What Is Palestinian Food Anyway?

This is the question explored, in all its facets, in a long feature in The New York Times Style Magazine. What are the key ingredients? How does it differ from the food eaten by other people in the Middle East (notably Israelis)? Is it possible to have a cuisine if you've never had a nation of your own? What do you do if outside forces keep you from foraging or farming the things that you need to make your ancestral dishes? Writer Ligaya Mishan talks to chefs, cookbook authors, seed savers, philosophers, and documentarians in Gaza and the West Bank and in London and the U.S. "Food may be the most effective form of propaganda," Mishan writes. "It humanizes: When we dine with strangers, we learn something of who they are."