Someone once asked me, in the context of Israeli appropriation of Palestinian or broader Shami food: what, exactly, is the difference between inspiration and appropriation?

My answer was, succinctly, this:

Inspiration engages with a source, building upon what came before through a relationship of respect and acknowledgment. Appropriation extracts from a source, severing that relationship entirely. While the former is a dialogue, the latter is erasure and theft made possible by a power imbalance.

Appropriation and gaslighting are not a uniquely Israeli phenomena. And while this essay is not about who owns falafel or hummus, the underlying mechanism in cultural debates is remarkably similar.

Because the erasure isn’t really about the dish, recipe, idea, aesthetic or technique. It is about severing a creation from the person, people, labour, experience and lineage that birthed it.

The appropriator does not merely steal the artefact; they hijack the authority. They replace the role of the inheritor with that of the originator. In doing so, they become the exclusive authors and they seize control of the narrative. They become the brand, the face, and the voice that captures and wields the audience. They are the ones who get believed, recognised, and credited.

Ultimately, they are the ones who cash the cheque. That is the power play.

So when I use the word appropriation in this essay, I am talking specifically about intellectual and creative extraction: absorbing someone else’s thinking, research, techniques, terminology, aesthetic language or conceptual vocabulary, then presenting the resulting work as though it emerged independently, simply because the wrapping has changed.

And note: this is infinitely bigger than plagiarism.

Plagiarism is the most obvious form of the problem because the evidence is usually sitting there in black and white. It leaves a clumsy fingerprint because it copies sentences, paragraphs, or recipes word-for-word. It doesn’t steal your exact phrasing; it steals your blueprint.

It is the culture of:

“I just woke up with this idea.”

Except you didn’t. Sometimes you encountered something somewhere, consciously or unconsciously, and it found its way into your thinking.

That part is not a problem. That is how creativity works.

We are all porous. We are all influenced. We are all taking inspiration from each other. We all stand on our predecessors' shoulders.

But, it’s about what happens next…

Do we acknowledge the shoulders we stand on, or do we pretend we built the ground beneath our feet?

The Devaluation of Intellectual Honesty

Indeed, one great paradox of the digital age is how comfortable “creatives” have become with inheriting the work of others while pretending they arrived there entirely alone.

Instead, the grid is full of effortless eureka moments. We are inundated with overnight visionaries and “original” concepts appearing with suspicious, factory-line regularity.

There is a peculiar mythology that has really buried itself into creative culture: that if you alter something sufficiently, reword it, repackage it, run it through a different filter or just change the garnish, the lineage no longer matters.

Suddenly, something that took someone years to build or develop, suddenly becomes your authorship, your invention, your vision.

But in reality, the most celebrated creator is rarely the one who built the foundation. They are simply the one who arrived last and spoke loudest—benefiting from a concept after it had already been painstakingly developed by others. Someone lays the stones; the person with the larger megaphone gets mistaken for the architect.

But, no serious artist, researcher, writer, cook, musician, or thinker exists in a vacuum. We are all composites of our encounters—the teachers, communities, books, and arguments that opened doors for us before we even knew there was a walkway.

An idea can take twenty years to arrive at. A technique can take decades to develop. A dish can be the cumulative result of generations of cooking, migration, adaptation, and survival memory. A true framework emerges from a lifetime of reading, questioning, following obscure references, unearthing contradictory sources, getting things wrong, testing, challenging, and sitting with an ambiguity long enough for it to become something more than a clever observation.

Ideas are never isolated flashes of genius; they are the physical manifestation of someone’s labour, context, lived experience, and personal risk.

And, that is why lineage matters.

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Nothing Comes From Nowhere

Borrowing and repackaging are as old as art itself. The digital age did not invent this behaviour; it simply made the machinery faster, slicker, and infinitely more scalable.

When I entered this industry in the late 2000s, as a food blogger no less, the creative world was smaller and distribution was more constrained. There were fewer voices, fewer publishing channels and fewer ways to instantly broadcast an idea to millions of people. That did not make people inherently more ethical. But it did make provenance easier to see. Social Media changed that.

The internet democratised publishing, which is wonderful. Anyone can now publish, teach, experiment, document, research and contribute without waiting for an institution to grant them permission. But it also shattered transparency and blurred a fundamental boundary:

Seeing and being inspired by someone’s work does not make the work yours. Finding an obscure source does not make you its originator. And changing the packaging does not erase the person who built what is inside it.

Academic scholarship has mechanisms for this precisely because ideas do not exist in a vacuum. You can disagree with a thesis, build on it, reinterpret it, popularise it, even dismantle it. But you acknowledge the intellectual lineage. If you don't, you are disqualified from the conversation.

Because the lineage is part of the intellectual work.

Content culture often behaves as though attribution only matters when someone has copied text verbatim. sometimes the most effective form of appropriation is not plagiarising someone’s words at all.

Academia has a name for a version of this: idea laundering. Taking something that already carries intellectual or creative value, removing its provenance, giving it a new wrapper, and returning it to the world as though it emerged independently, sometimes with the history distorted or misrepresented.

The algorithm is particularly hungry for this. It rewards speed over depth. Consistency over contemplation. Familiarity over provenance. Reach over lineage.

The internet has given us unprecedented access to human knowledge while rendering us strangely indifferent to the humans who produced it and to fact-checking.

I am not suggesting that every Instagram post needs a bibliography or every creative act requires a footnote. Influence is messy. Ideas overlap. People forget where they first encountered something. Parallel thinking happens. Culture is porous. But there is a difference between imperfect memory and a pattern of convenient omission.

Intellectual honesty does not require us to create less. It asks us to be more truthful about how what we create came to be.

And frankly, that is one of the things that separates a professional from an amateur. Not whether they have original ideas… but whether they have the integrity to acknowledge the people who helped them reach them.

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The Age of Performative Originality

With the rise of generative AI, performative originality and research has only intensified. It has never been easier to produce the appearance of research, fluency or originality without doing the slow work underneath it.

But if you look closely, you can always tell who is operating at the surface and who is doing the real work. Real research is slow, uncertain, and deeply contradictory. It requires wrestling with evidence, hammering at what appear to be dead ends, and accepting that sometimes there is no neat, viral, caption-ready conclusion. It is fascinating—and deeply telling—to watch someone who was never particularly skilled at creative expression suddenly transform overnight into a prolific “ideas generator.”

So when these identical frameworks, visual languages, recipes, or conceptual structures suddenly begin appearing elsewhere within the same circles—without a shred of credit—one question becomes completely unavoidable:

How did they arrive there?

Sometimes the answer really is genuine coincidence. Two people can walk separate paths and land on the same destination independently. But there is a vast moral chasm between a genuine coincidence and a calculated pattern—between discovering something on your own, and lurking behind someone else’s work, absorbing it, repeating it, and systematically obscuring the evidence of your journey. Not once. Not twice. But consecutively.

If someone suddenly develops a remarkably familiar conceptual vocabulary or aesthetic language after years of demonstrating absolutely no affinity for that discipline, the chronology speaks for itself.

So why does it matter where an idea came from?

Or rather, what kind of culture do we create when we reward visibility over substance, reach over lineage, and performance over integrity?

When we celebrate a viral success born from gaslighting the people who did the actual heavy lifting, we become active participants in their erasure. We build a bankrupt culture that rewards extraction over contribution, weakens the very process through which truth is sought and found, and burns through ideas rather than participates in them.

Acknowledging lineage is not about protecting fragile creative egos. It’s about respecting human labour and honouring process. It’s about building a real culture of creativity, rather than appropriation.

Acknowledgment is a Radical Act

In an age of algorithms, generative AI, and frictionless extraction, acknowledgment is the most radical creative act left to us.

Crediting others is not a polite courtesy; it is the baseline of dignified work. It is intellectual honesty, it provides an edge, and it is the absolute hallmark of career longevity. True creativity is having the courage to name your sources—not as a dry, academic citation list, but as a deliberate act of honouring the shoulders that hoisted you up.

It does not diminish your contribution. Quite the opposite.

To say I learned this from you is not to surrender authorship. To say this made me think differently is not to confess a lack of originality. To say I am building on this work is not to make yourself smaller. It demonstrates that you are secure enough to participate in a much larger human conversation.

And that is where real creativity lives. Not in pretending nothing came before you, but in knowing what came before you well enough to take it somewhere new.

I continue to spend years researching, vetting and writing about our food histories: resurrecting recipes, tracing provenance, following obscure references and trying to understand the forces that shaped what we eat.

I have watched others absorb pieces of that labour and reproduce them without acknowledgment. Of course that is deeply frustrating. But I will not change my approach to make the algorithm like me more, nor will I pretend that visibility is the same thing as substance.

Because the well does not run deep for the person who only knows how to extract from it. Eventually, you run out of other people’s water. The deeper value of creative work is not whether someone else can imitate its surface.It is whether there is enough underneath it to keep generating something of its own.

A borrowed vocabulary will always remain one step behind. You can launder a concept.

You cannot launder the decades of life, research, struggle, curiosity and experience that made the concept possible in the first place.

So perhaps we need to stop treating acknowledgment as a weakness. Perhaps we need to stop pretending we built the ground beneath our feet. Perhaps we need to become curious again about where ideas come from, who carried them, who developed them, who made them visible and whose labour disappeared along the way.

Because nothing comes from nowhere.

And there is nothing more original about pretending otherwise.

Let us name the shoulders we stood on. Then build something worthy of the view.

CREDIT: Inspired by centuries of shared human labour, fuelled by sleepless nights, coffee, wine, literally blood and tears, and yes, edited in collaboration with AI. Not by AI. All ideas are most certainly my own.

Ma’ esalama (with peace) مَع السَلامة ,

Bethany x

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The courgette flower is one of summer’s most fleeting gifts. Delicate and ephemeral, it asks to be cooked almost as soon as it’s picked..

Viewed through the meso-mediterreanean lens, stuffing vegetables has long been less about abundance than ingenuity. Leaves, fruits vegetables and blossoms have all served as vessels, filled with grains, herbs, dairy or meat according to season, terroir and circumstance.

Courgette flowers simply continue that culinary logic, transforming an everyday practice into something both elegant and memorable.

For this version, I pair them with shankleesh, one of the region’s most distinctive cultured cheeses.

Often misunderstood, shankleesh begins life as a cultured yoghurt that is strained into a thick curd before being salted, shaped into balls, dried and left to mature, developing a natural bloom of mould. Over time, it acquires a firm, dry yet crumbly texture and an assertive, earthy tang. The balls, often around the size of one’s palm, are then coated in herbs and spices such as za’atar, smoked peppers and cumin. While associated most closely with Bilad al-Sham, its story belongs to a much older tradition of preserving milk, a necessity in societies where fresh dairy could not be relied upon year-round, and especially before refrigeration.

To soften its intensity, I fold it into fresh soft goat’s labneh. The result is creamy and spreadable yet bright, retaining the character of the aged cheese while becoming light enough to complement the fragile courgette flowers.

Alongside it sits a smoked tomato salsa, sharpened with vintage garlic. Rather than dominating the dish, it provides contrast: sweetness from ripe summer tomatoes, gentle acidity and the mellow complexity that only a long-cured garlic develops with time.

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This is a dish built around seasonality, preservation and contrast. Fresh against aged. Fragile against robust. Fleeting against enduring.

It also reminds us that recipes rarely exist in isolation. They are accumulations of climate, necessity, migration, technological advancements and taste. Of nafas. And so much more.

A blossom picked in the morning. A cheese patiently and lovingly matured over months. Tomatoes that crossed oceans before becoming indispensable to regional cooking. Every ingredient carries a journey and a story of landscapes, people and time.

That is the essence of the Meso-Mediterranean: not a single cuisine uncomfortably chained to imagined borders, but an interconnected and entangled world where ingredients, techniques and ideas have continually moved, adapted and found new homes and expressions.

What are three summer ingredients you’d like to see explored through the Meso-Mediterranean lens?

Think history, movement, lineage and evolution. One ingredient, one entangled world.

I’ll bring them to life through video recipes, tracing the stories, landscapes and connections that shaped them.

Courgette Flowers Stuffed with Softened Shankleesh, Served with Smoked Tomato & Vintage Garlic Salsa

Serves: 4 to 6
Makes: About 12 stuffed courgette flowers

Ingredients

For the courgette flowers

• 12 courgette flowers, gently cleaned

For the filling

• 1 small ball of shankleesh, crumbled

• 2 tbsp goat’s labneh

For the tomato salsa

• 2 large ripe charred tomatoes, peeled and finely diced

• 1 small charred onion, peeled and finely diced

• 3 to 4 cloves vintage garlic, finely minced (see The Jewelled Table)

• 50g or 3 to 4 tbsp toasted pine nuts

• A pinch of basil, finely chiffonaded

• 45ml/3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

For the batter

(Alternatively, use your favourite tempura batter.)

• 60g or ½ cup cornflour (cornstarch)

• 80g or ½ cup rice flour

• 1 tsp sea salt

• 1 tsp baking powder

• Approximately 100 to 150ml chilled beer or sparkling soda water

Instructions

• Gently clean the courgette flowers, removing the inner stamens if needed, taking care not to tear the delicate petals. Dry very well.

• Combine the crumbled shankleesh with the goat’s labneh until softened and creamy, then carefully spoon or pipe the mixture into each flower, twisting the petals closed to secure the filling.

• For the salsa, combine the diced tomatoes, onion, vintage garlic, toasted pine nuts and basil, then season with salt and drizzle with olive oil; allow it to sit so the flavours can meld.

• Prepare the batter by whisking together the cornflour, rice flour, sea salt and baking powder, then gradually add the chilled beer or soda water until you have a light, loose batter.

• Heat oil for frying, dip each stuffed courgette flower into the batter, allowing any excess to drip away, then fry until crisp and golden.

• Serve immediately with the smoked tomato and vintage garlic salsa.

Dayma enshalla <3

Ma’ esalama (with peace) مَع السَلامة ,

Bethany x

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The city is where synthesis happens.

While cities are rarely the origin points of cuisine, they are the compression points.

Dense populations, trade, markets, migration, administration, pilgrimage, conquests, diplomacy, slavery, intermarriage, technological advancements, and more, force ideas, languages, and foods into inescapable entanglement and evolution. In that sense, the city is where food stops belonging to a single terroir. Instead, it begins to express diverse surrounding landscapes, the collective memory of its inhabitants, and the layered histories that have shaped it; what has been adapted, adopted, transmitted, and dispersed.

That is why the first course of my Meso-Mediterranean chapter, CITY, begins in Beirut, one of the world’s longest-inhabited cities, while reaching back to one of the earliest recorded urban civilisations: Mesopotamia.

The opening course? A contemporary synthesis of the earliest recorded tabīlu logic of seasoning and transformation, intertwined with the layered evolution of tabbouleh, the parsley and tomato-laden dish now so closely associated with the modern nation-state of Lebanon.

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ÈDN Table: CITY has come to a close, marking the end of our first chapter.

ÈDN Table is an evolving series of immersive dining experiences that uses food as a lens through which to explore the intertwined histories, ecologies and cultures of West Asia, North Africa and Southern Europe through the Meso-Mediterranean framework.

For some time, I have found myself constrained by the existing vocabulary we use to describe our food culture(s). National and commercial culinary labels all serve a purpose, but their purpose is to define, reinforce and legitimise modern boundaries than illuminating the layered histories, relationships and continual evolution that have shaped them over millennia.

"Mediterranean cuisine", for example, has become commercial shorthand for olive oil, tomatoes, Greek salads and Italian pasta. Meanwhile, regional descriptors such as WANA or Bilad al-Sham, both of which I use in the appropriate context, remain geographically or historically bounded. The same is true of terms like "Middle Eastern", “Levant”, “Levantine”, or “Mashriq” (which I’ve delved into here and here) and "Arab", a descriptor that reflects only one layer within a far older and more complex culinary continuum, and one I explore in greater depth in an upcoming monograph.

The challenge is not simply that these terms are imperfect or contested. It is that they were developed to describe geographies, identities or political realities, whereas I am attempting to understand a historical system. None fully articulates the long interplay of terroir, ecology, migration, trade, empire and exchange that linked the Eurasian Steppe, Mesopotamia, West Asia, North Africa and the three continents that kiss the Mediterranean. Rather than replacing one label with another, Meso-Mediterranean offers a different unit of analysis. It privileges relationships over borders, historical continuities over modern categories, and synthesis over ownership.

National cuisines are meaningful cultural identities, but they are often poor historical categories. The Meso-Mediterranean framework shifts the unit of analysis from the nation-state to the longer ecological, commercial and cultural systems through which cuisines actually emerged. In doing so, it reveals cuisine not as a collection of isolated traditions, but as an ongoing process of synthesis and exchange.

Unlike fusion, which combines recognisable culinary traditions, synthesis describes the gradual emergence of new food cultures through sustained interaction over time. It is less an act of invention than a process of historical becoming. What is initially perceived as fusion, such as Nikkei cuisine, may, over generations, become synthesis as it develops continuity, depth and its own internal logic.

Think of it this way: fusion is a mosaic, where distinct elements are placed together but remain legible as separate parts. Synthesis is more like watercolour, where boundaries soften and meaning emerges through interaction rather than separation.

Rooted in curiosity and informed by terroir, seasonality and the many historical forces explored throughout the essays to come, the Meso-Mediterranean framework seeks to uncover the stories embedded within ingredients, dishes and techniques. It looks beyond recent political memory towards the longer currents of exchange that have shaped them over millennia.

Rather than replacing one identity with another, the framework offers a different lens altogether. It is not intended to define a civilisation or a people, but to describe a historical system through which cuisines evolved via continuous interaction, adaptation and synthesis across landscapes that political borders would later divide.

If this feels difficult to grasp, good. It’s a sign that curiosity is required to step outside inherited frameworks shaped in part by colonial and post-colonial systems of categorisation that have shaped how we understand cuisine, history and identity.

Sometimes clarity begins with unlearning — including the origin narratives we continue to rely on to anchor belonging and legitimacy.

The point is not to replace one story with another, but to move beyond linear frameworks altogether, and read history as entanglement, movement and continuous synthesis.

ÈDN Table

Each ÈDN Table chapter explores a different theme through a narrative-led menu, inviting guests to look beyond the plate and reconsider not only what we eat, but how we understand history, identity and belonging.

CITY was the inaugural chapter.

The journey continues with COAST, the next exploration in the evolving ÈDN Table series.

Join the WhatsApp community via this link for early access to future experiences.

For those interested in the research, historical pathways and ideas behind each chapter, subscribe to this Substack :)

If you’re interested in partnering with ÈDN Table, feel free to get in touch via message or email.

Ma’ esalama (with peace) مَع السَلامة ,

Bethany x

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Maraheb :)

Last week, I introduced ÈDN Table, my latest experience bringing to life strands of research I’ve been developing across cookbooks, Substack, and ongoing writing.

What might tabbouleh have looked and tasted like before tomatoes arrived in our region?

That’s where the conversation begins.

The inaugural ÈDN City Table opens next Friday at Arthaus Beirut, bringing together a ten-course menu shaped by terroir, trade, migration, and the forgotten histories hidden between borders that have shaped the foodways of West Asia, North Africa, and Southern Europe.

This video offers a small glimpse into some of the dishes, ideas, and stories behind the menu.

Here is the menu with wine pairings by Chateau Qanafar.

If you’ve been considering booking, please don’t leave it until the last minute. With preparations already underway and only a handful of seats remaining, reservations will need to close shortly so we can ensure an intimate and thoughtful experience.

If you’re outside the country but know someone in Lebanon who might appreciate it, feel free to pass it on.

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🗓️June 26 at Arthaus Beirut.

Come hungry. Come curious. Leave satiated and looking at the world a little differently.

📞 Contact Arthaus directly for reservations 71 907 160

P.S. My chef’s jackets are still in Dubai, so I’ve stolen my father’s shirt. If I look less like a chef and more like a priestess about to bless some vegetables, that’s why. I kinda like the look though 😅

Ma’ esalama (with peace) مَع السَلامة ,

Bethany x

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Maraheb dear readers,

This project has been a work in progress for many years and several eleventh hour near misses of actually becoming a permanent space. A story for another time. Right now, I have taken one distinct piece of that dream and brought it to life.

Please welcome ÈDN TABLE.

What ÈDN Means to Me

عدن ‘Adn in Arabic—close in sound to ÈDN in French and cognate with Eden in English—is believed to be of Sumerian origin, coming from the word edin, meaning “steppe” or “plain”. Over time, it came to signify a well-watered, fertile place, and eventually the Garden of Eden: a place of abundance, sanctuary, and bliss—a kind of lost paradise. For me, it represents the nucleus of so many of our cultural, spiritual, and culinary stories, while also suggesting a return—to awareness, to knowledge, to a belonging unbounded by borders or confines, and to a deep devotion to humanity and craft in a world increasingly shaped by greed, violence and dispossession.

For me, ÈDN is a point of departure.

People often ask me where my ideas come from. The truth is, I’ve spent the last twenty years traveling, cooking, researching, and documenting food across West Asia and North Africa. When I began this journey, conversations around cuisine were—and still largely are—framed through national identities. As someone whose work has always been research-led, I deeply struggled with the idea of compartmentalising dishes into fixed national categories. I kid you not: my first cookbook publisher had to drive four hours to collect the manuscript, because I could never feel it was ready, or researched enough. And, yes, there were tears when I handed it over.

The deeper I looked, the more I realised that food rarely conforms to borders. What fascinated me wasn’t what made us different, but what connected us. That curiosity has shaped my work for the last two decades, and ultimately, it led me to ÈDN.

Some of the oldest recorded recipes in the world can be found on Babylonian clay tablets and much of our own nationalistic culinary expressions today find lineage in stories almost forgotten. Curiosity can really remind us how far back our culinary story extends. ÈDN invites us to zoom out, to find strength in our shared inheritance, and to recognise just how deeply our lands have shaped history, culture and civilisation.

ÈDN is a deliberately intimate chef’s table -always in motion- that tells our layered story in chapters across coast, valley, highland, desert, and city, tracing the landscapes and empires that have shaped our foodways.

It then seems only natural to begin the first chapter in The City—my home city Beirut, one of the longest-inhabited cities in the world. I chose the city to begin because cities are where everything converges. Where traders, migrants, people of different social classes, ingredients, and ideas collide. The city is where cuisines are made and remade. Where synthesis happens.

My Table as Synthesis, Not Fusion

Early in my career, I was criticised for taking liberties with traditional dishes because many saw tradition as fixed. I never did. I’ve always been more interested in understanding a dish than preserving it unchanged.

Where did it come from? How did it evolve? What influences shaped it? And what did it influence? What possibilities does it still hold?

Fusion suggests a visible mix of very distinct parts and ingredients; synthesis is slower, deeper, and more fully integrated. It is the long historical process through which cuisines are shaped by trade, migration, conquest, colonisation, climate, ecology, religion, and everyday life, until they form a coherent culinary language rather than a collage of very random influences.

My cooking is always rooted in terroir, seasonality and the historic, rooted themes of this region.

A Kindred Space

To bring this first chapter to life on Friday, June 26, we are gathering within the historic surroundings of Arthaus Beirut.

Arthaus was built on Roman ruins; the stones in this garden are older than the modern city surrounding them. When Nabil and his wife Zoe looked at this neglected family ruin, they saw not a demolition site but a home worth restoring. That’s the exact same instinct as this project: old things, new eyes. Nothing invented—everything uncovered.

Gemmayzeh itself also carries this duality. It is one of Beirut’s oldest streets, but also one of its most vibrant and contemporary. History and the present co-exit without apology. It is in every sense a kindred space.

Through a ten-course tasting menu, we will journey through time, terroir, and ecology via a series of rooted and reinterpreted historical dishes, including:

• City of Many Tongues: A reflection on Beirut’s layered, multicultural identities.

• Sardine Sikbaj: Inspired by one of the region’s most ancestral recorded flavour logics.

• Tabilu: A dish drawing on historic culinary records and centuries of seasoning traditions.

• Halawa, Unwritten: A contemporary reimagining of familiar regional ingredients.

To complete the experience, each course will be paired with expressive, high-altitude wines by Château Qanafar and the table candlelit by artist Sibylle Tamer of Atelier S/Z.

Join Us at the Table

There is nothing quite like launching our very first chapter right here at home. Reservations are now officially open and very few seats remain.

• When: Friday, June 26, 2026 at 7:00 PM

• Where: Arthaus Beirut, Gouraud Street, Gemmayze

• To Reserve Your Seat: contact Arthaus: +961 71 907 160

Let’s gather over food, wine and music, embrace curiosity, and explore our deep, entangled and fascinating culinary and cultural lineage together.

Future chapters will unfold across different terroirs and cities, join the table to be the first to know. And make sure to subscribe here for more in-depth focus culinary and culture focus pieces.

With warmth and defiance,

Ma’ esalama (with peace) مَع السَلامة,

Bethany x

_{NB: If you are a patron of the arts, culture, history, gastronomy, or research and storytelling, and would like to support this work, I would be delighted to hear from you. Opportunities exist to help bring different aspects of this evolving project to life, from research and publishing to dining experiences, cultural programming, and travel. Serious enquiries only.}

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It’s not easy for me to post about my joys, work and experiences while large portions of Lebanon are under heavy annihilation and annexation. My favourite and most frequented places, annihilated and out of reach.

For a long time, I chose silence. Almost three years of one form of self-censoring silence. And the struggle continues.

Drowning in a mixture of personal and collective grief, and shaped by the firsthand experience of my brother’s death and the grave corruption and injustice surrounding it, I have struggled to reconcile my everyday life with the death and destruction unfolding around me.

So I stopped sharing much of my work and life. I struggled to breathe life into many of my projects, particularly Taste Lebanon and Taste WANA — not only because of circumstance, but because I had no stomach to “gloss over” what was happening. I used my voice almost exclusively to confront the devastation surrounding us. Looking back, I think it says a lot about where I was and how much I was struggling to carry.

It took many people attempting to jolt me out of that place. Some advice I welcomed. Some I could never accept, particularly from those whose own silence on the matter remains intact.

But, ultimately, these realisations are something one can only arrive at alone.

If anything, that kind of silence, too, creates the very absence these death squads rely on.

I have been learning to push past my own discomfort. Just as others must push back through the discomfort of confronting what is happening rather than hiding behind platitudes, abstractions, or convenient distance.

This is the Lebanon they are trying to erase.

And I say “Lebanon” as though we stand alone, when the reality is that this violence begins and extends far beyond our borders. The fragmentation of land, memory, history, culture and movement is not confined to one single “nation’.

Many of you who have been in conversation with me over the years will know of my growing discomfort with nationalism as the primary lens through which we understand ourselves, our histories, and our relationships to one another. It is a subject I have been wrestling with deeply, and one that increasingly informs both my research and my work.

In many ways, this journey back to expression is also a journey back through the very tools I know best: food, writing, cultural storytelling, and tracing movement, memory, and the threads that connect us across borders rather than divide us.

I am looking forward to sharing more soon, and against all odds.

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The day I travelled to Al Hauch, several well-meaning people advised me not to go.

“They’re hitting the Bekaa,” they said. But after speaking with Faysal, I realised that going was not reckless. It was necessary. To show up. To insist on life where others are attempting to eradicate it.

This summer, I hope we resist the instinct to retreat entirely into our bubbles of comfort and familiarity. To move through this land and support its people where they need it most. To stand with the places being reduced to headlines and rubble. To refuse whatever form of silence we have wrapped ourselves in. To choose life, joy and solidarity, and expression, no matter how disoriented we may feel, and to fight for them with our voices and our choices.

See you somewhere around Lebanon, and around the table.

Ma’ esalama (with peace) مَع السَلامة ,

Bethany x

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Who is ready to liberate the table—and their minds?

This summer, I am back in the public kitchen.

I will be hosting a series of supperclubs across Lebanon that will challenge your perceptions and disorient your palate 😉

Expect layered narratives, unexpected pairings, regional memory, reinvention, and interventions.

I’ll be leading with terroir and playing with fire, smoke, acid, sun, time, history, and resting easy with contradiction—including a few things your grandmother may not approve of.

These are not nostalgia dinners stuck in a 1947 paradigm.

If you’re interested, join the waitlist, we’ll be releasing our first chapter in the coming week.

As always, thank you for helping to spread the word.

P.S. International Dates: Ibiza and Andalusia are calling—I just need the venue. If you know of any appropriate spaces, or are a hospitality owner looking for a fresh, exciting collaboration, get in touch.

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I once prepared a fisherman’s moghrabieh using a combination of local clams, calamari, and whatever else was in season. It was divine. Don’t take my word for it. Many at the table were transported, except, one person refused it entirely. But this isn’t mograbieh they proclaimed. They couldn’t reconcile it with the moghrabieh they had grown up eating. The standardised. The nationalised version. The “Lebanese” one.

For them, moghrabieh belongs to a fixed canon: pearl onions, chickpeas, chicken, cinnamon, caraway. Anything beyond that is deviation. Corruption. Sacrilegious improvisation. A betrayal of “authenticity”.

But the name tells us a very different story… If only we stop for a moment and lean in with curiosity.

The Lands Where the Sun Sets

Moghrabieh. The larger, chewier cousin of couscous — both born from the same ancient instinct to roll grain into something shelf-stable, accessible and portable.

From Maghreb — the Arabic word for the place where the sun sets, but also for west, rooted in gharb, meaning foreign.

During the height of the Islamic Empire, this referred to the lands of the North African coast — Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania.

Exactly how these rolled semolina pearls travelled east is difficult to prove with certainty. But the routes themselves are not difficult to imagine.

For centuries, North African pilgrims crossed through Bilad al-Sham on their way to Mecca. Trade caravans stitched together deserts, ports and cities across the region. Techniques, ingredients and culinary knowledge always travelled with people — carried for survival, for sustenance, for trade. Food built for movement.

Wild Grass and Pearl Millet

The invention of couscous is widely credited to the Berbers, an ethnic group indigenous to Northwest Africa — peoples stretching from Morocco south to Mauritania. The evidential trail is not without mystery, but it allows us to connect, if not always the grains themselves, then the techniques, the ideas, the intent.

Couscous- or kuskus- is a word born from labour and sound. It draws from an Arabic root meaning ‘to pound small,’ and Berber terms like seksu, meaning ‘well-rolled grains’. More than that, the name mimics the very acoustic signature of its making: the ‘skss, skss’ rustle of raw durum wheat semolina being worked through a sieve to create dainty granules destined to be steamed into something supernaturally light and delectable.

In the mid-14th century, the berber explorer, Ibn Battûta references a grain called fonio in his “Voyage to Sudan” (modern-day Mali). He specified that, in these lands, coscoçoû (couscous) is prepared with white foûni (fonio) which he described is “the smallest of all species of millet” and “like mustard seeds”. Fonio is likely Africa’s oldest cultivated cereal, with a history stretching back over five millennia, its traces found even in ancient Egyptian pyramids.

What this might tell us is not that fonio became couscous, nor that the rolling technique was universally applied to every grain. Rather, the common denominator was a shared culinary architecture: the method of steaming a microscopic grain over a simmering stew to serve as a porous base for a meal. While wheat couscous requires human hands to consciously roll and shape flour into a granule, fonio is a naturally-occurring tiny seed that demands rigorous husking and washing instead of rolling.

The historical confusion—such as Ibn Battûta's labeling of West African grains as couscous—stems from a traveler's tendency to conflate a shared steaming and serving presentation with an identical manufacturing process. And this exposes a persistent quirk of human nature: when faced with the fascinating and unfamiliar, we inevitably rewrite it to fit the boundaries of what we already know.

And here I'd like to push a little further off topic and add, sometimes, there is nothing malicious in this reflex; it is simply the default script behind how we process the world. Yet, it is a crucial truth to keep in mind today when we get bogged down in political rhetoric. If we can pause and realise that history is inherently complex and layered, we might see how frequently we are all guilty of flattening it. We could all benefit from a radical curiosity rather than an 'us against them' rigidity—a mindset that serves us universally, with the vital exception of when a people are facing genocide and active erasure, where boundaries and resistance are a matter of survival. Beyond those lines of existential crisis, if we can recognise our instinct to shrink the vast histories of others into a comforting template, we might finally learn to look closer and see the whole: the similarities, richness and differences rather than trying to make everything fit a neat and tight box

Whatever the grain — fonio, durum wheat semolina, bulgur — the concept, the intention and the ingenuity bind them together. The sun the common denominator.

Ancient Technology

The technique of making couscous, mograbieh and maftoul itself is almost meditative.

You take semolina, or cracked wheat, or bulgur. You moisten it barely, a drizzle of water and oil — in a wide, shallow vessel. Then with your palm, with a circular, patient pressure, you roll. The friction and moisture cause the grains to aggregate, to stick to each other in small, imperfect spheres. You dust with flour. You roll again. The spheres grow. You repeat until you have a tray of pearls, each one slightly different, each one bearing the mark of a specific hand, specific human touch, the maker’s nafas.

Then you dry them. In the sun, historically. On a rooftop, on reed mats. And “suddenly” you have something that will last for months. Something you can cook in broth on a cold night in a village in Lebanon six weeks after making it. Something you can carry across a desert.

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This is ancient technology. Human craft and dedication solving a fundamental problem- how do you make food that is both shelf-stable, fast-cooking, portable and delicious- long before industrial food systems imperfectly solved that problem for us.

And here the journey itself becomes obvious in the shape.

In North Africa, couscous is fine and delicate — rolled from durum wheat semolina into granules barely larger than a grain of sand, light enough to be steamed into something almost cloud-like. But as the technique moved east into West Asia, something shifted. The pearl grew. Moghrabieh is larger, chewier, more substantial — and often made not with semolina but with burghul wheat, known in parts of the Levant or Bilad al Sham as maftoul. A different grain, a different hand, a different landscape. A different nafas.

Perhaps because it arrived as an imported technique rather than an inherited one, it was never rolled quite as fine. Perhaps the available grain demanded a different touch. Perhaps the cooks who received it simply made it their own — adjusted it to what they knew, what they had, what felt right. Whatever the reason, the transformation is written into the pearl itself: you can see the journey in the size.

On Transmission

The rolling-and-drying of pasta — orzo, fregola sarda, pearl pasta — shares a conceptual DNA with North African grain rolling that is hard to ignore. Fregola, from Sardinia, is the most telling: hand-rolled semolina pearls, toasted, chewy, cooked in broth. It looks like large couscous. It eats like moghrabieh’s Italian cousin. Sardinia and North Africa are not far apart. The Arabs controlled Sicily and parts of Sardinia in the 9th and 10th centuries. The vectors of transmission existed.

Influence, of course, is not the same as origin.

And the Berbers, who deserve the credit for the rolling technique, tend to get written out of these conversations entirely. Absorbed into “Arab” or “Islamic” culinary history, their specific contribution dissolved or denied and erased altogether, casualties of a persistent reluctance to acknowledge Africa as a source of culinary innovation rather than merely a recipient of it.

Older Than Borders

The precise genealogy of these grains and techniques remains, and may always remain, debated. But perhaps that uncertainty is the point.

A dish does not need a passport to have a history. And history rarely moves in straight lines.

The Kinetic Plate

Which brings me to a fascination of mine — not so much where moghrabieh came from, but why people become unsettled when it changes.

When the Shami people — the people of modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and the surrounding lands — gave this grain and its namesake dish the name moghrabieh, they were not being poetic or exotic. They were making a precise, declarative statement: this thing came from there. It is not native to us. Until, gradually, the lines blurred. It became native. And on one fine afternoon, it was declared authentic, after someone’s mom made it countless times. Parameters quietly redefined.

This is always how it happens.

The dishes we now call “traditional” were themselves products of adaptation — shifting according to harvests, climate, class, trade routes, economics and personal taste. A fisherman cooks differently from a shepherd. A mountain village cooks differently from a port city. What we call tradition is, at its core, repetition that hardened into habit, habit that began to feel sacred, until we could no longer distinguish familiarity from truth.

This is why the policing of food strikes me counterintuitive. Especially in a region shaped so profoundly by exchange.

Moghrabieh with seafood is no less logical than moghrabieh with lamb, duck, quail or lobster. Tossed with za’atar pesto or muhamara. Peas or spinach in spring. Mushrooms in autumn. Dressed with browned butter and toasted pine nuts. Served as a stew or a salad or something in between. Each version an expression of landscape, season, and the nafas of the hands preparing it. The context of the experience. The grain itself already carries a story of migration, transmission and reinterpretation. It was never standing still to begin with.

Food is a living archive. And every time we cook moghrabieh, we participate in a conversation far older than ourselves.

Couscous is born entirely from movement—the patient, passionate work of human hands. Its Shami evolution, moghrabieh, rolled forward like a scarab ball. Along the way, it gained mass, and absorbed the unique flavours of every landscape it crossed.

The least we can do now is keep it moving

Ma’ esalama (with peace) مَع السَلامة ,

Bethany x

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Ma’ esalama (with peace) مَع السَلامة ,

Bethany x

One of the 20 work-in-progress drafts currently sitting in my Substack is one on the winding lineage of kebbeh—a subject I could write about for days, let alone use as an excuse to eat kebbeh for breakfast, lunch and dinner in the name of R&D. We're not getting to that today.

What we are getting to is this: the beginning of spring means loquat season, and I cannot let it pass without sharing one of my most original and most beloved recipes with you.

Growing up, I never really thought anything could compare with the traditional lamb kebbeh pie—what we call kebbeh bel sayneeyeh, or kebbeh in a baking tray. It felt untouchable. The gold standard. But as I became a professional cook and then a chef, I began experimenting, letting creative curiosity lead the way.

I created Kebbeh bil Akedene in May 2017. It was one of the last recipes I worked on before closing out my manuscript and sending it off to the publisher. By that point, I had already been experimenting with seasonal fruit additions—the now famous and widely copied sour cherry, mahlab and arak flambé kebbeh, which first featured at my Beirut Supper Clubs and then at my Dubai delivery concept DAYMA; and the kammouniyé, apple and rose kebbeh, which makes its first appearance each year on the cusp of apple harvest, between September and October.

So, let’s give akedene a try, I thought one May morning. After all, loquats are perfectly juicy, floral-sweet stone fruit—made for this.

This version takes kebbeh to another dimension, and I assure you I’m not being biased. Kebbeh bil Akedene is certainly one of my top renditions. The contrast is electric: a crisp, flavourful bulgur and fatty meat crust, then—bite—bright, tart loquat juice, caramelised onions, and sumac cutting through all that richness.

This is what happens when you cook seasonally, when you trust your instincts, and when you’re willing to break the rules a little. This isn’t a year-round dish. It’s a moment. An edible reminder that some of the best cooking happens when you work with what’s in season, not against it.

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Watch Me Make It

Over the years, I’ve demonstrated this recipe on national television—both in the UK on Sunday Kitchen:

And in Lebanon on LBC, in Arabic:

Both clips capture different elements and techniques—how to layer, score, and everything in between.

And then there’s this quick video I made ad-hoc yesterday, from home, with whatever was available. It belongs to a series I keep joking I’ll officially release one day: Hayda al Mawjoud—this is what’s available—a love letter to improvisation and necessity, especially in these times.

So, and without further ado- Get your hands on loquats. Now. Check farmers’ markets, West Asian grocers, or orchards if you’re lucky enough to have access. They won’t last long.

The recipe might appear lengthy, but once you’ve made this a few times, you’ll be ready to do it blindfolded.

A Note of Gratitude

To my newest paid subscribers and those who have upgraded their subscription to Founding Members — which genuinely brings tears to my eyes — welcome, and thank you for showing my work such appreciation. This little Substack is growing into something I’m genuinely proud of, and your support — whether a like, a comment, a share, feedback, or yes, a monetary contribution — is what keeps these drafts moving from 20 to one. I don’t take it lightly. More soon.

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A little interlude from the series because it is near impossible to concentrate with a grieving and enraged soul as feral as mine right now.

I want to start with something Valerie Kaur wrote in See No Stranger- because she said it so perfectly, and because it is the spine of everything that follows:

Love, grief, joy, rage. Not opposing forces. Not a hierarchy. A wheel of emotions. And the wheel is supposed to turn.

Now ask yourself: When did you last let it?

Because here is what I believe- and what Eric Fromm spent his life trying to tell us- we are not living in a sane society that has developed some troubling pathologies. We are living in a pathological society that has learned to perform sanity extraordinarily well.

In The Sane Society, Fromm agued that modern capitalism doesn’t just shape our economics. It shapes our interiority. it reaches inside and reorganises what we feel, what we permit ourselves to feel, and most devastatingly, what we learn to stop feeling altogether. Our society is built to reward consumption, not connection. Performance over presence. It takes the feeling wheel, and one trend at a time, one product at a time, one numbing escape or business at a time, quietly brings it to a stop. And it sells a replacement- coloured water, shiny, feels good, tastes like connection. And we take it gratefully.

And we drink it down. Again and again. And wonder why we grow thirstier.

This is the dehydration mechanism at the centre of everything. We are a society that has been sold coloured water for so long, we have forgotten what real, unadulterated water tastes like. What a real connection to life, to reality, to our planet, to each other, actually feels like.

We consume and consume: content, convenience, the curated performance of a meaningful and successful life, confined safety… But the thirst deepens. We don’t realise it because often times, we’re just drinking and drinking the coloured water, at the expense of others.

And when someone points at the thirst- when someone names it, when someone’s rage breaks through the surface of that carefully curated facade- we pathologise them.

They’re too emotional. Too much. Too angry. Too crazy.

We have confused the symptom for the disease.

The disease is the stillness of the wheel. The disease is the daily frictionless, administrative choosing to stop feeling. To not quite see. To settle into the comfort of dissonance. To embrace indifference.

I recently watched a video of a Lebanese woman recounting a story. She is driving through Beirut, the car in front of her keeps stalling. Again and again. She honks. Aggressively. She is irritated, impatient, and already constructing a story about the person in front of her.

Incompetent. Careless. Inconsiderate.

Finally, the car pulls over and a young woman steps out. Shaken. Apologetic.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know where I am.”

She had driven up from the South of Lebanon. She had just been brutally displaced from her home.

In that instant, reality shatters. The irritation dissolves into violent tears. For the women recounting the story. For me.

I want to stay here for a moment. Because obviously this story is not an anecdote about being nicer in traffic. This story is about the entire architecture about how we got here.

The woman honking is not a villain. She is us. But notice what we permit her. We permit her rage at the inconvenience. We understand it. We’ve all been there. A very relatable human moment. What we do not permit, what we pathologies and dismiss and call too much, is the rage at the system that created the displacement in the first place. One rage is civilised frustration. The other is hysteria. One gets a nod of recognition. The other gets excluded from the dinner table.

This is not accidental. This is the curation of feeling. This is the coloured water conditioning you which feeling is acceptable.

Which brings me to the banality of niceness.

Hannah Arendt gave us the language for this. The banality of evil. The way ordinary people become participants in extraordinary harm not through monstrousness but through the simple , daily, decision to stop seeing. To be indifferent. To be preoccupied. To be busy. The ease with which we dismiss, minimise and look away.

In our frictionless composure. In our ordinariness.

But I want to go a little deeper here. Because the people I am thinking about are not the bureaucrats processing weaponry paperwork in a regime. I mean, these people are actually amongst us, we’ve dined with them. They are people I know. You know. Educated, warm, funny, cosmopolitan, hard working, successful, generous with their table, devoted to their children. To their parents. To their siblings. To their friends. People who would be genuinely offended- hurt even, to be included in any conversation about their complicity.

And yet.

Watch what happens when you put the evidence in front of them. Not just facts, but consuming, undeniable, overwhelming evidence. Watch them not quite see it. Watch them retreat into “it’s complicated.” “We don’t deserve this… shu khasna's.” The nationalism over humanity bargaining. The invoking of nuance as a shield. Watch how seamlessly their niceness becomes a processing mechanism- a way of engaging just enough to feel exonerated, without engaging enough to be changed or effectuate any change.

Fromm understood this. The comfortable person is not just failing a moral test. They are the end product of a system that has spent decades replacing their capacity for genuine feeling with the performance of it. Their niceness is not hypocrisy. Or better yet, it is not only hypocrisy. It is the natural output of a dehydrated soul. They have been drinking coloured water for so long they have lost the ability to recognise honest nourishment. Lost ability to let grief in. Lost the ability to let rage clean house.

And so when the wheel should be turning- when the only natural response to reality should be grief and rage, when love itself is demanding to be felt, some instead reach for composure. For neutrality. For civility. For balance. For niceness. All the things a sick society rewards and calls virtue.

Do not mistake your niceness for kindness.

Kindness requires seeing. It requires disruption. It requires being willing to let the wheel turn even when it turns towards grief, towards rage, towards the shattering of your very own comforts.

Niceness is what you perform when you have confused your comfort and luck for merit, rather that seeing it for what it is- the numb contentment of a dehydrated soul drinking coloured water that is bought at the cost of someone else.

And in that confusion- in that daily, well-mannered, cosmopolitan confusion- genocide inches closer and closer. Not because the nice people wanted it. But because enough of them, for long enough, chose to drink the coloured water. Chose to stay locked in numbness of the feeling wheel. Chose the emotions and stories that cost them nothing…

Or so they think.

Here is what I need you to understand.

You are already paying.

Not abstractly. Not eventually. Right now.

You are paying in the anxiety that no productivity hack can resolve. In the numbness that absorbs you after enough scrolling. In the persistent, low-grade, impossible- to- name feeling that something is profoundly wrong, that the life you have carefully constructed and dreamt up, is somehow completely starving you. You are paying in your children’s mental health. In the epidemic of loneliness inside the most connected society in human history. In your own body. In the cancers that grow in the silence of suppressed grief.

This is what dehydration of the soul does. It does not announce itself. It creeps in. And it makes you reach for more of the very thing making you thirsty.

Meanwhile, the circle widens. The war that pauses combusts again. Closer. Broader. louder. That madness is inching in more and more. That displaced woman in the car becomes a statistic, becomes an abstraction, becomes a scroll, becomes a reel between dinner and dessert.

And here is what the dehydrated soul whispers from behind its comfortable door…

But why? What did we do to deserve this?

You keep drinking the coloured water. You chose the stories that “cost you nothing.” You do not look at what your comfort protects, what your niceness is built on.

But the cost is knocking at your door. You don’t need to open it to let it in. At some point, it will simply take the door down.

So take back your permission.

Your grief is not weakness. It is the price of love. Your rage- this arresting, feral, all-consuming rage at what is being done, at what is being enabled, at the coloured water being sold as civilisation- it is not instability. It is not excess. It is not something to manage or moderate or balance with niceness and civility. It is the force that protects what is loved.

The truly heartbroken will rage. The people brave enough to stop drinking the coloured water long enough to sit with their grief and let rage clean house will rage. These are the people that are going to help steer this world to a safer place. It’s not the nice people. It’s not the composed. It’s not the people keeping the “peace.” Because on the other side of grief and rage is not breakdown. It is repair.

The rage of nations going to war- met with flags and anthems.

The rage of leaders ordering strikes- called strength, called resolve, called leadership.

The rage of markets, of borders, of military machinery- institutionalised, funded, celebrated.

But the rage of the person watching it? The rage of the displaced woman who doesn’t know where she is? The rage of the ones who loved what was destroyed?

Hysterical. Crazy. Too much. Too political. Too emotional.

This is not accidental either. The machine needs your wheel still. It needs you drinking the coloured water. It needs your grief sedated and your rage pathologised because a world of people whose wheels are turning - who are grieving and raging in full, disciplined, loving fury - is the only thing it actually cannot survive.

So yes. Rage. Rage. Rage against the murderous machine.

Not enough people are raging. And the ones who are- who have put down the coloured water long enough to feel the full weight of what is happening - are being told they are the problem.

They are not the problem. They are the only solution. EN MASSE.

And I want to be clear- I am not writing this from the other side of it. I struggle with this too. I reach for the coloured water. I go numb. I doom scroll when I should be present. I perform composure when I should be feeling. I let the rage paralyse me. I let the rage consume me. This is not a prescription from someone who has it figured out. This is a note from someone feeling completely helpless. From someone in the middle of it, trying to find the discipline, trying to keep the wheel turning, trying to choose the harder and more honest thing on the days when the coloured water is right there and it would be so easy to just drink.

Rage, like love, requires discipline. Not to tame it. Not to make it quiet. Not to make it comfortable, or safe or palatable to for the dinner table. But to make it directional. Dangerous in the right way.

It is loud and messy and inconvenient and necessary.

It is the discipline of holding conflicting and opposing truths at once, and refusing to let that complexity collapse into the relief of a simpler story.

The discipline of rage is the most loving thing you can bring to a world on fire.

It asks: what am I protecting? What needs to change? What am I going to do about it?

And the answer is always smaller and more immediate than we expect.

It begins with the person in front of you. With the story you choose to tell about them. About this world you are inhabiting. With the conversation you stop avoiding. With the money you redirect. With how you use your platform. With the silence you refuse to perform. With the decision to no longer mistake your composure for virtue.

Disciplined rage is not a revolution you join. It is a practice you begin. Today. In your choices. In the moment you put down the coloured water and feel, fully, what is actually happening. That is where it starts.

Disciplined rage is not nice. But it is kind.

Remember. The price of keeping the wheel still is not paid once. It is paid daily. In the numbers. In the loneliness. In the business and misplaced priorities. In the quiet, persistent feeling that you are living adjacent to your own life rather than inside it. And it is paid collectively. In the widening circle. In the war that keeps combusting closer. In the world that we are handing our children.

The price of love is grief. But the price of indifference is everything.

The wheel was always supposed to turn.

Let it.

It’s the only thing that will tear this system down.

Ma’ esalama (with peace) مَع السَلامة ,

Bethanyx

The irony as I hit publish is that we are living through a moment of dangerous escalation. The escalation and amnesia continues across the Gulf. Iran shows no signs of abating, while the United States and Israel continue to operate in a state of full psychosis. Mass evacuation orders have now been issued across southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs. Military infrastructure across the region is being activated in ways that move far beyond isolated conflict.

These are the mechanics not only of a regional war, but of a global one. This is not clickbait. It is not abstraction. It is the reality unfolding around us.

And while many of us are quite literally running for our lives, it is precisely in moments like this that the stories societies tell themselves matter most.

In that sense, it is both the worst possible time to publish these reflections and, perhaps, the most necessary time.

This essay is dedicated to my late brother, Eli. He was a critical thinker with a deep commitment to law, politics, human rights, and to understanding Lebanon beyond its myths. His idea of “nationalism” was civic: a belief that people deserved rights, responsibility, accountability and rather than slogans. I write in conversation with him — to make sense of things, imagining the questions he would have pushed, the arguments he would have sharpened, the histories he would have chased with me.

The Third Zone

I am what is often called a Third-culture kid. But even that label feels too neat for what was, in reality, a life lived in the in-between.

I grew up on the periphery- in a third zone that was always searching for its own vocabulary. A space defined not by geography or borders but by a persistent and overwhelming feeling of not fully belonging. Anywhere.

Born in the United States to an American1 mother of German-Irish lineage (and the privilege of a US passport) and to a Lebanese father who had left his homeland as a student during the Lebanese civil war. I was raised for the overwhelming majority of my life in Lebanon, jolted between two countries, two legal systems, two flags, and two competing definitions of “home”.

My mother believed, with a loud certainty of someone raised inside it, that the United States of America is the land of freedom, order, and democratic virtue. The “land of yes.” The civilised, humanist centre. The dream. The benchmark.

My father, by contrast, carried the fierce imprint of upheaval and the complex interplay of colonial oppression and impression. His compass pointed firmly toward his homeland, the land, his deep ancestry, and by the political anxieties, sovereignty struggles, and nationalist currents of civil war-era Lebanon. And to him, for as long as I can remember, America was no one’s friend. A corrupted nation where everyone is nothing but a number, enslaved to a system and war-waging doctrine.

No less absolute. Only differently framed. But one certainly resonates today. 2

As such, my existence was suspended between two powerful and often competing belief systems and a no-so-quiet tug-of-war between two parents, two different flags, two different definitions of "home", and which country is more sanctified. Between them, I was not simply moving between countries. I was being shaped by two different mythologies of what makes a place legitimate, liveable, even superior. Two atmospheres.

Global Nomad.

My unsettled existence did not end in childhood. It has followed me into adulthood. Into (various parts of) America again. Into (various parts of ) the United Kingdom. Into Dubai. Different flags. Different tones. Different performances of order and virtue. But the same underlying choreography. Each place convinced of its coherence. Each certain of its own stability. Each carrying its own version of exceptionalism.

I have lived a nomadic3 life. Perhaps that sounds enviable in modern days with the “global nomad” as a lifestyle brand. But I have also seen the other side of the unsettled. I have seen forced displacement, born of war and divorce in my younger years and then in my adulthood of the financial crisis, covid 19 and the Beirut Blast’s shattered glass. Even as I acknowledge my own privilege— an ecosystem of family to fall into, a beloved aunt and a safe home in Dubai to land that welcomed me with dignity when the ground in Beirut literally and economically dissolved beneath my feet. The feeling of grief, loss, disruption is indelible. The trauma engulfing. You can have a soft place to land and still suffocate. And also question it.

There is a vast, jagged difference between moving because the world is your oyster and moving because your world has been blown apart.

The modern world has created a hierarchy of wandering. We celebrate the global nomad while shaming the immigrant. We aestheticise movement for the few and criminalise it for the many.

The Atmosphere of Exceptionalism

We treat the nation-state as the ultimate prize. As if it were ancient. Fixed. Sanctified by soil and blood. What we rarely interrogate is the rhetoric that keeps that belief intact. Every nation, large or small, ‘democratic’ or autocratic, cultivates some form of exceptionalism. A narrative that reassures its citizens of their uniqueness, their stability, their moral clarity, their immunity from the failures of others.

In liberal empires, this appears as the language of freedom and democratic virtue. Elsewhere, it is expressed through institutional continuity, civilisational distinction, economic insulation or hyper-stability— sometimes accompanied by the suggestion that criticism itself is destabilising. The form differs. The mechanism does not.

Exceptionalism is seductive because it offers psychological shelter. It replaces nuance with certainty. It converts vulnerability into pride. But it is also precarious. It depends on repetition and reinforcement. On narrative choreography. On selective remembering and selective forgetting. And, in some environments, on the quiet discouragement of dissent.

History offers no shortage of examples. American exceptionalism frames the United States as uniquely virtuous and necessary for global order and human rights. The French mission civilisatrice cast empire as a moral duty to “civilise” others. Zionist narratives ground the legitimacy and expansion of their entirely illegal state of apartheid and ethnic cleaning in a singular historical destiny myth. In Lebanon, exceptionalism is often rooted in elusive Phoenicianism and the internalisation of French civilising discourse. In parts of the Gulf today, stability, safety, and prosperity are often framed as proof of exceptional governance insulated from the turbulence of the wider region, while the political and security bargains that underpin that stability remain largely unexamined. The form differs. The mechanism does not.

Unquestioned exceptionalism produces intellectual blind spots. A structure built on unexamined superiority depends on silence to remain upright.

Power, order, prosperity or prestige may indeed be tangible in the short term. But the promise of invulnerability is a myth, particularly when moral cost is backgrounded and bargains go unscrutinised — stability resting on unexamined fault lines.

When critique becomes risky, the narrative consolidates. Not because people lack intelligence, but because systems reward alignment and penalise disruption. Over time, repetition settles into common sense.

Once common sense shifts, reassurance delivered through image and performance begins to substitute for structural reckoning. Visible strength — military, economic, institutional or civilisational — is quietly mistaken for immunity.

Atmosphere does not argue. It surrounds. That is not stupidity. It is comfort.

Comfort, when reinforced by atmosphere, can be more powerful than evidence.

Resistance narratives, particularly those forged under occupation, sanction, or siege, do not emerge from the same structural position as imperial exceptionalism. They are often grammars of survival rather than superiority. Yet even survival can sediment into sanctity. When resistance becomes untouchable, when critique is framed as betrayal, when the language of defence ossifies into permanent moral monopoly, the architecture can begin to resemble what it once opposed. The origin differs. The mechanism can converge. A narrative born to dismantle domination may, over time, internalise the very architecture of the nation-state it seeks to undo.

No narrative and no nation deserves immunity from interrogation.

I learned this not in theory, but in the space between many flags.

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Navigating Nuance

In moments of crisis, we have a duty to interrogate our assumptions and challenge our absolutist beliefs; to choose every word with care and thought. In these times, nuance is essential. Because the one true constant is that reality is a collusion of chaos and order. And therefore navigating nuance is the antidote.

Cognitive dissonance is one of the most powerful forces shaping public discourse. Coined by psychologist Leon Festinger, the term describes the discomfort we feel when our core beliefs collide with reality. When that tension appears, we rarely abandon the belief. Instead, we weave a story that allows the contradiction to coexist. That is cognitive dissonance: it is not stupidity, but psychological self-protection.

But it has consequences. When societies refuse to confront contradictions, they construct narratives that require collective amnesia, lazy slogans, and tropes to survive.

Some dogma is easy to adopt because it arrives wrapped in glitz, glamour, and the aesthetic of the future. It doesn’t need to be intellectual; it just needs to look successful. It claims to be a new way of living, but it is often just ancient dogma draped in the empire’s cloak—and we are failing to see it. We mistake the shimmering facade for progress, and in our rush to belong to something that looks this good, we stop asking what lies beneath. We defend the ‘vision’ because we’ve fallen in love with the view.

There is a difference between appreciating your country and idolising it. No nation should ever be defended absolutely. Nations are political constructs built of institutions, interests, and shifting alliances; they are capable of great achievement and deep contradiction simultaneously. Gratitude for home and country is understandable; blind, absolutist defence is not. Because when loyalty becomes absolute, thinking stops. Criticism is rebranded as betrayal, and complexity is replaced by slogans. Dogma ensues.

Responsible citizenship—true patriotism, rather than nationalism—requires us to reject blind, absolutist defence. It invites accountability where nationalism shuts it down. It is the willingness to examine our own systems with clarity and nuance, even when the answers are uncomfortable. It is the courage to be open and honest about that discomfort.

You can admire and defend what a country has achieved and still question its alliances. Especially when you do so for other countries.
You can value stability while acknowledging the trade-offs or bargains that created it.
You can support a society without defending every action taken in its name.
A country can offer opportunity, comfort and belonging while still requiring our honesty. We must refuse the idea that gratitude requires a vow of silence, a forgetter of our conscience.

Respect for one’s country and its leadership does not require the suspension of thought.

That is not disloyalty. It is intellectual honesty. This is patriotism.

We have conflated what it means to be a citizen, to build a nation, and to be a patriot. We have forgotten that the highest form of loyalty is not a salute, a meme, a slogan, but a question.

Before the nation

And before the city… Badia; The “beginning” of everything…?

Bādiya (بادية) in Arabic refers to the open steppe and desert fringe beyond the cultivated zone, often associated with the “Syrian” steppe, Bādiat al-Shām. The term derives from the root b-d-w (بدو), a semantic field linked to openness, exposure, and life in the uncovered lands. It sits linguistically adjacent to bidāya (beginning) and is related to badā (to appear, to emerge). It is also the root of the English term Bedouin.

In the Arabic imagination, the bādiya is therefore not simply empty, uninhabitable desert or sahra’ صحراء but a zone of emergence. A frontier. A horizon. A liveable and lived space. A foundational and enduring mode of habitation characterised by mobility, fluidity, pastoralism, and seasonal movement that long predates the fixed territorial logic of the modern state.

By contrast, the ḥāḍira (حاضرة), from the root ḥ-ḍ-r (حضر) meaning to be present or settled, denotes the towns and cultivated zones: the world of enclosure(s), permanent architecture, formalised administration and the archive. In modern usage, the term’s derivative ḥaḍāra (civilisation) often carries an implicit aura of progress and refinement.

Yet classical Arabic sources frequently frame ahl al-bādiya and ahl al-ḥāḍira not as civilisational opposites but as coexisting ecological and social formations, bound together through trade, seasonal movement, and cultural exchange, despite both often tending to look down on each other (and which Ibn Khaldun crystallises later in his writings.) Here I will share excerpts from Jan Retsö, formidable book, The Arabs in Antiquity, chapter 4, p. 113, which he inturn excerpted from the Classical Arabic dictionary and Encyclopedia, Lisan al Arab.

“. al-Layth said: bādiya is the name of a land (ʔarḍ) where there are no settlers (ḥaḍar) and when people go out from the ḥaḍar to pasture grounds in the desert (ṣaḥārā), you say that they qad badaw. The noun is badw.

2. Abū Manṣūr said: bādiya is the opposite to ḥāḍira. The ḥāḍira are people who live by waters and put their camps at them in the summer heat. When the season becomes cold, they leave these waters and badaw, i.e. [begin] to look for pasture. The people are then bādiya after having been ḥāḍira … The places to which the bādūn go out are also called bādiya.

3. He (Ibn Manẓūr) said: the ʔaʕrāb, living in the bādiya, belong to the ʕarab who do not dwell in fortified towns (ʔamṣār) and only enter them for business.

He (Ibn Manẓūr) said: the ʕarab are the people of the fortified cities (ʔamṣār), and the ʔaʕrāb among them are especially the dwellers of the bādiya.

The Lisan further quotes the Hadith: He who badā, has escaped, run wild, i.e. settled in the bādiya and has acquired the uncivilized manners of the ʔaʕrāb.”

Other quotes taken from classical poetry and other works, listed on P. 17:

“She belongs to the baduw, she is not among the ḥḍiriyyah.”

The ḥaḍir, the people of the Mountain [of Shammar] remained but as for the badyih, they emigrated to Mesopotamia.”

My eyes shed their water; Ninety nights’ sleep did not delight them; I am looking for medicine for them among ḥaḍar and bidwān.”

I will further touch on this dynamic and the etymology and identity of “Arab” in a future post, but I want to really highlight this important and ancient dichotomy now and will likely revert back to it many times.

Ibn Khaldun and the Power of ʿAsabiyya

In the 14th century, the North African scholar Ibn Khaldun identified what he believed to be the true engine of human history. Not monuments, not the stone walls of cities, and certainly not borders. The force he identified was ʿasabiyya (عصبية).

Derived from the root aʿ-ṣ-b, meaning “to bind together,” ʿasabiyya describes the social cohesion that allows a group to organise, defend itself, and act collectively. It is the glue that turns individuals into a political force.

It is not ideology. It is not doctrine.

It is the living bond of the group. But what is exactly is that group?

In Ibn Khaldun’s framework, it is not a nation, an ethnicity, or a passport category. The group is formed through shared obligation and mutual dependence. It may begin as a tribe, a clan confederation, a religious movement, a military coalition, or even a political faction. What defines it is not territory but cohesion: the recognition that survival, power, and dignity depend on standing together.

Membership is therefore relational rather than bureaucratic. It grows through proximity, shared struggle, economic cooperation, and loyalty to a common cause. Outsiders can be absorbed; alliances can expand the circle. The boundary of the group is not drawn on a map but revealed in practice: who stands together when survival or power is at stake.

Khaldun observed that this cohesion was often strongest in societies living beyond the comforts of the city. Communities of the bādiya developed powerful internal bonds because survival depended on cooperation and mutual defence. He saw history as a cycle: the high-energy, raw Asabiyya of the Bādiya eventually flows and settles in the city, where it becomes “softened,” institutionalised, and eventually stagnant.

The city offers comfort and civilisation. But over time it erodes the very solidarity, the nerve, that built it.

The modern nation-state did not invent solidarity, but it captured and redirected the ancient human impulse toward collective belonging. What Ibn Khaldun described as ʿasabiyya — the living cohesion of communities bound by mutual dependence — was gradually reorganised by modern states into something more rigid and institutionalised: nationalism.

The modern nation-state represents the most complete administrative enclosure of this urban order. It did not invent belonging; it standardised and governed it. The electric, shifting pulse of the bādiya was compressed into the jagged geometry of borders. What had once been a living network of relationships across landscapes was reorganised into a frontier: a line on a map that now determines where you may move, belong, or exist.

Mobility became instability.
Layered identities became suspicious.
Fluid solidarities were forced into passports and categories.

In doing so, the state reclassified our mobility as instability and our layered soul and nuanced thoughts as a threat. It offered us the “safety” of the cage in exchange for a vow of silence. Our loyalty. It commodified belonging, into a subscription service.

But when living solidarities are manipulated and narrowed, something else takes their place. The same root that produces ʿasabiyya also produces taʿaṣṣub (تعصّب)—blind factionalism and ideological fanaticism. Where genuine cohesion once emerged through shared responsibility, modern politics increasingly manufactures belonging through rigid identities, lines in the sand, and absolute loyalties.

We often imagine this dynamic only at the edges of political life—in the hardened dogmas of movements such as Zionism, Wahhabism, or evangelical fundamentalism. Yet the same logic operates far more quietly within the structures we consider normal.

In many ways, the modern nation-state can be understood as the institutionalisation of taʿaṣṣub. The living bonds that once tied communities together through shared obligation are redirected toward loyalty to a flag, a border, and a national myth. Wrapped in the language of prosperity, progress, modern success, so-called sovereignty. This narrowing of solidarity is celebrated as civilisation itself, appearing virtuous rather than dangerous.

The paradox of the modern world is that the deeper bonds that once held societies together have been weakened or captured, while louder and more aggressive forms of identity politics have multiplied.

The sorting machine of the modern world is beginning to glitch precisely because it attempted to confine and lobotomise ʿasabiyya. It mistook the glitz of the city for a benchmark of success, identity, and safety—confusing spectacle with stability and comfort with belonging.

To tell the truth about who we are beyond flags and marketing, we must step outside that machinery. Beyond the empire’s cloak.

Back into the badā—the open, unvarnished beginning where belonging was never confined to a border or reduced to a container of identity. A place where one could come and go, as needed, as dictated by the seasons.

Because the truth is not found in the archive of the state.

It is found in the living human bond that remains when the machinery finally breaks.

That is ʿasabiyya.

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If ʿasabiyya reveals how humans bind themselves into communities, the next question is obvious: what political containers have historically organised that cohesion?

For most of human history, belonging did not flow through nations. It moved through a wide variety of political forms: tribes, city-states, caliphates, empires, confederations and trading networks. To understand how recent and contingent the nation-state really is, we need to travel back to the earliest experiments in organising power.

Gods, the Granary, and the City-State

Set the chronometer to dawn in the lands of Sumer and Akkad, between the Tigris and Euphrates. Here, we are usually told, the first small, stratified, tax-collecting city-states rise from the mudbrick plains, born of crop domestication and the management of surplus. The familiar story writes itself: farming produces the granary, the granary produces hierarchy, and hierarchy produces the state.

Or so the civilisational script insists.

Recent scholarship, most notably David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, urges a more complicated reading. Large, seasonally dense settlements, complex trade networks, and sophisticated social differentiation appear in some regions long after the earliest domestication events, and in others, forms of hierarchy and administration seem to predate fully agricultural lifeways. The sequence is far less linear than the textbook ladder suggests.

Which raises the uncomfortable question: was farming the inevitable engine of political complexity, or something closer to a Faustian bargain that gradually locked certain societies into more rigid forms of extraction, taxation and control?

This is where our political vocabulary begins to betray our historical amnesia.

In classical Greece, the polis was the basic unit of life: a compact community of citizens, laws, shrines, marketplaces and quarrels, ringed by its fields and villages. It was a legal and ritual world, not a flag.4 From this word comes politics itself.

Later thinkers reached for a broader term: polity. A polity is any organised community with institutions, rules, and a capacity to act together collectively – whether a city-state to a sultanate, a caliphate, an empire or a federation.5 The modern nation-state is only one species within this far older and more diverse political ecosystem, not its inevitable culmination.

That matters. If we remember that humans have always lived inside many kinds of polities, the nation loses its aura of inevitability and perhaps exceptionalism. It becomes what it is: a recent experiment in organising loyalty, territory and bureaucracy, not the natural or perhaps even best container of identity and human belonging.6

To see this historical flexibility in practice—to see a sophisticated form of belonging that isn’t rooted in flags or birthright—we turn to the ultimate example of a state built on status, not natio: Rome.

In Rome, You Were a Citizen, Not a Nationalist.

Let’s take a caravan ride back to Rome.

If you were a Roman, you were a civis7, a citizen. That title wasn’t just a label; it carried real weight: full legal rights, political privileges, and even a say in the assembly. In contrast, the vast majority of the empire’s population were peregrini8, free non-citizens. The word comes from peregrē; meaning “abroad,” literally “through the fields” or “across the lands”, and is the root of the English word pilgrim. Peregrini kept their local laws and customs but stood outside the full protections of cīvitās or Roman citizenship. It was a pragmatic system for managing a vast, multi-ethnic empire, but it left no doubt about the hierarchy: citizens above all; not all citizens equal.

Crucially, Romans thought in status9- the latin for “standing” and the ancestor of our word State with a capital S. (I will return to the word’s widening meaning later). Jurists sorted persons by liberty, citizenship, and family; your standing decided what you could do and what could be done to you.

Meanwhile, natio (pl. nationēs, from nascī “to be born”—ancestor of “nation”) named peoples/tribes: an ethnographic label, not a legal status like peregrinus. Writers often used it with a barb of foreignness, sometimes even barbarism. In practice, many peregrinī were described by a natio—“a peregrinus of the natio Syria10,” say- but the categories aren’t the same. Cicero sharpens the contrast with nationēs exterārum gentium (“foreign peoples”), drawing the line Romans loved: natio as otherness; civis as belonging. Over time, particularly as the Roman Empire declined, the word civitas came to refer to the physical urban center itself. This is the root of the English word “city” through Old French. 11

Over centuries, pathways opened: citizenship could be earned through military service, granted by favour, or decreed by the emperor. Eventually, Caracalla’s edict of 212 CE extended citizenship to nearly all free inhabitants of the empire, dissolving much of the old divide.

To become a civis was to change your legal status from peregrinus to citizen. Your natio-an ethnographic tag- might still be mentioned, but citizenship detached belonging from birthplace: a man from Hispania or Syria could be civis Romanus. The real divide was never strictly ethnic; it was legal.

Simply put, the civis was protected. The peregrinus was not.

Here’s the paradox. Rome built belonging without nationalism or even democracy as you’ll soon find out. This was not nationalism in the modern sense12. There was dominant culture and thick civic pride—romanitas, SPQR13, the imperial cult, the proud “civis Romanus sum”—but no sovereign Nation claiming the State.

Roman citizenship functioned as an imperial tool: extend privileges, co-opt elites, stabilise frontiers, keep the machine together. Power sat with rulers and institutions, not an abstract People. Separate empire from nation and the “ancient nationalism” line falls apart.

Ancient Rome built a scalable legal status that it could extend, grade, and eventually nearly universalise (212 CE).

That’s not nationalism. That’s Empire.

Despite this clear imperial structure based on legal status, modern narratives often mistakenly claim Rome as the origin point of our modern democracy or nationhood.

However, history tells us otherwise.

“DEMOCRACY” IS NOT A “WESTERN” INVENTION

Democracy is often invoked as the ultimate legitimising principle of modern political power, and frequently as proof of the moral and institutional superiority of “Western” political traditions.

The word itself derives from the Greek dēmokratia: dēmos (the people) and kratos (rule or power). In its simplest form, democracy refers to a system in which political authority ultimately derives from the collective body of citizens rather than from monarchy, aristocracy, or divine mandate.

Yet the historical reality behind this familiar origin story is far less tidy.

Even Rome, whose political vocabulary still shapes modern states through words like Senate and Republic, was never democratic in the modern sense. The Roman Republic functioned largely as an oligarchic system in which political influence remained concentrated among elite families and institutional offices.

The common narrative that democracy emerged uniquely in fifth-century BCE Athens also requires qualification. Classical Athenian democracy excluded women, enslaved people, and resident foreigners; political participation was limited to a relatively small portion of the population.

More importantly, the idea that collective governance began in Greece ignores earlier and parallel traditions of deliberative decision-making across the ancient world.

In Mesopotamia, literary and administrative sources describe assemblies of elders and councils of fighting men consulted by rulers during moments of political crisis. While historians debate the precise authority of these bodies, they nevertheless reveal traditions of collective deliberation long before classical Athens.

Across the Atlantic, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy developed sophisticated council systems through which multiple nations deliberated collectively on diplomacy and governance.

These examples do not suggest that democracy existed everywhere in its modern form. Rather, they reveal that participatory governance is a recurring human political experiment, not the exclusive inheritance of any single civilisation.

The desire for collective decision-making is far older—and far more geographically widespread—than the tidy civilisational narratives that often claim it.

Yet this raises a deeper question.

If human societies have repeatedly experimented with participatory governance, why do such systems struggle to endure at large scales?

The Limits of Scale

If the earliest of human societies have repeatedly experimented with participatory governance, a deeper question remains: why do such systems rarely survive at large scales?

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar offers one possible answer.

Dunbar’s research on primate social structures suggests that humans can maintain stable social relationships with roughly 150 people—a threshold now widely known as Dunbar’s Number. Beyond this scale, personal familiarity, trust, and reputation become increasingly difficult to sustain without formal institutions.

In small communities, cooperation can be maintained through direct relationships and social accountability. People know who contributes, who defects, and who can be trusted. Governance emerges organically through discussion, reputation, and shared obligation.

But once societies grow beyond that cognitive threshold, institutions must replace relationships. Bureaucracy replaces familiarity. Law replaces reputation. Administration replaces solidarity.

This tension exposes a deeper paradox at the heart of modern political systems. Democracy promises rule by the people, yet the scale of modern states makes direct participation by “the people” practically impossible. What emerges instead is a layered structure of representation, bureaucracy, and administration that governs in the name of the public rather than through its continuous participation.

The language and mechanics of popular rule survive, but in practice they become increasingly indirect. Decisions are filtered through institutions, political elites, and administrative systems that stand between citizens and power.

This distance and manipulation becomes most visible in moments of profound moral consequence—questions of war and peace, surveillance and privacy, migration and border control, sanctions, or humanitarian intervention—where public opinion often struggles to translate into meaningful restraint on state power.

In this sense, Dunbar’s insight echoes Ibn Khaldun’s theory of ʿasabiyya. The strong social cohesion that binds small communities together becomes increasingly difficult to sustain as political structures expand. Large and by their nature, settled states therefore rely less on living bonds and more on systems of administration, hierarchy, and ideology to maintain order.

And where those institutions are weak, fragmented, or captured, older forms of social cohesion often reassert themselves in different ways.

Lebanon offers a striking contemporary illustration of this dynamic. The country’s political system contains a dense constellation of sectarian parties, militias, patronage networks, and communal organisations, each sustained by its own internal solidarities. These factions function, in many respects, as parallel centres of loyalty and protection.

In Khaldunian terms, each possesses its own ʿasabiyya.

The result is not the absence of cohesion, but its fragmentation. Rather than consolidating into a single civic solidarity anchored in the state, social bonds remain distributed across multiple overlapping communities. The political order becomes a negotiation among competing solidarities rather than the expression of a unified public will. Under such conditions, the promise of large-scale democracy becomes structurally difficult to realise. The institutions of the state are expected to govern millions, while the deepest loyalties of citizens remain organised through much smaller networks of trust and obligation.

When these solidarities are manipulated or hardened into rigid identities, ʿasabiyya can mutate into taʿaṣṣub—narrow factional loyalty that prioritises the survival of the group over the stability of the polity itself.

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From Natio to Nation(alism) and the Nation-State: How Enlightenment Europe turned “the people” into the sovereign.

Now, jump into the time machine and exit in Enlightenment Europe.

This is where nation stops naming outsiders and starts naming an insider collective with a claim to rule. The French Revolution blows the doors open, but the groundwork is broader: Scottish moralists, German historicists, and French republicans all help recast “the people” as the locus of sovereignty. No king, no divine right; the civic body claims the throne. The nation ceases to be a birth tribe and becomes a political we. This is less a reversal of Roman usage, so much as a radical repurposing; nation shifts from marking “foreign peoples” to the foundation of belonging, and the State (capital S) hardens from what Cicero called the status14 rei publicae (the “condition of the commonwealth”) into an impersonal sovereign “it”, not a human ruler. Let’s walk through that shift.

• 16th–17th centuries: theorising the State. Think Machiavelli’s lo stato / l’État rather becomes a political domain under a prince’s control rather than a king’s body. Jean Bodin (Six Books of the Commonwealth, 1576) codifies indivisible sovereignty; later Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) casts the State as an artificial person. State moves from condition to a mechanism of rule.

• 1648—Westphalia15: the diplomatic habit. States recognise each other, police borders, and preach non-interference. Westphalia standardises the container; it does not yet fill it with a sovereign Nation.

• 18th century: people enthroned. Enlightenment arguments about rights and the general will relocate legitimacy to “the people”. American (1776) and French (1789) revolutions operationalise it: constitutions, citizens, and the nation in arms; flags, anthems, and rituals that train subjects into citizens.

• 19th century: sentiment becomes administration. The nation-state becomes the default container for freedom, liberty, democracy and sovereignty: territory gives the “we,” borders legitimise it, bureaucracy enforces it. The toolkit is administrative and universalising—press (print capitalism), maps, mass schooling, conscription, citizen armies, censuses, standardised languages, railways, museums, and national ceremonies.16 Rights are coupled to duty. Fly the flag, draw the map, write the anthem, brand the cuisine, wear the colours, and you are made a citizen of the nation-state.

And so what began as a Roman word for outsider—natio—becomes the cornerstone of modern belonging: nation. The outsider’s tag turns into the thing we are told to fight for, die for, and cook for. In Europe, The nation-state and modern nationalism1718 are born.

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And here, I want to make an important distinction: Nationalism is not Patriotism.

Nationalism is an ideology, not just “love of country or homeland”. That’s patriotism; an attachment and affection to place and people that can still allow for criticism, reflection, and discourse.

Nationalism is something else entirely. It is a political project. It imagines a Nation, demands loyalty to it, and builds institutions, borders, and narratives to police who belongs and who does not.

It also polices loyalty itself. Within nationalist frameworks, even questioning can be treated as dissent; criticism is recast as disloyalty, ingratitude, or betrayal. The dissenter is no longer treated as a citizen participating in public life, but as someone whose loyalty is questioned and whose voice must be contained.

This dynamic is hardly confined to one place. It appears across many political systems. In some countries dissent can carry severe consequences, including imprisonment. In others, public life encourages a highly curated and performative patriotism where criticism of the state remains socially or legally constrained.

As Benedict Anderson famously argued, the nation is an “imagined community.” Hannah Arendt warned how easily such imagined communities can harden into exclusion. George Orwell captured the distinction bluntly: patriotism is defensive; nationalism is power-seeking19.

Nationalism demands unquestioning loyalty to the nation. Patriotism demands responsibility toward it and the freedom to question it.

And Then Nationalism Turned Combustible.

As Europe invented the modern nation-state in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it also became the first laboratory of its dangers—though this does not mean conflict is unique to the nation-state.

Once political legitimacy became tied to the idea of a singular nation, borders became existential and identity became weaponised. Language, ethnicity, religion, exceptionalism, ta3assob and myth were mobilised to define who truly belonged and who deserved a life of dignity, or a life at all.

The spark came in 1914.

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo triggered a regional crisis between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. But Europe had already become a dense web of competing nationalisms, imperial rivalries, and rigid alliances. Industrial capitalism had intensified the competition, fuelling arms production, economic expansion and imperial ambitions that made conflict increasingly combustible.

Once mobilisation began, diplomacy struggled to keep pace with the machinery of war.

Within weeks, a conflict that began in the Balkans engulfed much of the world.

The twentieth century revealed the full volatility of this system.

Two world wars—driven by rival nationalisms, imperial competition, and industrial power—nearly destroyed the continent that had produced the ideology in the first place. Entire populations were displaced, and genocides unfolded under the banner of national purification and civilisational struggle.

And yet the model endured.

The nation-state became the dominant political container of the modern world, replicated across continents and legitimised through the language of “sovereignty.” That language promised order, stability, prosperity and self-determination. Yet “sovereignty” has often functioned as something else: a shield behind which power operates, and a flag under which violence can be justified.

Today we are witnessing, in real time, the most documented and expanding genocide in history—the ultimate culmination of the nation-state’s violent logic. But this horror reveals a deeper deception: true sovereignty is largely an illusion. We are trapped instead within a modern system of empire, a global capitalist project fronted by the United States and Israel, where the ‘nation-state’ is merely a mask for imperial management.

Nationalism has effectively disoriented our reality. It has convinced us that freedom, liberation and prosperity can only exist within the narrow, rigid confines of the state. In doing so, it has forced a devastating trade-off: we justify politics over morals, and “national security” over ethics. We have been conned into choosing the short-term survival of a political unit over the actual survival of our species.

In our desperate reach for stability and the colonial projection of prosperity we flirt with the devil. We build walls against the “other.” We vilify and marginalise the oppressed.

We have lost sight of the forces that engineered the instability we live in and continue to fear. It is an ingrained structural feature of the system we have internalised, leaving those same powers free to shape our futures with the flick of a switch.

And so, we cling to a model that offers a false sense of safety while driving us toward collective ruin. We are choosing the icons of nationalism over the deeper civic responsibility we owe one another, trading our humanity for a flag, and our future for borders the empire has already redrawn.

Our layered histories, languages, foodways, lineages and long-established trade networks remember something wider.

The question is whether we will allow ourselves to remember it too.

The next essay will examine how nationalism—and the borders that sustain it—were exported into West Asia, reshaping the region in ways whose consequences we are still living through today.

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Knock. Knock. Well. That was some radio silence. I have missed you and this wonderful, much-needed platform.

Finally, here is the second instalment in the long-promised- I don’t know how many parts- series on authenticity, curiosity and gastro-nationalism, touching heavily on nationalism, sovereignty and fossilisation which is still very much in the works. Ever since writing about authenticity and curiosity last June, I have been deep in the weeds researching, cross-checking, and, admittedly, disappearing down more rabbit holes than is probably healthy.

Over the past few years, I have been studying the cuisines that circle the Mediterranean basin with West Asia as the nucleus. What keeps revealing itself is just how different culinary history looks once we loosen our grip on modern borders, nationalist tropes, and “memory.” There is a formidable shared culinary world waiting to be rediscovered.

Today, let’s begin somewhere deceptively simple: Hummus, Mutabbal, and Tabbouleh.

A quick aside: Substack is complaining that this piece is too long for email. It all must be said. So, if the text suddenly cuts mid-sentence, click through to the website or app. I promise it’s worth it.

If you have my second cookbook, The Jewelled Table, you will have come across the essays I dedicated to the topic, titled Will the Real Hummus Please Stand Up, Who Gives a Toss and On The Tabbouleh trail. I recommend them as additional reading. I also highly recommend as additional reading to this, the excellent recent piece on the state of Italian gastro-nationalism by Emiko Davies.

The Grammar of the Table: Mutabal as an Active Verb

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I’ve been a little quiet on here, for good reason. More soon, inshallah. One of the reasons is that the authenticity series is very much underway; I’m distilling months (and years) of research into something clear and useful. You’ll see why it took time when I hit publish. At least, I hope so :) I’ll also intend to share some recipes and a few mouneh processes next of what I was up to the last month or so.

It’s no secret I’m obsessed with preservation—what I call “ancient technology”—especially kishk and jameed; criminally underappreciated and under-utilised, wildly versatile and whole-heartedly nourishing. If you are curious or as obsessed as I am, come join me as I host a hands-on session workshop at Dubai Design Week: Survival by Design: Sun, Salt, Time, how our ancestors engineered and designed food to last with three simple forces: sun, salt and time.

We’ll explore kishk (salted yoghurt + cracked wheat, sun-dried), Jameed (salted and sun-dried curds from churned buttermilk) and discuss maleh (salted fish) as part of Gulf foodways, with light demos and tastings.

When: Tuesday 4 November 2025, 3:30–6:00 pm
Where: Maker Space, d3 (Dubai Design District)
Seats: Limited — register via this link

If you can’t attend, I’ll share the discussion and a follow-up guide for paid subscribers with recipes and applications. If you’d like that, hit subscribe below.

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Thank you, as always, for your patience and support. I’m very moved to share that I’ve received my first founding member subscription—it genuinely touched me. If you’d like to support, there are many ways: share with a friend, hit like, subscribe (free or paid), or join the conversation in the comments.

Ma’ esalama (with peace) مَع السَلامة ,

Bx

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Time flies. Seven years ago today, following the success of my first award-winning cookbook, The Jewelled Kitchen (2013, Watkins), my second book, The Jewelled Table, was published internationally with Hardie Grant. On paper, it had everything: a bigger publisher, creative agency, more original recipes, beautiful photography, a growing international fan base, and an established reputation.

It’s also important to bear in mind that at the time, I was one of the few voices in what was still an unsaturated market. There were the so-called dinosaurs, for example the late Greg Malouf, Claudia Roden and Anissa Helou, few realise how much the work of early bloggers, authors, writers, and cooks did to democratise the space for today’s voices. Back then, earning respect and recognition was hard; we didn't have the power of social media to cut through the gatekeeping yet, though blogs paved the way.

Nevertheless, by doing the work, I became a good candidate for the kind of career publishers and media love to manufacture. In fact, I was already well-poised for that hyper-capitalist trajectory, with first-to-market plans on several book ideas, a nation-wide supermarket range, restaurant(s), and all the shiny trimmings.

But, The Jewelled Table, was never just about recipes, becoming the next “Ottolenghi” or fitting into the capitalist “Chefdom” wheel… at any cost at least. It was, and still is, a manifesto: challenging lazy tropes, rejecting erasure, debunking Western myths and bastardisation, resisting hyper-nationalistic food wars and reductionist histories born of our own internally colonised mindset, and insisting our stories belong on our own terms and in our voices.

Also, commercial publishing has its boxes, and there was only so much that could be pushed. For example, I was already bristling against labels like “Middle Eastern” that flatten WANA foodways and fall into detached colonial terminology. (Note: I was also pushing against “Levantine” and understood on the surface that it was a colonial misnomer, but I had still not fulfilled any in-depth research where I could vocalise it as I do here.) Still, I pushed.

In doing so, I discovered who the camouflaged Zionists were. I ‘lost’ followers, industry supporters, media opportunities, (Zionist) fans, and “legitimacy” in the eyes of Western gatekeepers.

I’ll admit, I haven’t always capitalised on social media, and that plays into the bigger picture too. But I’m choosing to be kind to myself - the last five years have been difficult globally and personally, while I’ve been navigating a less commodified path rooted in research, context, and dismantling the system. That’s meant disruption and halted projects- some I’ve spoken of, others still under wraps - from TV to restaurants to supermarket shelves. Some never saw the light of day because they no longer aligned, others collapsed through narrative clashes, political instability (like Taste Lebanon/Taste WANA), or sheer logistics (DAYMA). And yes, some through my own misjudgements (DAYMA as a delivery concept being one). None of this is about excuses. Whether it’s missed visibility, speaking out against the settler colony, or projects that stalled, it’s simply the reality of doing this kind of independent “entrepreneurial” (a word I’ve grown to hate) work.

Don’t get me wrong: I still believe in profits, and I charge a fair price for my work. Some may think it’s too much, and that is precisely the point. My prices reflect value, sustainability, and the refusal to undersell myself or my region’s heritage for the sake of appeasing a market that has long extracted from us without acknowledgment. That’s alignment.

I have learned and grown profoundly since 2018, and I have come to see clearly that I no longer wanted to partake in that framework. And while I have never fully confused market validation with substance, value and meaning, over the last seven years, I have come to understand the immense privilege and importance of alignment. It costs you, but the reward and growth are immeasurably worth it. And today, with everything going on in our world and region, more so.

I have never been one to give up and I have not been abandoning nor have I been failing; I have been aligning. And alignment takes time, patience, and a lot of sacrifice and perseverance. You really do have to absolutely love, adore, be obsessed and immersed in what you do to survive the lows. And I believe that shows dedication and commitment. The dignity and honesty of my work, the depth and truth it gives me and gives back to the world, is what inspires me to keep going.

Our region, our food, and our stories deserve better than that. The future of our gastronomy and hospitality lies not in mimicry or tokenisation, but in intellectual rigour, cultural honesty, and the courage to resist senseless commodification.

The future of our gastronomy deserves courage, not compromise. If you feel aligned with that, reach out.

Ma’ esalama (with peace) مَع السَلامة ,

Bethanyx

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This is a heavy post. This is a heavy day. So much to hold, so much to say.

Three years without you, precious Eli. In the physical.
Because you are very much alive in our hearts and minds.
Your name is still called out loudly, every single day.

Three years without your laughter,
that body-shaking chuckle,
your way of caring for people so naturally, so gently.
Your diplomatic instincts.
Your love for life, food, friends and family. Gatherings and celebrations.

Three years of remembering the warmth of your love,
the generosity of your spirit,
your humour, your intelligence,
the revelatory way you saw the world.

Three years of remembering your voice.

You deserved to grow old.
To keep creating, to keep giving.
You were such a big part of the thoughtful change
our country and world needed-
out of corruption, out of bigotry, out of colonialism.

And yet, the greatest irony remains:
you, who stood bravely against exploitation and corruption, paid the ultimate price at the hands of imperial criminals: the France-Afrique mafia.

This is colonialism’s legacy. It stole and ruptured our lands, our livelihoods, and it stole you from me, from us, from Lebanon.

Yes, all death is incomprehensible.

Yet some deaths bear a heavier shadow -
cloaked in injustice, foul play, unaccountability, atrocity.
Yours was one of them.

Three years on, we continue to seek truth, justice, accountability. Until our last breath.

We know that’s what you would have wanted.
What you would have done for any one of us. Because justice must be pursued to stop further crimes, to stop further lives being stolen.

As new investigations into the Perez network unfold -
kidnappings, fraud, embezzlement, corruption
stretching from France to Gabon to Switzerland -
I return again and again to the shadows around your death.

Medical records withheld. Files disappearing.
Diagnoses shifting with every question we asked.
Delays in giving you life-saving antibiotics,
even when we flew them in overnight.
Our efforts to airlift you obstructed at every turn.

The so-called “brother” who lured you to Gabon-
whose first words in that despicable message were “he was poisoned” vanished onto yachts, partying, lying about his whereabouts and circumstances while you lay in a coma. Others came forward to say you had been poisoned- and then disappeared. Until finally, even the FBI summoned me to New York, because there was simply too much shadow, too much contradiction surrounding your death.

The truth has a way of surfacing. Slowly but surely, piece by piece. And these new allegations only confirm that nothing about your death was coincidence.

As anyone living with grief knows, it doesn’t get easier.
In truth, it grows heavier. Especially, when you are left navigating a labyrinth of lies.

As the cushioning of shock and disassociation fades,
grief pierces viscerally right to the bone.

There are days I feel I am being pulled into a black hole,
swallowed whole by void, anguish, despair.
Days I want to scream myself into oblivion. I keep going because carrying you forward is the only way.

So no, grief doesn’t get easier.
We just learn how to carry it.
Shifting and merging with it.
Talking about it, despite the taboos.

We are left to carry you in memory,
in every story retold,
in every person whose life you touched,
in every stand we take against colonial legacies,
exploitation, corruption, and death squads.
In every truth we share.

They say grief teaches patience.
I am not so sure.
But it does teach you how to sit with the heaviest kind of fury.

Time will unravel all truths.
Until then, we remember.
We carry you forward.
We wait for justice.
We sit with our grief.
We sit with our fury.

And we speak aloud,
for you, for ourselves,
and for the voice you were denied and for everyone whose life was cut short at the hands of greed, colonialism and empire.

I love you Eli. I am proud of you. I miss you. No words can capture this feeling we are left with. I will speak you to life everyday of mine.

Ingredients

• 200g fresh or frozen mulberries, strained (reserve the juice)

• 300ml mulberry juice

• 1 heaping tsp Dijon mustard

• 2 tbsp honey

• Juice of 2 lemons (adjust depending on the acidity of your mulberries)

• Salt and pepper, to taste

• 100ml olive oil

• 4–5 ice cubes

Method

1. In a blender, combine the mulberries, reserved juice, mulberry juice, mustard, honey, and lemon juice.

2. Season with salt and pepper, then drizzle in the olive oil slowly while blending, until emulsified.

3. Add the ice cubes and blitz again - this chills the dressing quickly and gives it a light, frothy texture.

4. Taste and adjust: more honey if your berries are tart, more lemon if you want extra sharpness.

Check out a photo-essay on mulberry here.

Ma’ esalama (with peace) مَع السَلامة ,

Bethanyx

Mulberries, toot in Arabic, are one of my favourite summer harvests. A sort of stubborn fruit, in the sense that it stains everything it touches; hands, lips, tongues, shirts, counters, vessels, memories. It’s nature’s graffiti. Toot doesn’t show up quietly, and it doesn’t leave quietly either. It lingers.

For all its unruly colour, it’s a fragile fruit. It collapses within hours of being picked, unless you move fast- eaten straight from the branch or traditionally into a syrup, a jam, a molasses or dried for winter.

Mulberries have always left their mark. Their leaves fed silkworms, and their silk by-product subsequently fed empires, from Persia to the Ottomans. Our family’s land, was once thick with mulberry groves, before they were uprooted in favour of longer-lasting apple harvests. Today, only a scattering of ancient mulberry trees remain, dotting the land, relics of another era.

And they come to life in my kitchen in more ways than the ubiquitous syrup. Most often as a vinaigrette- fermented or not- their sweet and sour juice brightening up almost any kind of salad, even in memorial dishes like the one I made at Cook for Beirut in memory of the Beirut Blast tragedy.

Sometimes it’s just a handful scattered over sourdough labneh toast, folded into my labneh mousse dessert, drizzled over bouzet haleeb or whipped into a mulberry & rosemary butter (need to revisit that one again).

Other times, we slip them into Arak (yes, we’ve been doing this long before it became a trend ;), into spritzers and more recently into kombucha with lavender. I have also fermented them with salt and sugar for deglazing and marinades or dehydrated and taken them with me to Dubai, sometimes then ground to dust to finish a dish at special events, adding its signature unruly lustre. I hear they can even be turned into wine, a sort of mead, though I’ve yet to give this a try. Perhaps next year. How else do you use mulberries?

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Our mulberry trees may be fewer now, but they are the most beautiful stains of my summer. The only thing that makes me move with urgency in the kitchen, so that not a single berry goes to waste. A fruit never taken for granted.

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Toot / Mulberry Dressing

Ingredients

• 200g fresh or frozen mulberries, strained (reserve the juice)

• 300ml mulberry juice

• 1 heaping tsp Dijon mustard

• 2 tbsp honey

• Juice of 2 lemons (adjust depending on the acidity of your mulberries)

• Salt and pepper, to taste

• 100ml olive oil

• 4–5 ice cubes

Method

1. In a blender, combine the mulberries, reserved juice, mulberry juice, mustard, honey, and lemon juice.

2. Season with salt and pepper, then drizzle in the olive oil slowly while blending, until emulsified.

3. Add the ice cubes and blitz again - this chills the dressing quickly and gives it a light, frothy texture.

4. Taste and adjust: more honey if your berries are tart, more lemon if you want extra sharpness.

Stay tuned for my other seasonal favourite, and namesake- the (house) fig. Bethany is often traced back t its semitic roots, most poetically be beit-el-teen or house of fig. Though it’s actually a lot more entangled than that :) Much like the histories of nationalism, sovereignty, and authenticity, themes I’m deep in research and writing and hope to have more on soon. Till then…

Ma’ esalama (with peace) مَع السَلامة ,

Bethanyx

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Maraheb,

It’s been a little quiet here- but not for lack of things to say or cook. I meant to get this wrap-up out to you sooner- well, by the end of June. But here we are. As always, there’s been a lot stirring beneath the surface- some of it creative and exciting, some logistical and existential, and some… well, a sharp, not-so-sweet crumble.

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One of the deeply personal projects I’d been quietly working on didn’t unfold as hoped. The vision was clear, the groundwork solid, everyone aligned… but the stars? Nope, other plans. These near-misses have become a rhythm I know all too well. And while they’re maddening, they’ve also become refining. They have forced clarity and tested my conviction. I laugh- not without crying-that maybe I’m just getting all the evil-eye energy out of the way in one go!

This is the reality of the entrepreneurial path- especially when you’re building in a region where vision often outpaces infrastructure, or defaults to copying the latest success rather than betting on what’s truly original and needed. Political destabilisation is a mainstay. And deeply informed creative work is still struggling to be properly valued.

The dining scene, while full of potential, is still maturing. It often celebrates social dining at the expense of cultural depth and anchoring, confusing spectacle for substance.

Nothing about this process is linear, especially when you’re building something that refuses to fit the mould- not for the sake of being avant-garde, but because it dares to ask more of the experience.

Truthfully, there are days I question the path. I’ve (half) joked about moving to Ibiza (the agro-tourism culinary scene!!) or Sri Lanka. But I’ve also learned that doubt is part of the process- especially when the work is this personal. What I do know for certain is: I’d rather be in this than out of it. Because I care. Deeply. Obsessively. And despite the stumbles, I’m still building. I’m still here.

So thank you- for staying on this journey with me, and for your support. Some of you have been along for the ride since the very beginning- nearly two decades now. That means more than I can say. And hamdella, I’m exploring what the next phase could look like- with the right support and alignment. More soon, enshallah.

In the meantime, I’ve been (slowly) continuing work on the essays that build off the authenticity piece- which, in case you missed it, started here: The Curious Case of Authenticity. I’d really love to hear what your perspective is and I’m really looking forward to deepening the conversation.

There are now five essays in the works. And by “in the works,” I mean open word docs, scattered notes, and an ever-growing web of thoughts with zero clean endings. But we’ll get there. Eventually. Maybe. Hopefully. 😂 Anyway, I’m now in Lebanon for the rest of the summer as Dubai scorches. And there’s nothing like fresh mountain air in the land of my forefathers (no humble brag, but yes- my great uncle Mikhail Naimy, and my grandfather too) to get the juices flowing again. There really is something about that Baskinta air. We’ll wait and see :)

I also re-shared this piece I had written and published on Taste WANA last year on the term Levantine. If you’ve ever felt confused about regional terminology (or inherited labels that never quite fit), this one’s for you.

I stopped using “Levantine” years ago and here’s why: It doesn’t mean “from the Levant.” In fact, Levant itself is a Eurocentric invention- a vague geographic placeholder used by colonial powers to describe the Eastern Mediterranean through their own lens.. It historically referred to Europeans- merchants, missionaries, diplomats, living specifically on the coastal enclaves of Bilad al-Sham. Not the indigenous population. Sometime, early on in the last 76 years (ahem), it got reappropriated, and now it’s casually thrown around as a catch-all identity. But should we be using it just because everyone else is?

👉 Levantine or Shami? Reasserting an Indigenous Identity

What else you may have missed:

I have also published a few seasonal recipes, ingredients and stories you may have missed if you're only subscribed via email:

• 🌾 Freekeh: The Original Smoked Grain
  Survival, fire, resilience, and how this ancient grain still carries all three.

• 🍆 Batenjan Makdous
  Baby aubergines stuffed with walnut, garlic, and pomegranate. Pantry magic!

• 🫙 Loubieh Makdous + Video
  Green beans, preserved the old way. Crunchy, garlicky, bold. Summer stashed in a jar. 🎥 Watch the video here

• 🍝 Pasta Sharmatesca
  A tribute to my Makdous obsession - sharp, sultry, and perfect for when you want something comforting but not boring.

And finally, I’d love to hear from you - what seasonal dishes or ingredients are calling to you right now? What would you love to see in the next recipe drop?

Reply to this email or leave a comment - your cravings shape what comes next (almost).

Ma’ esalama (with peace) مَع السَلامة ,

Bethanyx

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