oyster mushroom farming in Gaza, resistance + a recipe from Laila El Haddad's Gaza Kitchen
I harvested my first batch of homegrown oyster mushrooms and cooked a Gazan recipe with them, learning about the resistance of Palestinian mushroom farmers along the way.
A few days ago, I harvested my first batch of oyster mushrooms I grew myself, in a simple box kit from North Spore. Obviously, I wanted to eat them.
I’ve been cooking through Laila el Haddad’s Gaza Kitchen, so when I came across a recipe for oyster mushrooms with chicken, or Aysh Il Ghurab Bil Dajaj, I was intrigued. Especially by what Laila had to say about this particular recipe. She writes, “[This recipe] is not traditional, but [has] been introduced by NGOs and agricultural unions in order to teach families what to do with the oyster mushrooms now being cultivated as an agricultural supplement. Mushrooms were completely unknown in Gaza before these initiatives, but they are growing in popularity. The combination of tastes in these dishes is recognizably Gazan.”
When I searched to find more information about oyster mushroom farming in Gaza, one name kept popping up — Alaa Al-Masri, a woman entrepreneur who used government programs to learn how to cultivate oyster mushrooms and sell them, producing up to 150 kilograms a month just in her apartment. In 2022, she told Jinha Women's News Agency, “I attended the courses organized by the Palestinian Ministry of Economy for a year and I loved the idea of organic farming. I attended an agriculture fair in Gaza, which was funded by the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees (PARC). I saw a girl selling mushrooms and I bought a box of mushrooms from her. I cooked them at home and loved its taste. So I decided to grow oyster mushrooms. In October, 2019, I searched on the internet how I can grow oyster mushrooms. And then, I began to grow mushrooms in my garden.” Alaa had dreams for her mushroom growing venture; she wanted to have a laboratory and more modern equipment to increase her production and business, and she wanted to grow a larger variety of mushrooms.
News articles say she was 27 years old in 2022, which means she’d be 29 years old now, the same age as me, if she is still alive. The problem is that I don’t know if she is still alive. I found another woman named Alaa Al-Masry whose child and husband had been murdered by Israel, but I could not find the Alaa who grew oyster mushrooms in Gaza. I am not the only one searching for her. Hyphae Mushrooms, a low-tech micro-shroomery in west Wales, blogged about their research into mushroom farmers in Gaza, like Shaima al-Amoudi, who grew oyster mushrooms in an insulated room on the roof of her apartment in Khan Younis to support her family. They also wondered about the fate of Alaa, along with the rest of these mushroom farmers. “What has become of them?,” the blog wrote. “Are they even alive now? Do their farms still exist? We can barely imagine the magnitude of loss they face, as we can barely imagine our homes being flattened, our trees burned and our crops and siblings killed by white phosphorous.”
The Zionist occupation lashes out at any Palestinian who tries to find food sovereignty for themselves or their people. I read an Al-Jazeera story by Dalia Hatuqa that gave me further insight through the story of Amoro Farm. In Jericho, in the occupied West Bank, Amoro Farm began growing mushrooms in 2013, shipping them all over the West Bank, to Nablus, Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem, and so many other cities. The four friends who started Amoro Farm did so intentionally for the purpose of food sovereignty, to resist the “Israeli” domination of all agricultural goods, a poison of control that grows with each year of occupation. “You don’t feel like you are producing anything for your community and yourself,” Mahmoud Kuhail told Al-Jazeera about his previous NGO career. “It’s good money, but you don’t sleep well at night, because you don’t believe in what you do.”
The friends, who included Mahmoud Kuhail and Sameer Khrishi, left high paying NGO jobs, studied mushroom farming in Europe, and dedicated their time to providing mushrooms in Palestine. “We realized that there’s a lot of demand for our mushrooms because the culture of boycotting Israeli mushrooms was gaining traction,” Kuhail told Al-Jazeera, noting that their parents had made a point to boycott Israeli products as well.
Amoro soon began to dominate almost 50 percent of the market share of the mushroom industry, and provided employment for Palestinian women. With their success came retribution, and the “Israelis” began taking more land, sabotaging deliveries of mushroom spawn and compost, letting it go rotten in the ports, and institution inhumane port fines to make Amoro pay for the destruction the Zionists themselves had caused. The goal was simple, to force Amoro into debt and out of the market, making way for Israeli domination once more. Hyphae Mushrooms says the last they’ve seen of Amoro was in 2018.
As a food writer, I almost feel the term food sovereignty has been dulled, people use it to refer to anything. A white woman having a garden in her liberal neighborhood becomes food sovereignty, the simple act of owning a restaurant while marginalized becomes food sovereignty, etc etc. Not that any of these things are bad, but they take away from the revolutionary aspect of food sovereignty. When you think of it as a revolution, a seed becomes just as effective as a slingshot. They aim to control our food, so they can control us, so they can control our land, so they can control our lives, so that ultimately, they can have the final say over whether those lives continue or end.
Asserting your right to food sovereignty is revolutionary. They will pass cruel laws to stop you. They will hunt you down and ruin you. They will kill you. Not “simply” for the act of trying to grow your own food, but precisely for the act of trying to grow your own food. Humans — all life really — need water, shelter, and food to live. And so these are the three things the occupiers — whether they are “Israelis” or “Americans” or English or Dutch — try to take from us, try to control.
Taking control over the components that you need to live is an incredible act of resistance, for which the occupiers always demand a heavy price. For Gaza, that price right now is hundreds of thousands of lives. This genocide is fought over land, over food, over life. The question the Zionists want us to answer in their favor is whether they deserve to take life from others, whether they can be gods in their own right, striking down and raising up as they see fit. Our answer must always be a rageful refusal, a determination to die rather than allow them to take food out of our people’s mouths, to strip them of their lands, to poison their water. The “Israelis” are not gods, and neither are any other occupiers. They are human, just as we are. Which means they can be stopped.
This destruction is not inevitable.