Bread in Palestine
On damper, saj and thinking of others.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter presented in partnership with BurgerFuel. Written by me, Lucinda Bennett.
Much of my childhood was spent in Australia and so many of my cherished food memories are located there. Much like Aotearoa, defining Australian “cuisine” is a complex task, but there was one quintessentially Australian food that I loved: damper. Bread so simple a child could – and did – make it, just flour, salt and water pinched together until a dough formed. Usually made on Scout camps, we would then wrap this dough around sticks and toast it over the flames like marshmallows. When the outside was crispy and golden, it was time to unravel the bread and douse it in golden syrup, the soot and sugar turning fingers dark, sticky and delicious.
Damper is bread at its most basic, just flour, water and heat. All around the world, people combine these three things to create something simple, miraculous, sustaining. Not just damper but tortilla, matzo, roti, bataw, bannock, crepe, arboud, arepa, tortilla de rescoldo, lavash, the Eucharist, elemental, life-affirming moons of cooked dough. As artist and baker Lexie Smith (aka Bread on Earth) pointed out recently in The New York Times, this simplicity is why bread is so venerated, because in times of devastation and war, bread can “…keep people alive until the world order settles back into something more humane.”
In besieged Gaza, starving Palestinians have revived traditional cooking methods to bake saj – an unleavened flatbread cooked on hot metal dome of the same name – eating the thin bread without syrup, butter, jam, mostly without meat, eggs, onions, vegetables of any kind. Even before October 7, 65 percent of Gaza’s population was food insecure, and as has happened in times of war since time immemorial, bakeries were early targets. With little else but flour available, UN officials reported that around one month into the siege most Palestinians were surviving on two pieces of saj a day. Six months on and systematic blockades have seen people grinding animal feed into flour to make bread they can barely chew, sorting through dirty rice to salvage clean grains, scouring the ruins of their bombed homes to find flour half spoiled by rainwater. Last week, over a hundred starving Palestinians were killed and at least 750 injured while waiting for aid trucks in a horrific attack that has been dubbed the Flour Massacre. Bread can keep people alive, but they are being killed in pursuit of it.
In her essay Bread & Salt, Palestinian-American artist and cook Amanny Ahmad traces bread back to where it all began, to Palestine. She writes, “It has been 14,000 years since the oldest bread (that we know of) was fire baked on hot stones by my Natufian ancestors, a remnant of which was found only recently in an ancient hearth in the area now called the Levant.” Wheat has been harvested, ground and baked in Palestine for several thousand years, long before the Abrahamic religions emerged. Ahmad continues, explaining how the remains of that ancient hearth can be seen as “a precursor to the tabun oven, which itself evolved into the communal oven and gathering space of Palestinian village society.”
In war-torn Palestine today, where there is bread baking, people still gather. In a video posted from Gaza City on Tuesday, Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda spoke to families fleeing starvation, but not everyone she met was evacuating. Lining the street were people staying in Gaza City, families making bread to feed those arriving hungry and malnourished from the north. With hands covered in flour, a huge mixing bowl in front of him, a man tells Owda: “We give them bread. We make sandwiches: mortadella, hummus and whatever… I’m just trying to do good.” A woman with an uncooked disc of dough draped over her arm explains how “little children come running from the bridge for the bread… they race to the bread. It’s like a dream for them”, echoing the words of a young father evacuating with his three sons who described a loaf of bread as “a child’s dream.”
Bread is a dream, but it should be one that is easily fulfilled. While writing this newsletter, I sat in a bakery café and watched people arrive empty-handed and leave with brown bags and hot coffees. A mother and teenage daughter ordered hot cross buns with butter. Two pregnant women were served plum Danish pastries which they cut in half, trying to preempt the inevitable mess when flaky Viennoiserie meets teeth. On my phone, I re-read Mosab Abu Toha’s essay, My Family’s Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza, which ends with a description of a friend from Gaza arriving to his home and eating the grains of rice dropped on the floor during dinner. Finishing my own pastry, I dabbed my finger against my plate, refusing to waste a single buttery flake.
This newsletter was inspired in part the poem Think of Others by the great Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008).
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Weekly bites
Hungry people can be found everywhere and Aotearoa is no exception with an estimated 15 to twenty percent of our population impacted by food insecurity. Without a meaningful strategy being put in place by our government, community groups are stepping up to fill the gap with initiatives like Guru Nanak’s Free Kitchen serving a once-a-month community meal run by Sikh volunteers from across Tāmaki Makaurau. Speaking to The Spinoff’s Shanti Matthews, one diner said “we’d be starving without people like this” while another — a young, pregnant woman recently arrived in Auckland and living on the streets – explains how hard the lack of choice can be, both as someone who prefers vegetarian food and is suffering morning sickness, highlighting the way poverty robs people of the right to express individual needs and preferences.
Meanwhile, Associate Education Minister David Seymour this week confirmed that Ka Ora, Ka Ako – the government-funded lunch programme provided to about a quarter of schools in Aotearoa – is under review ahead of the Budget. Experts were quick to challenge Seymour’s claims that a “quarter” of lunches were going to waste and that there was “no hard evidence” of the programme improving attendance or achievement, pointing to studies listing numerous other benefits such as improved mental health and wellbeing, food security and better attendance for some students. Gabi Lardies has written an in-depth breakdown explaining who gets free lunches, what’s in them and what various stakeholders have to say on the matter.
If you reside – or have ever resided – in Ōtepoti, you will have visited Rob Roy Dairy at least once, probably more than a hundred times if you are a student. In a city with relatively few establishments open after 8pm, especially for the teetotal, Rob Roy is a shining beacon, a destination, something to do. After 16 years of scooping ice cream (half the shop is actually an ice cream parlour serving Tip Top and Kapiti scoops as well as milkshakes, soft serves and real fruit ice creams), owner Liz Watson says it’s “time to give someone else a go” and so the iconic Rob Roy Dairy is up for sale.
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Snack of the week
Potter Brothers Chocolates, Hokey Pokey in Milk Chocolate, $5.99 for 130g from Farro Mt Eden: These made it into my basket during a midweek trip to Farro to check out their discounted protein. Given how obscene supermarket prices are these days, I like to shop around, my eyes peeled for those green “reduced to clear” stickers, ideally on a whole free-range chicken or a packet of fancy sausages. This week, I made the mistake of dropping in after an afternoon meeting when I was feeling very snack-ish – so much so that I was willing to shell out $5.99 on 130g of what is basically a high school science class smothered in milk chocolate.
The thing is, hokey pokey can go wrong. I recently bought a bag of “chocolate honeycomb” from a bulk foods store only to find something horrible had happened to them whereby most of the honeycomb had turned so soft I could squeeze the squares between my fingers. Luckily, there was no repeat of this experience with my Potter Brothers hokey pokeys chocolates. I was immediately thrilled when I pulled the first cluster from its bag and it felt reassuringly firm. First bite and I was on board. Hokey pokey was super crunchy – you know how one side of a Crunchie bar is paler in colour and denser, while the other is slightly darker, almost orange and you can see the bubble texture (maybe something about the side it rests on to cool)? These are the dense side only, making up for that slightly less caramelised flavour with maximum crunch. The ratio of chocolate to hokey pokey was also perfect, slightly more chocolate than honeycomb which prevents them being too sweet, and the chocolate itself is of fairly decent quality, well below Whittakers but above Cadbury.
For the price, I do think the Brothers could spring for a higher cocoa percentage – but then, I didn’t expect perfection in this arena, given the quality of their products has come under scrutiny before. Alleged misrepresentation aside, these are a delicious sweet snack. The packaging tells me there are five servings in there, I ate half in the car on the way home and the other half while writing this week’s newsletter, unable to stop myself from having just one more despite resealing the bag and putting it in the cupboard multiple times. I do have to deduct some points for the cost though, given $5.99 will get me a full block of Whittakers on a good day. 7/10
Mā te wā,
Lucinda
