Armenians have long memories

Food, family history, and identity fuel each other. The Armenian Genocide occured nearly a century ago, but it is still a part of every Armenian's psyche.

I am an Armenian-American, the daughter of a family who lost their homes and everything they owned to political upheaval. At the beginning of the 20th century, a large part of my extended family was murdered during a genocide that resulted in the deaths of approximately 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Turkish government in power at the time. My great grandfather was marched away by Turkish soldiers for "questioning" and never seen again. Many of my grandparents’ siblings, aunts and uncles were marches into the Anatolian Desert and simply left there to die of thirst and starvation. The "good Turks" they encountered along their death march were not allowed to feed them or to give them anything to drink…and yes, there were many who tried to help. As usually happens in an ethnic cleansing, the ones in power…the ones with the guns….are a minority of the population. But they have the ability to silence and terrorize their own people along with those they are killing.

My grandparents were lucky. In time, they managed to get to Greece, to a refugee settlement where my father and his siblings were born. Then came World War II and my family’s lives were upturned yet again. This time, they made it to America, where I was born.

What has this to do with food, you might be asking?

The link between what we put into our bodies for nourishment and our cultural identity is so strong – a major reason why food traditions are so longstanding and family recipes are passed down from generation to generation. With each bite of pilaf, each sip of Turkish coffee, each nibble of lokom, we listened to the family stories. It formed our identities and crystallized what we believed in.