If you are interested in the culture, politics, ecology and economy of food in Palestine, may I recommend FoodJusticePalestine, a quite remarkable website curating diverse articles and voices from around the web on many aspects of eating and growing there.
Had I been following this site earlier, I might have been aware, for example, of the neoliberal trade context that makes Nutella a normal part of life in occupied territories, despite an initial dismay, elucidated for me by Aisha Mansour in this article. I’ve also come to question my own assumed unequivocal support of fairtrade products from Palestine, a movement that is well intentioned (and so much about solidarity) but needs to be examined in terms of issues of food sovereignty at the broadest levels.
“International fair-trade companies have also decreased Palestinian self-sufficiency. These companies offer local farmers a slightly higher price for their products than the price in the local market, but the real price of this practice is that high-quality local (baladi) produce is removed from the local market and sold to the global market at much higher prices. This has increased inequalities in Palestinian society, creating a minority of wealthy businesspeople, and leaving an entire population with low quality, imported food.”
There’s much more on this Tumblr site – articles about foodways, Permaculture, trade deals, land rights and more. In fact it brings together so many aspects of how and why food is interesting to me. So I wanted to share it on my blog. Have a look and fall into a rabbit hole of fascination… You don’t need to join Tumblr to view, but joining means you can follow people and ‘scapbook’ your own posts.
Kitchen Counter Culture 
Thank you for the recommendation for Food Justice Palestine.
It is salutary to realise that Fair Trade can skew local availability.
“high-quality local (baladi) produce is removed from the local market and sold to the global market at much higher prices”
OUCH. How can this be remedied? Perhaps, global trade laws should be fair, right from the start, for all countries.
Yes! Good idea! 🙂 And also remembering to keep looking at ourselves and what we assume to be true, and not close off to contrary ideas….
Thanks for sharing this. We try to direct source food we don’t grow ourselves but with certain things (coffee and tea especially) we have to rely on third party certifications, even though we know they’re problematic (we aren’t certified “organic” by the USDA for example and most of the products that are come from large scale corporate industrial operations). It’s difficult to shop ethically when the buyer and seller are separated by third parties.
Fabulous, thanks for sharing!