Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the transformation of traditional foodways in a settler colony as seen through the gaze of women producers from Gaza, exploring their relationships to food as a site of struggle against intersecting forms of oppression, namely colonialism, neoliberalism and patriarchy.

Paper long abstract:

Our paper investigates the transformation of traditional foodways in a settler colony as seen through the gaze of women producers from Gaza, exploring their relationships to food as a site of struggle against forms of oppression.

Gaza’s foodways have been shaped over millennia by trade, waves of occupation and, more recently, by dispossession as farming families fled violence bringing their food traditions with them. Today, Palestinian foodways are shaped by three intersecting forms of oppression: Settler colonialism that controls access to shrinking resources and imposes a devastating blockade that ensures a captive market for its powerful agro-military industrial complex; Neoliberalism that imposes industrially produced imported food and ‘aid’, that degrade human health and Gaza’s fragile ecosystem in a drive for localised ‘food security’; And patriarchal structures that impose these industrial logics for agricultural intensification that consolidates corporate control and consumes farmland, while devaluing and constraining the work and knowledges of women.

This paper investigates these forms of oppression through the narratives, memories, and identities of Gazan women and their relationships with traditional Palestinian food and farming landscapes, known as the Baladi food system, that tells a parallel story steeped in the richness of interconnection. It navigates neoliberal and gender identities through a process of re-membering that reconnects people and place, while considering the role of food as medicine and as resistance. Contextualising these pressures, it is possible to position Palestinian peoples’ voices and frame them in broader struggles to the corporate industrialisation of the food system by reclaiming traditional foodways.