While the Middle East has long been a compelling idea in the Western imagination – an exotic place with rolling olive groves, spice markets and evergreen oases of date plantations – today’s food culture has produced new forms of abstraction.
As the world goes crazy for za’atar, labneh and pomegranate molasses the dire situation of many in the Middle East is largely ignored.
Green talks to Yasmin Khan about her new cookbook that tells a more complex story of Palestinian cuisine and the lives of the people and families in Palestinian kitchens but that’s not the whole story as Green eke’s out the oft-heard saga of Palestinian victimhood from a human-rights activist.
Yasmin Khan, author of Zaitoun: Recipes and Stories from the Palestinian Kitchen
Listen to the episode by Jonathan Green on Blue Print for Living in which Green takes another opportunity to demonstrate where his very Left-wing political allegiances lie.