SOUL-SATISFYING SOUPS
Humanitarian cookbook project is raising much-needed funds for Syrian refugees
“Soups for me have always been something very comforting. I remember telling my dad once, ‘The soup is warming my heart,’” Barbara Abdeni Massaad says. “It’s comfort food. It nourishes your body but it also nourishes your mind, and when you’re cold, what better substance to drink or to eat than soup?”
Freezing conditions compelled Massaad to first visit the Syrian refugee camp in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. The cookbook author and photographer lives in Beirut. It was wintertime, and even in the comfort of her heated apartment, it was chilly.
“I thought of all the refugees living in tents. And I saw footage of the children in the tents being really, really cold. That hit me because I’m a mother of three children, and I can’t stand the fact that children are cold,” she says.
Massaad knew immediately that she wanted to help but didn’t know exactly how. She found the answer organic ally, in the form of a humanitarian cookbook project: Soup for Syria. The book has raised more than US$300,000 to date, with all proceeds going to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR)’s food relief initiatives.
“Each one of us has a God-given talent (that we can use) to help somebody that comes to our country and is in need of something,” she says. “At the beginning when I went to the camps, they didn’t know what I was doing or who I was. So I had to simplify it and say for example, ‘If I was a hairdresser, I would come and cut your hair for free. But I’m not a hairdresser so I’m going to try to do something with what I’m doing in my life, — so something dealing with food, journalism and photography.’”
The seed for Soup for Syria was planted in a farmers’ market. Massaad is the president of Slow Food Beirut, which runs the Earth Market in the city’s Hamra district. A friend suggested that they make soup to hand out to refugees at the market and Massaad thought “it was a brilliant idea.”
She had thought about cooking with the women in the camp, and sharing their recipes in a Syrian cookbook. Access to ingredients and hygiene issues posed challenges, so her focus shifted to a collection of soul-satisfying soup recipes. She reached out to her network of friends — some of whom are worldrenowned chefs and food writers .
Soup for Syria is available in Canada, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the U.S, and a Turkish edition is in progress. While Massaad is proud of the funds the project has raised, and hopes to raise more, she says that money wasn’t the only goal.
“Empathy, that’s the main objective,” Massaad says. “These people are not so different from you and me — the beautiful children, the beautiful families. What they need is food, shelter, love and most importantly, dignity.”