THE NEW
SALSA
on the Internet, “First our land,
then our hummus.”
Zohar, a blunt-spoken man of
52 who rose through the industry by persuading more Israelis to
consume American corn products,
dismisses both groups of critics as irrelevant. The Palestinian
boycott amounts to mere “noise,”
he says. As for the argument that
hummus belongs to Lebanon: “I
am very happy if Lebanon is going
to fight about the hummus and
not about anything else.”
Like any businessman, Zohar
likes to talk about his product’s
promising future. But hummus
has a long history. And in the
Middle East, history has a way of
intruding upon the present, shaping questions about the legitimacy
of what Sabra has been adding to
the American table.
“The history of this food is that
of the Middle East,” writes Claudia
Roden, an Egyptian-Jewish cookbook author who has been credited
with introducing Middle Eastern
food to the West. “Dishes carry the
triumphs and glories, the defeats,
the loves and sorrows of the past.”
HUMMUS WARS
No one knows for sure how far
back the history of hummus goes,
HUFFINGTON
06.30-07.07.13
but traces of chickpea, the key
ingredient, have turned up in
Middle Eastern archeological sites
dating to 7,500 B.C. In his bestselling book, Guns, Germs, and
Steel, the anthropologist Jared
Diamond identifies the chickpea
as one of several hardy, nutritionpacked food crops that grew in the
Fertile Crescent and enabled its
people to develop agriculture and,
in turn, cities, armies, systems of
taxation and governments.
As civilization spread outward, chickpeas did, too, becoming garbanzos in Spain and
chana in India. In the Middle
East, they were boiled, mashed
and mixed with the sesame
paste known as tahini, becoming
“hummus bi tahini,” more commonly known as hummus.
In recent years, the growing
popularity of hummus has made
the dip an object of controversy.
Sabra instigated one of the fights
at a publicity event in New York
in 2007, where it served several
hundred pounds of hummus on a
plate the size of an above-ground
swimming pool, prompting its
executives to boast that they had
produced the la &vW7BF