Food and Power: A Culinary Ethnography of Israel

by Nir Avieli

Drawing on ethnography conducted in Israel since the late 1990s, Food and Power considers how power is produced, reproduced, negotiated, and subverted in the contemporary Israeli culinary sphere. Nir Avieli explores issues such as the definition of Israeli cuisine, the ownership of hummus, the privatization of communal Kibbutz dining rooms, and food at a military prison for Palestinian detainees to show how cooking and eating create ambivalence concerning questions of strength and weakness and how power and victimization are mixed into a sense of self-justification that maintains internal cohesion among Israeli Jews.

Genres: Nonfiction

293 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 1, 2017

Reviews

[Shir · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was fantastically researched and written, and is contextualized within the heated political milieu of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israel’s social currents. It gives a thorough basis for the social and political bases for food preparation, presentation, and consumption. The author also interweaves his personal experiences with different foods and restaurants, as well as how his time in the Israeli Army influenced his food research. This book emphasizes the myriad and complex ways that food interacts with broader social, political, and economic factors.

[Ilana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an engaging read - clearly a work of scholarly ethnographic writing, but not at all inaccessible. There were (and are) aspects of the culinary milieu in Israel that were not touched upon that I feel are integral to the larger story of the topic, but understandably Avieli cannot reasonably be expected to cover everything, and the subjects he discussed were fascinating and revealing examples of power dynamics between different interest groups and communities within Israel. I appreciated, also, that while Avieli is (rightfully) extremely critical of the many social problems that exist in Israeli society, he resists the temptation to use these realities as fodder for any kind of anti-Zionist polemic (nor does he, thankfully, indulge in any overtly Zionist defences of the state). While I wouldn't generally expect an anthropologist of any integrity to indulge in polemics of that nature, this is unfortunately something one comes to expect in writing on Israel and Palestine, and it's to Avieli's credit and the book's benefit that his autoethnography manages to remain as impartial and observational (and therefore useful) as it does.