Why not call it what it is? When a restaurant bills itself as Mediterranean, they’re usually trying to obscure the ethnic origin of the food. And they don’t usually mean French or Spanish or Italian or Croatian. Sometimes they mean Greek, but usually they’ll just call it Greek. All of these nations share the Mediterranean, yet you rarely hear of a French restaurant being described as Mediterranean. Why? Because France, Spain, Italy, and to a lesser extent Greece are the “safe” Mediterranean countries, and I mean safe with all of its attended meanings. So if we don’t apply the tag “Mediterranean” to Western European countries that share its shoreline, what does Mediterranean mean? Most often, it means Arab.
Why can’t we call it Arab food? That just sounds derogatory. Take it from a half-Syrian, half-Norwegian: please don’t say “Arab food.” It sounds like “dog food” to my ears. But why can’t we call it Arabic food? I think we could. Better yet, why don’t we call it one of these?
Tunisian, Moroccan, Algerian, Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian
Jordan and Iraq aren’t even on the Mediterranean. Why do we call the cuisine after the sea anyway? Most of the food is grown and consumed on land. Mediterranean should be reserved for what’s from that sea.
Let’s give credit to the nations that make this food. But before we do that, I think we have to be respectful of these countries – maybe not their political boundaries and often harsh leaders or their radicals, but certainly their everyday people. The Arabs have not “always been at war.” We are not a “war-like people” anymore than Norwegians are still vikings. Most of us are incredibly normal. Some of us happen to be incredible :). Eat our food, ask us about us, not just where we’re from. Most of us that’ll you’ll come into contact with in America are Americans. 9/11 happened to us too and was just as tragic for us. Eat our hummus, our baba ghanoush (however it’s spelled. We call our gyro kebab, but it’s a little different. Eat our rice. Eat our flatbread. Hopefully it’s not that terrible kind made out of cardboard and closer to the real thing. We invented agriculture you know. Or at least wheat. Try our lentil soup, our stuffed grape leaves. You’ll love it. We probably won’t poison your food.
-S
P.S. Side note, my parents almost named me Jihad. So glad they didn’t. Not sure where to put this. -S
