The past fifteen years has seen the phenomenal growth in the political and cultural consciousness of Arab Americans and Arab Canadians. In Food For Our Grandmothers, editor Joanna Kadi has published reflections of an increasingly visible and articulate segment of this larger community - women. Such an anthology has been long overdue, and in bringing this project to fruition, Kadi establishes a precedent that, no doubt, will lead to the appearance of more illuminating volumes written from the perspective of North American Arab feminists. The body of Food for Our Grandmothers consists of six, separately titled, sections, all introduced by a recipe, followed by autobiographical essays and poems. Each part of the book receives a double label: first, the name of a distinctively Arabic food or herb (olives, bread, thyme, laban, grapeleaves, and mint); and, second, a designated concept (heritage, returning home, the Gulf War, stereotypes, identity, and personal pride). As editor and writer Kadi envisions her "cultural work" as equivalent to the skillful cooking of her Lebanese grandmother, and employs food as an extended metaphor to emphasize the nourishing qualities of the collected poems and essays, as well as to link the abstract linguistic creativity of the authors with the concrete culinary output of their "sittees."--Http://www.jstor.org (Oct. 4, 2016).
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