November 30, 2024—Nigerian women cook large quantities of jollof rice in one of the migrant-led community kitchens in Beirut, Lebanon. Photo by Sonia Caballero Pradas.
In Lebanon, a country still recovering from a surge in internal displacement and enduring socio-economic crises, food has become more than a source of sustenance—it is a means of survival, a vessel for memory, and a tool of quiet defiance. For the hundreds of thousands displaced within and beyond its borders, the act of cooking carries profound significance. It preserves culture, fosters community, and resists the erasure of identity in an environment that often marginalizes the displaced.
During the escalation of armed conflict in Lebanon in September 2024, displacement in Lebanon reached record-high levels, further straining the country’s fragile infrastructure and exacerbating the vulnerabilities of marginalized groups. Migrant domestic workers (MDWs), already navigating precarious conditions and abuse under the country’s restrictive Kafala system, have been disproportionately affected. With little access to formal relief efforts and housing, many have been left to fend for themselves in makeshift shelters, abandoned buildings, or overcrowded community spaces. Yet, in the midst of this crisis, an inspiring form of resilience has emerged: migrant-led community kitchens.
These spaces transcend their functional role of feeding the hungry. They become sites of solidarity, resistance, and cultural reclamation. As the conflict displaces Lebanese citizens, refugees, and MDWs, the kitchens offer a unique intersection of shared struggles, where flavors and traditions from Togo, Senegal, Sri Lanka, and other countries blend to create bonds of survival across cultural lines. These kitchens challenge the dominant narratives that often render MDWs as voiceless victims, instead highlighting their agency as cultural custodians and active participants in shaping transnational solidarity networks.
In contexts where displacement leads to the loss of both physical and cultural homes, migrant-led kitchens serve as a means of cultural preservation and social cohesion. These initiatives demonstrate how food can function as a stabilizing factor, fostering a sense of continuity and belonging for displaced individuals navigating the disruptions caused by conflict.
This article explores the intersection of food, displacement, and identity through the lens of MDWs’ experiences in Lebanon. Drawing on interviews with MDW chefs, it reveals how these women navigate and resist cultural erasure by reclaiming their culinary traditions. It examines how recipes passed down through generations serve not only as acts of memory and protest but also as bridges between diverse displaced communities. Grounded in the concept of “everyday resistance” articulated by James C. Scott, this piece situates food as both a deeply personal and political tool.
November 12, 2024—A group of Sri Lankan chefs are assisted by Sudanese women to distribute curry chicken in individual containers in Beirut, Lebanon. Photo by Sonia Caballero Pradas.
An everyday space of resistance
The smoke rising from colorful stews in gigantic pots contrasts sharply with the dark plumes of destruction outside, where war has shattered the sanctity of home kitchens and brought these communal spaces to life. Since the onset of the armed conflict in Lebanon in late 2023, over 1.2 million people, among them migrant workers and refugees, had been internally displaced, making community kitchens vital hubs of sustenance and solidarity. Accurate data on the displacement of MDWs resulting from this conflict remains difficult to verify, largely due to inconsistent estimates of their total number in the country —estimated to be anywhere between 177,000 and 250,000.
While some of these kitchens, led by Lebanese activists and volunteers, have received substantial national and international recognition, others operate with little visibility, much like the marginalized migrant communities they support. These migrant-led kitchens play a crucial role in Lebanon, serving as more than just spaces for cooking—they are sites of cultural continuity and collective memory. Through ingredients, tools, and routines, they preserve untold stories and traditions. The simple acts of chopping, simmering, and sharing transform these kitchens into spaces where personal narratives and broader social realities converge, with each meal embodying the endurance and resourcefulness of marginalized communities.
A Sri Lankan chef and community leader, a role similar to that of an elder or spokesperson in the community, shares: “Migrants in Lebanon are not a homogeneous people. I will admit, we do not always agree on everything, and we are often enough, segregated and separated from each other. We form cliques, we self-organize by nationality […] but under these circumstances, in these kitchens, when we cook together, it is as though all the politics and social tensions are not important anymore. I used to cook every Sunday for my community, but now, I cook for so many different people.”
This experience is not unique. Many migrant workers, despite their differences, find solidarity in shared kitchens, where cooking becomes a unifying act. Take Hiruni, a 60-year-old Sri Lankan woman who came to Lebanon during the Civil War (1975–1990) as an MDW. “When I landed, the airport was almost completely destroyed. They [the employers] picked me up with smoke all around,” she recalls. Decades later, she endures another war, using her limited free time and dwindling energy to cook meals for thousands of MDWs displaced or abandoned by their employers.
November 30, 2024—Volunteers from Western African countries prepare the utensils to cook. Photo by Sonia Caballero Pradas.
In the same kitchen, Siham, a Sudanese refugee in her 40s, voices her frustration at being excluded from Lebanon’s public conversations about war: “With ceasefire or not, it doesn’t matter for us. Israel will keep bombing, and if not, another civil war will harm us.” Having already protested with other Sudanese refugees outside the UN headquarters in the past, she sees these kitchens as an extension of her existence and a space for collective healing—a way to demand recognition of her experiences as integral to Lebanon’s social fabric.
Embassies and international organizations have offered little more than slow, scarce, and segregated support, forcing many migrant women—already the primary care providers in their communities—to turn to the coping strategies they know best: food. As Siham quips, “Habibti, which Sudanese woman doesn’t know how to cook?” Cooking isn’t always easy, though. Ingredients and remedies are often found through improvisation or quiet defiance. Diane, a cook from Togo, remembers smuggling her favorite hot peppers into Lebanon because her peers warned her of their scarcity. “I wrapped them carefully and put them in my suitcase, […] but when my madame saw them, she threw them away.” Fast forward to this year, those same peppers were chopped and stirred into a cabbage soup for 300 displaced migrant workers and their families in a pushback against the erasure of identity.
Food, in postcolonial settings like Lebanon, has long been racialized. Restaurants in Beirut’s trendiest districts elevate Lebanese, Italian, and French cuisines while sidelining the culinary contributions of migrant communities. Ethiopian, Senegalese, or Sri Lankan restaurants thrive only in working-class, multicultural neighborhoods like Bourj Hammoud and Dora, often operating underground. Yet, despite systemic racism, classism, and sexism, migrant women continue to cook, reclaiming their space and feeding those in need using recipes once forbidden in their employers’ homes.
Protests are often seen as visible acts of rebellion, but food is a subtler, equally potent force challenging patriarchal, racist, and classist patterns. James C. Scott’s concept of “everyday resistance” frames these acts: smuggling spices, cooking traditional meals in secret, or transforming community kitchens into sites of care and solidarity. These women navigate the illegality of their identities through “quiet, disguised, anonymous, often undeclared forms of resistance” (Scott, 1985). Though their actions may lack the visibility of public protests or widespread media coverage, they have a meaningful impact on their communities. Cooking, a seemingly trivial routine act, transforms into a symbolic expression of sociality, while the kitchens become living sites of memory. In these kitchens, chefs blend traditional and contemporary flavors, maintaining cultural heritage and personal identity while adapting to challenging social and political conditions, including the impacts of conflict.
Ifeoma, a Nigerian chef and meals distributor, captures this transformation best: “What we do is good; you just need to see beyond the skin”. She recounts how displaced Lebanese, living near migrant shelters, often request leftovers from the kitchens, drawn by the flavors and aromas that “fill both the room and the soul.”
November 26, 2024—Women from Sri Lanka wash the ingredients of the day in a migrant-led community kitchen in Beirut. Photo by Sonia Caballero Pradas.
The taste of dialogue: Food as a universal language
Much like the unassuming nature of daily gossip, which quietly shapes social dynamics, food—especially when used as a means of control—can have unintended consequences that extend beyond its basic function of nourishment. This unpredictability is not unusual; many of the world’s most cherished dishes originated by chance, emerging from a mix of available ingredients or preservation techniques that later became culinary staples.
Ragelyn, from the Philippines, never imagined she would create a new recipe for instant noodles, but the outcome was both delicious and, in her words, “life saving.” She arrived in Beirut 35 years ago as a live-in domestic worker, facing the harsh reality of her employer controlling both her mealtimes and what she consumed. In secret, she used the balcony as a makeshift communication channel. Through hushed conversations “as quiet as the birds,” her neighbor, a Sri Lankan domestic worker, slipped her packets of instant noodles. These packets became more than just a hidden stockpile—they marked the beginning of a friendship that flourished later throughout years of activism.
As Ragelyn’s story highlights, intercultural interactions are, without a doubt, one of those unexpected results of cooking, sharing, or restricting food. In the ongoing struggle to abolish the Kafala system and secure humane treatment from employers, neighbors, and the law, food serves as a universal language. The Great Oven, an organization dedicated to building and sending giant ovens to vulnerable spaces, such as refugee camps, war-torn communities, and cities in crisis, understands the transformative power of food in reshaping social dynamics.
In Lebanon, their giant ovens not only address immediate food needs—especially since the onset of war and mass displacement—but also spark conversations around the fire between people who have never shared a meal together before. This approach has been their modus operandi since their beginnings, from Tripoli to the Bekaa Valley and the heart of Beirut, with a growing family that includes ex-fighters, refugees, and MDWs. These kitchens have served as transformative spaces where their chefs reclaim the act of cooking as a public celebration of the home flavors once silenced, but long-woven into the fabric of the country.
Indeed, for many of these multicultural chefs, Lebanon has been home for long enough. However, their fluid, ever-evolving identities have been forced to slip between the cracks, finding refuge in corners and spaces where community, activism, and the art of cooking have become lifelines for survival. In the act of preparing meals for fellow displaced migrants, many women have reasserted their bond with the land they now call home. Just as Lebanese volunteers stand on the front lines, these women, too, are deeply committed to their communities in a country that often denies them recognition, yet one where they have invested much of their lives. As Eugénie, a Cameroonian worker in Beirut shared: “I have spent 35 years in Lebanon. This is my home, and I love it as much as I suffer from it. But when I cook my country’s food, I feel I haven’t lost myself. I am still African. I am an African with a home in Lebanon.”
In the act of cooking and sharing, women from Syria, Sudan, Ethiopia, and beyond—whose identities are caught between the wars of their multiple homes—find healing together. They share with us that the simple, resonant act of feeding others here in Lebanon, nourishes not only those around them but also their own sense of purpose, offering what they cannot give to those they left behind.
June 28, 2024—Photo taken during a cooking session conducted by an Ethiopian chef at The Great Oven in Mar Mikhael, Beirut. The place was later used by volunteers to prepare meals for displaced persons during the armed conflict. Photo by Sonia Caballero Pradas.”
Cooking as a language of defiance
“No one cares about us in this country—not Lebanese citizens, and not law enforcement. All we have is some kind organizations that take care of us, and we also have each other. You bet we will find the little joys we can collect, we will find strength in displacement in any form we can, and we will cook to feel connection and belonging in this armed conflict.” (Alia, Ethiopian migrant, Beirut Greater Area)
Migrant-led kitchens in Lebanon represent more than spaces for preparing meals; they are sites of resilience, resistance, and cultural reclamation. In a country grappling with the layered crises of armed conflict, internal displacement, and economic instability, these kitchens emerge as powerful symbols of defiance against marginalization and cultural erasure. They preserve traditions, foster solidarity, and offer a rare sense of agency to those often stripped of it by systemic inequalities.
Through the simple yet profound act of cooking, MDWs challenge stereotypes, build bridges across diverse communities, and create alternative narratives that defy their relegation to the shadows of Lebanese society. Their efforts demonstrate that food is not only a necessity but also a political tool—a quiet rebellion against oppression and an assertion of their right to exist, thrive, and be seen.
As Lebanon continues to endure Israeli aggression, displacement, and a fragile ceasefire that has not been upheld, these kitchens remind us of the power of everyday acts to inspire change and foster human connection. They underscore the need for systemic reforms, particularly the abolition of exploitative structures like the Kafala system, and for greater recognition of the contributions of migrant communities.
Ultimately, these kitchens are more than havens for nourishment; they are living testaments to the enduring strength of marginalized groups. The flavors that emerge from them carry stories of survival, resistance, and hope—stories that deserve to be heard, celebrated, and amplified.
Sonia Caballero Pradas
Sonia Caballero Pradas (she/her) is a Linguist and an Erasmus+ scholar on Migration and Intercultural Relations (EMMIR Program) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Migration Studies at the School of Arts and Sciences at the Lebanese American University. Her current research, grounded in the interplay of gender, culture and urban studies, explores how marginalised communities in Lebanon, especially migrant domestic workers and non-heteronormative individuals, actively shape the spatial fabric through their everyday practices of survival and belonging.
Jasmin Lilian Diab
Jasmin Lilian Diab is the director of the Institute for Migration Studies at the School of Arts and Sciences at the Lebanese American University, where she also serves as an assistant professor and coordinator of Migration Studies at the Department of Communication, Mobility and Identity. She is a research affiliate at the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University and a global fellow at Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies. As of 2024, she is a Visiting Professor in Migration Studies at Sciences Po Lyon.
- Jasmin Lilian Diab
- Jasmin Lilian Diab
- Jasmin Lilian Diab
