War. A state of armed conflict between different countries or different groups within a country. It has reshaped nations, merged and split peoples, and changed the course of human history. Feminist Food Journal’s second issue, WAR, considers how gender and food intersect during times of conflict, when food is both a weapon and a lifeline and women fight not only on the front lines but also from kitchens, supermarkets, and the streets. 

In wartime, looking at food is a window into broader societal dynamics, one that reveals how women are constrained not only by acute conflict but also by chronic oppression. It also illuminates how we fight back. The pieces in this issue explore and celebrate the resilience, ingenuity, and power of women and our food practices in conflicts both historical — the French Revolution, World War II — and contemporary — the Kashmir conflict, the occupation of Palestine, #EndSARS in Nigeria, and the global war on fatness. Through diverse perspectives and with vivid prose, our writers bring to life characters whose stories are often overlooked in times of war, despite the centrality of their actions to resistance and reconstruction. We’re proud to bring you:

• Chicken, Chips, and Teargas: How protest food fueled #EndSARS in Nigeria | Mariam Adetona

• Dying For Sardines: Gender and food politics in occupied Paris (audio) | Isabela Vera

• "Für Später": A lifetime spent digesting war | Lisa Gow

• House of Meat: In Bethlehem, the tomato tells of steadfast resistance | Rachel Hobley

• In Jameela’s Kitchen: Where Kashmiri politics and family-style meals collide | Rahma Khan

• The Breadwinners: Women’s hunger led the French Revolution but the patriarchy prevailed | Tommie Brown

• There’s a War on Fatness: Justice in the anti-fat age (audio) | Zoë Johnson

Read now

When we started planning for this issue, we had no idea that for many people, war would suddenly be closer than ever. It’s a critical time for intersectional perspectives on gender, food, and conflict, as headlines from Ukraine on the struggles of trans and non-binary, non-white, pregnant, and elderly people have reminded us. Meanwhile, driven by the same war, a global food and cost-of-living crisis is unfurling — destined, like all crises, to punish women and people with marginalized identities most harshly. With this publication, we want to acknowledge the horror of the current moment in Ukraine while honouring the grim reality that many people in this world have lived in the shadow of war for some or all of their lives. 

So where do we go from here? What we’re taking away most from this issue is the resiliency of the human spirit and the myriad ways in which food nourishes it. It may sound contrived, but during an editing season when reading the news brought much despair, researching the role of French communist women in undermining the Vichy regime by throwing sardine cans, how a housewife in Kashmir runs a groundbreaking women-only political club from her kitchen, or the ways in which actions as (seemingly) simple as choosing a tomato in occupied Palestine can constitute meaningful resistance, filled us with a cautious sense of hope. Even in the face of the most adverse circumstances, people have persisted, and although they shouldn’t have to — especially not so hard and for so long — they will do it again. And the centrality of food, materially and symbolically, means that it will continue to form the backbone of this persistence, embedded in our habits, meals, and domestic and political spaces.

We hope you enjoy the issue and that it lifts your spirits as it did ours. Please let us know on social media, in the comment thread below, or by email (hello@feministfoodjournal.com) what you thought; we’d love to connect with you.

Finally, please consider supporting Feminist Food Journal if you can. Unlike our first issue, MILK, which was freely available in full, two pieces from this issue are behind a paywall. We run Feminist Food Journal as volunteers, and for now, this is fine. On volunteering, Cheryl Rivera, one of the editors of Lux, a magazine that we deeply admire, put it perfectly in her interview with Kerry Cardoza at Study Hall:

“I consider it a sort of world-building project. It’s necessary work.”

But we need to be able to pay our writers fairly. We increased our rates from USD100 to USD130 per article between our first and second issue, and we’d be grateful if you would consider supporting us to continue this upward climb — so if you haven’t yet become a paid subscriber, please consider doing so for as little as $3.75 per month. (If this is not possible for you but you’d still like to read the full issue, please reach out!)

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With that, we’re now going to be (rather dramatically) switching tracks: pitches for our third issue, SEX, closed last week. We’re busy reading through all of the juicy ideas that have come our way and can’t wait to share what is sure to be a thoughtful, creative, hot, and horny third issue with you soon.

Gratefully,

The War on Fatness

Justice in the anti-fat age

Listen on our podcast here.

Is a social, political, economic, and cultural war being waged on fat bodies? FFJ editor, Zoë, brings you a discussion about the war on “obesity”, its roots, its manifestations in the food movement, and fat food justice in the future.

Dying For Sardines

Gender and food politics in occupied Paris

Listen on our podcast here.

Paris, 1942. A group of women storm a grocery store on the Rue de Buci to seize the sardines on sale that day and distribute them to a hungry crowd. A scuffle ensues, shots ring out — and at the end, two policemen are dead. Today, the Rue de Buci event is remembered as an act of women’s resistance during wartime. But is that all there is to it?

In this episode of Feminist Food Stories, FFJ editor Isabela sits down with Paula Schwarz, the Lois B. Watson Professor Emerita of French & Francophone Studies at Middlebury College and author of Today Sardines Are Not For Sale: A Street Protest in Occupied Paris, to discuss the intersections of wartime food politics and gender, and why and how resistance is remembered in different ways.

When Nigerians poured into the streets to take down the infamous Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a group of young Nigerian feminists and their protest food proved key to supporting the movement.

By Mariam Adetona

On October 3, 2020, Nigerians woke up to a video on social media that showed an officer from Nigeria’s notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) shooting an unarmed young man in Ughelli, a town in the Southern part of the country. After allegedly killing the man, the video showed the officers pushing his body out onto the street and speeding away in his car.

This was just one in a long line of atrocities committed by SARS — which the Nigerian government had repeatedly vowed to reform or disband — but the video brought the nation’s simmering anger over police brutality to a boiling point. News of the killing spread like wildfire on social media and people took to platforms like Twitter in new force to share their own stories about extortion and violence perpetrated by the Squad. The protests quickly moved from cyberspace to the streets. 

But not all believed change could be achieved, at least without certain conditions. As the protests gained traction in cities across the country, Ozzy Etomi, a communication strategist and vocal Nigerian feminist, tweeted:

Ozzy’s statement was rooted in the history of women’s (often forgotten) involvement in social change in Nigeria. From the Aba Women’s Riot of 1929 and the Abeokuta Women’s Revolt, women have been pivotal to the fight for fairer governance and policies throughout Nigerian history. And #EndSARS was no different. 

“Nigerian women have been primed for fighting [because] we spend so much time fighting,” Saratu Abiola told Quartz Africa. She was referring specifically to young feminists’ fight for gender equality in Nigeria, a nation that ranks 139th place out of 156 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index and where women are marginalized by discriminatory laws, religious and cultural norms, gender stereotypes, low levels of education, and the disproportionate effect of poverty. In the time leading up to the #EndSARS protests, the fight Abiola describes had taken the form of a market march against harassment in marketplaces in 2019 and a State of Emergency protest in 2020 calling out the country’s rape epidemic. 

“So when [the EndSARS protest] happened it was easy to mobilize,” Abiola said. “It’s become an instinct.” 

Young women became the coordinators, fundraisers, and, critically, feeders of the #EndSARS protests. By using food as a tool to fuel peaceful resistance to state violence, these women were in effect reappropriating food as a weapon that in the past has been used against them — by patriarchal forces that dictate women’s roles as provisioners of the household, and by the Nigerian government as a weapon of war against its own people. 

***

It all started with Chef Mosope Odeseye’s emergency fundraising campaign, which initially sought ₦50,000 (US$120) to pay for breakfast for the 50 or so protesters planning to spend the night in front of the Lagos State House of Assembly in Alausa, Ikeja from October 8 to 9. Within 16 minutes, they had already raised around ₦312,000 (US$748), enough to feed the protesters breakfast and lunch the following day, and even to share leftover funds with other demonstration grounds.  

Around 40% of people in Nigeria live below the poverty line, so it is no surprise that keeping protestors fed quickly became a topmost priority of organizers. Despite Nigeria’s rich natural resources, food insecurity remains a major challenge in the country. Government policies and state corruption have exacerbated the situation. In 2019, the government banned the import of rice and wheat flour in order to stimulate local production, effectively increasing the prices of these staples to a point that was out of reach of the masses. In 2020, crowds across the country reclaimed the contents of warehouses that were filled with COVID-19 palliatives like rice and instant noodles, meant to be distributed to low-income Nigerians but had instead been hoarded by government representatives. This is not uncommon in the Nigerian context where food has always been closely tied to politics and the government has been known to withhold food and weaponize its access as punishment against those it deemed as enemies: during the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s, the Nigerian government enacted a “starvation policy” to force the surrender of the Republic of Biafra, an Igbo secessionist state. 

Given the scale of the #EndSARS movement, feeding the protestors was no easy feat. In Lagos and Abuja, the Feminist Coalition set up “The Food Coven”, a structure designed to oversee the procurement of food from vendors at affordable rates and to distribute it across protest grounds in the area. Founded by long-time advocates for women’s rights in Nigeria, the Feminist Coalition had been set up to promote education, financial freedom, and representation of women in public offices. The Food Coven came on top of the group’s long line of ventures ranging from crowdfunding for victims of gender-based violence to running Wine and Whine, a community to foster networking opportunities for women.

For a team of just six women, Food Coven offered an expansive menu, with choices like chicken and chips, plantain kebabs, BBQ wings, and banana bread. Food became a major reason that people showed up to the protests, spurred on by the social media buzz about “protest food”, a goal the Coven and others feeding protesters in other cities, did not originally set out to achieve. 

“I just wanted to make sure food, glucose, and water are available to everyone protesting,” said Irianele Virtuous, a volunteer working with the Food Coven. “The SARS officers keep assaulting and killing our men, and this is our only chance to get them scrapped.” 

***

SARS was a plain-clothed unit of the Nigerian Police Force set up in November 1992 to combat waves of robbery, kidnapping, and other violent crimes that were sweeping across major cities in Nigeria. At the time, the country was ruled by a military dictatorship and frequently rocked by the violence of coup d'etats and assassinations. Violence became hardwired into policing, spurred by the precedent of the commodification of people set during the British colonial rule and perpetuated through local and native forces.

Almost as soon as it was created, SARS officers began to perpetuate the very crimes they were charged with fighting. They engaged in extortion, illegal arrests, torture, sexual harassment and assault, and extrajudicial killings. It wasn’t until 2007, that the first formal public reports about SARS’ crimes emerged in the form of reports from organizations within and outside of the country. Despite the subsequent creation of a presidential committee on police brutality, corruption let these atrocities go unchecked. To this day, no SARS officer has ever been prosecuted for a crime. 

Social media changed the way Nigerians could draw attention to SARS’ abuses, and it became common to share stories and videos online. Some women began posting about incidences of sexual harassment and assault by SARS officers, but most of the stories shared online were about men — even though SARS violence affected all facets of society.  In addition to the direct consequences of assault, women are impacted by the trickle-down effects of the violence and incarceration perpetuated by Nigerian police. Police and judicial violence are systemic drivers of gender-based violence and abuse — levels of which were spiking in the country when #EndSARS took off.  

***

Deeply-rooted gender discrimination also presents in less overtly violent ways. As in other patriarchal societies, many in Nigeria consider women’s main role to be the maintenance of their households, including caring for and feeding their husbands and children. In this sense, food and the responsibilities associated with domestic provisioning have been used as a mechanism to keep women subservient. 

By dishing up meals at #EndSARS protest sites, Nigerian feminists reclaimed the power of food back from state and patriarchal forces to emerge as leaders of the largest protest against state violence in Nigerian history. The food they served at the protest sites kept participation rates high, and it fed not only protesters but also people passing by on their way to work, artisans, and neighbours. Communal eating brought people together across class, ethnic, and religious divisions — the fractures of which are felt most by Nigerian women and other vulnerable members of society. 

In addition to feeding protestors, the women of the Feminist Coalition were actively involved in sustaining the protests in other ways. Women from this group initiated the organization of security and coordination of medical services. Rinu Oduala, a student and media strategist, helped to disseminate important information during the protests and was a youth representative of the Lagos Judicial panel on police brutality when the happenings at the protests were investigated.

The Feminist Coalition also raised $200,000 through a crowdfunding campaign built on the momentum of an initial breakfast fundraiser, amplified by Feyikemi Abudu, a founding member of the group. Within days, the Feminist Coalition was able to fund over 150 protests around Nigeria, and made a point to update the public every day on how much had been raised and how much was spent. In a country with one of the worst corruption indices, this came as a welcome surprise to many Nigerians, some of whom began using the Feminist Coalition logo as their display picture on social media and referring to Feyikemi Abudu as their president. 

Despite being lauded by civil society, their participation in the protests came at great personal risk. Moe Odele, a tech-focused lawyer licensed in Nigeria and the US, helped provide legal aid by creating a network of over 50 lawyers working around the clock to provide legal advice to detained protesters. She later had her passport seized at the airport without explantation. Aisha Yesufu, a community organizer, who had previously been involved in the Bring Back Our Girls Campaign in 2014, marched with protesters in Abuja and was instrumental in maintaining calm at the demonstration grounds — even when tear gas was sprayed at the crowd. 

***

The protests came to an abrupt end on October 20, 2020 when the Lagos state government ordered the shooting of protesters at the Lekki toll gate in Lagos in what is now referred to as the Lekki Massacre. Although the Nierian government announced its plan to dissolve SARS on October 11, 2020, protests continued, pushing for more meaningful reform of the country’s law enforcement. Protesters were gathered at the tollgate singing, chanting the national anthem, and waving flags when, just before sunset, army officials were deployed to the venue. They removed the CCTV around the tollgate and turned out the streetlights before charging the crowd. Chaos broke out as the army sprayed teargas and shot live bullets into the mass of protesters. Over 150,000 people watched the Lekki massacre on an Instagram-live that was streamed by another feminist activist and DJ, Obianuju Catherine Udeh, popularly known as DJ Switch.

SARS was disbanded, but a new unit took its place shortly after. Police brutality remains an issue, and many protestors live in fear of retribution. But despite the protest ending the way it did, the impact of protest food reiterated the importance of women-led advocacy in Nigeria. Since then, the Feminist Coalition has been focusing on what they were originally set up for: empowering women. They have created the Girls Education Program which is a full scholarship for girls with outstanding academic performances in low-income communities, and have hosted two editions of a food drive which saw them providing bags of food to 1,000 women in low-income communities.  

At the end of the protests, Ozzy, the feminist who suggested the movement would go nowhere without women’s participation, quote-tweeted her original tweet.

It was a confirmation of the fact that the Feminist Coalition’s intervention helped #EndSARS stay its course.

Mariam Adetona is a Nigerian writer who enjoys writing essays and reports on the experiences of Black women. Her writing has appeared in Al Jazeera, VICE, Meeting of Minds UK, etc. She tweets at @Amamayoyo.

Listen to Mariam’s reflections on this piece in our WAR BTS here.

How a grandmother’s memories of hunger became lifelong lessons in thrift — and a reminder of how food connects us even after the ruptures of war.

By Lisa Gow

On my grandmother’s 90th birthday, I asked her the secret to living such a long and healthy life.

“Well, I make sure to eat a little bit of sauerkraut and quark every single day — that's how I stay fit and strong!” she proudly replied.

We were sitting in a charming, medieval-style restaurant in the rolling hills of the Moravian-Silesian countryside in the Czech Republic, surrounded by family. Some of us had flown in for the special occasion, which was held in a round, castle-like room, its one curved stone wall adorned with medieval garb and topped with a high, turreted roof.

We ate traditional Czech dishes like svíčková na smetaně — delicious slices of sirloin floating gently in a vegetable and cream sauce, served with cranberries and fat, bready dumplings. Ever the matriarch, my grandmother presided over the huge round dining table flanked by my brother and uncle, and at one point she broke into song. But even though several generations had come dressed up for her milestone birthday, she insisted upon wearing a humble house dress.

***

My grandmother Elfriede, or “Omi” as we called her, was born in the first Czechoslovak Republic, created out of the newly dissolved Austro-Hungarian Empire in the aftermath of the First World War. The early decades of her life unfurled under the conditions of scarcity and hardship common for many of her generation. 

In 1945, when the Czech lands were being liberated from Nazi occupation, my grandmother was around 24 years old. She and her older sister Anna fled their home in the tiny mountain town of Rýmařov and hid in a nearby forest to avoid the Soviet soldiers who were making their way across the region, raping people and committing other heinous crimes.      

Their father was long dead. Anna’s husband had been tortured and murdered by the Nazis during the occupation. Their brother had been forcibly transferred, along with millions of other Germans, to Germany’s Soviet-occupied zone under the Beneš decrees, a series of laws drafted by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, that triggered the violent ethnic cleansing of Germans from Czechoslovakia. The women were on their own, and there wasn’t enough to eat.

Another World War and several dictatorships later, my grandmother died in the democratic Czech Republic, and we held her funeral in the same Catholic church in Rýmařov where she had once been baptized. Although the world around her had changed, food was always a tether to her past and her place. Memories of hunger became lifelong lessons in thrift that she passed down through generations, and she dedicated her cooking to the Central and Eastern European foods she knew. These foods, still ubiquitous across the region, remind us of what hostile neighbours hold in common — regardless of whether they call themselves Czech or German, Russian or Ukrainian. 

***

Omi’s life was dogged by a silent fear of scarcity and the compulsion to squirrel away food. What had once been survival strategies necessitated by war eventually became baked-in habits that she clutched onto until her last days. In restaurants, it was normal to see her wrapping a leftover sausage in a paper napkin and surreptitiously slipping it into her handbag “für später” [“for later”].

Anyone who gave Omi fancy foods as gifts eventually realized that she would never actually eat them. On a summer visit when we were kids, my brother and I had a chocolate craving and asked whether she had anything sweet in the cupboards. She rummaged around in the pantry and dug out a dusty box of Thorntons chocolates, a popular British brand. “How did she get a hold of these?” I wondered, before realizing that we had brought her the chocolates from Glasgow many years before. Unfortunately, tiny ants had got their teeth into them before we did.

Her kitchen was a time capsule. She held onto the chipped crockery and old, tarnished silver cutlery that she had inherited from her own mother, so I got a hint of oxidized metal with every spoonful of Omi’s chicken soup. Even after modern appliances had become readily available she only reluctantly agreed to get a small fridge. She stubbornly refused to make her life easier with a proper kitchen sink and tap, preferring to use a wooden “washing table” from the 1920s instead. The table had a pull-out drawer with two large holes cut out of it. These were sized perfectly to hold two enamel basins that she filled with dishwater. Without a proper sink in the kitchen, the basins had to be laboriously filled and emptied in the bathroom. 

Long before anyone was talking about the microbiome, antioxidants, or dietary probiotics, Omi was diligently pickling and fermenting her own vegetables, storing everything in glass jars in the pantry. Committed to frugality, sometimes at the expense of flavour, she eschewed small luxuries, using margarine instead of butter, and oats instead of ground almonds. 

Upon entering her kitchen, I was struck, if not disgusted, by the lingering odour of stale garlic and the farty smell of fermenting cabbage. No doubt, her “delicacies”— designed to keep food on the shelf and meat on your bones — would have been extremely useful in the event of food shortages. They may have even ensured her longevity.  But as a little girl visiting from the West, her stinky cheeses and dishes fortified with goose fat were enough to make me gag. 

***

Only two generations later, my life has been radically different from Omi’s. She only got a basic education and spent her youth working as a domestic servant and seamstress to support the family. Born and raised in Glasgow, I’ve lived an urban, geographically mobile life, benefiting from my graduate education and work in the knowledge economy. I sew my own clothes for pleasure rather than necessity, and I spend silly money on unpasteurized sauerkraut from the organic supermarkets in Berlin, where I now live, aware of the irony in Western capitalism’s commodification of poverty foods.

But Omi’s fear of hunger has always reminded me that things can still go horribly wrong. I’ve long felt compelled to cut off a little bit of mould to save an otherwise perfectly fine piece of bread or ask for a doggy bag at the restaurant because I feel guilty if my leftovers go to waste. The older I get, the more I see that her practices — which predated the modern mantra of “reduce, reuse, recycle” — have become relevant for my generation. 

The horrific conflict in Ukraine has put the impetus for Omi’s habits of thrift into stark relief. Not only has the war created a desperate humanitarian crisis and food shortages for people in Ukraine, but it has also exacerbated global food insecurity, especially for the vulnerable populations that depend on Russian and Ukrainian exports to put food on the table. We’d become amnesic about food shortages in Western Europe, but now even Germans are panic-buying basic foodstuffs such as flour and cooking oil. 

I wonder what Omi would be doing now if she were around to see this conflict unfolding. Having lived through several invasions and in the shadow of the USSR, she was no stranger to Russian aggression. Even in peacetime, conflict continued to exist in her head, if not in the outside world. Omi would probably react to the current crisis in the same stoic way that she always did: by shrugging her shoulders and hunkering down in the pantry with her jars of pickles. 

***

What we eat or drink — an everyday decision that, on the surface, hardly seems to warrant much reflection beyond our taste preferences or nutritional needs — is closely tied to where we started from. 

Growing up in the young, multi-ethnic Czechoslovak Republic, Omi and her sister Anna self-identified as “Sudeten Germans”, a term which referred to the German-speaking people of the Sudety mountain range, in what is now part of the Czech Republic. The history books tell us that the first “ethnic Germans” arrived in Bohemia and Moravia in the eleventh century, and throughout the Middle Ages and until the Second World War, the Czech lands were a cultural melting pot home to a multitude of peoples, including Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Poles, and Jews. As such, the distinctions between my grandmother’s family and her Czech neighbours were blurry.

This multi-ethnicism came under threat during the Nazi occupation and was completely rejected by the end of the war, as the Communist Czechoslovak government set about erasing most traces of German culture from public life. The Czechs had suffered through six years of Nazi terror and condemned both their Sudeten German neighbours and the official Nazi regime for the atrocities they experienced. In an orgy of retribution, and copying a Nazi tactic used during the Holocaust, they forced the Sudeten Germans to wear white armbands with the letter “N” (the “N” stood for Němec, meaning “German”).

Between 1945 and 1950, up to 90 percent of the German-speaking population was expelled from Czechoslovakia. Those who could prove their credentials as “good Germans”, meaning they had not cooperated with the Nazis, were allowed to stay. Towns and villages were renamed to sound more Czech; German language instruction gradually dwindled in schools, and most families — regardless of any German ties they had before the war —  assimilated into the majority Czech-speaking culture and stopped raising bilingual children. After years of co-existence, intermarriage, and multiculturalism — Franz Kafka, one of the most influential Czech writers, wrote all his manuscripts in German, after all — the post-war narrative insisted that the Czechs and Germans were separate and different. 

Anna’s pre-war marriage to a Czech man had not been unusual. But by the time Omi met my (Czech) grandfather Josef in 1945, marriage between Czechs and Germans wasn’t just taboo but actually banned. When my mother and her twin brother were born the next year, Josef’s identity was concealed from the authorities. My grandparents had to wait until 1948 (when the ban was lifted) to get married. 

By the 1950s, my grandmother was uncomfortably aware that raising German-speaking kids had become a subversive act in the eyes of the local Czech community. Like most of the small minority of Sudeten Germans who had remained in Czechoslovakia, Omi kept a low profile and tried to blend in, speaking enough Czech to be able to get by. German was reserved for the home. 

 “Shhh! Don’t let anyone hear you speaking German!” she would whisper to my mother, a confused little girl, as they crossed the cobblestones of Rýmařov town square. 

As time passed, Rýmařov changed shape. Socialist ideology ushered in concrete, high-rise apartment buildings, state surveillance and the Art Deco walnut furniture that suddenly every single family had in their living room. Adjusting to a life without her family and many of her German friends, Omi tightened her grip on the kitchen — the one domain where she could exercise a modicum of control. Trying to feel at home in a place deeply traumatized by conflict, she cooked the meals her ancestors had made: vinegary cucumber salads, crispy potato fritters, dumplings that could put you to sleep for an afternoon, schnitzels, beef roulades, chicken broth poured over pancakes that were cut into ribbons, and of course, the goulash (although her version had more fat than beef).

***

Ever guarded, Omi never opened up to us about whether she regretted her determination to stay in her ancestral home. But the impacts of her choice were all around me. Growing up, instead of the beef mince and mashed potatoes (“mince and tatties”) typically eaten by Scottish families, my Czech mother Eva would cook Omi’s goulash. The rich, beefy stew that was ladled onto my plate as a child was the result of countless small decisions and big geopolitical events, among them Eva’s first-ever encounter with Coca-Cola in 1968 and the Soviet tanks that crushed the Prague Spring that year, prompting her to buy a one-way plane ticket to the UK. 

Goulash, and these other meat-heavy dishes, survived the rupture of war and lived on in kitchens across Central and Eastern Europe and the diaspora throughout the twentieth century. On a visit to Jerusalem a few years ago, I even found similar dishes at a restaurant in the Haredi neighbourhood of Mea Shearim. Such dishes have different names depending on whom you ask, but the similarities point toward common roots — roots that pay no heed to new divisions sown along ethnic, linguistic, religious or national lines. 

Just like the horrors of eighty years ago, the current conflict in Ukraine has driven a wedge between two peoples with overlapping identities, shared languages, family histories — and food traditions. And history tells us the brutal attempt of one neighbour to drive home a narrative of sameness usually strengthens the other neighbour’s national identity based on difference. In the long term, the rupture between these neighbours will surely take years to heal, if it ever does. Maybe we will see Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens distancing themselves from the Russian language and reaffirming their Ukrainian identity. But regardless of the language that comes out of their mouths, I suspect that it will be more difficult to change the food that they put into them. Omi’s goulash is a reminder of that.

Lisa Gow is a project manager and occasional writer and editor in Berlin. Along with her strong interests in work and labour policy, she is usually doing a deep dive into one health topic or another.

Listen to Lisa’s reflections on this piece in our WAR BTS here.

Further reading

D. Rock and S. Wolff (eds) (2002). Coming Home to Germany? The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic. Berghahn Books.

R. Tait (2016). “The Czechs and Germans trying to deal with ghosts of the past”. The Guardian.

In a place where conflict permeates life, food is a medium through which Palestinian women steadfastly resist both Israeli occupation and restrictive gender norms.

By Rachel Hobley

She wants washing lines full and much, much rice to cook for lunch

And a large, large kettle boiling in the afternoon

And the table for everyone in the evening, its tablecloth dripping with the sesame of chatter.

She wants the smell of garlic at noon to gather the absent ones

And is surprised that the mother’s stew is weaker than the power of governments and that her pastry in the evening

Dries on a sheet untouched by any hand.

- Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah

In this stanza about his mother, Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti captures the ways that food and the political, economic, and social context of occupation intertwine in the lives of Palestinian women. In Palestine, women are the stewards of food and dominions of feeding. Making decisions about the kitchen, preserving culinary knowledge, maintaining familial honour through exceptional cooking — all are tasks which fall to the women of Palestine, whose food culture has been shaped over centuries by the natural riches of the land that lies between the Jordan River and the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea. Through this work, they embody the principles of sumud (steadfastness), a concept which encapsulates the essence of the Palestinian story.

A means of resistance to the Israeli occupation of parts of what is today the West Bank and Gaza Strip, sumud means continuing forward despite the challenges of the context. It has become a way of life in a region where being — especially being — on the land is in itself an act of resistance. Since 1967, life in Palestine has been warped by poverty, unemployment, food insecurity, surveillance, and military attacks. Palestinian women in particular exist within what Pamela Urrutia Arestizábal calls a “continuum of violence”, made-up of oppression under occupation and traditional patriarchal structures. Yet in the spirit of sumud, their lives go on. Central to this steadfastness is food, an anchor to family and place even in times of conflict. 

To understand these dynamics more deeply, I want to take you to “Beit-lehem” — a town in the West Bank whose name means "house of meat" in Arabic and "house of bread" in Hebrew. Cleaved from Jerusalem by a militarized eight-metre-high separation wall, in Bethlehem the clashes, detentions, and disruptions of occupation underscore the rhythm of the everyday.

It’s 2018, and true to David Sutton’s adage that anthropologists “choose their field sites based on gustatory preferences,” I find myself there as part of my master’s research, looking for a culinary narrative to challenge the downtrodden Palestinian “story” often portrayed in mainstream media. It is through this journey that I find myself shopping and cooking with three women: Salma, Yara, and Maryam1, who together form three generations of a Palestinian Christian family.

Food is a uniting factor across all the generations. Salma, the matriarch, taught her daughter, Yara — who is now a 70-year-old wife and mother of four — how to shop and cook. In turn, Yara passed these skills down to her daughter-in-law, Maryam. Over a hot Bethlehem summer, they then taught me how to core courgettes to fill them, roll warak dewali (stuffed vine leaves), scrub the spikes from cactus flowers, and make thick tomato sauce — one of their most cherished family recipes used to preserve the tomatoes that are vital to their cooking all year round. Through the humble acts of provisioning and preparing the sauce, Yara, Maryam and Salma demonstrate how they resist the constraints of occupation and socially prescribed gender roles. Following the tomato helps us to see the radical in the mundane and to reimagine our understandings of resistance against systemic oppression. 

***

Choosing the perfect tomato is tricky. Yara says that it should be without a hint of green, and smell like summer. But if you find the right one, does it matter where it comes from? 

Yara and I are at the suq (market) to buy vegetables for dinner. The street of the suq is covered and mostly used by pedestrians. Beef carcasses are suspended in glass-fronted butcher shops, the tops of their meat hooks adorned with bunches of parsley. The smell of offal cooking in the heat hangs heavy in the air. Balding Palestinian men and their apprentices flank tables stacked high with punnets of produce, most of which are from Israel. But some sellers, in a different part of the suq, have fresh fruit and vegetables that is balady, which literally means “my land” — seeded and nurtured in Palestine. 

Yara approaches a woman sitting with a huge bag of tomatoes. These ones are balady, she tells me, and you can tell because of their taut skin, which is even in colour, not tacky with chemicals, and never squishy. 

“Ithnaan shekkel!” [“Two shekkels”], the seller says. Rejecting many of the tomatoes the seller selects for her, Yara rifles deeply in the pile. When satisfied with her haul, she reaches for her purse, double-checking the price. “Arba3a shekkel” [“Four shekkels”], the seller says. 

No. That’s too much. Yara tuts as she walks away. It is clear that she enjoys the performance of haggling, and the seller quickly relents: “Khallas! Ithnaan shekkel!” [“Enough! Two shekkels!”] Yara pays and hands the heavy sack of tomatoes to me.

Yara and her daughter-in-law Maryam both prefer to buy balady produce. For one, they prefer the taste. Palestinian vegetables are often cultivated using rainwater, a choice made largely from necessity — 85% of the annual groundwater yield of the West Bank is extracted by Israel, leaving Palestinians only 15% for their domestic and agricultural use — but one that has a distinctive taste, known as ba’ali, as well as look and feel. Occasionally that summer, I would buy non-balady tomatoes, cucumbers, mint, onions, and lemon to dice into a fresh and addictive Arabic salad. If Yara had come to steal one of the ingredients from my fridge, she would have known immediately where it came from.

Buying balady is also a key tenet of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Campaign, a global Palestinian-led movement that aims to use non-violent pressure, including product boycotts, to end the occupation. Some BDS campaigns actively promote the cooking of “slow-food”, using only balady produce. But the realities of occupation mean that buying balady is not always possible. Climate change is driving increasingly erratic weather patterns that impact the ability of farmers to cultivate their crops with rainwater. As it becomes harder and harder to grow crops naturally, Palestinian farmers have had to increase their use of pesticides to be able to compete with the abundance of Israeli-grown produce that floods the market. The increasing restrictions on the use of arable land in the Jordan Valley, the so-called “food basket of Palestine”, where 85% of the land is now fully under Israeli military control, means that sometimes, Israeli produce is the only option available.

The scarcity of Palestinian produce means that refusal of non-balady is not automatic. In Bethlehem, where hospitality is the backbone of family honour, putting traditional dishes on the table is very important, so women persist in buying the ingredients they need regardless of their origins. Yara can deduce where produce was grown just by matching the surname of the seller with the region they came from; armed with this information, she will then decide whether to buy. Maryam, Yara’s daughter-in-law, relies on shopkeepers to tell her that a product is from Israel, or looks for a sticker. And if she knows it’s from Israel, does she try and avoid it? “No,” she tells me. “I don’t!”

Their nonchalance about buying non-balady surprises me, but it’s simply another representation of sumud. You continue, despite the circumstances. Refusing to let every facet of your life — in this case, the food you make for your family — be dictated by politics is, in its own way, an act of resistance. It is as Yara says: 

It [sumud] means getting the children to school every day, keeping what is Palestinian and teaching it. It means cooking and eating every day, no matter what is happening.

***

A few weeks later, with tomato season still in full swing, I enter Yara’s narrow, white-painted kitchen, the floor tiles cool and tacky beneath our bare feet. The house is quiet, aside from the hum of the fridge and the drone of the small TV in the corner. But the tranquillity is deceiving — much work lies ahead.

Yara has collected seventy kilos of tomatoes in boxes fresh from the suq. She tells me that making tomato sauce is her favourite way to preserve the taste of summer. She learned to make it from her mother, Salma, and in turn taught her daughter-in-law, Maryam. Now, she wanted to pass the recipe on to me. 

My mother used to say put this, put that, put this on the fire. While she was sitting, she would tell me put the onion on, do this, do that. When my aunt comes and sees me rolling malfouf [stuffed cabbage], she says ‘Wow, Yara, you are good! You are like us!’ I am happy because I know how to do the things.

Yara is committed to protecting the recipes which allow her and her family to maintain a modicum of normalcy in everyday life. While she is unable to protect Palestinian land, sumud means that she can play a role in protecting the intangible Palestinian culture by passing on culinary knowledge.

We sit down at her kitchen table and using small, serrated knives, remove the tomato stems and then quarter the fruits on chopping boards. The juice runs off the table onto our knees. Batch by batch, we blend the tomatoes and pour them into a large saucepan. We add generous pinches of salt and bring them to a boil. Yara tastes each batch as they bubble to make sure the sauce is both delicious and sufficiently salted to preserve the tomatoes.

As we bottle the sauce, the air is thick with steam. Throughout the process, Yara explains what we are doing and why, then allows me to feel the action in my body. 

“Make it [the lid] as tight as you can,” Yara tells me. “Any air that enters ruins it, and we want it to stay the whole year.” 

My hands pulse with the satisfaction of screwing a lid onto a recycled bottle, with the contents still warm, and creating a seal that will last for months.

***

My journey around the tables of Bethlehem found culinary delight in the feasts folded into the hands of the women I came to know. Their palms read like a recipe: garlic, thyme, olive oil. But in Palestine, such traditional recipes are rarely written down. In Yara’s kitchen, I only ever saw her use two: the first for a twisted “cookie” with rose essence, dates, and walnuts (demanding precise baking measurements), and the second for lasagne (a dish Yara had never cooked before). Any attempts to ask about the use of written recipes beyond these dishes were met with scorn, even by Maryam, who, as part of the younger generation, could access recipes on the internet easily. When I ask her about using recipes, she exclaims “What recipes? We cook from our head! Shoo [what] recipes! What blasphemy!”

Women are the purveyors of embodied culinary knowledge, not because men cannot learn it but because Palestinian society expects that a good woman is a good cook. A mother-in-law helps teach her daughter-in-law to cook both to maintain the family’s reputation as a generous host, and to assure sufficient care for her son. In the context of patrilocality, with wives sometimes moving to live with the family of their husband, a woman’s performance in the kitchen can reflect onto the mother-in-law’s household.

Not all Palestinian women feel comfortable with this gendered division of labour. Maryam tells me that when she stays in the kitchen for hours on end, no one tells her to come out. But when she wants to get ready for an event and takes the time to put on makeup, her family will demand, “Why?! You are using so much many colours, so many pencils. Stop it — we are waiting for you.”

But these household dynamics are changing. The economic situation in Palestine has been precarious for decades due to the occupation and has worsened significantly in recent years with the impacts of COVID-19 and global economic decline. Women are increasingly engaging in both informal and formal work, leaving less time for domestic duties like learning and making traditional recipes. As a result, men are spending more time cooking.

Technological advances have also shifted society’s demands on women’s time. Maryam, for example, preserves her tomatoes differently than Yara, her mother-in-law:

I put them in the freezer because I don’t like it her [Yara’s] way. The tomato sauce is too acidic, it causes something in the stomach that makes you sick. I put it in the freezer. I think it’s healthier.

Maryam has been learning more about the health implications of different recipes on social media, as a result of public health campaigns that are being run in the West Bank to counter the rising levels of diabetes and heart conditions. In her view, Yara’s sauce is too salty — another reason that it’s better to go with whole, frozen tomatoes instead.

***

The impact of these changes on the knowledge transmission of culinary knowledge remains to be seen. But as circumstances change, so too will the practices of steadfast resistance. Says Yara:

I don’t live like my mother or my mother-in-law. My daughters-in-law don’t live like me. Every twenty years there is a big change. Palestinian women and men of future generations will find their own ways.

What remains constant is the importance of decisions made by Palestinian women like Salma, Yara, and Maryam. Whether they choose to buy balady or not, cook in traditional ways or not — these considerations are anything but banal. When the day-to-day is dictated by the pressures of occupation and womanhood, each choice that one can make constitutes a small act of resistance, a commitment to sumud in the face of seemingly endless constraint. 

From a background in social anthropology, Rachel Hobley works in humanitarian and development research and advocacy. For her, sharing food stories helps build connections and understanding through a shared humanity. 

Listen to Rachel’s reflections on this piece in our WAR BTS here.

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By Rahma Khan

In the spring of 2018, after driving for almost eight hours from the metropolis of Islamabad, I found myself in Mirpur, a city that nestles against the border with India in the Pakistan-administered Kashmir Valley. Western Himalayan peaks cast shadows on the Jhelum river as it flowed between the curvy mountain gorges, Chinar trees dotted the landscape for as far as I could see, and the surrounding lush green meadows shone brightly in the summer sun. 

I had come to Kashmir to document the lives of people living through decades of conflict. My grandparents hailed from India and migrated to Pakistan during Partition. Although I did not grow up on the Indian subcontinent, during my childhood, I often heard about how my grandparents left their friends and loved ones behind as they fled from India to Pakistan to escape the chaos and communal riots. I wanted to know more about the ongoing reverberations of this violence and division in the lives of Kashmiris. What was it like to live under heavy military surveillance, under the active threat of attacks from across the border? In particular, how did Kashmiri women — who are largely marginalized in social and political life — cope with the impacts of the war?

Unexpectedly, my quest to understand these dynamics brought me to a kitchen.

There, I encountered Kashmiri women who have transformed this domestic domain into a space for political mobilization and meaningful exchange, coming together over fragrant woks to advocate for better futures for their families and communities. It’s not the usual point of analysis in the conflict, but my experience in the kitchens of Kashmir reveals how, in the face of challenging circumstances, the humblest and most feminized of spaces can become sites of political mobilization.

***

On account of its abundance of natural beauty, Mughal poet Aamir Khusro once called Kashmir “Heaven on Earth”. But beneath the breathtaking natural magnificence of the valley lies a dark and continual story of conflict. For generations, Kashmir has been subject to state-administrated violence catalyzed by the cleavage of India and Pakistan following Partition in 1947. In January of 1949, upon intervention from the United Nations, India and Pakistan signed a ceasefire called the Karachi agreement, and a line of control (de facto border) was established in Kashmir dividing the Valley into two parts — Indian- and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Another short war broke out in 1965 as a result of Pakistan’s attempts to support an insurgency against the Indian occupation of Jammu and Kashmir, followed by another ceasefire. Today, even after seventy-five years of Indo-Pak independence from the British, the vastly Muslim majority Indian administered part of Kashmir is still fighting for independence from the right-wing Hindu extremist government.

Between 1965 and 2018, when I visited Kashmir, the area had managed to avoid an all-out war. But ceasefire violations from both countries remained frequent, steeping Kashmir in violence. These ongoing skirmishes resulted in the massive relocation of Kashmiris, leaving the towns and villages closest to the border very sparsely populated. In these border areas, it’s now mostly farmers, many of whom are adamant about not leaving their ancestral homes and farms, who remain. The major cities in Kashmir, like Muzaffarabad, Mirpur, and Neelum Valley, are farther from the worst of the violence but are nonetheless heavily guarded and surveilled. 

***

I visited Mirupur, the second-largest city in the Pakistan-administered Kashmir, with Abdul, a travel guide I had hired to show me around the valley and facilitate connections for my research on the rhythms of conflict. I was interested in visiting people in their homes, and Abdul warned me that it wouldn’t be easy. In Kashmir, the kitchen is a site of intimate socialization, and women usually only invite outsiders with whom they have established a certain level of trust. But he managed to introduce me to Jameela, a connection that would prove crucial to my understanding of the valley.

Jameela, a homemaker and mother of four in her late 50s whose petite frame and gentle smile belie a fiery spirit, runs a weekly baithak — a social gathering organized to discuss political and community issues — for women in her community. Baithak are an old tradition in South Asian cultures. They emerged from mostly rural areas in South Asia as fora in which men would meet in the evening to discuss their day’s business. Over time, baithak developed into more serious gatherings, during which village elders would solve local issues both administrative (problems with water and sanitation, for example) and intimate (disputes over private property or marriage and divorce). Norms of male control over administrative affairs have meant that these decision-making structures remain largely restricted to men, despite the fact that including women in public and private decision-making increases the effectiveness and accountability of institutions at all levels.

Jameela’s baithak is unique in that it is women-only. She started it back in 2016, first as an opportunity for women in her neighbourhood to simply spend time together while the men were working and children were at school. But she found that the conversations quickly became political. In Kashmir, women are often discouraged from publicly sharing their opinions on “important” matters, including the war. But as women and as mothers, the conflict affects them in unique ways that are often not represented in mainstream narratives. Frequent checkpoints and searches leave women particularly vulnerable to the misogynistic “militaristic gaze”, rape has been used throughout the conflict as a means of dehumanizing and controlling Kashmiri people, and the violence and upheaval impact the quality of life for their children.

With so much to fight for and to talk about, Jameela’s weekly baithak was officially born, and she’s been hosting them every Monday morning since. 

***

Jameela’s kitchen is small, located at the back of the house with unpainted cement walls, but it’s big enough to fit the six to eight women — friends, friends of friends, neighbours, and acquaintances — who show up each week for the 90-minute baithak. I was lucky enough to stay with Jameela for three weeks and attend these sessions several times. They are a convivial and intergenerational scene: young children play in the garden outside, while teenage girls sit in on the discussions, often uncertain about chiming in but keen to listen nonetheless. 

Given that the meetings take place in the kitchen, food is always a central component. Sometimes the women plan potluck-style meals, and other times Jameela cooks for all the attendees, using vegetables from her own organic farm. She enjoys cooking a big spread of traditional Kashmiri meals for the baithak participants.

“Cooking allows me the time to understand the political situation,” Jameela tells me over a crackling wok of homemade ghee (clarified butter) that she is melting to make saag, a spinach dish popular in Kashmir and Punjab. “Once I understand the politics, I can think through the ways in which I can protect my family from harm.” 

Jameela’s saag recipe

1. In a wok, melt butter. Add cumin, turmeric, garlic, and chilli pepper. Cook for two minutes.

2. Grind spinach with milk and water to make a thick paste. Add a few drops of mustard oil and a pinch of salt.

3. Cook the paste on a medium flame for five minutes and then mix with the cooked spices in the wok.

4. In a separate pot, fry onion and tomato. Add a few spoons of curd to the mixture and cook until the onion and tomato become soft.

5. Add mixture to the wok and cook slowly, over low heat for an hour.

6. Garnish the dish with melted butter and coriander before serving. 

Once the food is ready, participants sit in a circle around a big coal heater that warms the room during the harsh winter months — the same way that Jameela’s own family would sit down for a meal. They open the discussion over heaping plates of colourful Kashmiri biryani, steaming cottage cheese dumplings served with kasundi, a type of tomato sauce on a banana leaf, and Jameela’s famous saag.

Jameela and her close friends, whom she considers to be founding members of the baithak, decide on the topic of each meeting beforehand and share it in a Whatsapp group with all the women planning to attend. In the years since the baithak launched, they’ve discussed everything from recipes and how to increase crop yield, to challenges like ensuring children’s access to education during military curfew and creating opportunities for young women to become financially independent. Crucially, everyone is given a chance to share their opinions. Jameela and the other organizers are the final decision-makers, critically analyzing and evaluating all the arguments raised during each meeting. 

Through these debates, Jameela and the other women are catalyzing real change in their community — particularly for Kashmir’s youth. Most of the women who attend the baithak didn’t have the opportunity to go to school, so they are deeply committed to their children having a quality education. In 2016, when Indian airstrikes in Kashmir necessitated a curfew and the local administration threatened to shut schools down indefinitely, Jameela’s baithak group proposed they switch to online studies instead. The motion was ultimately approved. In the weeks that I sat in on the discussions in Jameela’s kitchen, the women were discussing the possibility of starting a homeschool program for young girls in villages around their city. Because girls' schools in the villages are few and far between, girls have to travel long, risky distances on foot to attend; as a result, many parents refrain from sending them. The homeschooling program was the women’s attempt to ensure that girls in these areas had equal access to education.

***

Sitting amidst the group of women in Jameela’s kitchen, I was struck by how their conversation reminded me of the war stories I heard growing up from my grandparents about their migration from India to Pakistan during Partition. But unlike the male protagonists that tended to dominate my grandparents’ stories, this time, it was women strategizing about how they would protect their families should a war break out. 

Witnessing the resilience and resourcefulness of the women in Jameela’s baithak was the highlight of my journey to Kashmir — which, as it turns out, I made just in time. In 2019, a third war almost broke out between India and Pakistan, after members of the Indian police force were killed by a terrorist group while driving on the Jammu–Srinagar National Highway, and a series of armed clashes broke out between the two countries. The crisis ended with a peace offer, but the situation in the region remains volatile. 

Jameela plans to continue her baithak irrespective of the valley’s politics. Over time, more and more women have begun to take part, and while Kashmiri society remains male-dominated, Jameela says that when it comes to their participation, she and her attendees have been encouraged and supported by their respective families. Her baithak demonstrates the potential for domestic spaces and shared meals to be transformed into sites of collective resistance and positive change. In Jameela’s kitchen, despite the military conflict and conservative social norms that encroach on their lives, women are harnessing the power of collective action — a small but powerful step in their quest to better their own lives and those of the next generation.

Rahma Khan is a travel writer and independent journalist from Pakistan based in Canada. Her reported features and travel articles are published in publications like Matador Networks, Independent UK, and CondeNast Traveller, among others.

By Tommie Brown | Listen to Tommie’s reflections on this piece in our WAR BTS here.

France, 1789. The October night is black, the sky cracked open with rain. A mob of enraged and starving women march to the beat of a drum being played in the crowd as they trudge through the mud chanting, “Le pain! Le pain!” (“Bread! Bread!”). With pitchforks and pikes, the women knock on each door they pass, recruiting all Parisians to take up arms against their hunger and join them as they descend upon Versailles. 

The entire country is swelling with famine and fury. The people are starving, but the monarchy hides within the walls of their palace, apathetic to the suffering taking place at the foot of their gates. In the absence of food, women, freed from the duty of feeding their families, are awakening to the injustice of having been imprisoned in the kitchen. They are about to get their first taste of revolution. 

As the women reach the doors of Versailles, they spill the blood of two guards. They put their heads on pikes — a warning to the rest —and force their way into the King and Queen’s quarters, demanding to see the face of the one woman who they perceive to be wallowing in the lap of luxury, perched atop her gilded throne instead of working to end their starvation: Marie Antoinette. She emerges on a dark balcony, overlooking the mob of thousands calling for her death. Trapped in her own secret plight of hunger, Marie Antoinette bows her head to the baying throng. Empowered by her shame, the angry women below spare Marie Antoinette’s life, for the first and last time. 

The women who marched on the palace of the vilified Queen were famished, but they wanted more than bread. Starvation, for them, had awakened a new hunger: one for equality. But as they shook their pitchforks up at their silhouetted monarch, the vanguards of this nascent feminist movement didn’t realize that their villainization of Marie Antoinette would ultimately play a role in their own movement’s downfall. 

Starvation: A woman’s burden

The French Revolution, which began in May of 1789 and lasted until November 1799, was sparked by the deteriorating living conditions of poor commoners in France. A wicked combination of a baby boom, multiple bad harvests, the monarchy’s lavish spending, and generous financial support for the American revolution meant that country’s economy was in dire straights, and things were only growing worse by the day. For the lower classes, everyday life was overshadowed by mass food shortages and grocery price gouging. In the lead-up to the Revolution, heavy government taxes raised the price of bread by 88%. At the same time, wages for women’s labour dropped drastically, making it almost impossible for women to afford bread, a staple food for the impoverished French commoners. Rising bread prices left families starving — in many cases, to death. 

As a domestic duty, the responsibility of bringing food onto the table fell squarely on the shoulders of French women. With the food supply threatened by France’s spiralling economy, it was women who were often blamed for not being able to produce sustenance. After all, they were the only ones who shopped and cooked for their families. Many of them worked in poorly paid and laborious jobs — as laundresses, lace workers, and farmers — just to be able to afford food. In every sense, French women of the time were relied upon to provide meals for their families and suffered the consequences when they could not. 

In Food and Femininity, Kate Cairns and Josée Johnston write, “The gendered expectation to purchase, prepare, and enjoy food within context, or failing at food, is… perceived as a failure of femininity, or womanhood.” In pre-Revolutionary France — the peak of the philosophical Enlightenment movement, headed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a staunch anti-feminist — it was widely accepted that a woman’s place was in the domestic or private sphere. Since French women were given little to no form of education or independence outside of domestic duties, this narrative was met with limited pushback. They were, ironically, the breadwinners, but their power remained invisible outside of the home. 

But food shortages flipped the script. French women turned their anguish over their brutal living conditions and starving children into rage, staging hunger strikes and protests, even once beheading a butcher accused of price gouging. In his account of protests about sugar prices, Charles Alexandre described women as “the most excited of the mob” and “real furies”. They had gone from being the invisible “softer sex” to revolutionaries determined to cause a scene. The growing fervour culminated in women leading the 1789 march to Versaille, considered by many historians to be the formal beginning of the French Revolution. 

A movement grows, fixated on power

After the march on Versaille, women got organized. Olympe de Gouges, a leader of the feminist revolutionary movement, wrote, “The revolution will only take effect when all women become fully aware of their deplorable condition and of the rights they have lost in society.” 

It had started with bread, but the changes women were advocating for soon had little to do with food and everything to do with education, marriage, and politics. Between 1789 and 1793, 56 women’s clubs, the Société des republicaines revolutionnaires, emerged in Paris, dedicated to women’s equality. Women revolutionaries — accused by men of being “hysterical,” “ignorant”, and doing nothing but “disturbing otherwise calm sessions” — started showing up to popular men’s political clubs and voicing their grievances and opinions on behalf of all women. While men were reaching “enlightenment”, starvation brought women to their own great awakening.

Crucially, the Revolutionary women wanted to take down the key figure they saw standing between themselves and a better life — Marie Antoinette, France’s infamously decadent queen. Painted by commoners as the human caricature of gluttony and ignorance, Marie Antoinette was said to have spent more money than anyone in the history of France. Rumours echoed through the populace that while the people were starving to death, Marie Antoinette was throwing lavish dinner parties solely for the purpose of inviting members of the public over for a ritual known as “au grand couvert” — to sit and watch her and her husband, King Louis XVI, eat. Revolutionary anger fixated on the manufactured mental image of the Queen swaddled in twelve-layered dresses with diamonds stolen from Comtesse de la Motte around her neck.

When the band of women marched to Versailles, it was Marie Antoinette’s quarters they trampled into first. And in 1791 when Olympe de Gouges wrote the infamous text “The Declaration of the Rights of Woman” — drafted in response to the 1789 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” written by the French National Assembly as a preamble to the Constitution, which failed to include any mention of women (or enslaved citizens) as citizens who would gain equal rights — it was to Marie Antoinette that de Gouges dedicated the text. In hopes of awakening her desire to fight alongside the poor and common women against all patriarchal oppression, de Gouges personally delivered a copy of her manifesto to the Queen, inscribed to “the most detested of women”.

Marie Antoinette and the politics of protest

But what de Gouges and the revolutionary women did not know was that Marie Antoinette was engaged in a food fight of her own. While the stories of royals and elites gorging themselves on never-ending courses of fine food were true, contrary to popular belief, Marie Antoinette was the sole royal who didn’t partake. Not only was Marie Antoinette not responsible for the dinners, but she had no interest in eating at all. 

An outcast in her own palace, Marie Antoinette had been ostracized by her Court for seemingly myriad reasons — for being of Austrian descent, for offering up political advice to the King when her place was to stay silent, for not bearing the country a son within a timely manner. Lonely, powerless, and coattailed by maids who were ordered to keep a steady eye on her, Marie Antoinette lost her appetite. Henriette-Lucy, Marie Antoinette’s lady-in-waiting, wrote in her memoirs that while “the King ate with a hearty appetite, the Queen did not remove her gloves, nor did she unfold her napkin”. The lady-in-waiting goes on to describe how Marie Antoinette would often not touch her food. Her Chambermaid, Madame Campan, also wrote in her memoirs that if the Queen ever ate, it was in private, and she would only intake poultry or water. Her only true meal of the day — often also taken in the privacy of her bedroom — was breakfast, which following Viennese tradition, consisted of coffee or hot chocolate, and a pastry that we now know as a croissant. Exhausted by the constant attention, she even dismissed the maids ordered to serve her meals.

Marie Antoinette’s eating habits, or lack thereof, may have been an act of rebellion on their own against the assembly who stripped her of her independence. And the royal French Court took it as such. They mocked her desire for daily Viennese breakfast. They made no secret of the fact that her decision to dismiss her maids scandalized them. Above all, they set out to paint the Queen as a haughty, cold, and selfish woman. This unbecoming portrait, packaged and resold for centuries, is likely to have not been further from the truth. Marie Antoinette may, in fact, have been an empathetic and generous — if lost and naïve — figure. A chambermaid’s journal tells of Marie Antoinette sending her monthly income to help the victims of a fire in Paris before proceeding to cry over the tragedy for seven days straight. But to the Court, she was simply not what a French queen should be. Isolated and resented, Marie Antoinette continued to starve herself, fully aware that this only fueled the monarchy’s willingness to let her take the fall for their over-indulgences with the French public. In the end, she paid for it with her head. 

Coming undone

What came next was far from the feminist awakening that the women Revolutionaries had worked for. Two weeks after the fall of the monarchy, the all-male Revolutionary government banned women’s political clubs. They decreed that women’s sexuality was a scourge on society and guillotined Olympe de Gouges, the first to claim that women had the right to the scaffold, as a warning to other politically active women. It would be centuries before women’s rights improved: The civil code introduced by Napoleon Boneparte in 1804 declared women inferior beings and denied them all civil and political rights, and after the fall of Napoleon, the newly reinstated monarchy established even more traditionalist policies, including the prohibition of divorce.

The Revolutionary women inadvertently sharpened the tools that men then turned against them as soon as Marie Antoinette’s head had rolled. In accusing Marie Antoinette of promiscuous behaviour that betrayed her country and husband, and fixating on her negligence as a mother, they had, through their own internalized misogyny, reaffirmed the exact roles they had spent the last ten years trying to redefine. French womanhood was now idealized in opposition to Marie Antoinette: a good French woman was to be obedient, non-sexual, motherly, and placid. Women were swiftly removed from the public sphere and the image of Marie Antoinette as a coquettish villain would keep them out for a long time to come.

The tragic irony is that by seeing Marie Antoinette as their main aggressor, the Revolutionary feminists starved their own movement — all while Marie Antoinette, too, failed to recognize their fight as her own. The common women were hungry, but so too was their Queen, who was surrounded by food but said to have been spitting mouthfuls into her napkin, refusing to internalize the demands of the King and his Court. One side was being starved by force, the other by will. Both were using hunger to claim power over their lives. But as they starved for the sake of freedom, they unknowingly deprived themselves of communion.  

Tommie Christopher Brown is a SoCal writer whose style spreads from poetic to academic but finds home in marrying the two. She has a BA in English and recently worked for VICE, Boshemia Magazine, and Mitu. Follow her on Instagram @Tommiethegirl.

Further Reading

Cairns, K., and Johnston, J. (2015) Food and Feminity. Bloomsbury Academic Publishing.

Grey Levy, D. (1979). Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1795. University of Illinois Press.