Ortega directs a UCLA project that converts corner stores into hubs of healthy fare in low-income neighborhoods of East Los Angeles. He and colleagues work with community leaders and local high school students to help create that demand for nutritious food.

But more than that, he says, many people, particularly in low-income food deserts, just aren't used to buying or preparing healthy meals — they haven't had the opportunity, until now.

The answer has to do with much more than a new kind of food. For all its terrifying urgency, climate change is an invitation — to reinvent our economies, to rethink consumption, to redraw our relationships to nature and to one another. Cultivated meat was an excuse to shirk that hard, necessary work. The idea sounded futuristic, but its appeal was all about nostalgia, a way to pretend that things will go on as they always have, that nothing really needs to change. It was magical climate thinking, a delicious delusion.

a few animal cells, nurtured with the right nutrients and hormones, finished with sophisticated processing techniques, and voilà: juicy burgers and seared tuna and marinated lamb chops without the side of existential worry.

It puzzled me how much she considered her own history to be immaterial, and if she never patently diminished herself, she was able to finesse a kind of self-removal by speaking of my father whenever she could. She zealously recounted his excellence as a student in medical school and reminded me, each night before I started my homework, of how hard he drove himself in his work to make a life for us. She said that because of his Asian face and imperfect English, he was “working two times the American doctors.” I knew that she was building him up, buttressing him with both genuine admiration and her own brand of anxious braggadocio, and that her overarching concern was that I might fail to see him as she wished me to—in the most dawning light, his pose steadfast and solitary.

This made us all feel good, especially me, for I couldn’t remember the last time she had felt any hunger or had eaten something I cooked. We began to eat. My mother picked up a piece of salmon toast and took a tiny corner in her mouth. She rolled it around for a moment and then pushed it out with the tip of her tongue, letting it fall back onto her plate. She swallowed hard, as if to quell a gag, then glanced up to see if we had noticed. Of course we all had. She attempted a bean cake, some cheese, and then a slice of fruit, but nothing was any use.

Essays attempt to understand. They’re digressive, composed efforts to answer our great questions, make sense of our stories, the misfortunes and longings that other people experience, too; our larger histories, our collective human reaching toward meaning. It isn’t enough just to tell our own experience. Vivian Gornick, master essayist, writes “A subject beyond the self must be intersected with.”

This is the life of the writer. We experience a tragedy on two levels: the first is the one that feels, that grieves, that aches in every room where he isn’t; that plans the ceremony for the children, that speaks to the vet on the phone about the bill for the dead dog. The second level is the writer who is gathering evidence, who understands this story will grow more stark with time—who knows it’s too painful to write about yet but will nonetheless hold onto it in fragments, for down the road it will become part of the experience of sensemaking.

Even then, I was intensely curious about Gazan food and the stories it told: of villages erased from the map, of places I’d only heard about, of people I’d never met. Recipes were a sort of  treasure map to a largely invisible, or invisibilized, world of Palestinian history going back well before the 1948 Nakba, the year Palestinians refer to as their “catastrophe,” or mass expulsion and dispossession. After finishing college in North Carolina, I followed that map to Gaza, where I lived, worked, and raised my firstborn.

I felt that sense of community whenever I was in Gaza, but not so much in Saudi Arabia, where I spent most of my childhood in the 1980s. My parents were medical professionals, too busy securing their children’s education and futures to labor over traditional dishes. The first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, was raging back home, and beyond making sure we had degrees (the stateless Palestinian’s safety net), their priority was ensuring we didn’t forget our history (“so history won’t forget us,” they said). Food got lost in the shuffle.

caviar was a peasant staple, less expensive than fish itself, and a sanctioned fasting food on holy days:

But it was precisely this distance, in space, time and above all class (even in a supposedly classless society), that made the food — once the barest minimum, eaten and endured only in order to survive — suddenly palatable.