Ottoman Cuisine
Food Fights and Hummus Wars — with Suna Çağaptay, Riada Asimovic Akyol and Kareem Shaheen
Few topics evoke as much passion as food. New Lines' Kareem Shaheen is joined by Suna Çağaptay and Riada Asimovic Akyol to talk about how our identities are connected to what we eat, why Kareem is so passionate about authentic hummus and why recipes have become such a political battleground.
A Recipe for Mashing Civilizations
Despite what culinary chauvinists claim, few cuisines have developed in isolation. The history of foodstuffs and food words is a history full of migration, adoption and constant civilizational mashups.
Recipes for Disaster
Food nationalism started with the formation of nation states and the breakup of empires in recent centuries. Cuisine, like political borders, became an effective tool for marking new distinctions, used by chauvinists and genocidaires as a weapon.