Make food, not war

The Irish Times

If Kamal Mouzawak calls you cuckoo-crazy that’s a big compliment. The 44-year-old Lebanese restaurateur did something that many would have described as cuckoo almost a decade ago. He started a farmers’ market in Beirut.

The Souk el-Tayeb brought people in from the fields and farms around the city to sell food along what used to be Beirut’s Green Line between east and west, where trees and greenery had grown wild during the war.

Mouzawak’s idea was simple. Food unites people, dissolving difference and connecting place and a shared history of food memories. Tayeb is Arabic for “good”, but it’s a rounded version of the word that brings in ideas of tastiness as well as virtue.

Source: The Irish Times FULL STORY