“Lebanon: Children Facing Crisis Hunger Levels to Rise by 14% in 2023 Unless Urgent Action Taken,” Save the Children, January 23, 2023 →.
“Lebanon: Rising Poverty, Hunger Amid Economic Crisis,” Human Rights Watch, December 12, 2022 →.
“Help Lebanon Rebuild and Recover,” UN World Food Program USA →.
Wendell Steavenson, “In Lebanon, Parents Are Abandoning Their Children in Orphanages,” The Economist, January 31, 2023 →.
For Lebanon with a Story, see → (in Arabic).
In a similar vein, the other main TV station in Lebanon, MTV, launched the program Saru miyye (Turning One Hundred) to commemorate a hundred years since the state’s inception and also celebrate our so-called national cuisine.
Camellia Hussein, “A Daily Celebration of Life: What Do You Know about Food Tourism in Lebanon?” Al-Jazeera, August 16, 2019 → (in Arabic).
Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Penguin, 1986), 13.
We can think here of modernity as affecting the senses and not only ideas. The historical transformation commonly referred to as modernity is not only meaningful at the level of thought, as some of our Arab theorists of modernity like to say, but also at the level of a transformation in diets. Modernity entails a movement away from a mono-crop diet to a more diverse one, where animal products take up a bigger share of the average diet.
Modernity is often explained through technological advances like the introduction of the radio or TV. The focus on these forms of technology betrays a certain understanding of technology as a vehicle for words—for discourse. But these technologies also included the fridge, which transformed, in a nondiscursive manner, not only our food but also our habits, social structure, taste, and sensitivity to the meanings of food.
The importing of cheap labor did not only serve the market. It was also essential for the management of life: thousands of foreign laborers were assigned the responsibility of caring for children and the elderly, which permitted “the family” to persist in its recognized form. In the same way that there is no Lebanese family today without a fridge, there is no Lebanese family without the kafala (sponsorship) system.
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburg University Press, 2014), 179–80.
Originally published on megaphone.news in Arabic and translated by Rana Issa.