Foreign Correspondence, Vol 137
Anissa Helou on discovering new flavors in a cuisine she thought she knew
Hello, happy Friday and — to those observing — Eid Mubarak!
It’s hard to feel celebratory given the state of, well, everything. As my Reuters’ colleagues reported this week, the U.S. is weighing the deployment of thousands of troops to the region — an outcome that only a small fraction of Americans would actually support, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll — while global markets reel from the impact the war is having on energy exports.
Yet concerns about the price at the pump feel trivial compared with the toll the war is taking on people living through it — most notably in Lebanon, where entire buildings in Beirut have been leveled by Israeli bombardment, killing nearly 1,000 people and displacing another million across the country.
I was particularly struck by this visually rich story from my colleagues, who spoke with Lebanese Muslims navigating a Ramadan defined by fear and loss.
“Those fasting have two joys: iftar, and Eid,” one Lebanese man said. “We haven’t seen iftar, and we’re not going to see Eid.”
What I’ve worked on
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to speak with James Beard Award-winning author and Beirut native Anissa Helou about her latest cookbook, “Lebanon,” and the urgency of documenting regional recipes that were previously unknown to her.
The conversation took place before the latest escalation. Her comments, as you’ll see below, were very prescient:
Your work often explores how food preserves cultural memory — something that has been similarly discussed by cookbook authors like Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi. How important is it in the Lebanese context?
I think it’s very important. My whole purpose writing about food is preserving culinary traditions for future generations. Food is much more important for Palestinians to preserve for their identity because most of their food is being appropriated. Whereas in the case of the Lebanese, we don’t yet have that problem. But there is the problem of instability, conflicts, aggression. There is a risk of loss of this knowledge because people get displaced, places get destroyed. Lebanon is not immune to destruction, especially now.
So it’s very important for me to preserve and to document, especially visually, because you might lose that beautiful village or this gorgeous house with the old lady who is making mishtah in a hole in the wall. These places are going to go eventually; they will not stay. And so to document them visually, as well as in the written word, is very important.
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What I’ve read
This Reuters investigation on unmasking Banksy:
Reuters took into account Banksy’s privacy claims – and the fact that many of his fans wish for him to remain anonymous. Yet we concluded that the public has a deep interest in understanding the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse. In so doing, we applied the same principle Reuters uses everywhere. The people and institutions who seek to shape social and political discourse are subject to scrutiny, accountability, and, sometimes, unmasking. Banksy’s anonymity – a deliberate, public-facing, and profitable feature of his work – has enabled him to operate without such transparency.
This piece on why AI still can’t write well:
AI research is an empirical science—people can verify when something works and make tweaks when something doesn’t. But art resists rules and quantification. No objective measurement exists to prove whether Pablo Neruda’s work is better than Gabriela Mistral’s. Novice writers learn conventions; great writers invent them. An LLM trained to imitate taste can go only so far. … The difficulty of evaluating writing does not prevent AI labs from trying. They are motivated in part by a question that came up again and again in my interviews: If LLMs can’t write mind-bending essays or poignant sonnets, are they generally intelligent at all?
Though I consider myself a fan of the Oscar-nominated film, The Voice of Hind Rajab, I found this to be a very thoughtful critique:
I am uneasy with how quickly the film’s success was claimed as a victory for Palestine. As a Palestinian writer, I can’t shake the feeling that we are accepting a measuring stick that was never ours and never meant for us — one that rewards proximity to Western institutions more than accountability to the people whose lives are being depicted. And I wonder if, in our hunger for visibility and validation, we were willing to accept a film that names our pain but still falls short of what Palestinian cinema could—and should—be.
What I’m thinking about
If your corner of the internet looks anything like mine, you may have seen rumors about Benjamin Netanyahu’s supposed death, sparked by claims that a video of him addressing the Iran war had been AI-generated.
Netanyahu, needless to say, is very much alive. But the persistence of these denials underscores that the threat of AI isn’t limited to people falling for disinformation; they may also, to borrow from Orwell, begin rejecting the evidence of their eyes and ears.
Until next time,
Yasmeen