Welcome to Seeds of Middle Eastern Culture
Seeds of Middle Eastern Culture is a food sovereignty project focused on Middle Eastern culinary practices and raising awareness about the plants that hold unique meaning to our region of study. Food sovereignty refers to the right of individuals and communities to access nutritious and culturally suitable food, and to shape their own food and agricultural systems. This concept emphasizes that local communities should play a central role in food production and policy-making, which helps to address food insecurity and ensures the availability of culturally significant produce and ingredients.
Through this initiative, we will highlight the significance of culturally relevant plants, promote learning about Middle Eastern foodways of the Middle East, and learning about those plants and foodways in ways that can be experienced in Columbus. Guiding principles of this project related to food sovereignty:
- engaging community members in sustainable local food systems, cultural heritage, and cultural diversity
- supporting the collective action of communities working towards food security and related cultural knowledge
- prioritizing local farmers and food producers, with emphasis on ingredients and cultural practices of the Middle East.
These priorities make it apparent that transforming current food systems takes a cultural shift. At the same time preserving traditional knowledge requires younger generations learning about their heritage and revering older generations. That is why Seeds of Culture project focuses on young people. The mission of this project is to inspire young people to source their food locally, appreciate the cultural value of plants, and seek ways to contribute to their local food systems.
As of the 2022 Census of Agriculture, the average age of a farmer in the U.S. is 58 years. While our project does not claim to reverse this trend alone, it aims to inspire young people to engage with food sovereignty through hands-on experiences that illustrate how people play critical roles in food systems at a local scale. Our approach uses the culinary practices of MENA communities as an entry point for engagement, offering a means to both connect young people to farming activities and to increase their intercultural awareness. This often also means connecting young people to knowledge that is relevant to their own cultural backgrounds.
Partnership and Collaboration
The partnership between the Middle East Studies Center and All THAT – Teens Hopeful About Tomorrow is a cornerstone of the Seeds of Middle Eastern Culture project, empowering Columbus youth to connect with Middle Eastern culinary heritage and local food systems through hands-on experiences and intercultural learning.
The Middle East Studies Center collaborates with the Vincent Walters Urban Farm in the Bronzeville Neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio and Owner/Operator Jodi Spencer to advance community engagement through culturally rooted farming and education. You can learn more about the larger vision and Vincent Walters Agriculture & Cultural Heritage Center at Ubuntu Farmers Market.
Third Floor Design guides our project's community building efforts through their ground-breaking methods for action-oriented collaboration and learning.
Our Co-Sponsors
Thanks to our co-sponsors for making this project more impactful. Thanks especially to the Office of Outreach and Engagement at Ohio State University for funding our effort to document the impact of our activities. Thanks to the following departments at Ohio State for sponsoring guest speakers to come speak directly to kids and all of the people in our diverse community:
The Melton Center for Jewish Studies
The Department of Anthropology
The Department of Comparative Studies
The Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures Department
Mission, Values, and Approaches
Mission
Why a food sovereignty project? It's our mission to inspire young people to become more involved in their local food systems. Connecting with young people on the level of their values is an important way to achieve this mission. Young people are motivated by the desire to change the world for good. Resilient food systems, built on regenerative agricultural practices, that cater to a diverse array of cultural communities offer a key to solving food insecurity. This project also teaches skills that are in demand in the job market, fosters independence, and enhances personal development.
Our approach places strong emphasis on cultural heritage and the exchange of traditional knowledge, engaging young people in the discovery and sharing of culturally meaningful plants, foodways, and stories.
Values
This project reflects our core values: a commitment to local community engagement and education, with a focus on raising awareness about foods that express and sustain the cultural heritage of the Middle East region (specifically, South West Asia and North Africa - SWANA). While food sovereignty is a global concept, our team brings practical experience from culturally rooted projects, such as the restoration of traditional Hawaiian fishponds. Food sovereignty responds to food insecurity by reconnecting people to cultural heritage, while empowering communities to create food systems that reflect and preserve their culture. Resilient food systems thrive on the market's demand for global tastes, while offering everyone the possibility of cultural exchange.
Our project values local food systems, community building, and cultural exchange. It's an interdisciplinary concept of food, community, and environmental stewardship that emphasizes culturally relevant crops, culinary traditions, and cultural practices for cultivating plants and other sources of food. We define local food system as a network of food production, processing, distribution, and consumption that is geographically localized. This system emphasizes the use of locally sourced ingredients and aims to reduce the distance food travels from farm to table. Key components include:
- Local Farms: Small-scale farms that grow crops and raise animals within a specific region, preferably following regenerative practices and avoiding toxicity.
- Value-Added Products Businesses: Local businesses that process raw agricultural products into consumable goods.
- Distribution Channels: Farmers' markets, local grocery stores, and community-supported agriculture (CSA) clubs, food banks, food pantries and other programs that distribute food within the community.
- Consumers and Businesses: Individuals and institutions within the region who purchase and consume the locally produced food.
Local food systems support local economies and local efforts at regenerative agriculture, fostering community connections. They help reduce the environmental impact associated with long-distance food transportation and foster biodiversity in the plants people consume.
Community building is another core value. Creating opportunities for meaningful connection, shared learning, and mutual support are high priorities. We demonstrate our values by organizing events, facilitating online forums, developing collaborative projects, and creating spaces for open cultural exchange—including storytelling sessions, presentations of foodways, and shared gardening experiences. These actions foster a strong, connected community invested in the exchange of heritage, knowledge, and practices.
For our project, cultural exchange means recognizing, valuing, and sharing the diverse cultural backgrounds within our community—particularly by connecting and comparing personal traditions, foods, stories, and histories. This involves:
- Acknowledging and exploring heritage: Creating opportunities for participants to share and learn about both their own and others’ cultural backgrounds.
- Promoting mutual learning: Ensuring everyone has space to contribute, listen, and reflect on both similarities and differences.
- Encouraging active participation: Building environments where all community members feel invited to share, teach, and engage with cultural practices.
- Fostering respect and understanding: Elevating storytelling, traditional knowledge, and culinary heritage as means for bond-building within cultural communities and across cultural difference.
We actively engage cultural communities by focusing on plants and knowledge relevant to their heritage and traditional region. The Middle East Studies Center curates knowledge related to the Middle East and its cultural, religious, and linguistic communities, inviting other area studies centers to join in the conversation and promote global, heritage-based connections.
Background
This project addresses the need for education and community building with cultural relevancy as they pertain to food sovereignty. Our project focuses on cultural communities of the MENA region and their culinary practices as a way to engage people with their local food systems. This project promotes cultural awareness and heritage in response to the unique cultural perspectives and identities of the communities we serve. The project incorporates feedback we've received from conversations with urban farmers, food sovereignty researchers, and other stakeholders over the past two years. These conversations are rooted in the Community-Centered Approaches for Food Systems Transformation Workshop we hosted in 2022. This workshop focused on university-community partnerships and the importance of learning from communities about their local food systems, both historically and in the present. The workshop brought together historians, anthropologists, communications and literature scholars, scientists of nutrition, aquaculture, public policy, and many others, making it a genuinely transdisciplinary event. It also included individuals working locally in food systems transformation, non-profit urban farming, government offices focused on food access, environmental protection, and public health. Check out the materials from our 2022 Food Sovereignty workshop for further information.
We will offer engaging learning activities that target young people and teach about culinary cultural practices around herbs, fruits, and other plants of particular importance to the Middle Eastern region. These are plants that can flourish in Ohio but originate in cultures of the Middle East, Eastern Mediterranean, and North African region (MENA region). We will provide pots, seeds, soil, and handouts about plant care and the related cultural knowledge about the plant. QR codes will lead to further in-depth information. By offering palatable linkages across communities of New Americans and birth citizens in Columbus and across diverse ethnic and religious sects of MENA we will facilitate cultural exchange.
Food sovereignty strengthens the resiliency of food systems by localizing food sources and increasing diversity. The role of this project and in strengthening our local food system is the need for education and community building with cultural relevancy. Building resilient local food systems requires numerous inputs. The journey from soil to table includes producing, processing, distributing, and other aspects integral to consuming food within a specific region. We are grateful organizations are addressing these needs in our local area of Central Ohio and will collaborate with stakeholders to create opportunities for cultural exchange around food, focusing on cultural communities of the MENA region, and the culinary practices and plants that come from that region.
“It takes a village” to recreate food systems to be more locally sourced, culturally relevant and earth-friendly. To bring the village to our urban community, the Middle East Studies Center will teach and share about plants in different cultural contexts across the MENA region and their adoption and spread beyond. We will show how specific plants have heritage roles and how their production and use is traditionally tied to collective action at the heart of food sovereignty. Our project will build community around food production and sharing and the collective actions required for both. The MENA region offers many models. Olive oil provides an example of collective action in the Eastern Mediterranean. It comes from generationally tended trees on inherited terraces where entire kin groups harvest and share a few presses.
Educational activities will start by engaging with people at farmers', markets. We will encourage passers-by to learn more about the cultural contexts of plants by offering seeds and pots for them to plant, along with cultural information. We will award points for stopping by other market stands and learning about the value-added products and other businesses that are helping to maintain locally sourced diets whilst supporting local businesses. Undergraduates will form an integral part of these activities, by serving as educators at the market stands, capturing personal stories, and gathering feedback and additional background knowledge from faculty members and guest scholars we invite to speak on related topics. Collaborations with other units on campus and local schools or after-school programs might be another important outcome of the program. By growing the program in partnership with other units, producers and local organizations we will sustain the activities over time and increase their impact.
Learn More About Crops, Cuisine, and Food Systems of the Middle East
Learn more about the plants and ingredients essential to Middle Eastern Culture and Cuisine
Learn More About Crops, Cuisine, and Food Systems of the Middle East
Learn more about the plants and ingredients essential to Middle Eastern Culture and Cuisine