Food as a pluriverse: interacting with Taghmees, a social kitchen in Amman

1st July, 2024

Tamara Taher

During March and a part of April, I have explored the possibilities of doing research on local food systems and with local food communities through a post-development lens in the context of Jordan, taking into consideration the regional and global dimensions involved in development dynamics.

One crucial concept I am interacting with is the “pluriverse”, based on recognizing multiple ways of living, making community and building material and spiritual well-being.

Being inspired by post-development theories which aim to think and practice the world as “pluriverse”, I have met with local groups in Amman that engage in community practices that centre food as both a material question and an epistemic relational practice. In their practices of community making, food production or sharing, and in their knowledges and pedagogies, such groups focus on food’s connections with multiple dimensions, such as consumption or production, and relationship with land, people, and environment. Some of these are groups I already knew quite closely, while others came to my attention later, by exploring different relationships among groups and individuals working on these elements.

The question of food and how it is produced, consumed, shared, and accessed proves crucial in the whole Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in light of global crises that develop within it and in other regions as well, such as climate change, pandemics, public health issues, and wars. In the contextual work of some of the local groups I am getting acquainted with, food is a way of reconnecting with community and land and of reappropriating knowledges and agencies over collective and individual well-being.

One of the experiences I know closely is Taghmees, a “social kitchen” based in Amman and active since 2011. ‘Taghmees’ is an Arabic word that indicates the action of dipping bread in food, and it is used by the group to point both to this act of convivial eating and to the idea of being immersed in one’s own context and environment in the process of learning and seeking knowledge and wisdom. Taghmees has constantly engaged throughout the years in activities of ta’allum (learning) and bahth (search) that interact with Palestinian learning theorist Munir Fasheh’s critique of ta’leem (formal education).

With the start of the spring season, the founders of Taghmees invited me to accompany them in the activity of buying and preparing jars of delicious freshly produced white cheese and soft labaneh, which they sell in a local bakery in Amman. Cheese and labaneh (a thick yoghurt of the Levantine kitchen, usually served covered in olive oil) are produced in the spring to be stored all year round.

During the trip to a Shatana (a small village 24 km away from the city of Irbid, in the north of Jordan) to buy the cheese from a local lady who produces it in her own establishment, differences in taste and fattiness between ‘white’ and ‘dark’ milk (the first produced by sheep, the latter by goats), and the processes of producing the cheese were described in between stories of past seasons and journeys to cheese producers in previous years. Once arrived on the site and after having met with the owner and producer, Taghmees members and I proceeded to fill to the brim a number of 1-kilo jars which were then loaded in the car to be taken back to Amman.

Taghmees always writes phrases and words of love and resistance for Palestine and the land on its jars, which finally appear on the shelves of a local bakery to be sold to customers. “Healing and liberation”, “We are not numbers”, “Palestine is the land of miracles”, “The universe is alive, and it loves life” are beautifully written in Arabic white letters over black cardboard stickered on the jars. Connection and relationship with land – one so geographically close to the Gaza Strip being starved and bombed – are recalled as a practice of love and imagination of community and solidarity.