Every day for about a year, I found myself watching a cooking show on Instagram. It features a girl from Gaza — a fierce funny preteen named Renad — showing the world how she makes her favorite dishes “the Gaza way.” She describes the scarcity of ingredients, the food shortages that shape her improvisations, the bombings that shake her world. These shortages are not accidental — they are the result of a blockade that has now escalated into widespread starvation. Entire families wait for humanitarian aid that may never come. Human rights monitors report that people are now dying of starvation in Gaza — mostly children, elderly, and the already ill. The official numbers are shocking, but I suspect the real toll is far greater, hidden in places the cameras can’t reach, in homes where people simply fade away before any aid ever arrives.
But Renad kept smiling, and kept cooking when she could. The joy of creating something delicious, even in destruction, is beyond necessity. It is an act of defiance. But six months ago, her cooking show went almost completely silent. One day she posted out of the blue: a list of the things she hadn’t tasted in four months. Onion. Garlic. Eggs. Meat of any kind. She wrote that she dreams about the smell of frying onions, that even imagining it makes her stomach hurt, because she knows there is nothing to smell, nothing to taste. I think about her constantly…..more
