“That’s when you saw these very broad categories, like Italian food, Chinese food or fancy French food,” she says. Instead, Hudson says that they stem from American restaurant culture in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Americans began to familiarize themselves with the food traditions of different immigrant groups. “These aren’t really old-fashioned or authentic categories.” “These are all very recent consumer and marketing terms,” says Leila Hudson, a n anthropologist and associate professor in the school of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona. What I’m trying to get at is that you’d be far from alone in this ignorance, as many of the terms are deliberately used interchangeably by those selling it. Both of my parents are Persian and I, too, occasionally struggle to differentiate between Middle Eastern cuisine, Mediterranean food and where or even if Persian food falls on that spectrum. I fucking love Persian/Mediterranean foodįinally found Persian food in Michigan!!! Rumi's Mediterranean Persian Restaurant) on #Yelp įrankly, I get it. By that measure, when you told your friend how good the kebabs were, you likely said something like, “Man, Middle Eastern food is the best!” Maybe you were confused maybe you didn’t know any better or maybe you legitimately believed that all the places where the yogurt with those delicious spices and chopped cucumbers flows like wine are all, in fact, the same. If you’ve ever eaten Mediterranean food, you’re probably working under the assumption that you’ve also, to some degree, tasted Persian food, Lebanese food or even Israeli food.

Middle eastern food