A Middle Eastern Food Fight

photo by David Rubinger

Fighting words. A Lebanese gentleman wants to sue Israel for trying to steal its cuisine. "In a way the Jewish state is trying to claim ownership of traditional Lebanese delicacies like falafel, tabouleh and hummus" says Fadi Abboud, president of the Lebanese Industrialists Association. (An industralist? Shouldn't he be more worried about car tires than tabouleh?)

I decided to test the case of true ownership in Jerusalem's Old City. Yes, I confess. I was hungry. Follow the old Roman flagstones down the Via Dolorosa, past the two Armenian photo shops and the stalls selling everything from radical Palestinian kaffiyehs (Made in China) to dodgy 2nd Temple oil lamps, and you'll find Lina's, which makes the best hummus in all of the Holy Land.

So, who invented hummus? I asked the owner, Ghalib Zahdeh. Was it the Lebanese or the people of Palestine? (Let's face it; hummus wasn't exactly a favorite of the Ashkenazi Jews who flocked to Israel from Middle Europe. They brought recipes for gefilte fish and stodgy dumplings.)

“Who cares?” replied Zahdeh with a shrug. “Everybody makes good hummus around here –-except the Egyptians.”

He put a few plates of hummus on our table. There were puddles of pale-green olive oil on a mound of mashed chickpeas, garlic, a squeeze of lemon juice, and sesame seed paste. It was topped with a sprinkling of finely diced green peppers, and it was scrumptious.

Zahdeh, who runs Lina's with his brothers, only has five or six tables, but on weekends he'll serve 300 people, with a line snaking down the Via Dolorosa. Food archeologists, if such an outlandish profession exists, should be able to tell us if the Jerusalemites of Christ's day were eating hummus. Back then they certainly had chickpeas and all the other ingredients, except maybe lemons which were an exotic import from India that only ritzy Romans could afford. “Everyone comes to eat here… Arabs, Jews, tourists, even Americans,” said Zahdeh, interrupting my Biblical reverie. “My kid eats hummus two times a day, and look at him,” he said, pointing to a strapping teenager. “He's very healthy.”

I reminded him of the gauntlet thrown down by the Lebanese. So, I asked, “Who does hummus really belong to?”

“Look,” Zahdeh replied magnanimously. “If the Lebanese want the title, they can have it. Not worth fighting over it.”

Nations have gone to war over a woman, a bad roll of the dice, even the outcome of a football game. So why not over a chickpea-based condiment? I guess we're not that crazy, not yet.

by Tim McGirk/Jerusalem