What Burns When a Farm Burns

Now we're getting somewhere.

Because this isn't really about recipes.

It's about who gets to claim a history, and in Lebanon's case, that claim has been interrupted over and over by war.

El Líbano tiene muchas guerras en su historia.

Lebanon has many wars in its history.

Hay guerras civiles y guerras con vecinos.

There are civil wars and wars with neighbors.

The civil war alone ran from 1975 to 1990.

Fifteen years.

Think about what happens to a food culture when a generation grows up unable to farm their land, unable to go to the market without fear.

The knowledge doesn't always survive.

Las recetas viven en las familias.

Recipes live in families.

Las abuelas enseñan a los hijos.

Grandmothers teach the children.

Exactly.

And when grandmothers flee, the recipes go with them or they disappear.

There's actual research showing that conflict zones lose food biodiversity at a measurable rate.

Crop varieties that took centuries to develop get abandoned in a single harvest season.

En el sur del Líbano hay muchos olivos muy viejos.

In southern Lebanon there are many very old olive trees.

Algunos tienen cientos de años.

Some are hundreds of years old.

Hundreds of years.

An olive tree can live for over a thousand years.

You cannot replace that.

You can plant a new one, but your grandchildren's grandchildren will be the ones who see it produce properly.

When those trees burn, that's generational loss.

El aceite de oliva libanés es muy bueno.

Lebanese olive oil is very good.

Pero ahora es difícil producirlo.

But now it is difficult to produce it.

And this connects directly to what's happening this week.

Over seventy targets in the south in one day.

The military reports focus on Hezbollah positions, which is understandable.

But farms aren't easily distinguished from infrastructure from the air, and the south of Lebanon is densely agricultural.

La gente del sur no tiene comida fácil ahora.

The people of the south do not have food easily now.

Es muy difícil.

It is very difficult.

And Lebanon was already in a catastrophic economic position before this round of fighting.

The financial collapse in 2019, the Beirut port explosion in 2020.

Food prices in Lebanon rose by something like 300 percent between 2019 and 2023.

People were already going hungry.

El pan es muy importante en el Líbano.

Bread is very important in Lebanon.

Cuando no hay pan, hay un problema muy grande.

When there is no bread, there is a very big problem.

The bread lines in Beirut during the worst of the economic collapse were something I couldn't have imagined in that city when I first visited in the nineties.

Beirut was Paris, everyone said.

The restaurants, the nightlife, the food markets.

Beirut tiene restaurantes muy famosos.

Beirut has very famous restaurants.

La cocina allí es una mezcla de muchas culturas.

The cuisine there is a mix of many cultures.

French pastries next to Arabic sweets next to Armenian lahmacun.

The food of Beirut was a living map of who had passed through, who had stayed, who had been absorbed.

And that map is getting harder to read every year.

Pero la gente no para de cocinar.

But people do not stop cooking.

La comida es resistencia también.

Food is also resistance.

That's the sentence that gets me every time.

Food is resistance.

Because you keep hearing it, from Lebanon, from Gaza, from Ukraine.

When everything else is taken, people cook.

They insist on the ritual of the table even when the table is half empty.

En España también.

In Spain too.

En la guerra civil, la gente cocinaba con poco.

In the civil war, people cooked with little.

Pero cocinaba.

But they cooked.

That actually connects to something historians of food have been arguing for decades.

Scarcity doesn't kill a food culture.

Sometimes it defines it.

The cocido madrileño, the cassoulet in the south of France, Lebanese lentil soup, all of these are poor people's food that became beloved national dishes precisely because they made something from almost nothing.

Las lentejas libanesas son muy buenas.

Lebanese lentils are very good.

Con limón y aceite de oliva.

With lemon and olive oil.

Simples pero deliciosas.

Simple but delicious.

Now I'm hungry and slightly depressed, which is apparently the appropriate emotional state for this podcast.

What I keep coming back to, though, is the question of what gets rebuilt first after a conflict.

Infrastructure, fine.

Electricity.

Housing.

Food comes later, agriculture comes much later, and the cuisine, the culture around the food, sometimes never fully comes back.

Es verdad.

It is true.

La gente recuerda los sabores de antes.

People remember the flavors from before.

Pero no siempre puede hacerlos.

But they cannot always make them.

The taste of before.

There's a whole field of sensory memory research around exactly this, the way food smell and taste carry trauma and nostalgia in equal measure, sometimes in the same bite.

Lebanese emigrants describe their mother's cooking in a way that's almost grief.

Mira, hay una palabra en español: 'añoranza'.

Look, there is a word in Spanish: 'añoranza'.

Es como nostalgia pero más fuerte.

It is like nostalgia but stronger.

Añoranza.

I've seen that word before but I've never had anyone explain the difference to me.

What makes it stronger than nostalgia?

Nostalgia es recordar algo con tristeza.

Nostalgia is remembering something with sadness.

Añoranza es desear algo que no puedes tener.

Añoranza is wanting something that you cannot have.

Wanting something you cannot have.

That's a sharper edge.

And honestly, it describes what we've been talking about precisely.

A Lebanese grandmother in São Paulo making kibbeh from memory, in a kitchen on the wrong continent, for a dish her olive trees can no longer produce the oil for.

That's añoranza.

Exacto.

Exactly.

Y la diferencia con nostalgia es importante.

And the difference from nostalgia is important.

Nostalgia puedes sentir en tu casa.

Nostalgia you can feel in your own home.

Añoranza es cuando no puedes volver.

Añoranza is when you cannot return.

I was going to ask you about the grammar, actually.

How does añoranza work as a verb?

Is there one?

Sí, el verbo es 'añorar'.

Yes, the verb is 'añorar'.

Yo añoro mi ciudad.

I miss my city.

Tú añoras tu país.

You miss your country.

Es fácil.

It is easy.

And in English we'd just say 'miss,' right?

'I miss my city.' But 'añorar' already bakes in that layer of longing for something unreachable.

You can't just say 'I miss my city' in Spanish and have it mean the same thing as 'añoro mi ciudad.'

Correcto.

Correct.

'Echar de menos' es más normal en el español de hoy.

'Echar de menos' is more common in Spanish today.

Pero añorar es más poético.

But añorar is more poetic.

Y más exacto para cosas perdidas.

And more precise for things that are lost.

More precise for things that are lost.

That might be the sentence of the week.

It also might be the sentence this whole conversation needed to land on, because that's what we've been circling: Lebanon's food is not gone, but parts of it are añoradas already, by people who are still alive to miss them.

Sí.

Yes.

Y espero que el sur del Líbano tenga paz.

And I hope that southern Lebanon has peace.

Para comer, para cocinar, para vivir.

To eat, to cook, to live.

To eat, to cook, to live.

Octavio, that's the cleanest ending we've managed in weeks.

I'm not going to touch it.