Food-Making in the Sisterhoods of Bourj Albarajenah Refugee Camp: Towards Radical Food Geographies of Displacement

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon suffer from colonial occupation over their lands, and from socio-economic exclusion in their host community. This chapter explores how collective cooking within camp sisterhoods is a means of resistance in the face of double injustice restricting Palestinian refugees, both in homeland and in exile. Using ethnographic and auto-ethnographic recordings of growing up in Bourj Albarajenah refugee camp in Lebanon, I analyse how food-making and food-sharing practices within my mother’s sisterhood has enabled us to attain food self-sufficiency and food sovereignty for decades. The food-making practices weave friendship and stories into alternative food networks across the camp space. These networks promote justice in local food systems by sharing culturally relevant food among food-insecure families, and foster food sovereignty by safeguarding the relationship with the colonized land in settings of forced displacement. I conclude that alternative food networks, in this case established by sisterhoods, can be a radical tool developed and used by forcefully displaced communities to rearrange food geographies, and establish channels of access to the homeland and its culinary traditions. Ultimately, I argue for the need to address the peculiarity of radical food geographies in settings of displacement.