Eating Wild: Hosting the Food Heritage of Palestine

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines the strategic use of an event of hospitality celebrating the Wild Foods of Palestine as part of a form of fertile activism. Artist Mirna Bamieh presented the dinner as a “live art” event where the positive power of food and Palestinian culinary distinction was highlighted more than victimhood. In a moment of pleasurable pedagogy, the guests learned about the preservation of knowledge about foraging precious wild plants and their preparation. They enjoyed traditional and innovative spins on Palestinian cuisine, absorbing the wild tastes of the land. By eliciting embodied responses, a moment of pleasurable convivial pedagogy was produced to inspire the guests to engage with activism against ongoing dispossession under Israeli settler colonialism. The wild plants themselves and the knowledge of how to process them were envisioned as a type of cultural heritage to be preserved as an archive for potential transformation. The event raised important possibilities for the futures of this particular kind of Palestinian activism: edible, fertile, aesthetic. [wild plants, foraging, cuisine, hospitality, settler colonialism, Palestine/Israel]