At the world's largest Syrian refugee camp, food still matters

In Northern Jordan, not far from the Southern Syrian border sits a 1,300-acre village that's home to 83,000 people. The main shopping street is populated with around a thousand businesses — restaurants, boutiques, electronic stores, food shops. The town's majority population is under 18, which creates a vibrant energy. The way this community came about, however, isn't the story of most similarly sized towns. 

Zaatari is the largest Syrian refugee camp in the world. Karen E. Fisher, a professor at the University of Washington, arrived there in 2015 to work with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. She and her team of refugees — her "2,000 collaborators," as she calls them — tell the story of Zaatari through the food in an extraordinary cookbook, Zaatari: Culinary Traditions of the World's Largest Syrian Refugee Camp.

Evan Kleiman: The book just blew me away.

Karen E. Fisher: Thank you, and thank you. That really warms our hearts.

For me, the cookbook part of it was secondary. The stories of the people and how much they were willing to share was quite moving. So I have to ask, is Zaatari the camp named for the spice? 

Yes, it is. It's named after za'atar. Za'atar is one of the most ubiquitous spices in Syria and Arab cooking.

Karen Fisher worked with 2,000 collaborators to compile recipes for "Zaatari: Culinary Traditions of the World's Largest Syrian Refugee Camp." Photo courtesy of Goose Lane Editions.

Remind us of the reason there are so many refugees from southern Syria living in this refugee camp in Jordan.

Well, the story of Syria is still unfolding. A lot of people think that maybe the war is done because we don't hear about it so much in the news anymore but that's definitely not the case. It's just a kind of a known thing that during conflict, people will go to the closest border. People in the North, for example, will go to Turkey. In the West, they would go to Lebanon. In the south, most people went to Jordan. 

Now, in Zaatari camp, we have people from all over Syria but most people are from the south, which is one of the reasons our book is so special, because we have recipes that you're not going to find, for example, in Aleppo, and the way of life, you know, the culture is a bit different. That's the reason in the Syrian war, people fled in different directions. 

One of the reasons people go to the borders is that everyone hopes the conflict is going to be over quickly, maybe just a week or two weeks, something like that. Unfortunately, with the Syrian war, we're into 13 years of it. The other reason is also that people don't have the financial means to go further. Their families are too big. People are suffering from trauma, war injuries, things like that, and maybe they want to keep an eye on their property. So there are a lot of different reasons that people stay in the border countries, and Jordan was very welcoming to refugees. In fact, over 1 million Syrians are in Jordan. 

Once people enter the camp, are they able to leave, if they wish? Do some people who can leave choose to remain?

In the early days, Syrian refugees, they all registered at Zaatari camp, then most people continued on to wherever they chose to go but a lot of people stayed in Zaatari. In its heyday, it had about 140,000 people living there. Right now, it stays kind of static at about 83,000. It's a closed refugee camp. It's a very high-security, high-constraint, low-resource, low-affordance environment. For visitors to come to the camp, you have to have a special invitation. It has to be approved by security weeks in advance and things like that. For people residing in the camp, they also have to have permission, a permit from the police, to be able to exit the camp. Their permit might be good for one day, or if they're working at a farm outside the camp, it would be good for a couple of months, or something like that.

What brought you to Zaatari? What is your background?

I'm a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, and I'm kind of like an ethnographer. So I studied people and everyday life with regard to information and technology. I had done a lot of work across the United States with immigrant youth and UNHCR, now the UN refugee agency. They invited myself and a couple of colleagues from across the US to go to Zaatari to understand and do research on how young people in the camp were using their mobiles and the internet, and then how that usage contrasted with the work in Syria.

Karen E. Fisher arrived at Zaatari in 2015 to work for the UNHCR. Photo by Alex Lau.

During your time there, did you live there? Were you embedded? Or did you go in and out?

In and out. Visitors are not allowed to stay in the camp overnight. In fact, one of the things with our book that I think is so fascinating is that the aid workers, for example the UN and the international aid organizations, their staff, they will arrive in the camps around 9, 9:30 in the morning and then they will leave the camp around 3:30 or 4 in the afternoon. So very, very little was known about life in the camp in the evenings and especially on the weekends.

At the beginning, the camp was made up of tents with dirt floors. Kitchens and public wash centers were communal, as were water stations. Can you talk about the transition to what exists now?

It's a tragedy that's so compelling. The tents are there for emergency response. The premise is that people will be leaving the camp, they will be returning home, something like this. And that didn't happen. The Syrian war just got worse and worse and worse, if you know the history of the war. They had to do something else. So some of the countries volunteered, they provided metal caravans for people to live in. 

These caravans, they're the same deal as the tents — you're not meant to live in them for years and years and years. They have a life cycle of maybe three or four years or something like that and then the caravans need repairs, because the floors are falling through, the roofs are caving in. The caravans are very difficult to live in. In the summertime, it's incredibly hot inside and in the winter, it's incredibly cold.

One of the things that's really interesting about Zaatari, as opposed to other refugee settlements, is that these caravans have been used in other places. There's another large Syrian camp in Jordan. It has about maybe 20,000 or 25,000 people there. Then there are other camps in Turkey and Greece and [other] places. Those caravans tend to be arranged in very neat rows, like how a modern city is laid out. Zaatari camp is quite different. It's very much like you mentioned at the beginning, like a village. All the caravans are very bespoke. The Syrians in the camp, how they've built little fences around their caravans, added on other pieces, they've set up compounds with other members of their family to create a larger space for themselves. 

If you know from the book, a lot of the caravans are painted on the outside, and that is a very Syrian thing to do. Where most of the people are from, Dura in the south of Syria, the majority of them were farmers. Now, they're living in the desert where there's not much greenery. So they would paint the outside of their houses and the insides, as well, to give the illusion that they're still living in a forested area or a place with fields.

A scene from a kitchen at the camp. Photo by Alex Lau.

Amazing. Let's talk about how they're able to cook. How were they able to cook when it was still a tent settlement, compared to now?

That hasn't changed so much. They would use these small gas burners. The very, very beginning, of course, was more like open fires. That's dangerous and it's not very efficient. So they started using these camping stoves, it could just be one unit, or maybe two units, and that's how people continue to cook today inside the camp. 

One of the things I found most fascinating is that the cooking style is extremely social and the eating is social as well but in the caravans, there's no furniture. This harkens very much back to life in old Syria when people were nomadic, Bedouin, and they didn't have furniture. Instead, you sit around on the ground, on the floor, on a carpet, things like that. The women would prepare all the food. It would take many hands to prepare the dishes that they have and then they would serve the food on very large platters. And we don't use plates. Instead, you just use your hand to take a piece of food off a large plate, or maybe you could use bread as a utensil.

Can you describe the overall energy of Zaatari? What would we experience as first-time visitors? Are there different neighborhoods? Is the shopping area concentrated in one area?

It is, yeah. It's called Champs-Élysées, which is kind of tongue in cheek. There's another market street that's kind of like a T-bone. There are other little, small shopping areas that have popped up all around the camp. Then there are vendors who go around by donkey cart, selling vegetables and all kinds of stuff. The energy level at the camp is really quite astounding. 

In the mornings, when you go in, it's more quiet, but you can hear the children on their way to school. The boys will go to school in the afternoon, the girls go to school in the morning. That's very typical in a lot of Arab countries. Slowly, you just see everything waking up across the camp. 

One of the things I love about Zaatari, I call it the magic of Zaatari, is truly, if you go with an open heart, you will be amazed. You cannot predict what you're going to see on any single day. There's a tremendous can-do attitude there.

Breakfast is served on the floor. Photo by Alex Lau with Jason LeCras.

I imagine we would call it MacGyver on steroids. Where does the food come from that is sold and used by all of the families? Is there a growing space? Do people go outside to markets and bring it in? Are the vendors the refugees themselves?

All of the above. In the early days, and it's a typical emergency refugee situation, the World Food Program, the UN's WFP, they come on site and they give out food to everybody. It's the typical things that you would expect — rice, lentils, things that are preserved. By the way, that had an interesting impact on how food culture evolved in the camp. Then, people would also get a food allowance and they could use that to get food from the different shops inside the camp. They also have a Safeway. It's not like the Safeway that we would know but it's kind of similar. You go in and you would pay by having your iris scanned, blockchain. It's really fascinating. 

People would grow food. A lot of people, like I said, Syrians are farmers, they're tremendous at that, growing their own food. People have shops. They could bring things in from outside. Syrians are also very big food snobs. They want to have fresh yogurt, fresh eggs, fresh meat, things like that. You can see it in the recipes, what they call karma, how much love goes into every dish that they prepare. Sometimes, if the border is open, they're able to get ingredients sent from Syria. There would be things like olives, cheese, different dairy products, sweets.

There are actually bakeries. There people make sweets.

Oh, yes. There's different types. You'll have a bread maker making this atennoir and different types of bread. Then there's the sweet shops, which in Arabic, we call it baklava, and other types of cookies as well. A lot of these sweets are very seasonal. For example, during Ramadan, we make a cookie that's called ma'amoul. You will enjoy ma'amoul all year round, but especially at Ramadan.

I understand that this book came about after you asked the women of the camp to keep diaries, and a 15-year-old girl included her favorite cake recipe. How enthusiastic were people to participate in a cookbook?

They were incredibly excited to do this. But Evan, I have to tell you that in Zaatari camp, there were no newspapers, no bookshops. These things are not allowed in the camp. I must say, of all the difficult things to bring into the camp, books are right at the top of the list. It is so difficult. As refugees, when people left their home, they didn't take books with them. You know, if they took any book, it was going to be the family Quran. That was it. 

So I asked the women if they would like to do a cookbook? And they all said temmah, which is, yes, absolutely. And then they all said, "Karen, what is a cookbook?" Because they'd never seen one before. They had this tacit knowledge, a corporeal way of learning how to cook from their mothers and their grandmothers. Everything was in their heads and they've never even thought about it before. They didn't know what a recipe was. 

That was really freeing for us, and we could envision the book to be... I call it me and my 2,000 co-authors who created the book because it's not just women, there's men, old, young, people with disabilities, people from all over the camp who participated in it. But we had some really great questions that we had to answer with regard to being precise about cooking methods, spices, things like that.

How did you get the word out about this project, and who showed up to the first meeting? How did decisions get made about whose recipe would be picked to represent certain iconic dishes? 

The word about the book went viral very quickly. This is in 2016 and not a lot of women had mobiles, but instead, it was just word of mouth. I was at the UN Women Center, and they were having a special training class for men and women about cooking, preparing food for children in the camp schools. So that was one way. Then, we did a workshop in the northern part of the camp. That was an open call, and 140 people came to the workshop, men and women, and it was maybe 120 degrees outside. It was just incredible how much interest there was. 

We all just started. We started and started and started. I had to get everything translated and there's many different ways of spelling the name of a Syrian dish in English. I'd be looking at these, I'd think, "Oh, I think this is really the same dish that we're talking about here." There can be variations in how different people prepare things. But as we got closer to the book, we had our literary agent and our publisher, we figured out, okay, these are the top recipes. Then, I would work with different experts in the camp and show them and say, "Is this correct? Does this make sense?"

Are the experts the women whose prowess in the kitchen gives them an elevated reputation as cooks?

Yes. I think all the women in the camp are phenomenal cooks but there are some people who are just extraordinary cooks.

Let's talk about food. I should say the photographs are just delicious.

Thank you. We were so blessed that Alex Lau, he's a world renowned food photographer. He's formerly from Bon Appetit. Alex did the food photography pro bono. I had to get the cost covered for him to come to Zaatari. None of us had any experience with food photography, we knew nothing about it. 

What was really nice is that the women prepared all the dishes in their homes throughout the camp. We had a lot of people participate in this part. We also had teenage boys and girls who supported Alex. They were like his assistants, so they learned about the art of food photography. Then, we had a separate food stylist who was also tremendous. 

Before I forget, please for your listeners to know, all of the royalties from our book return to the people of Zaatari camp. Everyone who's been involved with this book, it's just been a labor of love.

So much of life in Zaatari revolves around celebrations and holidays. Can you pick one of your favorite dishes that represents this spirit?

Gosh, there'd be so many for that. The way we started the book is we wanted it to be a day in the life. Then, it was a time of the year. So we start with welcome coffee. Then, we have breakfast. You go on a bicycle ride with the boys. Then, you do activities with the girls. They may have lunch. After lunch, we start with Ramadan. It is one of the most important times in the Muslim year and there are several dishes there that, as I mentioned earlier, we would enjoy them year-round but definitely during Ramadan. 

For example, fattet makdous, this is one of my favorite dishes, with the baby eggplants. It has pine nuts and fried bread on it. Absolutely spectacular. Another simple one is called shorbat adas, which is lentil soup. It's very healthy, very easy to make. Then we get into grape leaves, what we call yalanchi and yabrak, grape leaves that are stuffed and rolled up. To watch how the women would prepare it was fascinating because they would tie it in bundles to make it easier to take out of the pot. Probably, they'd put a big rock on top of the lid so that no steam escapes while they're cooking.

One of the dishes, I think it was maybe from the breakfast portion of the book, was harisseh but not harissa, the Moroccan spice paste. It was like a cake.

Yeah, harisseh is wonderful. It's like a cake and then there's syrup poured over at the top of it. It's sprinkled with nuts, as well. Another version is called namoura. Namoura you make when you don't have any eggs. Harisseh has eggs. And then there's a third variation that's called basbousa, sometimes basbousa cream. What this means is that it's like the harisseh but it will have a layer of cream in the middle.

And it's a semolina cake, right?

Yes, it is. Semolina is very important in Syrian cooking. In Arabic the word is smeed. I have to tell you that once you have one of their sweets made with semolina, you can never go back to straight flour.

Why? What does the semolina bring?

It's this little bit more of a crunch to it, like a different texture. It's something that your palate remembers, there was something special about this that you just had.

Wartime and this kind of living always impacts how home cooks access and prepare food. As you've said, the ingenuity is often astonishing. What kind of accommodations have home cooks in Zaatari have had to make? Maggi appears in a million recipes.

It does. That was an interesting question when we were starting out the book. Do we or don't we include the maggi. I was looking at all these recipes that say maggi, maggi. Then I realized what they were talking about was the dried bullion cubes. We kept it in because that is authentic. That is what this book is about. It's the life in the camp and the life of the people there. 

I'd ask people this question, "How did the cooking differ in Syria and coming here?" One of the things I noticed is that in many instances, it was the old people in the camp who knew how to eke out a living in the desert because the younger generation, they had modern affordances in their homes. How do you keep your food cold when you don't have a refrigerator? What do you do with bananas so insects don't get at them? Things like that. There was this practical element to it.

Then, there was also the sad part about not having access to things. To give you an example of that, I mentioned earlier the baklava. The highest quality nuts for Syrians and Arabs are pistachios and cashews, and pine nuts but pine nuts are used more in cooking as opposed to in sweets. They wouldn't have access to cashews so, instead, they would get peanuts and dye the peanuts green so you'd have, at least in your mind, or if you give it to a child, your mind thinks that, yes, you are eating pistachios or cashews.

Has the flow of the population stabilized? Is there a certain percentage of people who are able to leave Zaatari and pursue their lives elsewhere? Or is there a core group of people who have chosen this to be their home and remain? Or are those who remain basically there because they don't have any contacts outside or monetary resources that would help them leave?

I think it's both. There are people who would definitely like to immigrate. Jordan is a wonderful country but Jordan's population has almost doubled in the past years. Over half of Jordan is Palestinian because of the Nakba in 1948. With the Iraq War, a lot of Iraqis came into Jordan. Jordan has refugees so we know countries in Africa. And then with the Syrian war, they've had an influx of over 1 million people. Jordan is kind of a middle-income country but it's very barren, it's very dry there, and they have a lot of stress on water. They don't have enough water for everyone. Then, it's just a matter of the economy. There's high unemployment with young people, and this affects refugees who want to have their own livelihoods. 

The thing about conflict, it doesn't matter where you're from, if you've been away from home, you probably at some point want to return home. I mean, that is your home. It's where your ancestors are buried. It's your way of life. It's where your family is. You want to return. And that is certainly the case for the Syrians and Zaatari camp. They would love to be able to return to Syria. 

Something else tragic about war is that even if the war was over and there was peace, it will take decades to clear out all of the unexploded mines that are there. Explosives. It's very, very dangerous. Just the state of the house, everything that has been destroyed. There's no infrastructure. It's not as simple as saying, "Okay, the war is over. Everybody can go home now." 

With regard to the families who are there, some members of the family have left, and that was for economic reasons. Maybe they have some members of the family, and they would typically be younger people, especially men, who went to Germany or the UK or America or Canada, so they could get a livelihood and help support their family that's back in Zaatari. 

One of the things that I'm stunned about is that when I travel around the world and I meet Syrians, how many Syrians have a connection to Zaatari camp. If they did not live in Zaatari themselves or passed through when they were registered in Jordan, almost every Syrian has a relative who lives in Zaatari.

It is an absolute, stunning piece of work that you've done with your 2,000 collaborators. It just gives us so much insight into people who have and are still really going through it. What they manage to create out of all of that trauma and pain is really heartwarming.

Thank you. I wish that you could come to Zaatari, all your listeners, everyone could come to Zaatari and experience, as you mentioned, the joy. There's just so much. It's really hard to put it into words but I know many people, aid workers, who have worked at Zaatari at one point or another, and everyone misses those days so much after they leave their position. There's just something special about Zaatari that really just stays in your heart. What I wish the most, of course, is that it will be safe for people to return to Syria, or that people are able to immigrate to other countries, because everyone benefits so much from that.