From Mouneh to Takeout: How Beirut Ate My Teta’s Recipes

When I first moved to Beirut seven years ago, I didn't go looking for coffee shops or galleries. I was after something more elemental, more urgent: a butcher, or rather my butcher. I'd been raised in a kitchen where nothing came prepackaged, where freshness wasn't a fashion trend, and where traditional culinary practices weren't a lifestyle choice. They were life itself. Meat came with bones, and bones came with a purpose. 

Two streets from my apartment, I discovered a tiny corner shop. Outside, a small yellow generator rumbled beside the entrance, blocking not only the sidewalk — a common inconvenience in Beirut — but half the doorway, forcing customers to step over it to enter. Fadi, the butcher, didn’t seem concerned with appearances. His priority was protecting his meat from routine power cuts. A cat brigade lingered by the door, meowing at anyone who passed through. I didn't need to see more. I knew I had found my butcher. 

One afternoon, I went to Fadi’s hoping to get lamb bones for fasouliyah, a local staple made with white beans soaked overnight and stewed in vegetable or meat broth with fresh tomato paste, onions, and garlic. 

Inside, an elderly woman sat on a worn white plastic chair. Nearby, a domestic worker clutched a small yellow piece of paper with a meat order scrawled in Arabic. I was the youngest woman there, and the only one not waiting to be called. 

“Ya hala,” Fadi greeted me, his back turned, as he minced parsley to mix into the ground beef for kafta. 

“Marhaba,” I replied, stepping forward. “Do you have lamb bones?” 

For a moment, Fadi kept chopping, as if he hadn't heard me. Then he stopped, dropped his knife onto the counter, turned around, and planted his hands on his hips. He looked at me with something between amusement and respect. 

“You’re either a really good cook,” he said, in a tone that was both sarcastic and serious, “or you’re not from Beirut.”

He wasn't wrong... I am a good cook. And I’m not from Beirut. 

I was born and raised in a village in northern Lebanon, where bones weren't scraps but staples. Whenever our family butcher had leftovers, he sent them to my mother. She would either stock them in our freezer or simmer them into bone broth right away.

The cooking I learned and practiced growing up revolved around a few main principles: make everything from scratch, use everything, save everything, and waste nothing. What is now called “zero-waste” was, in my teta’s kitchen, just how things were done.

Then I moved to Beirut. And before I knew it, I began to drift from those practices.

In Lebanon, those of us outside the city often face only two choices: emigrate or move to the capital. Either way, we often lose touch with our kitchens. This is when we give in to the city lifestyle: fast-paced, busy work schedules, burnout, fast food, limited green spaces, tight apartments, and cramped kitchens. Instead of honoring the rituals of our childhood, we start consuming in ways that contradict everything we were taught.

The cooking I learned and practiced growing up revolved around a few main principles: make everything from scratch, use everything, save everything, and waste nothing.

At first, I didn’t realize it was happening. One day, I came home late from work, too tired to even think of setting foot in my kitchen. So I ordered a kale chicken salad for delivery — $13 for barely two bites of chicken, packed in a plastic container. It was the fourth time that week I had opted for take-out.

The moment I took the first bite, it hit me: kale chicken salad? Me? Ya ʿayb el-shoum. The Layla who used to make fasouliyah from scratch with lamb bones had become the Layla who eats kale salad out of plastic. I’d taken the bait of city life and the realization filled me with profound sadness.

In Beirut, I rarely find the time to cook, let alone prepare the elaborate traditional dishes my grandmother taught me. The unfortunate reality is, it’s not a lack of love or skill that holds me back. Cooking connects me to my senses, my memories, and the warmth of my family’s kitchen.

If I, someone passionate about preserving our traditions, can’t cook mindfully in Beirut, then who can? How did we lose our tetas’ kitchens, and can we ever get them back?

A Global Problem

Food waste isn’t unique to Lebanon, it’s a global problem. About one-third of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted along the supply chain. If food waste were a country, it would rank as the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States.

Historically, food waste is a recent phenomenon, driven not by individual habits but by the transformation in food systems and industrialization. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Industrial Revolution brought mass food production. Imported and processed food became cheaper and more accessible, leading to a mindset of abundance and disposability. 

Colonial powers drastically reshaped global food systems. Countries in the Global South became the main producers, while people living in the Global North became the primary consumers. The balance of power shifted in favor of capitalist modes of mass production, at the expense of traditional farming practices.

Lebanon, once a place where not even a sliver of lamb was wasted, is now also grappling with a culture of disposability. 

Today, about 13 percent of food is lost in the supply chain, after harvest and before retail, while another 17 percent is wasted in homes, restaurants, and stores. This is happening while nearly 735 million people go hungry daily. The food we waste each year could feed 1.26 billion people. Lebanon, once a place where not even a sliver of lamb was wasted, is now also grappling with a culture of disposability. 

Rural Exodus

Lebanon is one of the most urbanized countries in the world. Eighty-nine percent of the population lives in cities, with nearly half of the population residing in the capital, according to the World Bank. The rest are scattered across areas often difficult to access due to limited public transport.

Systemic urbanization began just two decades after the country’s independence from French colonial rule. Under President Fouad Chehab (1958–1964), sweeping reforms aimed to modernize governance and shift the economy towards services and imports came at the expense of productive sectors like agriculture.

This economic transition crushed rural communities, forcing people to leave their villages and move to the city in search of work. Villages shrank while Beirut continued to grow.

During the civil war (1975-1990), internal migration intensified. Many people fled bloody battles in war-torn villages, especially in the South and Mount Lebanon, and resettled in Beirut, even as the capital was also engulfed in conflict.

The 1990s brought post-war reconstruction, transforming Beirut into a concrete jungle. Green spaces almost vanished, while traditional houses and gardens were razed to make way for high-rise towers. These new tower blocks weren’t designed for traditional ways of living. If people living in Beirut today wished to follow seasonality and keep their traditional food-making practices alive, where would they dry their mloukhiyeh leaves or red peppers to make paste, on balconies that barely see the sun or in their cramped apartments?

If people living in Beirut today wished to follow seasonality and keep their traditional food-making practices alive, where would they dry their mloukhiyeh leaves or red peppers to make paste?

Take my lamb broth recipe, for example. If my butcher sets aside five kilos of bones, I would have to wait for the weekend to cook them at my family’s home in the north, outdoors over a flame. Cooking them in batches in my apartment would take days. These preservation practices are the backbone of our cuisine, but modern urban life makes them nearly impossible to maintain.

Oudet el-Mouneh

I can still see and smell my grandmother’s pantry. Oudet el-mouneh is a small room devoted entirely to preserves, and she was the only one with keys to the precious vault. As children, we’d press our faces to the gap in the rusty red iron door just to catch a glimpse of the treasures inside. When she would slide open the bolt, a wave of vinegar, olive oil, and dried za’atar would greet us. It was more exciting than any candy shop.

Inside were rows of glass bottles — once used for juice, now filled with homemade tomato paste, yogurt, and lemonade. Entering that room meant it was time to prepare lunch together.

Oudet el-mouneh is one of the deepest threads connecting us to our past. “Thousands of years ago, when people settled in this region, they didn’t have the concerns we have today; all they cared about was agriculture and farming,” says Chef Suleiman Okan, a researcher of Levantine food history.

Barbara Abdeni Massaad, a food writer and president of Slow Food Beirut, agrees. “Our ancestors shaped their entire year” around securing and preserving food, she says in an interview with The Public Source. 

Historically, nothing was wasted. That necessity birthed the many preservation techniques and traditional recipes we now cherish. “With time, experience, trial, and error, they discovered that a lot of what they had could actually be used in various ways,” says Okan. Preserving was often a response to environmental necessity. “Some villages would be snowed in for more than two months in a row,” adds Okan. “People had to use whatever resources they had to their fullest extent. This is how mouneh came to be.”

Oudet el-mouneh is one of the deepest threads connecting us to our past. As a child, my teta's pantry room was more exciting than any candy shop.

These days, my family’s pantry room is much emptier. My grandmother’s five children and many grandchildren live far away. She only makes enough for herself, my grandfather, and a few care packages for family members. Like many others, she’s scaled down. Traditions shrink when families disperse, and the city cannot sustain the rhythms of the rural kitchen. 

“What can we do? This is life,” my teta would say with a sigh, quoting Gibran Khalil Gibran: “Your children are not your children, they are the sons and daughters of life itself.” 

My mother now repeats the same expression to me.

The Luxury of Time

When I was around 13, my grandmother showed up to our house with a bag of quicklime, baking soda, a large white plastic bucket, and a sagging black nylon bag. My mother had deep-cleaned the kitchen the night before and set out the equipment. I was excited because I was about to learn how to make fawaregh: stuffed sheep intestines, one of Lebanon’s most beloved and hated traditional dishes.

I remember seeing the buckets lined up in the shade on my grandmother’s balcony for days before the meal was cooked. Inside were snake-like coils of intestines, brown, beige, or colorless, soaking in solution, the hues changing with each stage of the cleaning process. Every day, she rinsed, scrubbed, and soaked them again, ensuring they were spotless. We scrubbed them one last time before stuffing them with hashweh, a mixture of ground beef, Egyptian rice, big onion chunks, seven spices1, and finally an extra sprinkle of cinnamon.

Watching her mix the filling by hand was a ritual: her motions were slow and deliberate, as if she were coaxing the ingredients into harmony.

Watching her mix the filling by hand was a ritual: her motions were slow and deliberate, as if she were coaxing the ingredients into harmony.

But zero-waste cooking, like this, demands more than tradition or awareness. It demands time. Dishes like stuffed intestines or vine leaves are elaborate and labor-intensive. “Maybe you really like to do it,” says Elizabeth Saleh, Assistant Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at the American University of Beirut, “but in the end, the only day you can do it is on your day off.”

The intestines take around six hours before they reach the table.  I once asked teta what she would think if someone paid her for all the time she puts into her cooking. “I’d be so rich by now, I could buy you and each one of your cousins a house!” she said. I have 15 cousins.

The Rise of Gadget Food

Around the same age I learned how to make fawaregh, my mother opened a clothing store for pregnant women. Her business needed time and care, so I began helping in the kitchen. Our meals became simpler. She prepared dishes early in the morning, chicken and rice, for example.

She’d make the chicken broth in one pot and the rice in another. At lunch time, when I came back from school with my two siblings, I would put the broth over the rice and boil it until it was ready. She would come and put together a quick salad and we’d have lunch all together before heading back to her shop.

Slow food, says socio-cultural anthropologist Diana el-Richani, “contradicts the fast-paced lifestyle that our current economy dictates.”

But some small food businesses have emerged to allow us to have it both ways: slow food for fast people. At Souk al-Tanabel, or the “lazy people’s market,” vendors offer chopped parsley, cored zucchini, and prepped grape leaves for those with more money than time. “Souk al-Tanabel is an interesting phenomenon that has integrated slow food into the market to make it accessible to those who don't have the time or skills,” el-Richani explains.

“Souk al-tanabel is an interesting phenomenon that has integrated slow food into the market to make it accessible to those who don't have the time or skills.” —Diana el-Richani, socio-cultural anthropologist

As much as I value traditional methods, I have to admit that Souk al-Tanabel is very practical. Living in Beirut taught me that preserving our culinary heritage sometimes requires compromise. I have the skills, but not always the time or energy to start from scratch.

“It's about convenience,” said Mohammad Abiad, Professor of Food Processing and Packaging at the American University of Beirut. “You have a lot of other things to do rather than just trying to save the food that you have. You're not going to waste time cleaning it up or using it for something else.”

The rise in grocery delivery apps echoes this sentiment, offering “groceries in a blink” or “groceries your way.” It’s also reflected in the popularity of “gadget food” like instant noodles or bouillon cubes: fast, easy, and far removed from my butcher’s five kilos of lamb bones.

“We live in consumerism,” says Massaad. "The world is really fast now, and if you want something, you have it ordered by delivery at the push of a button.”

The Food Waste Divide

My grandfather, now 84, worked as a butcher for many years. He used to bring home all sorts of animal parts that once puzzled me: offal, testicles, feet, tongues, lungs.

One day, while cooking offal, I asked him why he didn't just throw it out. Without turning to me, he said: “When nature is kind enough to give us something, we must use it fully. Nothing should go to waste.”

Today, celebrity chefs have made offal trendy. But these parts were always valued. Anissa Helou, a 71-year-old Lebanese-Syrian chef and food writer explains, “If a veal weighs 100 kilograms and only one kilo is offal, that makes it a very precious food because there's a lot less of it on an animal. It’s a delicacy.”

“From the olives, we have olive oil, and the pits inside the olives are gathered and burned during winter for warmth, and the olive oil's leftovers, the ones that can’t be eaten, are used to make soap!” —Suleiman Okan, Levantine food history researcher

But animal parts are not the only food group that can be used completely. For Chef Suleiman Okan, zero waste begins with something as simple as the olive. “From the olives, we have olive oil, and the pits inside the olives are gathered and burned during winter for warmth, and the olive oil's leftovers, the ones that can’t be eaten, are used to make soap!” he exclaims. “And that’s how we’ll have nothing left from the olive.”

Ovens are another example. In my village, we take large trays of kebbeh to the local bakery’s wood-fired oven, preserving both tradition and gas. And at home, we prop the tray to collect the excess oil, then store it in jars for reuse. These were standard practices. Today, most people discard cooking oil after a single use.

A Return to the Land

Since the crippling economic crisis began in mid-2019, food habits changed out of necessity. With near-constant power cuts, many started to carefully consider what to buy and take into account how long it would last. Refrigerated items became liabilities and many families turned to cheaper, longer-lasting foods like canned tuna, creamers, powdered milk and instant soup. 

A 2021 UN report revealed a stark shift: households with poor daily dietary diversity nearly tripled from 8 percent in 2019 to 22 percent in 2021. People were buying less fresh produce and more processed food, not by choice but by force. 

“The relationship with food and land has been reduced to a consumerist transaction,” el-Richani says. Food became about survival, not about cultural expression and connection, she added. 

“You need to have a society that carves out space for people to do this work without affecting their livelihoods,” she explains. “The knowledge of our cuisine came from an accumulation of centuries of people engaging and interacting with nature and themselves in order to produce what we know and enjoy today.”

“Without us knowing, we connect to our past and traditions with the food we consume even though the specific needs and conditions that required these practices to form are no longer present,” she adds.

For some, however, the crisis became a catalyst. The 2020 Beirut port explosion, COVID-19 lockdowns, and worsening economic conditions pushed a return to ancestral villages. “People turned to growing their own crops and plants, and many still forage herbs for their mouneh and stuffed delicacies,” el-Richani says. 

Saleh views this movement as more than economic survival: “It’s resilience against certain economic systems, but also, it safeguards certain traditions and practices against cultural erasure in a context of globalization and western hegemony.”

“We've leaned back on these practices and traditions that come from the land in order to overcome, or rather, to keep going through these waves of instability and crisis,” she adds.

When we lose our traditional kitchens, we lose more than recipes. We lose time carved out to cook and connect. We lose the smell of home, the sight of our mothers’ and grandmothers’ hands, the laughter in the kitchen. We lose the za’atar wrap that tides us over until the next meal, the tray of olives and spices, the sacks of onions in the corner, the apron passed down through generations. 

Some observers say Lebanon’s urbanization has been slowly decreasing in recent years. “We’re seeing more people moving back to their village, and increasingly living off the land because it's more affordable to do so,” notes Saleh. “But the reason they're doing it is precisely because of what capitalism has done to us.”

I still vividly remember the day of that fawaregh feast, with my mother standing at the sink, scrubbing sheep intestines. She held the snake-like intestines in both hands and rubbed them vigorously between her hands under fresh spring water. The smell was intense, and she grimaced with every scrub. My grandmother, beside her, guiding her with a watchful eye, encouraged her: "Yalla, jarrbi, jarrbi!" — "It's time you learned.”

She turned to me and said, half-joking, half-serious: “One day you’ll do this too. Watch and learn.”

I felt lucky to be there. I admired teta’s cooking, and I wanted to carry on her ways forward. She had already taught me some of the harder recipes, like waraq ‘enab (stuffed vine leaves) with bone broth. But I thought stuffed intestines were still too hard, maybe mama should master it first.

My mother never made that dish again. “Too much work,” she said. Over time, it vanished from our table.

Sunday lunches also started to fade, first due to the pandemic, then economic strain, and finally because of distance. My grandmother also got older. But I try to hold on to every recipe, every ritual I learned from her. Passing down this knowledge feels sacred.

When we lose our traditional kitchens, we lose more than recipes. We lose time carved out to cook and connect. We lose the smell of home, the sight of our mothers’ and grandmothers’ hands, the laughter in the kitchen. We lose the za’atar wrap that tides us over until the next meal, the tray of olives and spices, the sacks of onions in the corner, the apron passed down through generations.

I write this from my small apartment in Beirut, during a heatwave in July, one of the hottest ever recorded. The only thing keeping me grounded is the memory of my grandmother’s kitchen. I close my eyes and picture myself standing on a wooden bench, reaching over the stovetop to help her prepare yogurt for next winter’s preserves.

It’s hot. But this memory is warm and, despite it all, I know I’ll keep following the threads that connect me to my home.