In this compelling episode of Gold Foodies, host Malak Obeidi sits down with Palestinian writer and director Ahmed Masood to explore how food shapes cultural identity and keeps traditions alive across borders. Ahmed shares his journey of leaving a refugee camp in Gaza in 2002 to study in London, where he experienced profound culture shock—not just from the British weather, but from the stark contrast in food quality and availability. What began as a struggle to adapt to the UK’s ready-made meal culture evolved into a beautiful connection between his heritage and his adopted home, ultimately leading to his partnership with Zeitoun, the world’s first fair-trade certified Palestinian olive oil company.
Throughout the conversation, Ahmed reveals how Palestinian cuisine—with its unique blend of Asian and African influences shaped by Gaza’s geographical position—serves as a vessel for cultural preservation and storytelling. From learning to cook traditional Palestinian dishes over expensive phone calls with his mother to advocating for Palestinian farmers facing devastating losses due to settlement expansion, Ahmed demonstrates how food transcends simple nourishment. He discusses the importance of Palestinian ingredients like olive oil, freekeh, and za’atar in contemporary cuisine, and emphasizes how creative storytelling about food and people resonates more deeply with audiences than statistics alone. The episode beautifully illustrates how cuisine becomes an act of cultural resistance and connection in the face of hardship.
Main Topics
Ahmed Masood's experience moving from a refugee camp in Gaza to London in 2002 brought significant cultural shock, particularly regarding food quality and availability
Olive oil is deeply embedded in Palestinian culture and economy, with historical significance dating back to ancient times, including the famous olive tree where Jesus sat
Zeitoun olive oil company, co-founded by Ahmed's wife Heather Gardner, became the world's first fair-trade certified Palestinian olive oil, elevating UK standards for imported oils
Palestinian farmers face severe challenges including loss of farmland and destruction of olive trees due to Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank
Palestinian cuisine uniquely blends Asian and African influences due to Gaza's geographical position as a gateway between continents, including distinctive use of chili peppers
Food serves ceremonial and communal roles in Palestinian culture, marking important life events and festivals with specific traditional dishes
Creative storytelling through food and personal narratives proves more effective than political arguments in helping people connect with and understand different cultures
Full TranscriptHello and welcome to another episode of Gold Foodies, right here on Women's Radio Station with me, Malak Obeidi. Now, yo...▼
Hello and welcome to another episode of Gold Foodies, right here on Women's Radio Station with me, Malak Obeidi. Now, you guys probably know this by now, but on the show I love exploring how food can influence our cultures around the world. I mean, it's a frequent theme on Gold Foodies and today I'm definitely not shying away from this love of mine because I have another special guest with me on the show, Ahmed Masood. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. Now, Ahmed will be sharing with us his insight today on his own experiences growing up as a Palestinian, but also the projects that he's embraced that has actually influenced many people around the world, politically, culturally and even food wise. And we'll be talking a bit more about that later on the show. So Ahmed, just wanted you to talk to me a little bit more about your background and upbringing as a Palestinian based here in the uk. Tell me a little bit more about that. Sure. So my name is Ahmed Massoud. I am a Palestinian writer and director currently living in London. I've been here for about 15 years. I moved to London in 2002, so that makes it 16 years actually rather than 15. I studied English literature in the Gaza Strip in Palestine and moved over here to do my postgraduate degree in English Literature and then I did a PhD at etc. But really I'm not an academic. I'm more of a writer and a creative person. I like creativity more than academia. And yeah, so I've done a lot of work here in London, both in theaters and I published a novel last year. So quite a bit mixture of things really. So tell me a little bit more about coming to the UK after being based in Palestine the early part of your life. What was that change like for you? It was interesting because there was a huge cultural shock in a way because I grew up in a tiny refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. I lived all my life in there. I didn't know anything else. I left Gaza in 2002 and at the time, and still is actually all Palestinians who leave Gaza, they have to be deported to Cairo. We don't get to see Egypt, but we get on a bus, loaded in a bus with Egyptian police and we're taken to the airport and we fly wherever to our destination is. So I was coming to London to here, and the moment I stepped out of the plane, came into Heathrow and came into London, took the tube into London and yeah, there's this whole huge cultural shock that suddenly just hit me. The main One was the weather was really bad. I was thinking, nobody told me about this before and can I change my mind please? But it was too late by then. And the other thing actually was food. Food was just unbelievable here. I mean, unbelievably bad in the sense that I was not able to get any fresh stuff. Food from back home wasn't available at all at the time. So I had to kind of adapt to that. I had to adapt to sort of cold sandwiches picked up from the fridge on lunchtime. And that took a lot, a long time to really adapt to. Yeah, that's a very typical thing that we do. We tend to, on our way to work, just grab whatever we can. Ready made meals is a huge thing here in London. But we'll get back to actually talking about your relationship to food, actually. But as a writer, you've worked on many projects including theatre and radio and they spotlight very important matters. And I wanted to find out a bit more about what, what made you want to go into that and explore that. As a writer, it's because I wanted to talk a lot about my culture and my people and the political situation back home in Palestine. But I couldn't do it in a sort of academic, political sense because there are so many publications around that there are so many arguments around it as well. What I wanted to do was to focus on the humanity of the people, the stories of the people themselves who are living under such harsh occupation and harsh reality. So I'm not interested really of who's right and who's wrong. I'm interested in how this occupation affects people on a daily basis. About a mother who's not able to see her child, who's either in prison or abroad because of the borders closure. About a child who's looking for his missing father. That's what really interests me and that's what I wanted to tell people. So I turned into the creative world for that reason because people connect with these stories more than they can connect with statistics and any other public. Yeah, it's like a storytelling version of what's actually happening in real life, which I think people can connect with on a, on a much larger scale. Now a little birdie told me, and when I say birdie, I mean Google when I researched you. So you have a connection to olive oil. And I want to go a bit further into that. What is your connection to this? So olive oil is part of my culture. I grew up with it. We ate it on a daily basis. We cook everything with it because Palestine is very famous. For olive oils. They say that olive oil and olive trees started in Palestine. There is the old famous olive tree where Jesus sat under still there, still producing olives and people get olive oil from it as well. So it's very much entrenched in the Palestinian culture. The whole economy is based on the olive oil harvest which happens around October. And as a young man growing up in the Gaza Strip, I witnessed that there were olive oil harvest festivals that we used to go to there, used to dance on the street, etc. And all of that. But when I came to the uk here again, back to what I was saying earlier about the food being completely different and completely strange, but also the olive oil wasn't that great and the quality of it and was all imported. Obviously the UK doesn't produce any olive oil, but it's all imported but also not good quality somehow, because I think people here didn't know any better. And I'm talking about 15 years ago, I mean it's much better now. People are much more aware of these kind of olive oils and the different varieties and stuff. So I, I think, yeah, it was a shock for me not to kind of get that good quality with it. And then two years later, as it happened, I met my current W, Heather Gardner, who is. Who started a company importing olive oil from Palestine. So it was perfect, really. I mean, I didn't know that when I met her first and that's. That wasn't the reason why I went out with her, but it helped a lot. It's called Zeitoun, isn't it? The company and it's actually very acclaimed throughout the uk. It's a statement item in their cupboards. Now Zeitoun's olive oil and I think that's probably what you were saying, that the quality of olive oil wasn't great, but it's much better now. I think you could say that Zaytun is what upped the level of the competition for good quality olive oil, especially because it's imported from Palestine, it's made in Palestine, which is one of the most special things about it. The complete and wholeness of where it's coming from. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think one of the interesting thing about Zetuna is that it's the whole state story is the whole. Because it's a fair trade company, it's the first olive oil in the world to have a fair trade certification. And actually coming up now, next week is the Fair Trade Fortnight and what they do on a regular basis is that they bring the farmers from Palestine that they tell their own stories about the farms and about the olive trees and where they come from. Because this is very important to people at the moment. And unfortunately, because of the political situation and because of the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a lot of these farms are being lost because of the building of settlements, but also a lot of the settlers go in and burn trees, they cut off trees, etc. So their life is really miserable as a result. Now, you were telling me earlier about coming to the UK in 2002 and that change for you in terms of culture, the culture shock, but also in terms of food. What was the negative but also the positive changes that you have come across? I think the positive side is that I was exposed to a lot of varieties of food from around the world. I was lucky to live near Angel Station when I first arrived to London as a student. And there were a lot of restaurants from around the world, a lot of cuisine, Italian food. I'd never tasted Italian food before. I'd never tasted any other food apart from Palestinian food. But the problem was that it was very expensive. You know, as a student, I couldn't afford going to restaurants and all these things, so I had to rely on, I don't know, kebab shops and to compensate for it. So I gained a bit of weight, I remember. But as a solution, actually, and again, this is a positive thing, as a solution, I had to learn how to cook my own food. So I had spent a lot of time with my mum on the phone and she would describe each step for me as we are actually talking on the phone. So my phone bill was really, really expensive by the end of it. I can relate to that so much. I always have my mom on Skype with the video and she's just showing me how I'm supposed to make different foods from back home. So when it comes to Palestinian food, did you find any good places to get Palestinian food here in London? No. No. I mean, there's not much. Is there much? There are a couple of places now in London. One in Westbourne Grove called Maramia Cafe, and there's a Cafe Palestina somewhere in Camden or Kentish Town. These are the only two places that I can think of. But no, there aren't many, actually. It's just mostly my cooking it or my friends and being invited, etc. Right. I feel like that is. That is the one downfall about food here in London is that when it comes to international cuisines, there are some cuisines that are just Lacking in availability. And it's all about home cooked food. And that's where you get the best kind of food, I think is at home, isn't it? That's right. So, okay, the golden question to finish off is, in your opinion, how do you think food has kept the Palestinian culture alive? It's a very interesting question. It's my favorite question to ask. I mean, it very much plays a very important role because food back home in Palestine, like a lot of places in the world, has an important ceremonial kind of role to play within families and within the community, etc. So as we sort of get married, we have like lots of big meals served outside in the street. When you have festivals, again, different foods are cooked. There are specific dishes for specific occasions that you cook. I guess the same as here, you know, like the Christmas dinner, etc. But there are quite a few of them back home in Palestine. I think with the sort of rise of new chefs now and their sort of international acclaim, they're using a lot of Palestinian ingredients from like, for example, olive oil or freekeh. I don't know if you heard about freeke, which is like grain or zaata, that herb mix that says dried thyme, isn't it? That's the English one. That's right. And it's kind of becoming more and more popular. There is also the cultural debate and the political debate of falafel or falafel or who's actually, actually owns that, you know, and who does it best and who does it best and all of these things. But I grew up in the Gaza Strip and Gaza is very unique in terms of food because it has a mixture of cuisines and influences from around the world. Because geographically we are sort of the gateway between Asia and Africa. And as a result we got influenced a lot by both continents in a sense that we were unable to kind of keep it completely separate. But we got influenced a lot. We mix our food a lot. And so they. It's very unique and I would love to present it at some point to people. So, for example, we eat a lot of chili in Gaza and the rest of Palestine. They don't. Right. And it's also interesting that it's not just about food and the culture of food, but it's also about what it does to the people and how you were saying it brings people together and you've got a whole spread of it and people are all eating together. And it's really interesting to see how it's not just you eating. It's how it changes the story for people eating as well. I'm actually very grateful to have you on the show and get some insight, I think, for our listeners as well as me, to understand a bit more about Palestinian culture and food and how it's different, the different perspectives on that as well. And if you'd like to find out more about Zaytun, you can head to what's the website for Zaytun that they can go on? Zaytoun.org so Z A Y T O U N Amazing. And if you'd like to find out more about Ahmed Mas' Oud himself, you can go to ahmedmasoud.co.uk and for more information on what we've been talking about on the show and what is coming up next, you can head on to womensradio Stn on Instagram and Twitter. We'll see you next time. Sa.
