INSATIABLE APPETITE : FOOD AS A CULTURAL SIGNIFIER

AGYA Conference Report

Beirut - 12-14 May 2016

The Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA) has organized an
international and interdisciplinary conference entitled Insatiable Appetite : Food as a Cultural
Signifier in Beirut. AGYA’s goal is to strengthen international cooperation between young Arab
and German researchers in the various fields of sciences and humanities, with an
interdisciplinary perspective. This conference was organized by Julia Hauser (Assistant Professor
of Global History, University of Kassel, Germany), Bilal Orfali (Associate Professor of Arabic,
American University of Beirut, Lebanon), and Kirill Dmitriev (Lecturer in Arabic, University of St
Andrews, UK). Food in the lens of a common heritage and common challenges : this was the focus
of the participants’ lectures and activities held over three days, with the added presence of food
historian Charles Perry.

The conference was hosted at the American University of Beirut, as well as the Orient
Institut in Beirut and various other places : indeed, some of the lectures were delivered during a
trip that had been organized through Lebanon on Friday 13th, “Excursion along the Lebanese
Food Trail”, and a dinner event was being prepared in parallel at the Bristol Hotel in Beirut, for
Saturday 14th, entitled “Discover Abbassid Food”, which was to conclude the conference and take
participants from food theory to food practices.
The lectures were grouped among seven panels with the following themes : Food and
Social Status, Prohibitions and Prescriptions, Body, Intoxication, Abstention, Scarcity and
Humanitarianism, and Food and Gender.

- Thursday 12th May

1 - Food and Social Status :

1
 Chaired by Torsten Wollina (OIB), this panel inaugurated the first day of the conference,
with what food says about social positions and symbols. It began with Brigitte Caland (AUB) and
her talk on food as a display of power from the antiquity to the Ottoman Empire, food as part of
an art de vivre and as a symbol of the intellectual movements of the past, going through examples
such as the kitchens of Nineveh’s queen and Rome’s extravagant meals and some amusing
anecdotes.
The second talk was dedicated to an understudied part of cultural history of the Arab East
: Tarek Abu Hussein (Harvard) focused on the social role of food, linking or separating groups and
people in the Damascus of the late Mamluk and early Ottoman period, and how social interactions
around food helped creating a distinct elite. This study of social dining adds to the study of
material culture and everyday life in pre-modern Syria.
In the third talk, Nuha Al-Shaar (Sharjah) moved onto the ritualization of food and table
talk, its motives and social significances, with a special focus on Abbasid literature, wether
religious, philosophical or literary, and the themes of banquets and wine. She also drew some
comparisons with Greek and Persian traditions to underline the changes in the ritualization of
food.
This panel was concluded by traveling from the Ancient and Medieval East to 20th century
Germany, with the analysis of Norman Domeier (Stuttgart) of archival material disclosing
numerous details of the “Banquets of the Foreign Press” in Germany during the 20’s and the 30’s.
He covered the diverse questions which could be drawn from such details, and the greater social
and political implications, by making it a case study of the relationships between politics and
food, and more generally the significance of food inside the field of cultural history of politics.

2 - Prohibitions and Prescriptions (two sessions) :

The second panel, chaired by Kirill Dmitriev (St Andrews), covered the subject abstentions
and prescriptions around food, both religious and non-religious. It was opened by Yasmin Amin’s
(Exeter) paper on the history of onion and garlic. Sometimes viewed as positive, sometimes as
negative, they were omnipresent in Arabic classical texts, from their mention in the Qur’ân to
their different prescribed uses throughout history in food recipes, or medical books.
This was followed by the study of Al Shayzari’s 12th century manual, where Karen
Moukheiber (Beirut) showed how medieval food industry and food regulations in Syria went
beyond following the Islamic law on the subject : public satisfaction and welfare, hygiene, as well
as a sense of equity and civility were aimed at. The authorities were equally concerned with food
availability, diversity, preparation, and fair pricing.

2
 After lunch, the panel was continued by two studies focusing on present-day concerns.
The first presentation, by Mariam Al-Attar (Sharjah) examined contemporary Muslim ethics
regarding genetically modified food. While traditionally and mainly concerned with forbidden
food mentioned in the Qur’ân, legal islamic bodies are now facing a new concern which is widely
discussed across the world : GM food. Though usually made permissible, attitudes vary and are
not always well informed..
The section was concluded by a presentation of Shaheed Tayob ( Göttingen) on the
Mumbai food industry, through the ethnographic study of interactions between customers and
sellers, as an example of the perceptions of quality and production of trust. There, side by side is
to be found the older way of slaughtering animals, with what it entails of sights and smells, and
the newer hygienic and refrigerated delivering of meat to the client.

3 - Body
The next panel, concerned with the role of food in bodily self-fashioning as well as bodily
Othering, was chaired by Alexis Wick (Beirut). The first talk was by Christian Junge (Marburg),
who focused on Ahmad Faris Al-Shidyaq’s novel Leg Over Leg, On the Person of al-Faryaq. Studying
the affective and corporeal appreciation of the changes happening during the Nahda through
description of scenes involving food and different social and religious groups, Junge shed new
light on a much studied period of Arab history.
Silke Hackenesch (Kassel) explored in her talk the case of a German advertising icon, the
Sarotti Mohr, which appeared in chocolate commercials from the 1900s. She studied its imagery
and narrative, and how chocolate, a product involving the hard work of Black people and the
consumption of European elites, constituted a racial signifier,

Keynote Lecture : “The Abominable Pig and the Mother of All Vices”
Hosted at the Orient Institut, the keynote lecture was delivered by Eric Dursteler (Provo,
USA), on two alimentary products in the Early Modern Mediterranean, which are still subject to
this day much controversy: pork and wine. This lecture is part of his ongoing work on a book
about food and foodways in this historical period of the Mediterranean region. He explored how
these two products served as social, gender, political and cultural markers in Spain during the
Reconquista, where converts’ attitudes regarding pork and wine, supposedly reveiling the
sincerity of their conversion,were closely monitored,, While wine found wide acceptance, pork,
albeit a staple in Spanish cuisine otherwise, continued to be viewed with suspicion, although
some converts were engaged in its fabrication. Dursteler’s lecture therefore shed light on the
dynamics and nuances of Mediterranean cultural differences and identities.
3
 - Friday 13th May

4 - Intoxication
This panel was held during an excursion along the Lebanese foodt trail. Chaired by Mario
Kozah (AUB), it began with a talk by Bilal Orfali (AUB) on wine and humanism in Islamic thought
and literature. While Islam is usually considered to strictly prohibit alcohol, the study of various
religious, legal and literary texts shows that this discourse emerged in reaction to an ambivalent
stance towards it in Islamic culture involving diverse interpretations of the different Quranic
verses about alcohol.
The ensuing paper by Danilo Marino (Paris) dealt with the consumption of food and
hashîsh in Mamlûk literature in the works of two authors of the 9th century, with a comparative
perspective of the literary motif of “edible architecture”, or Land of Cockayne, in both Medieval
Middle Eastern and European literatures.

- Saturday 14th -

5 - Abstention
Chaired by Bilal Orfali (AUB), this panel dealt with dietary exchanges and conversations
between cultures in discourses on vegetarianism. The day began with a talk about vegetarianism
in Antiquity at the crossroads between East and West. Pedro Ribeiro Martins (Göttingen) gave a
lecture about the writings and arguments of Porphyry of Tyre on vegetarianism, to which
discussions about foodways in different parts of the world were central.
Moving on later in historical times, from vegetarianism to veganism, the second talk was
given by Kevin Blankinship (Chicago) on the poet al-Ma’arri’s personal correspondence. In an
environment where animals were widely regarded as food, the poet exposed his adverse position
in – frequently caustic – verse. Blankinship’s paper therefore explored the links between ethics
and authorship in a particular political context.
The concluding talk by Julia Hauser (Kassel) looked at the perceoption of foodways in the
Ottoman Empire and Egypt, which were central to an evolving vegetarian discourse in late
nineteenth-century Britain and Germany. On the basis of observations made in outdoor lower-
class settings rather than in the domestic sphere (often inaccessible to male Europeans), authors
ascribed a striking frugality to locals, thereby taking lower-class foodways as pars pro toto for
4
society as a whole While their view was largely positive, it collided with scathing remarks on
practices of halal slaughter and the supposed treatment of animals by Muslims.

6 - Scarcity and Humanitarianism

Chaired by Julia Hauser (Kassel), this panel focused on food in the context of humanitarian
aid and crises. The first lecture by Lola Wilhelm (Geneva) tackled an under-explored part of the
studies about humanitarian food aid : while the greater part of research is concerned with the
macro- and institutional level, Wilhelm studied the local histories and changes induced by food
aid and the implications of aid in recipient countries by looking at North Africa and Lebanon.
The second talk by Reem Maghribi (Beirut) analyzed the role of food, and the change of
foodways, in the lives of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. On the basis of interviews, Maghribi showed
how displacement affetcs the way Syrians prepare their food, the role of hospitality, and their
ways of coping with their situation.
Tylor Brand (Sharjah) concluded the panel with a paper on the famine of World War I in
Ottoman Syria through the lens of food consumption and practice. Reading through memoirs and
correspondences of the time, he explained that food had a palliative role in times of shock, aside
from its role as a social marker between those who could afford food and those who could not.

7 - Food and Gender

The last panel of this third day, chaired by Julia Hauser (Kassel), was cocerned with how
food helps shape gendered roles and activities in society. It started with a lecture by Rania
Elsayed (London) on a particular fruit, the quince, and its supposed effects on both male and
female bodies. The ancient Greeks dedicated it to Aphrodite the goddess of fertility, and the
Prophet of Islam recommended its consumption by both men and women although for different
results according to the sexes.
In the next paper Christian Sassmannshausen (Berlin) discussed food consumption in
Ottoman Greater Syria as a local reflection of a growing circulation of diverse foods across the
globe. He explained how this consumption reflected social ideals and gendered practices
according to people from different Syrian social backgrounds, and how class, domestic
architecture, and foodways were interdependent.
From Syrian kitchens to Egyptian kitchens, Anny Gaul (Washington) gave the last lecture
about the emergence of cookbooks written by Egyptian women in the 20th century after
centuries of cookbooks written by men, and what it reflected about foreign influences, culinary
encounters between social circles, gender and class distinction, from adapted foreign dishes to
domesticated street foods.
5
From theory to practice : the dinner event “Discover Abbasid Food” :
As a way of concluding these intense three days, the conference’s participants and other
guests were invited to share in a special dinner orchestrated by Brigitte Caland at the Bristol
hotel of Beirut, in which dishes from the Abbasid period were reconstructed and reinterpreted
with the support of the hotel cooks and staf.
Being both a scholar and a high-level trained cook, she was able to research during the
months leading up to the conference through numerous books regarding Abbasid kitchens and
recipes, to come up with a series of appetizers, dishes and desserts for this special occasion. Her
double formation and past experiences in preparing such historical dinners allowed her to make
do with the lacunae of the old recipes. Trying to retrieve ingredients, or use the closest local ones
available in Lebanon, she kept the spirit of the recipes and insisted on a traditional preparation.
Specific ways of preparation and ingredients sometimes bewildered her team, unused to deal
with such old recipes and what a historical reinterpretation of meals meant in practice.
After these week-long preparations, she and her temporary Bristol team delivered more
than a dozen appetizers, 8 main courses and several desserts, accompanied by Kefraya wines and
seasonal fruits. The dinner was presented to its guests by scholars Vahid Behmardi and Charles
Perry, and the dishes themselves presented in a refined style that must have been such as what
one imagine was to be found on the Abbasid Califes’ table, during these times called by many the
Golden Age of Islamic civilization.
Being able to taste dishes bearing the names so often encountered in classical Arabic texts,
scientific or literary, created a direct and tangible sensory connection to these much studied and
read-about distant times and places.

Concluding thoughts :
The richness of these lectures and events should documented in written form than this
report or the conference abstracts allow to, possibly in way of a book assembling texts of each of
the participants. These texts could be grouped by historical periods or geographical interests. As
many interesting subjects were touched upon and viewed in new perspectives, and through the
popular theme of food through time and space, such a book would certainly gain the attention of
a wider audience.

6
 ———-
This event was kindly supported by the following sponsors, which involvement have made the
conference and dinner possible : AGYA, Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Germany),
American University of Beirut (AUB), Orient Institut in Beirut (OIB), Le Bristol hotel, Château
Kefraya.

- For more information about AGYA : http://agya.info

- The videos of the different lectures are available on Bilal Orfali’s Youtube channel :
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEhQdsdon0x2eh72IKJKKVw

————

(Report written by Louise Gallorini, PhD student at the American University of Beirut, Arabic and Near
Eastern Languages Department).