‘It connects people’: Palestinian chefs are using food to share their stories

Sharing recipes and making food from their homeland has become a means of asserting their identity and connecting with their people as the Israeli assault of Gaza continues

When Heifa Odeh first moved to Chicago, she felt homesick for her mom's Palestinian cooking and a desire to master the dishes she grew up with - so she started writing down her mom's recipes and sharing them online. Whether she was whipping up stuffed grape leaves or hand-shaping shish barak (meat dumplings cooked in yogurt), she simply wanted to evoke the tastes of her mother's kitchen and the frequent summer trips her family would take to Palestine.

But as the years passed and she built a successful food blog called Fufu's Kitchen and later published a cookbook called Dine in Palestine, she started to see sharing Palestinian recipes as something more: an assertion of identity and connection to a land and people under threat. That's never felt more crucial to her than in the last two months, as more than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces to date, following a Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israelis.