>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Muhannad Salhi: Good afternoon everybody. Thank you all for coming. Sorry about the delay. My name is Muhannad Salhi and on behalf of the African/Middle Eastern Division and our chief Dr. Mary-Jane Deeb I would like to welcome you all to our event. Just a few words about our division. Our division is divided into three sections. The African section, which deals with Sub-Saharan Africa. The Hebraic section, which deals with the Hebraic and Judaic world-wide. And the Near East section, which deals from Kazan in the north to Hatune in the south, Kashgar in the east, to Casablanca in the west. So as you can see, we have our hands busy. We deal with about 78 different countries and about 35 different languages. So I would urge all of you who are interested in our areas to come here and do your research. I would also like to urge you to check out our four corners blog and check out our Facebook. Like us on Facebook. We also have a number of noon-time programs like this, and without further ado I'd like to introduce my colleague Ms. Nawal Kawar who is going to introduce our speaker. >> Nawal Kawar: Well, thank you all for coming. I'm so glad and thrilled to have two dynamic speakers. Laila Haddad is parking, as you all know. And Maggi Schmitt. I'm going to introduce Maggi Schmitt first. Maggi Schmitt is a writer, researcher, translator, educator, and social activist. She works in various media. Writing, production, photography, and video. Using everyday life as a way to approach complex political and social realities. She co-authored the acclaimed documentary cookbook The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey which has reached an astonishingly large and diverse audience with this peculiar blend of intimate antidotes, political analyses, and local food ways. Which is the topic of this program. The hybrid approach mixing scholarship with fresh first person narratives is characteristic of Maggi's work. She was one of the creators of [foreign word] -- am I pronouncing it right? A Madrid based project that used innovative methods of collective storytelling and cartography to show the changing relationship between work and life for young woman in the city, creating not only a much cited book, but film and also knitting together with a network of mutual support in the process. In the same spirit, she initiated a project that brought together feminists from various Middle Eastern countries to visit each other's spaces and conduct in depth interviews with each other about political strategies and personal lives. Creating a small archive of stories and strong network of allies. Ms. Schmitt has worked extensively on the issue of migration and discrimination. Domestic work and the economy of care and the uses of space in the city. She has participated in various documentaries and social research projects, as well as grass roots initiatives addressing these issues both at home, in Madrid, and in broader European networks. Recently her work has focused largely on food and music. In addition to the Gaza Kitchen and the other ongoing research on the political -- on the politics of food -- do we have politics on food? [Inaudible]. She did research and production for the collaborative music and project Beyond Digital in Morocco, looking at the contemporary Berber folk revival and its relationship to digital technology and creating the video elements of the related app Sufi plug-ins. She might like to elaborate on the project later on. Ms. Schmitt has also taught in a number of context, an author -- an outdoor -- sorry, an outdoor education program in Lebanon. Courses on Mediterranean history for university students in Madrid. Courses on post-Colonialism and feminist theory in community run continuing education programs. She's a member of the group Zenobia Translations, which specializes in the translation and interpretation of political and scholarly work. Ms. Maggi Schmitt grew up in Miami, Florida and has lived in Spain for most of her adult life. With extended periods of time also in Lebanon, Turkey, and Morocco. She holds a B.A. from Harvard in Literature and has conducted advanced graduate studies in social anthropology and Mediterranean studies at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. She now makes her home in a mountain village near Madrid where she lives with her partner Yeoman and their two young sons. Laila El-Haddad is an award winning Palestinian author, social activist, policy analyst, and journalist. She frequently speaks on the situation in Gaza, the intersection of food and politics, and contemporary Islam. She has written for numerous newspapers and magazines including the Baltimore Sun , Washington Post , International Herald Tribune , The New Statesman , The Daily Star , [foreign word], and has appeared on many international broadcasting networks including NPR and CNN. She's the author of Gaza Mom: Palestine Politics, Parenting, and Everything In-between , and co-author of the critical acclaimed The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey which was the recipient of Best Arab Cuisine Book. Awarded for the Gorman Magazine, and a finalist of the 2013 Memo Palestine Book Awards. Ms. El-Haddad has lectured to student groups, academic faculty, community groups, and non-profits around the U.S. and the world on topics ranging from Gaza culinary history, the situation in Palestine, as well as her own personal journey as a former Palestinian blogger and journalist. In her spare time she volunteers in her own community with Syrian refugees relief and resettlement efforts in [inaudible], as well as advocating for Palestinian rights and equality through her involvement with various community and national groups including the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights and the American Muslim for Palestine. From 2003 to '07, Ms. El-Haddad was the Gaza correspondent for Al Jazeera English and a regular contributor to the BBC World Service. During which time she covered such events as the Gaza disengagement and the 2006 Palestinian elections. Even though we are mentioning all these programs she's involved with, I like to tell the audience that we are not going to get involved in any controversial topics or political questions please. We don't get involved in politics. During this time, she co-directed two Gaza based documentaries including the award-winning Tunnel Trade . She's also a policy advisor with El Shebeka, the Palestinian policy network. Through her work as a writer and documentarian, she provides much needed insight into the human experience of the region. She was recently featured in CNN program Parts Unknown with celebrity chef and guest [inaudible] Anthony Bourdain in the episode titled Jerusalem, The West Bank, and Gaza as his guide in the Gaza Strip. Marking the first time a mainstream American audience has seen Gaza in this ordinary light. Ms. El-Haddad received her B.A. in Political Science and Comparative Area Studies with a minor in History from Duke University in 2000, and her master's in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School in 2002. She was the recipient of the Clinton Scholarship and the Barbara Jordan Award for Women's Leadership. She's also the recipient of The American French Services Committee Inspiration for Hope Award, and the Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's Literary Leadership Awards. Born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents from Gaza, she currently lives in Clarksville, Maryland with her husband Yassine Daoud and their three children. When not containing the blissful cowls of her household, you will frequently find her poking around other people's kitchen, in a forest, or on a basketball court. Without further ado, Ms. Maggi Schmitt and Laila Haddad please. [ Applause ] >> Maggi Schmitt: All right. >> Laila El-Haddad: We apologize for those really extensive and long bios. We really didn't think they were necessary, but we were pressed and told we have to have them. Anyway. >> Maggi Schmitt: The biography is always an embarrassing moment. But, so welcome. Thank you very much for being here. Again, so sorry for the delay. As you've heard, we're here to speak about this book that we published initially almost five years ago. The second edition has just been released by Just World Books. It's a much larger, more extensive edition with more photography, additional recipes, et cetera. So we're very, very pleased to see this finally in print on nice quality paper and everything. So -- and delighted to speak about it to you all today. The project was born basically each of us from our different angles, from our different life experiences, from our different relationship with the region, as a response to what people usually imagine or know about Gaza which is sort of this. This -- these are the typical images that one sees. Anonymous, distant, always shown either as a hapless victim or as a somehow dangerous aggressor. And this doesn't resonate certainly for Laila who's from Gaza, with her experience of the place. Didn't resonate with my brief experience of the place on an initial visit that I made in 2009. And for both of us what really grabbed our attention about Gaza, what we felt like was an important story to tell about Gaza is not -- and yes, Nawal, we will avoid the sort of over political polemic, but it's impossible to speak about the Gaza Strip without in some way speaking about its political situation because it's so overwhelming. That's all there is. >> Laila El-Haddad: I feel like there should be a hot cold button, like the closer -- >> Maggi Schmitt: The closer we get to controversy. But for us the question was to -- precisely by writing a book, a cookbook, a sort of ethnographic documentary cookbook, was to avoid the sort of big discourses of official politics and look at daily life, ordinary life. How are people surviving? How are households staying sane? How are people continuing with their lives every day in extraordinary and truly terrible circumstances? >> Laila El-Haddad: With the understanding that all that stuff exists. Right? It's not in a vacuum obviously. But kind of the idea was how do we tell the story in a different way? Sort of the same old story, but in a different way, using a different lens. A lens that is, you know, more meaningful, that is more humanizing, that is more dignifying for, you know, the people that we were -- the subject of this. >> Maggi Schmitt: And it helped -- I mean the interesting thing about the reception of this book is that it clearly helps an audience not familiar with Gaza to understand this place in its every day humanity. But also for the people we interviewed, for the people we talked to there, they've really embraced the book as a representation of their place and their lives that they recognize. And the way that most of the sort of mediadic representations of Gaza, they don't recognize their daily life in that because it's often pictures like this. So, what we always say is we were sort of trying to sneak in anyone of those anonymous block windows and get into the inside of households. The inside of daily life, and begin talking from -- fr om something as tactile as material, as human, as every day as for example, the baking of bread or the cooking of the daily meal. >> Laila El-Haddad: Which is often where the real stories get told and where the histories are perpetuated. Right? And where ultimately dignity is retained. It's the sort of one safe space that we frequently like to say people have sort of -- when everything else seems sort of out of your control you do exercise an element of control in how you bake your bread or what ingredients you're using to purchase to make those -- you know, the food that you've always known or what stories you are sharing and meals you're making. And so it's liberating in that sense. >> Maggi Schmitt: And as we -- as we undertook the fieldwork for this which was several months of fairly intensive fieldwork, talking to different individuals who were incredibly generous. Inviting us into their homes. We tried to get a sort of a cross section of Gazan society which goes from very humble households, rural households to very -- an urban elite of very accomplished people and wealthy households. We tried to cover a whole spectrum. Discussing with them -- basically asking for recipes, talking about family recipes and family techniques for cooking. But of course as you all surely know, recipes are never just how do you make a given food. They always drag along with them on the one hand family stories, histories, where do things come from, what do you remember? I remember my mother-in-law taught me this, but she said that it -- so you begin to pull on long threads of history and those long threads are invariably connected also to the circumstances of people's lives, how they've changed, when they've moved, when they've been exiled, when they've been pushed from one place to another. The sort of vicissitudes and ups and downs of their economic conditions, their household conditions. So all of these stories kind of come along with the recipes. >> Laila El-Haddad: And we do remind people over and over again in the book that again, it's about sort of getting beyond these caricatures and getting a true deeper understanding not only of the people themselves, but of the place. Right? And we remind people that Gaza historically is a very rich -- is a very rich place. It was a trading city. It was a main port along the Mediterranean. It was a place through which, you know, all major caravan routes and spice routes passed including the Frankincense route and on and on. So it has a very unique and storied place in history. And it's very difficult to remember that obviously in the context of everything that we know is happening these days. >> Maggi Schmitt: But it's very easy to remember this when you're looking at the recipes. And this is again -- >> Laila El-Haddad: Kind of tying those two things together. >> Maggi Schmitt: We kind of felt like we had stumbled upon a secret wormhole, a secret door into a different way of telling history. Because if you simply smell the rice cooking, how could you not know that this had been [foreign word] of he spice trade? How could -- so in the same way that recipes tell us family histories, and therefore economic histories, and therefore political histories, they also tell us sort of great global histories. You know, the fact of all of these spices here being integrated and now -- I mean in the last month we've been doing sort of more historic research, and the resonance's of Gazan cuisine with Medieval Abbasid cooking, the same -- we can find these same recipes. In some ways Gaza -- >> Laila El-Haddad: Sometimes with the same names, although somewhat different ingredients, yeah. >> Maggi Schmitt: So it's also kind of a backdoor access to a broad historical spectrum of the place. It's relationship, as Laila says, in the spice routes, in the trade routes. Its relationship to different courtly cuisine's and different sort of power structures over history. >> Laila El-Haddad: Arabian caravans would obviously pass through or maybe it's not common knowledge, but from Arabia they would then go to Gaza, and it was known that, you know, the grandfather's -- the grandfather of the Prophet Muhammad was -- died there and so on and so forth. And it was -- this is very different we should mention then elsewhere in historic Palestine. The cuisine differs remarkably. There's certain components that altogether absent -- that are present in Gaza that are altogether absent in other parts of Palestine. And this was what I think was so interesting to us and to so many people. Why did this happen? Why was this the case? You know, how did it come about and why was it preserved through the years? >> Maggi Schmitt: So the strategy of the book is to tell -- provide the recipes and of course that in itself is an undertaking because the translation from the oral history and the sort of folk knowledge of you take a little bit of this and just enough of that and you do it and you sauté it until it's done. >> Laila El-Haddad: And then we would say like explain how -- >> Maggi Schmitt: How do you translate that? >> Laila El-Haddad: It's like, what are you a moi? Why do you need me to explain to you -- >> Maggi Schmitt: You know when it's done. >> Laila El-Haddad: Should just be common knowledge, you should understand how this is done. Yeah. >> Maggi Schmitt: We all have grandmother's. We all know that that's how cooking is transmitted. But then, translating that kind of knowledge into the written kind of knowledge of a cookbook and, you know, teaspoon measurements, and how many minutes and so on is a whole paradigm shift. So we did the kitchen testing and Laila the lion's share of it. And from the recipes we received in interviews with these different -- mostly women, some men -- we documented, and wrote down, and sort of formalized those recipes. Which was a real labor of love for this Gazan cuisine. A lot of people have told us that they're really pleased to see these recipes that nobody's ever heard about now sort of documented forever. And for us it was important to recognize that body of folk knowledge that's mostly in the hands of women. Never really acknowledge -- I mean everyone's proud of their food, but it never sort of makes the leap into what gets recognized as knowledge. And so to acknowledge that body of knowledge as knowledge and write it down is sort of -- recognizes its dignity and its importance to generations and generations. So that was one of the kind of legs of what we were doing. >> Laila El-Haddad: Sorry about that. >> Maggi Schmitt: Another was the photographic documentary part as you see in this photo. It was important to us to document absolutely mundane spaces. The absolutely ordinary. Kitchen sinks. >> Laila El-Haddad: We have documentary style photography throughout the book. The point wasn't to make it this -- I mean it was to be a beautiful book, but not in the sense of like sort of these really photo finished, you know, images of what we sort of call food porn. I mean it was sort of -- it's very ethnographic documentary in nature. To give you a real sense of like ordinary life and ordinary kitchens, and markets and so on and so forth. >> Maggi Schmitt: And then also it was important to us to look as we said, to trace some of those personal stories and kind of pull on those threads and follow them -- follow them upwards, out from the immediacy of how do you make a cauliflower stew? To look at well, how much does the meat cost and how much did it used to cost? And where does it come from? And how does it get here? And what is the conditions in the markets? And speaking to individual households about their kind of home economy and then to shop keepers and people in the market places, to farmers to aid workers, to different NGO's that are trying to facilitate some sustainability or some -- just to keep Gaza fed under its present circumstances. And try to extrapolate sort of beginning from the micro level of these recipes in these individual households, extrapolate outwards and learn about the whole food system and there for necessarily the whole political circumstances of the Gaza Strip. What's happening there and intuit or begin to understand why. So we looked at industry. This for example is a picture of the industry in Gaza is reduced to almost nothing. But this particular [inaudible] factory was still operating. So here are the great machines that they had for toasting the sesame seeds. And a whole interesting discussion about where do you get the sesame seeds from? How do they get through the borders? Et cetera. You can choose sort of almost any mundane ingredient and from that draw a very complete picture of what's happening in this tiny little part of the world. That's so embattled and so constantly under the magnifying glass of geopolitics. >> Laila El-Haddad: And so many issues as Maggi talked about. I don't -- I'm thinking in my mind, like what's too political, what's not? But, you know, like Maggi was saying, it's kind of inescapably political. Right? I mean the food economy itself there, you know, we talk in the book how it's -- Gaza itself is kind of an experimented post-modern colonialism. But it is sort of one big social experiment in the sense that Everything that goes in and out is rationed and calculated, and it varies from week to week. And you know, and there's this whole, you know, shadow government operating as well beyond the current -- you have the UN, you know, and the [inaudible]. Then you have the various aid groups and NGO's. And the aid economy, you know, what's allowed in and what's allowed out. And how many people are actually dependent on that. And what -- how they use those ingredients to then manufacture or create all kinds of new dishes, and substitute certain ingredients, and what access they have to what is available. And you know, is a whole other issue. So we kind of weave together all these various stories in the book and -- I'm trying to think of one example. >> Maggi Schmitt: And with them we also provide sort of profiles of individuals who tell their stories in the first person. So it's an attempt to like I said, document and kind of formalize the recipes as knowledge and the peculiarity of Gazan cuisine, because as Laila said, it really is different from other regions of Palestine. And very notably different from other parts of the greater region. So really recognizing that and sharing that with the world. >> Laila El-Haddad: And the ways -- we should probably mention some of the ways in which it's different. Because we do -- so what we try to do is like we were saying, is we have this sort of documentary style photography. We have the profiles of the individuals and the various text boxes and, you know, analysis of the political and economic situation and everything that entails. And then of course we have the recipes themselves. And some of what makes it so different is the way that's it's absorbed certain ingredients amongst which are the use -- extensive use of spice. Both actual spices and heat. The peakensey of the cuisine is very notable as well. Mainly in the urban areas. Much of Gaza of course is rural or else descendants of former villages and so forth. And their cuisine is also very different. But it kind of incorporates -- it's a great place we say to experience the cuisine of sort of greater Palestine within the context of the small little tiny Gaza Strip. Because so many Palestinians came from elsewhere throughout historic Palestine to Gaza. So you have the peakensey of the urban areas, and the sophistication, and the extensive use of spices which is again an ode to Gaza's position in ancient times along those trade routes. And then you have sort of the Mediterranean flavors. You have the extensive use of dill and dill seeds. And very lemony sour flavors, which again dates back to sort of the Basit times. Sour pomegranates, and lemons, and tamarin, and all these various flavors. So it's a very urban -- herby vibrant, you know, peakant cuisine. But again, even in an area small as Gaza it varies greatly from like one mile to the next, and people have very heated conversations about like, this is not how they make it in our village. You know, or we would never dream of making Sumagia. That's a Gaza City thing. And we never use -- you know, villagers would say to us frequently, we never use garlic. Ew, garlic. You know. [Inaudible] us villagers only use onion. And so it was really remarkable how well preserved some of these traditions were. I just -- you know, from one area to the next. >> Maggi Schmitt: This was one of the things that really surprised us in the field work was how faithfully and sort of endogamically each village would reproduce -- these are villages, many of them that had been destroyed after or in 1948, and often the only trace left of them was the taste of them. And therefore you got a sense that people understood themselves, cooks, women understood themselves as somehow the -- >> Laila El-Haddad: Keepers. >> Maggi Schmitt: The keepers, the safe guarders of the only little intangible heritage left of a village of which no stone is left, no evidence is left. It's name's not on the map. But we know that we make lentils in this way. You know? And that these recipes were being perpetuated from one generation to the next in this way. It was very beautiful and very interesting to see that these are not first generation, these are second and third, and sometimes fourth generation that are perpetuating these specific tastes of these specific villages, and identifying them as such. So that was one of the many surprises that awaited us in the fieldwork. >> Laila El-Haddad: Right. The regional specificity of a lot of these dishes. >> Maggi Schmitt: In general in the fieldwork it was shocking just how generous people were, and we know -- we know that in this region people are generous with food in general. And passionate about food in general and proud of their food in general. But we felt like it was quite a lot. We were a little nervous when we set off to do the field work because speaking to publishers with the idea in the United States, mostly we got from sort of more political publishing houses, they said, ah how frivolous, a cookbook. And from more cookbook publishing houses they said, ye Palestine, Gaza, very political. We don't want to touch it. So we were nervous that we would get sort of similar responses from the people we approached in our field work. And on the contrary, it was a sort of affirmation of our intuition when we went and as soon as we started asking people about food they immediately understood that if we're asking about food we're also really asking about -- or talking about family histories, human dignity, cultural continuity, sustainability, the present economy. Like in Gaza everyone we spoke to about this really immediately captured the whole -- >> Laila El-Haddad: They were head over heels. I mean we -- >> Maggi Schmitt: Got the whole idea. >> Laila El-Haddad: I mean we had trouble sort of -- yeah. >> Maggi Schmitt: And we had to fend off invitations. >> Laila El-Haddad: We did. We would be speaking to someone and suddenly they would be pouring -- people would pop their heads out. Let me offer you the best way to make this. >> Maggi Schmitt: Okra, okra. No you make okra like this. >> Laila El-Haddad: And then they would -- yeah. It was incredible and I mean it really does speak to sort of again, the very humanizing, you know, aspect of all of this. And we frequently say that Gaza's besieged with media in addition to many other things. And people were always kind of bracing themselves to give us their rehearsed responses to whatever question they thought we were about to ask them and were really pleasantly surprised to find out that like no, we actually want to know how, you know, you make [foreign word]. But again, with the understanding that all -- we're not like pretending that none of this exists. But getting to there through a different window as it were. And then, you know, I mentioned a lot of -- how some of these dishes some of their ingredients we noticed had changed over time. People frequently ask us about like how have people sort of adapted? And we like to say, you know, that it's pretty remarkable how they have managed to adapt given sort of the impossible circumstances under which they live. And this is a good example. This is a mushroom cultivation facility that we went to, and of course mushrooms aren't ordinarily used in the cuisine, but because of the very dire conditions and the high rates of food insecurity, you know, many NGO's along with the agricultural secretary were struggling over -- for ways in which to -- through which to supplement the -- people's inaccessibility to protein. Right? Like fresh meat and fish, and so on. So they came up with this idea of cultivating mushrooms and using that as an income generation scheme for women, and giving them little recipes, you know, to help them adapt to using, incorporating the mushroom in their food and so on. But one very obvious one also was the -- I should say, not the use but the disuse of olive oil which is -- of course is a -- one of the -- the main fat, right in Palestinian cuisine. Now people we noticed mainly were using it just to sort of drizzle or finish certain dishes and that's due to the -- again, the large rates of food insecurity. The prohibitive, you know, price tag on olive oil now. The fact that so many of those groves, the trees are uprooted, and the inaccessibility of course between Gaza and the West Bank where most of the olive trees grow. So people have now swapped soy oil, which is distributed by many -- much of the aid organizations. Which of course, you know, aid distribution is intended for a short term emergency and in Gaza it's become a long term thing. And so that's just a whole other sort of can of worms. What happens -- what's the impact of long term aid distribution and dependence on a population and how they eat? Another good example is -- Maggi showed you the picture of those two brothers -- well not that you would know they're brothers, but they are, and they're sort of these entrepreneurs that established the fish farming industry in Gaza. Which again, why would you need fish farming in a coastal -- you wouldn't but again, due to the restrictions on the fishing zones off Gaza's coast they became inventive, innovative, and this sort of, you know, took off. I'm always careful about my use of words. Blew up. And the NGO secretary adopted this very enthusiastically and began to buy the fish from them and distribute them to other farms or NGO's to distribute to people. And um -- >> Maggi Schmitt: And they are characteristic -- I mean we like these stories of what the sort of pop word in the world of NGO's these days is talking about resilience. I have a lot of ambivalence about this notion of resilience. But we do like these stories of individuals who have found incredibly inventive ways to get around every obstacle that's put up. And these guys besides being just very charming and very funny in themselves -- they get giant electric blackouts and they can't aerate the fish tanks and the fish will, you know, suffocate for lack of oxygen. And so they invite all the village kids to come over -- the kids from the neighborhood come over and swim in the pool and splash. And they have splashing competitions for the kids, and that aerates the pools and then the fish can breathe. >> Laila El-Haddad: There's like 12-hour power outages in a row. >> Maggi Schmitt: So that sort of constant ability to -- okay, this is the situation, how do -- and being very much on their feet and coming up with solutions that get around these obstacles. With -- I mean I love that example because invite all the kids to come and have a splashing party? Like it's not only getting around a really serious material limit to the infrastructural problem, but also with joy, with a sense of community, with like let's have a splashing competition. So, and we came again and again upon this kind of inventiveness and ingenuity. And yeah, there are more things about these guys story that are relevant, but we should probably stop and give over the floor to questions. But we have many many, many, many more anecdotes. We can keep going and going. But should we pass the floor to questions? >> Laila El-Haddad: This is an example of the aid distribution we were talking about which again, something like 75% of the population is a participant in either the World Food Organization, the World Health Organization, whatever it is, [inaudible]. There's food vouchers and coupons and all this sort of, you know, a whole intricate system network through which aid is distributed and there's constant questions as to whether -- how the food aid packages should be changed. And I was shocked to discover in writing, you know, updating the second edition of the book that chickpeas were never included in UN packages. That was -- I was pretty floored by that. That seemed like sort of a basic thing. But again, a lot of it is white sugar, white flour, you know, soy oil. These kinds of things. [Inaudible] kind of -- >> Maggie Schmitt: With the corresponding nutritional problems. >> Laila El-Haddad: Right. >> Maggie Schmitt: That generates. Anyway, we should give the floor to questions. We're happy to -- yes please? >> Well since there's two speakers I get to ask two questions. For Laila I really have to kind of exonerate Anthony Bourdain, who I went to see here two weeks ago, who said he always gets asked about Andrew Zimmer. So I'm going to ask you about Anthony Bourdain. How was his cultural sensitivity? Because I take it that he's somebody who is very open-minded and really makes an effort to give dignity to cultures. And then for Maggi, Miami has an ethnic cuisine. Have you ever looked at Miami's ethnic cuisine? >> Maggi Schmitt: Miami has many ethnic cuisines. >> Even Chinese food, when I tell people about Cuban Chinese food. And then just to ask both of you all, do people depend on home gardens? You know, how important are those, you know, things that they could do in their own homes? >> Laila El-Haddad: Yeah, those are great questions. So, in regards to Anthony Bourdain. Yeah, I was a little like nervous a first. I didn't know what to expect. I thought -- you know, I just knew sort of his bad boy persona and I should mention I had my two daughters with me and like my youngest was four months old, and then my other was I guess five, and I had no one to help me. I went there under really sort of arduous circumstances and I was then told to meet him at a location in Gaza City. And I kept getting told by the producers, like no don't -- you can't bring the baby, and this and that. And come in your own car, and you know, all the -- and so I was getting really nervous this would be a very child unfriendly operation. And he -- you know, I immediately met him and he -- you know, and then my -- at one point during the shooting I had to take my baby with me to nurse her and she was freaking out, and I didn't know what to do. And I don't think people put two and two together, but that was her in the video and he just picked her up and was just like hushed her to sleep. And so I was like, oh okay then. So that was fantastic. And he's like, I miss this age. Because his daughter was seven I guess at the time. And so that was a real delight. And you're absolutely right in the sense that he's very comfortable, you know, speaking not only about all topics, but respecting people and, you know, their cultures. And having an open mind and open conversations. And it was fantastic. It was a really special unique opportunity I think. And I'm so glad it happened at that precise moment in time. It would have been impossible a few months before and a few months after due to all the border closures and so on. So it was great and I was able to take him to places I don't think they would have been able to get to otherwise. It was a really unique opportunity and I was really nervous about how or whether they would spin it sort of in a certain way at the end. Because I was only sort of part of -- one part of the whole episode. But overall I was, you know, very pleased and very happy that we had the chance to take him through. The only part we didn't get to do was take him out into sea. We were supposed to go out with some fishermen but they deemed it like too unsafe or something at the time. But in regards to the home gardens and so forth, yeah absolutely. We talk about that in the book. People not having not only dove coats, but rabbit -- there's little rabbit rearing operations and of course each one presents its own set of challenges. Access to water that isn't completely, you know, saline or being able to find, you know, the proper feed for chickens or whatever it is. There's restrictions on what comes in and out to the strip. And, you know, the heat and so on and so forth. But certainly you'll find everyone -- even if they have a small little strip of land will have something on their rooftop or if they have just a tiny little section of land will be growing something. But again, it is a very densely populated place with very limited space. And not everyone has the luxury to be living in a building with a rooftop obviously. But they do what we -- what they can I think. And part of the problem is that sometimes that knowledge isn't inherited due to the sort of constant, you know, misplacements and migrations, and so forth. And so we were always, you know, very pleased to find certain cases where that knowledge was given from -- passed down from an uncle, to a mother, to -- but often times they just didn't know how to do this. And so they -- in one particular case they -- one NGO or community center grouped together sort of grandmothers with younger women and the grandmothers kind of taught the younger women how to care for the rabbits and how to raise for them -- raise them and so on. >> Maggi Schmitt: So yeah, lots and lots of micro sustainability initiatives. And then a much bigger debate at the level of the Ministry of Agriculture or how much too really push for sustainability. Because any hope of sustainability in a territory like Gaza that is so tiny, so totally lacking in water. I mean the big crisis there is countdown to doomsday in terms of water. There is no water. They've over -- the aquifer of the whole region has been overdrawn. The saline water is entering from the sea. Like you could push for sustainability but A, the territories just not big enough to ever provide the calories that population needs, and B, at great -- like the more agriculture you do the more risk of over drying the aquifer. So there are lots of different parameters. So on an individual like household level everybody is drawing on every resource they can to raise pigeons, to raise rabbit's, to grow mushrooms in the closets, to grow, you know, herbs in barrels. >> Laila El-Haddad: But don't you feel -- like sometimes I feel the average American household can learn so much from -- >> Maggi Schmitt: Absolutely. >> Laila El-Haddad: Or whoever. There was one woman we visited in a tiny little space like cooked up a storm, like a three course meal, and you know, the grey water from washing the parsley went to her garden and the parsley stalks went to the chickens outdoors, and you know, everything was done in a completely sustainable way in this one woman operation. And it's just incredible. >> Maggi Schmitt: Absolutely. So yeah, and as for the Cuban Chinese. I'd love to go back and do this kind of ethnographic in Miami. I left Miami when I was 13 so I've never really lived there as an adult. But one of these days I'll go back to Miami and do something like this. Because it really is an unbelievably rich, weird, idiosyncratic, interesting place. >> I lived on South Beach for five years. >> Maggi Schmitt: There's a lot going on there. In any city block there's a lot of stories to tell in Miami. >> Thank you. >> Maggi Schmitt: Other question? Yes? >> I was intrigued by your mentioning the regional differences. That the food in Gaza is different from other parts of the Palestinian region. Could you give some concrete examples of that? >> Maggi Schmitt: Of course. Very roughly I mean there are lots of different regional differences even within Gaza as Laila was saying. Like between families that originally of the sort of farming village interior, the hill towns. Families that are from the coastal -- the sort of more urban coastal places like very -- even within Gaza there are very striking differences. But in the north of Palestine for example, there's much more use of yogurts. They do not like spicy food. Like spicy in the sense of hot. At all. There's in general, a much lesser use of all kinds of spices, both aromatic spices and like spicy hot spices. And a lot of use of yogurts. It's much more similar to the Lebanese or -- >> Laila El-Haddad: Seems to be a north/south thing doesn't it? >> Maggi Schmitt: North/south thing. >> Laila El-Haddad: I mean the most obvious example -- if I was to give you like one example. It's sort of the most stereotypically but it does hold true, is the use of the chili pepper. So they use a lot of chili peppers in the Gaza region, both in green form and sun-dried form. You know, chili flakes and chili sauce, and all sorts of things. And there's a really famous pounded salad similar to a salsa almost I would say, called [foreign word] Gazan salad or dead guy, which means pounded that's made with dill, tomatoes, garlic or onions depending on who you speak to. Another very heated debate as we learned. And then chili pepper, green chili peppers. Very fiery hot chili peppers. That seemed to be sort of an indigenous variety [inaudible]. Obviously before it came to the Americas. But that's one obvious example. Again, other's -- Fellaheen will tell you, we don't -- they don't -- they're not very fond of the chili pepper. Their tradition was one of more -- much more mild seasonal flavors of root vegetables and [foreign word], and things like that. But the chili pepper and then dill. The extensive use of dill in green form and then dill seed as well, is used -- yeah, sorry? [ Inaudible Speaker ] No dill, dill. Like dill weed or dill greens. >> What is the Arabic [inaudible]? >> Laila El-Haddad: Ah, what is it in Arabic? Okay, in Egypt and elsewhere they call it Shebat. In Gaza they call it Jirada. And yeah -- and the dill seed is called [foreign word]. Right. Leave it to the Palestinians with their sick sense of humor. That means locust eye. So because it looks like a -- I know, right. And yeah, they use that a lot. The other thing I would say is -- I'm trying to think off the top of my head. >> Maggi Schmitt: And also seafood. >> Laila El-Haddad: Right, that was what I was going to mention. Right. >> Maggi Schmitt: Gaza is the last little piece of -- of what is presently Palestine that has access to the sea. So there is a historic seafood cuisine in the region, but very few Palestinians in the region presently have access to the sea. Gaza has maintained a lot of the sort of high-end, elaborate, you know, stuffed and rolled, and fried, and breaded -- these sort of very elaborate, very sophisticated seafood cuisine is actually form Yafa. Yafa was the great sort of city -- cosmopolitan city on the sea. Pre '48 Palestine. >> Laila El-Haddad: Many of those Palestinians from Yafa came by sea, fled to Gaza in 1948 and ended up there. Yeah. >> Maggi Schmitt: And so there is significant Yafa population in Gaza and they've really maintained that seafood cuisine and those seafood traditions. So yeah, the -- and you talk to the -- >> Laila El-Haddad: Everything from fish, calamari, you know, octopus. All sorts of things you'll find there. >> Maggi Schmitt: You talk to Palestinians from the West Bank and in Israel, et cetera, and many from before the borders were closed, many have this sort of romantic memories of going to the beach at Gaza, and having the seafood at Gaza. It's like a thing, that you went down to Gaza to go to the beach and eat seafood. That was a -- you know, a lovely family Sunday for many years until the borders were closed. So it's very famous for its seafood and rightly so, because it's spectacular. >> Laila El-Haddad: There's also a lot of these, you know, dishes that we never knew quite how to categorize them. Mush bowls. >> Maggi Schmitt: Mush. >> Laila El-Haddad: No they're not -- come on, give them their due. They're very nice. But they're basically like one pot -- like they're cooked in one pot and made with either a green or a pulse like, you know, Sumagia's a good one. It's made with charred chickpeas, lamb meat. Usually a [foreign word] thickened with taina and sumac -- tartness from the sumac berry. And then kind of all cooked together until it thickened. Pour it into bowls and then eaten with bread or distributed to family. And there's other's. There's [foreign word] there's, you know, fogiya. And they're all cooked, poured into bowls, you know, allowed to kind of congeal and then eaten. That's something that seems to be -- >> Maggi Schmitt: Scooped up. >> Laila El-Haddad: Scooped up with bread. That seems to be peculiar or, you know, unique to that area as well. >> That does sound tough [inaudible]. >> Laila El-Haddad: The what? >> That does sound -- >> Laila El-Haddad: Right, yeah, absolutely yeah. >> Maggie Schmitt: It's an Egyptian type pronunciation and in Gaza it's more -- >> Laila El-Haddad: No, is it? No. It's not. That's different. No, in Egypt it's - no, in -- [ Inaudible Speaker ] [ Multiple Speakers ] In Gaza it's yeah -- >> Du-ca becomes du-gah. Sumatia becomes sumagia. Yeah, yeah. Yeah?- >> I was actually interested in thinking about substitution. >> Laila El-Haddad: Ah right, yeah. >> So in your book do you mention the original recipe and various substitutions? >> Laila El-Haddad: Yeah. >> Maggie Schmitt: This was a big debate. We were all the time sort of going back and forth between a sort official of memory of like how things were supposed to be. Like really this should be made with barley. Maybe this should be made with [foreign word]. But now we make it with, you know, imported FAO short grain rice. Or this kind of substitution. So we try to represent both. In some cases we specifically say like this is a dish of memory that should be done like this, but none of these ingredients are presently available. >> Laila El-Haddad: Like for the most part we -- >> But the audience is not in Gaza. >> Laila El-Haddad: No, no, for the most part we -- no, we include the original version of the dish. But then just for the sake of sort of representing this -- you know, this reality we include like two or three recipes that emerged in the aftermath of 1948 either during the exodus itself or that continue to be made. Very simple dishes that -- and we say, this emerged, you know, and is -- was created through sort of patchwork of, you know, ingredients and what not. But no, we do include the authentic -- >> Several. >> Laila El-Haddad: We do. We have -- we have several recipes, right. So, you know, we -- there are a couple of recipes too that are sort of in disuse, that are no longer made or not very frequently from certain -- like from [inaudible] and other places. Sort of ceremonial dishes that we thought were really interesting to record sort of for, you know, historical reference, but that most people because there aren't these big gathering in [inaudible] in Gaza right, don't make. But one example is [foreign word] which is eaten like a feta. It's made with [foreign word] but it's like feta, a big platter and everyone kind of gets around it. It's made with wheat -- during the wheat harvest. So we include a few references to dishes like that. But for the most part we try to sort of remain true to the original versions of the recipe. Yeah. >> One more question. >> Nawal Kawar: Are we done? >> Laila El-Haddad: While we're waiting for questions, I was going to mention one more thing that is unique to the way the dishes are prepared in Gaza. Is the extensive use of the zubdiah, the mortar and pestle. That -- I don't know if we have a picture of it here. That is fashioned from this really rich red clay and you'll see mortar's and pestles obviously throughout the world and elsewhere in Palestine, but what makes this unique is again, it's made from clay from a lemonwood pestle. It's used to prep ingredients. It's used to cook in. It's used to serve other dishes in. It's ubiquitous, absolutely ubiquitous. You'll see it in every household. Families retain it for generations and consider it sort of a member of their family and we thought that was really kind of a lovely anecdote. >> What about the popular dish? Do you have it in your cookbook? >> Laila El-Haddad: I'm sure we do, but I don't know what it is. [ Inaudible Speaker ] Ah right. >> And then you have the fire and then you put in a clay pot the rice -- >> Laila El-Haddad: Ah yes. Idra. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. >> I can't remember. >> Laila El-Haddad: Yeah, Idra, yeah. Yeah, yeah, of course we have that. That was sort of one of the first ones I mentioned. And I know there's debate about -- yeah. And we never claim that a particular dish is like only exclusively made in Gaza. You know, that would be absolutely absurd. And so we do mention that this is made in Hebron and made elsewhere. And in Gaza they have their own spin on it. But it's certainly kind of the go to ceremonial dish for weddings and funerals, and this sort of thing. [Speaking in foreign language], you know, birth ceremonies and so on. And it used to be made in the way that you mention and when we went and did the field work we found one remaining oven, right, like a community oven where they were still made in these big clay vessels and placed in a brick oven I suppose. And that's still going based on my most recent, you know, contact with the family there. But for the most part it's not made in the very traditional way anymore. People will usually take the meat to the oven and say, can you make me enough for 200 people for this party, and they'll give them to them in little foil packets and so on. >> It's not the same. >> Laila El-Haddad: No I -- it is. Well this oven is really good though. This is the one remaining oven that does it in the -- sort of in the clay vessels still in the way, and they pour the [foreign word] on top. So this is actually awfully good. But you really have to go out I think to the more remote areas of the Gaza Strip and the Bedouin areas to find them doing the fire pit thing. And they'll do -- a good example of that is the dish that they showed on the Anthony Bourdain show, [foreign word]. And a lot of the, you know, descendants of, you know, [inaudible] some of the Bedouin clans will still make those dishes in the fire pit and so forth. But not in the city. >> The nice thing about this one is when it is cooked they get it out from the pit and they use trays, they [inaudible] it and they come and knock out the clay. >> Maggi Schmitt: Yeah. [ Inaudible Speaker ] >> Laila El-Haddad: It's fantastic yeah. >> It's unbelievable. >> Laila El-Haddad: They do this -- they do break these too. >> Maggi Schmitt: These urns are made to be broken. >> Laila El-Haddad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Maggie Schmitt: So they -- but yeah, this is now -- this is a commercial oven that these urns that you see, they fill them with the rice, the meat, the spices, and then they cook slowly in a stone oven which produces a sort of similar effect to the embers in the ground. And then as a serving thing they break it open. >> Laila El-Haddad: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's incredible. >> Nawal Kawar: All right -- >> Laila El-Haddad: Yeah, you're making us hungry. >> Maggi Schmitt: It's lunchtime. >> Nawal Kawar: Thank you very much. We have the book at the end of the program for anybody who wants to buy it. I hope they are here. They are? >> Maggi Schmitt: Oh are they? [ Multiple Speakers ] Okay great. >> Nawal Kawar: Plenty are there. >> Laila El-Haddad: Fantastic. >> Maggi Schmitt: Thank you so much. >> Laila El-Haddad: Thank you. Happy to entertain more questions. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.