morocco, she designed a pottery jar (also referred to as an “olla”), that brings people together in the following ways: First, it consists of four connected parts such that pouring water in one jug would flow through all others. Second, the weight of the structure also requires guests to ask each other for support to carry the olla, which would trigger conversation and help break the ice.
In 2016, members of a Black Lives Matter (BLM) group and the Wichita (Kansas, US) police flipped the script and spent an afternoon over a barbecue together. Organisers and police officers were surprised to find how many issues they mutually cared about and how heard and seen they felt by the respective other side. While it’s understood that repairing racist legacies and racialized power dynamics will take more than a shared lunch, this is an example of noncomplementary behavior — the act of departing from an established script as to generate a different outcome to the expected, conflict one. In the case of the barbecue with BLM members and the Wichita police force, it broke unchartered territory, generated a different type of conversation and potentially new modes of engaging on issues that matter to the community
In Asia and the Pacific, our team is working with ALC and Imago chefs collective to explore how communities impacted by conflict can rebuild relationships and create employment opportunities through shared perceptions of food (for more, check out this and this blog post). Imago and ALC are also applying similar experience and learnings to help former combatants reintegrate in the broader societies, in Colombia and beyond.
Indigenous Knowledge and Health
Did you know that the world’s oldest bread was baked around 14,500 years ago in northeastern Jordan? Made with wild cereals (e.g., barley, wheat, oats, tubers), it added important nutrients to people’s diets. It might also have been an incentive for people to take up farming and organize their social relations around it.
This is part of what inspired Rabee Zureikat to start growing his own wheat with Lama Khatieb in Jordan. Driven by a desire to foster food sovereignty and self-sufficiency over food security alone, they felt particularly proud when they were able to bake their own bread by the time the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
Their deep dive into the history of wheat helped them reframe the debate from food security (limited to availability and access to food) to food sovereignty which implies people’s right to “shape [their] food system and to practice [their] culture [and] define [their] own diet.” As Rabee said to us, “Food sovereignty is a food system in which the people who produce, distribute, and consume food also control the mechanisms and policies of food production and distribution.” The approach explores different pathways to empower citizens, rethink the use of the land, and overhaul power dynamics in the food supply chains.
But the initiative isn’t about food alone; it’s also about learning from older generations, who haven’t stopped talking about the importance of wheat in Jordan’s culture. In the 1960s, Jordan produced 200% of its needs in wheat, whereas today, it is a mere 2%, importing the rest. Al Barakeh Wheat now works with 140 families and four schools in Amman and other places. Their dream? To get Jordan back to producing at least 50% of the wheat it needs, activate communities to join efforts toward building a more self-sufficient local food system, and re-introduce wheat as the social and cultural weaver that it used to be.
In addition to bread, wheat is famously transformed into couscous, one of the staples of North African cuisine. But not all couscous are the same. Up until the 1950s, the couscous eaten by Rafram Chaddad’s family, indigenous to the land of Djerba, Tunisia, was made of local wheat. It was less processed and therefore of a darker color. Through industrialization and a history that favored hierarchies, suddenly “white” couscous would be considered “’better” in the hierarchy of grains”. The impact of the switch to white, imported couscous, was devastating to the traditionally enclosed community given that they had not developed immunity to other sources of food. Diabetes rates rose in the community and some members became terminally ill. To critically reflect on the mindset that favors processed and imported food and perhaps to inspire the re-introduction of indigenous production and processing techniques, Rafram, who is an interdisciplinary artist, exhibited “Black Couscous” in a few venues from Brooklyn to Leipzig and Jerusalem.
Some questions that arise from this are: How might we integrate indigenous knowledge and practices more intentionally into food system design? How might this affect social relationships in communities, questions of identity, supply chains and overall health and wellbeing of citizens?
Economic Value Creation and Agency Through Technology
Technology can further support traceability of supply chains and food origins. While mindful of pitfalls related to technology, from privacy and access to data protection and environmental impact, there are some signs that, combined with a mindset shift that values local foods unique to a terroir, there is a potential to create added economic value for farmers and producers (for example, we have learned a lot from Su Kahumba’s i-cow initiative in Kenya).
Tunisia-based serial entrepreneur Soraya Hosni developed a blockchain powered application, CleverHarvest, to create better data around harvest, food origins and trade routes. Thanks to her anthropology background and entrepreneurial experience as an olive oil producer herself, she centered the hyperlocal knowledge and needs of farmers in building a solution that would connect them with the global food chain. Her startup does so by developing a “first-mile-technology” to route and digitise at source. The solution is already scaling to other countries, like Kenya and Ecuador, and products like cacao and coffee. In Soraya’s vision, the application might even serve as a tool to predict food and water futures at the national level. This leaves us asking ourselves how better data around food origins might create more value for food producers and support agency over the food system.
UNDP’s Track-and-Trace platform initiated by the Alternative Finance Lab will propose blockchain technology to country offices where they add value. For instance, in Morocco, it has contributed to creating more fair and transparent supply chains for women-owned cooperatives in the argan oil industry.
Intergenerational Relationships: Grandparents to the Rescue
When chef Fadi Kattan returned to his natal city of Bethlehem and opened a restaurant, he realized that the regional diversity and distinctiveness of Palestinian cuisine was on the verge of disappearing. Strongly impacted by his grandmother who initiated him to the kitchen, he recently launched a video series in which he cooks with grandmothers across Bethlehem, Jericho, Gaza, Yaffa, and the Jordan valley, to name a few. In the series, the viewers learn about food preparation techniques that vary from family to family and from region to region. They further learn about the terroir, the unique taste and tradition of a food product, given the climate, soil and terrain it grows in.
Grandparents are pillars of their communities; they have a unique position and expertise that can connect different generations, and perhaps especially the youth, with the value of local foods and food ways. How might we tap into the cultural and societal capital of grandmothers to build trust between generations?
A potential application is UNDP Tunisia’s Deep Demonstration. They have found that intergenerational understanding is key to building a sense of trust as expectations, needs and aspirations differ widely across generations. In the Palestinian context, Fadi hinted at some tension, too. Whereas the elderly generation’s cultural and societal capital, including culinary knowledge, connects youth with the culture they draw a lot of pride from, they also strive to be connected to a globalized world. In between this tension is where we see possibility for inter-generational trust building and value creation.
Building Trust
As mentioned earlier, food is probably one of the best excuses to bring people together and have important conversations. In 2018, the City of Los Angeles asked what the role of a city might be in facilitating a national conversation on race and racism. Given the political polarisation in the country, this became a topic of national interest. There was a clearly expressed need to spur civic dialogue across generations and communities to build bridges. The city asked Mark Gonzales and his team from the Department of the Future to contribute to the EmbRACE LA initiative, which organised 100 dinners that brought together over 1,000 people over the course of one week, with attendees dining everywhere from from private living rooms to shelters and places of incarceration. Within this logistically challenging undertaking, Mark learned a few surprising things: people need an invitation, a space, and an intentional methodology to come together. It is not evident that even within the same neighbourhood, people from different generations would engage in a dialogue without spaces explicitly set up for it.
In addition to the case of Tunisia mentioned earlier, we are eager to learn whether such a framework could be embedded in some of the portfolios UNDP country offices are developing. For example, in Iraq, the UNDP office is investing in a portfolio to reimagine the country’s social contract. And they have just published a cookbook that features food cultures in each of the country’s governorates. Might a series of dinner conversations across governorates surface important issues that we are overlooking?
Food as a Way to Understanding ‘What is Going on Here?’
Coming together over food across generations, parties and within cities has the power to “flip the script” and have people depart from their usual behavior. With an intentional framing and setting that is sensitive to power dynamics and context, sharing a feast, negotiating the pouring of water with a specially designed set of ollas, or an informal barbecue can trigger conversations and open possibilities that we may not have been able to imagine.
Taking inspiration from Imago chefs, might one design a menu in a way that offers three versions of the same dish from the past, the present, and the future to instigate indirect conversations about fears and hopes that communities holds about their histories and their futures? Might this be a more real way of doing development than a survey or consulting assessment done over Zoom? Or, as we are finding out in our deep demonstration in Uruguay, might we use a cleverly designed dinner to paint how a waste from the landfill moves around and permeates all aspects of a life in the city, from social segregation and health to a potential of a different economic system and relationships between citizens?
We are not claiming that food is the new panacea that will solve systemic issues of how we practice meaningful development work. There are reasons for which opposing parties will not come together to share a meal — formally or informally — and transform their relations.
But food might offer a glimpse into the ‘what is going on here?’ question that at minimum might help different players identify a role they may play in supporting certain causes in the field. Understanding the existing dynamics in communities is fundamental to rethinking development. Might food hold part of the promise in doing that more effectively?
We are very much at the start of this journey with many more questions: How might we create a connective tissue to link these isolated experiments so that they can become part of a bigger “movement”? Should we? And if we did support the building of meaningful connections, how would we engage in such a space?
If you’re looking into similar questions to the ones raised in this piece, please do connect at louisa.nora.mammeri@undp.org
[1] At UNDP, the “Arab States region” comprises Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Programme of Assistance to the Palestinian People, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen.
