Dear Slow Food friends,
One of us has been killed in Gaza.
His name, Emad Asfour.
Here’s what Slow Food founder, Carlo Petrini wrote.
As for me:
One power it would seem is to use my social media and blogging to express a strong conviction that the methods and outcome of Israeli military might in Gaza, and Palestine, is definitively wrong. And encourage others to do the same.
I didn’t know Emad Asfour, but when someone dies– killed by a bomb– and that someone shares things with you, you grieve.
I have tried to think through what’s happening in Gaza this past month through the lens of a cookbook called The Gaza Kitchen, and the work of Zaytoun, a Fair-Trade local-produce company working to ensure UK markets for Palestinian produce.
Through all the death, destruction, carnage, uprooting– I’m also thinking a little about the small gardens people plant, the rabbits, the bakeries, the aquaculture ponds, the trees they nurture– lots of these projects are likely destroyed too. Aspects of daily life, daily eating, daily growing, daily hope. Underneath rubble.
Kitchen Counter Culture 
I share your sense of helpless rage. Every loss of life in this wretched situation is a senseless, appalling waste, but it is so sad to learn that someone has been lost who was clearly doing so much to build and promote his culture and his community
It seems so senseless. Normal people who want to make a living and provide the best for the families living in an area that is ravaged by eons of destructive conflict. One day I pray that our friends will realise that they are one community.
Yes. (And thanks for checking in.)
Very sad – the loss of a good man, a man who took care to protect and cultivate his culture and ways of food and agriculture. Made me think of this poem. RIP, Emad.
The Seed Keepers (The Palestinian Poem)
Burn our land
burn our dreams
pour acid onto our songs
cover with sawdust
the blood of our massacred people
muffle with your technology
the screams of all that is free,
wild and indigenous.
Destroy
Destroy
our grass and soil
raze to the ground
every farm and every village
our ancestors had built
every tree, every home
every book, every law
and all the equity and harmony.
Flatten with your bombs
every valley; erase with your edits
our past,
our literature; our metaphor
Denude the forests
and the earth
till no insect,
no bird
no word
can find a place to hide.
Do that and more.
I do not fear your tyranny
I do not despair ever
for I guard one seed
a little live seed
that I shall safeguard
and plant again.
Annie thank you for keeping your focus on this. That you are Jewish (not sure if its fair to point this out) makes it more significant. One feels so helpless and it is a great thing to use whatever angle you have to draw attention to it (yours being food).
Reblogged this on Thought + Food and commented:
Reflections on war and food….
Where is hope?
May he rest in peace. Thank you for honoring his memory here.
It is a good thing to attach a face, name and story to deaths like this. I grieve for him and all those who are suffering and dying, and I’m angry at the complicity of my country in this.
And thanks to Meg for sharing the beautiful and poignant poem.
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