Since the war broke out on October 7, tens of thousands of Israeli families have been forced to evacuate their homes for months and stay in hotels across the country. Our “Open Kitchen Project” gives them an opportunity to cook the dishes they miss at the homes of volunteers. Many of the meetings were documented, and we were able to publish their recipes online. Doctoral candidate Michal Rozanis attended several of the sessions — these are her findings.
What makes a home?
Four walls?
A ceiling?
A floor?
Beautiful furniture?
Or perhaps
Me and you
The smell of food
A barking dog
A few toddlers …
— Tali Paz
By lunchtime, the pots on the stove filled the kitchen with the aromas of home-cooked food — chicken meatballs in tomato sauce and a rich vegetable soup with kubbeh. A roasted eggplant salad and pickled vegetables were already waiting on the table. The kitchen belonged to Chaya Salomon, a young woman in Tel Aviv, but she wasn’t the one cooking that day — Pirchiya Sabbag, a 65-year-old retired kindergarten assistant, was. A resident of Kiryat Shmona in the north of the country, Pirchiya was evacuated to a Tel Aviv hotel with her twin 9-year-old granddaughters when the war started.
The two women were brought together by “The Open Kitchen Project,” which offers evacuated families a chance to cook in the homes of volunteer families all around Israel.
Pirchiya was visibly delighted to finally be able to cook the food she used to make for her family before October 7. The only thing that bothered her was the size of Chaya’s pots: “It’s a shame you don’t have bigger pots; I could have made you much more soup,” Pirchiya said.
Many participants in “The Open Kitchen Project” have expressed the same regret — it seems their key motivation is to cook their food; eating it is less important. And many cooks insist on sharing the dishes they make with their hosts, neighbors, or the Asif team. This phenomenon is just one example of the meaning and role that cooking has taken on during the war. Discussing the emotional and cultural aspects of cooking and food in the context of Gaza’s severe food shortages is, of course, complex; however, this article will focus on the war’s effects on Israel.
The late British anthropologist Mary Douglas discussed the central role of home-cooked food and family meals in defining and exposing power relations within the family, as well as processes of inclusion and exclusion that symbolize family and community boundaries. Professional literature in the fields of anthropology and sociology, along with a variety of studies conducted in Israel, Belgium, England, the United States, and elsewhere, characterize the family meal as one cooked from basic ingredients and served to family members or close friends.
The preparation of family meals is perceived as a basic parental — often maternal — duty, and arouses feelings of nostalgia. Beyond the functional need of providing nutrition, home-cooked food also plays emotional roles, which during normal times include an expression of strong ties to other family members, as well as a need for the creation, preservation, and intergenerational transference of a family identity. On a social level, the family meal may be a tool for strengthening interfamily ties, for creating close relationships with others by cooking and eating together, or for setting limits by adhering to certain cooking and eating rules and patterns like keeping kosher.
However, like other concepts formerly taken for granted, such as personal security, the right for a “normal” routine, or the state’s responsibility for its citizens, after October 7, home-cooked food has shifted and taken on new meanings. In this article, I will discuss these developments, based on my active participation in war-related cooking activities, as well as informal conversations and interviews held with dozens of cooks over the last months.
Since the start of the war, cooking has looked different in many families, often taking place outside of the traditional home environment. In the early weeks, we witnessed a surge of cooks volunteering to prepare meals for soldiers. As the war continued, attention shifted toward those evacuated from their homes, and various initiatives aimed to address their needs for home-cooked meals. These efforts included “cooking shifts,” where evacuated cooks could use the kitchens in the hotels they are living in. There was also a food truck equipped as a home kitchen near the Dead Sea hotels, where evacuated families could find refuge and cook a family meal, and projects like “The Open Kitchen.” All these initiatives were driven by private institutions, organizations, and individuals.
These phenomena may appear different, yet they all share three common distinctions. The first is who they are cooking for, family, even if a temporary one. In conversations held with women who cooked food for soldiers, they commonly referred to the soldiers, whom they had never met, as “our children, who we must feed.” They also pointed out that they were preparing the same food they cooked for their families. Similarly, the participants in “The Open Kitchen Project” expressed a desire to feed their hosts and Asif team members. In some cases, they made changes to dishes to accommodate their hosts’ culinary preferences by preparing a vegetarian version or using gluten-free flour. The families, which were randomly assigned to these women, became part of their close circle for the moment.
The second distinction stems from the circumstances, yet fundamentally alters the definition of the family meal: the physical breach of the boundaries of the home. The home-cooked food prepared by the cook is no longer confined to consumption inside the home; rather, shortly after the start of the war, it was eaten in the soldiers’ areas of deployment, and today, it’s eaten in the hotels where evacuated cooks are living. The plastic containers the food is packed in enable this extension of the home, or function as “home capsules,” integrating new diners into the family circle.
The final distinction lies in the significance of the act of cooking, which took on therapeutic dimensions after the outbreak of war. While the early initiatives aimed to address reported food shortages, this problem was gradually solved, and cooking for soldiers became a means of establishing an emotional relationship. In many cases, cooking became a therapeutic process, whether through providing distraction or by helping cooks regain a sense of control following October 7. Some soldiers testify that although they had no actual need for the food, they understood how important it was for the senders and therefore continued to accept these deliveries.
The experience of the participants in “The Open Kitchen Project” seems to fulfill a similar role. Most of the participants prepared the dishes they typically make for family dinners: simple food with basic ingredients, such as schnitzel, matbucha, eggplant salad, and spaghetti with meatballs. Sometimes they opted for Shabbat dishes like Moroccan fish, stuffed vegetables, sweetbread stew, roasted chicken thighs, and challah.
Those who chose to cook a more elaborate meal expressed different motivations for cooking, and an emotional, rather than a physical need, to feed and eat. For example, Miri Ben Simon from Kiryat Shmona, who has lived in a Tel Aviv hotel with her husband since October, declared, “I hardly eat myself, but I missed cooking so much!” Meanwhile, Sharona Dahan, who left her home in Sderot on October 7 and has been living with her family in a hotel in Tel Aviv, said, “I haven’t cooked for myself since the Black Shabbat. We’re all safe and together, but we really miss the food of home.” Tami Moyal expressed similar feelings. “I haven’t done this for 70 days,” she said. “It made me feel so much better.”
The cooks’ tendency to prepare large quantities of food and their desire to share it with their hosts show a strong need to reclaim their customary role as those who feed and give, rather than receive. Often, their choice of dish was driven by emotion. For example, Valerie Chen made stuffed grape leaves, because they reminded her of the grapevines growing in her garden up north. Sigal Hayak prepared what she calls “Grandma’s soup,” a red lentil and barley soup, which her family asked her to make to honor the memory of her mother, who passed away last year.
In the personal sphere, the role of food for both the cooks who made food for soldiers and the participants in “The Open Kitchen Project” can be best described as “gastro-emotivism,” a term coined by anthropologists and sociologists Rafi Grosglik and Julia Lerner to describe the combination of food, emotion, and self-therapy. The two, who have studied the hit TV show “MasterChef,” explain that cooks “serve themselves on a plate.” Instead of cooking publically on television, like on the show, these wartime cooks are doing so in private as a form of mental survival. Cooking and feeding can’t bring them and their families back home — this requires top-down, long-term strategies and solutions — but it helps them preserve a sense of control and reaffirm the routine they had at home.
In a broader context, the expansion of home-cooked food beyond its traditional boundaries reflects a deep-seated need to rebuild a sense of home and security, undermined by October 7 and perhaps even before, during the judicial reform protests. As one long-time volunteer cook told me, “I hope this brings us together, just like in cooking, where everyone contributes as ingredients to make one delicious stew.”
It is important to stress that these reflections are preliminary. The intricate relationship between food, home, and society in Israel is currently undergoing significant transformations, and it remains too early to predict how these dynamics will evolve in the future. The war is still going on; the hostages, as well as tens of thousands of evacuated families and soldiers, have not returned home. At present, it appears that in the aftermath of the individual and collective trauma of October 7, Israeli society uses eating and feeding others as practices of emotional solace. Only with time can we conduct a more thorough investigation into the new roles home-cooked meals and family dinners, as well as food in general, play in the connection between home and society.