Culinary Connection: Experiential Learning on Middle Eastern Food History within NYU Shanghai Community
As an educator, how do I introduce hummus[1] to students at NYU Shanghai as an agricultural ingredient that originated from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)? Although MENA is a strategically important region to both China and the United States, few courses are offered about it at NYUSH. As a result, most students know little about it. Moreover, since hummus is an alien crop to most, it is difficult for the students to understand its nutritional values, positive environmental impact, significance in peoples’ everyday lives, and even symbolic meanings in the Arab-Israeli conflicts.[2] These questions have been hovering in my mind for a while until a chance encounter in Summer 2023 with the NYUSH University Cafeteria Manager Xiaoguang Sun who was trying to offer diverse and healthy meal options to students, staff and faculty from over eighty countries in the world. I quickly realized that we could partner up to try out experiential learning within the NYUSH community with a minimal cost.
Experiential learning cannot only give students an opportunity to cook and taste hummus first hand, but more importantly to understand the reading materials about the hummus wars in a more lively manner. As a historian with a regional specialization in MENA where I received intensive Arabic language training and had also lived for a total of seven years, I have long encountered hummus and understood how prevalent and important it is to the ordinary people’s lives in the region. As a historian of food (a thematic specialization), I have also been following the scholarly debate and journalistic coverage on the metaphoric “Hummus Wars” as well as various creative productions to advocate peace between Israel and the Arab peoples. But for students who are unfamiliar with the region and the ingredient, reading “Hummus Wars” for the first time could be too abstract to digest.
Planning and implementation
Due to course budget and time limit, I could not take the students to the local Middle Eastern restaurant. Moreover, the students’ learning experience will be much deepened if they cook hummus themselves rather than simply being served it. In order to persuade Sun and his team, I took them out to try out Middle Eastern food in general (and hummus in particular). I also introduced Sun and Leo Yao, the cafeteria Head Chef to Wael Accad, the owner of Eli Falafel, a successful chain Lebanese restaurant in Shanghai, with the intention of seeking authentic recipes and cooking techniques. With a signature hospitality of the Arab people, Accad not only generously shared recipes and techniques, but also treated us with a festive meal. He was happy to know that NYUSH is planning to offer Middle Eastern food to students, staff, and faculty who are originally from the region so that they can have a small taste of home. As I lived abroad myself for seventeen years before resettling back in China, I instantly understood the feeling.
After research and experimental cooking, at the end of the summer, the cafeteria team offered a trial tasting to the NYUSH community. Twelve students, staff, and faculty who were on campus at the time participated and gave valuable feedback on how to further improve the quality of the dishes.
In Fall 2023 when I was teaching MENA food culture and history, I first invited the students to read scholarly articles on the history of hummus, how it spread to the West, and the metaphoric “Hummus Wars” between Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon. As most students from China and East Asia had no idea what hummus was, I brought some dried chickpeas to the classroom to give them a visual idea about the subject in discussion. They seem unimpressed as I anticipated. After that, I invited Chef Yao to demonstrate how to make a hummus dish from dried chickpeas in the kitchen. Having seen the demonstration, the students were then divided into groups to make their own hummus with the same recipe that the chef provided them. Out of curiosity, they tasted each other’s dishes to compare and contrast the nuanced differences in the texture, flavor, and mouthfeel due to slight variations in implementing the recipe.
Outside the classroom, this teaching experiment also led to the new additions of Middle Eastern food options (such as hummus, falafel, and shawarma) at the university cafeteria halal cuisine station. The Hui chefs, i.e. Chinese-speaking Muslims living in China, who have never had a chance to visit the MENA region, were initially at a loss with the unfamiliar ingredient as well, but later reflected that they enjoyed the learning process too because it gave them new understanding and inspiration about the halal food beyond what they are familiar with among Muslim communities within China. The Middle Eastern students community at NYU Shanghai particularly welcome the new meal options that can bring them a small taste of home far away from China.
Unexpected Challenges
The process of generating an experiential learning plan and implementing it was not as smooth as it may seem. After the preparations during the summer, I finalized the details of my teaching plan for Oct 17 before the Fall break, including a detailed agenda of the 75-min in class time (such as how much time for in-class discussion of the pre-assigned reading, and when to take the student from the classroom to the kitchen), the layout of the kitchen (such as where to put the cooking station with ingredients, seasoning, and blenders, where the students can stand to observe and then make their own dishes, where to put the aprons, cooking gloves, hand sanitizer and napkins), etc. Just as I thought the class will be great, the latest conflict between Hamas and Israel broke out on Oct 7 2023 during the Fall break. To continue or not to continue with the original teaching plan during a sensitive time when military conflicts and international opinion were intensifying by the hour? I had to weigh the pros and cons. The pros include inviting the students to relate the course content to the current affairs in a timely manner which is all the more important given the severity of the conflict. The cons involve me taking a risk of being perceived by the students and others as being imprudent. In the end, I decided to implement the plan because I realized that the current moment was indeed a great way to demonstrate to the students how important and relevant hummus is to the region and its peoples. A historical conflict resurfaced in the news and became very real and present. To the students, the “Hummus War” they read in scholarly texts is no longer distant and irrelevant to their comfortable lives in Shanghai. During the class, I emphasized to the students, hummus is not just a new exotic dish they made and tried out once, but an essential everyday staple food for the peoples of the MENA region. Now because of the conflict, the people in Gaza are even deprived of an inexpensive and common dish such as hummus.
Learning Outcomes
To my pleasant surprise, the students enjoyed the experiential learning, taking selfies and inviting their friends to try out their dishes. After the learning activity in the kitchen, they went back to the classroom for further reflection. For example, if the student’s understanding of hummus has changed before and after cooking and tasting it. If so, in what ways their understanding has changed. They could articulate and retain lots of new information. Some even plan to spread their learning to friends and family members in China. The student’s anonymous feedback shows that this was a memorable and educational experience. To me, this is a sign that the students had a real and tangible understanding of what they had read in the scholarly texts. That is exactly the learning outcome I wish to have.
Designing an experiential learning plan takes time, reflective thinking, and sometimes serendipitous encounters as well, but if successfully implemented, the learning outcome for the students are much deeper and more vivid. Therefore, my suggestions for my peer educators are: 1) Get to know our community first. Since I started to work at NYUSH in Fall 2020, I have been actively participating in various events on campus and in Shanghai to get to know my new communities. From this experience, I came to know Eli Falafel and its owner Wael, his wife Mirna and their children. I also learned that at NYUSH there is a community of students, staff, and faculty who are originally from MENA. 2) Build friendly relations with peoples from all walks of life in everyday seemingly mundane routines. 3) Be creative to connect the many ideas that flow through our mind every day when trying to solve challenges. 4) Utilize local and adjacent communities via the friendly relationships that we cultivate in designing experiential teaching plans with the intention of benefiting the maximum number of peoples within the communities because they are the ones we interacted with the most on a daily basis. 5) Lastly, give credits to everyone who assisted along the way. Special thanks to Mr Wael Accad, colleagues at NYUSH University Cafeteria and University Communications, as well as my dear students!
[1] Hummus, the Arabic word for chickpea, referring to both the ingredient and the dish made of it.
[2] Such as Ari Ariel, “The Hummus Wars,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 12 (Spring2012): 34–42; Nir Avieli, “The Hummus Wars Revisited: Israeli-Arab Food Politics and Gastromediation,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 19 (Fall 2016): 19–30.
Shuang WEN (or 温爽 in Chinese) is a historian of the modern Middle East and China with a PhD in Transregional History from Georgetown University in Washington DC. As a native Chinese speaker, she received intensive Arabic-language training from the American University in Cairo (Egypt), University of Damascus (Syria), and Middlebury College (USA). At NYU Shanghai, she is passionate about teaching histories of the Middle East, including its multi-facet interactions with the West and China. Shuang’s research focus on the interactions and exchanges between the Arab world and China in the 19th and 20th centuries, which comprises intellectual, agricultural, diplomatic, religious, and labor affairs.
