Beans!

Food culture across oceans

For the past handful of weeks, I’ve been eating the food of Palestine, experiencing daily-life food culture. On the farm, we were served lunch by the Palestinian family: usually a rice & lentil dish, some stewed or roasted vegetables (carrots, beets, eggplant, summer squash, onions, peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes were all common themes), pita-style bread (khobez in Arabic), hummus, lebneh (yogurt), and a chopped salad with lettuce and tomato and cucumber. Top it all off with a generous sprinkle of za’atar and you’ve got a meal to rely on!

Meat’s expensive in Palestine (as it should be everywhere, in my opinion), so we didn’t eat that on the farm. The chickens and ducks did provide us with a steady stream of eggs that we took advantage of for breakfast or dinner most days. And I had a couple really excellent foraging moments on the farm! One of my first days there, I was clearing weeds out of the greenhouse when a few electricians came by and told me, with the help of a translation app, that the weeds I was clearing were a delicious edible kind, by the name of khobezeh (malva pusilla), so I harvested a bunch, and cooking khobezeh with a little bit of onion and a squeeze of lemon became part of the volunteer culture. Then, one of my last days on the farm, we were walking around the rainy muddy farm with a couple Scandinavians from the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program of Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), and one of them noticed a mushroom and identified it as the edible Field mushroom, Agaricus Campestris. After taking a spore print to make sure of the identification, I made a delicious breakfast with some wild mushrooms!

A harvest of khobezeh

A glorious edible Field mushroom!

For the last couple weeks I was traveling around Palestine with a German Mennonite group, meeting with their partners and learning so much more about different dynamics around the country. We ate a lot of the most classic travel food: falafel sandwiches. It’s like the taco of the Middle East, in that you can put anything and everything in a falafel sandwich! Red cabbage salad, tahini, hummus, baba ghanoush, cucumber tomato salad, sometimes spicy stuff, and even sauerkraut at an Israeli falafel place. We were also treated to some classic dishes like cabbage rolls, stuffed zucchini, and stuffed grape leaves. Gotta love stuffed nuggets of food!

The oldest of the Nassar brothers, Dhaher, had just been visiting his son’s family in the U.S. when I arrived on the farm, and he had brought some seeds home with him: beans! Regular old phaseolus vulgaris, the species of snap beans and dry beans most common in the U.S. He brought them to me, the resident vegetable farmer, and asked me to plant them, since he had no experience with these beans. And that’s when I realized: regular old beans are foreign to the Middle East!

All the phaseolus species are native to the Americas, and didn’t exist in Europe, Asia, or Africa before 1492. Dhaher wanted me to plant the beans right away, because it’s the rainy season and that’s when you plant chickpeas, lentils, and fava beans, the Middle Eastern staples. What he didn’t know is that beans need a soil temperature of at least 55 degrees F to germinate well, and the rainy season doesn’t provide that. So I held out and told him I wasn’t going to plant them until the ground warmed up, even though they’ll need to be watered by hand at that point, and even though I would’ve had a great time planting beans. I left a note for future volunteers about the vegetables I did plant (beets, kohlrabi, and kale), and instructions for planting beans when it gets warmer, so I hope the trans-Atlantic seed-carrying brings a harvest!

I’m on my way home now, making a stop in Paris to visit my brother’s family before flying back to the Midwest. Yesterday, Ben took me to a Peruvian restaurant for lunch, where I ate beans and potatoes, and afterwards to a Latino market across the street. What a comfort to see shelves full of hot sauce, corn products, and beans, and to be spoken with in Spanish, a language that I’m actually capable of conversing in! I was surprised by an awareness of my greater-American-ness, even a slight sense of belonging, or solidarity, in this Latino grocery store in Paris.

I’m excited to come home. Back to my kitchen where I can explore recipes that I experienced while in Palestine and use za’atar abundantly, yes, and also where I can cook beans for tacos and grind home-grown corn. My curiosity about growing chickpeas, lentils, and favas has been piqued, but this spring, after the soil’s warmed up, I’m eager to plant some good old beans in gratitude for familiar food culture and the land where it comes from.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

I’m proud to be part of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Each Sunday, Julie Gammack shares a roundup of articles that collaborative members have written in the past week. Check out the most recent roundup, here.