bread

Over 5 million California residents — including 2 million children — rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits that cover essential food such as fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, dairy, bread and snacks. Those funds are on hold as the federal shutdown continues, putting economic strain on the 1 in 8 Americans who rely on SNAP benefits, during a time of year when budgets are already tight as many prepare for holiday gatherings and gift giving.

But Angelenos are stepping up for those in need, from neighborhood nonprofits and community centers to local restaurants and chefs, offering grocery delivery, mobile farmers markets, grab-and-go meals and Thanksgiving spreads.

Here are 40 food initiatives happening across Los Angeles County this November, from free chicken rice porridge on Sundays to a communal Thanksgiving feast. Be sure to read details carefully; some events are open to all with no registration required, while others require advance sign up with proof of income and residency.

Times staff writer Kailyn Brown contributed to this report.

“Bread of Angels,” Patti Smith’s mesmerizing new memoir, only deepens the mystery of who this iconic artist is and where her singular vision originated. I’ve long been struck by her magnetism on stage, her fearless approach to her craft, and the stark beauty of her words on the page, including the National Book Award-winning “Just Kids.” She has a preternatural belief in her own instincts and a boundless curiosity that, taken together, help explain the extraordinarily rich life and oeuvre she’s constructed. This transcendent — and at times terrifying — account of that evolution enriches that understanding. And yet, Smith’s persona remains veiled — sphinx-like — an ethereal presence whose journey to fame was fueled by her questing spirit and later detoured by tragedy.

Like Jeanette Walls’ classic, “The Glass Castle,” Smith’s saga begins with a hard-scrabble childhood she relates as if narrating a Dickensian fairy tale. In the first four years of her life, her family relocated 11 times, moving in with relatives after evictions, or into rat-infested Philadelphia tenements. Smith’s mother was a waitress who also took in ironing. Her father was a factory worker, a World War II veteran scarred by his experience abroad. They shared their love of poetry, books and classical music with their daughter, who was reading Yeats by kindergarten.

Smith, who was born in 1946, was often bed-ridden as a young girl, afflicted with tuberculosis and scarlet fever, along with all the usual childhood ailments. She writes: “Mine was a Proustian childhood, one of intermittent quarantine and convalescence.” When she contracted Asian flu, the virus paralyzed her with “a vise cluster of migraines.” She credits a boxed set of Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” recordings her mother bought with tip money for her return to health.

As a 3-year-old, Smith recalls grilling her mother during evening prayers, posing metaphysical questions about Jesus and the soul, immersing herself in Bible study and later joining her mother as a Jehovah’s Witness. She didn’t confine herself to a single religious discipline, though. For example, while still a young child, she saw the movie “Lost Horizons” and became entranced by Tibet and the teachings of Buddhism — “an awareness of the interconnectedness of all things.” While “this seemed beautiful,” she writes, “it nonetheless troubled me.”

There is a romantic quality even to the deprivations Smith chronicles, an effect heightened by what she chooses to highlight or withhold. With little money for toys, she and her siblings entertained themselves using the knobs on a dresser as instruments on a ship, sailing on faraway seas. She and her younger siblings regularly set out with their mother to the nearby railroad tracks, where they harvested leftover lumps of coal to fuel their pot-bellied stove — the apartment’s sole source of heat. Under the floorboards of her closet, Smith conceals “glittering refuse I had scavenged from trash bins, fragments of costume jewelry, rosary beads,” along with a blue toothbrush she’s invested with magical powers.

Their apartment building overlooks a trash-strewn area dubbed “the Patch,” which is bordered by “the Rat House.” There, Smith proclaims herself general of the neighborhood’s Buddy Gang, fearlessly fending off bullies twice her size, while at school, she was viewed as odd by her teachers, “like something out of Hans Christian Andersen.”

Within this urban setting, Smith often paused to marvel at nature. Taking a short cut on the long walk to school, she stumbles on a pond in a wooded area. A snapping turtle emerges and settles a few feet away. “He was massive,” she recalls, “with ancient eyes, surely a king.”

It’s impossible to know if Smith was really this self-possessed and ruminative as a child or if nostalgia has altered her perspective. What’s undeniable, though, is that her extraordinary artist’s eye and soulful nature emerged at an age when the rest of us were still content to simply play in our sandboxes. She recollects fishing Vogue magazines out of trash cans around age 6 and feeling “a deep affinity” with the images on their pages. She’s immersed in Yeats and Irish folk tales while being bored at school reading “Fun With Dick and Jane.” On her first visit to an art museum, viewing Picasso’s work produces an epiphany: She was born to be an artist. A decade later, she boards a bus bound for New York City.

At this point, about a third of the way into the book, we enter the vortex that is Patti Smith’s talent and ambition on fire. The pace of the memoir accelerates. An alchemy infuses each chance encounter. Opportunities abound. Everywhere she turns there are talented photographers, poets, playwrights and musicians encouraging and supporting her. She writes poetry and finds a soulmate in Robert Mapplethorpe. She meets Sam Shepard, who features her poem in a play he’s writing. She meets William Burroughs, performs a reading with Allen Ginsberg. She forms a musical partnership with Lenny Kaye, and begins performing her poetry, with the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud as her spiritual inspiration.

Smith’s story unfolds as a bohemian fairy tale. Luck is with her, bolstered by a fierce conviction in her own bespoke vision. “There was no plan, no design,” she writes of that time, “just an organic upheaval that took me from the written to the spoken word.” Bob Dylan becomes a mentor. Her fame grows enormous with the 1975 release of “Horses” and the international touring that followed, yet she retains the bearing of an ascetic. She writes: “We hadn’t made our record to garner fame and fortune. We made it for the art rats known and unknown, the marginalized, the shunned, the disowned.”

Smith’s rock star trajectory is diverted by her love affair with Fred Sonic Smith, for whom she ditches her career at its height, against the advice of many of those closest to her. But as with every decision she’s ever made, she can’t be dissuaded. In this intimate portion of the book, we receive glimpses of two passionate artists hibernating, in love. They marry, have two children, and cultivate an eccentric version of domestic bliss. But harsh reality intervenes and the losses begin to accumulate. One after the other, Smith loses the men she loves most — Robert, then Fred, then her beloved brother, Todd. These losses haunt the memoir; she grapples with them by returning to the stage with a fierce new hunger.

The book’s final pages reveal Smith continuing to grieve, mourning the loss of other loved ones — her parents, Susan Sontag, Sam Shepard. I wish I could simply reprint those pages here — they moved me deeply. At 78, she reflects on the process of “shedding” — which she describes as one of life’s most difficult tasks. “We plunge back into the abyss we labored to exit and find ourselves within another turn of the wheel,” she writes. “And then having found the fortitude to do so, we begin the excruciating yet exquisite process of letting go.”

“All must fall away,” she concludes. “The precious bits of cloth folded away in a small trunk like an abandoned trousseau, the books of my life, the medals in their cases.” What will she retain? “But I will keep my wedding ring,” she writes, “and my children’s love.”

Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.

Fortunately for avid bibliophiles, Harper Lee was an inveterate pack rat. Born in rural Monroeville, Ala., in 1926, the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird” — whose first name is Nelle, her grandmother Ellen’s name spelled backward — spent much of her adult life in Manhattan after moving there in 1949.

First, she lived in a cold-water flat on the Upper East Side (subsisting on peanut butter sandwiches and meager bookstore and airline ticket agent salaries); then in a room in a Midtown hotel where Edith Wharton and Mark Twain once resided; a third-floor York Avenue walk-up ($20 a month for five years, where “Go Set a Watchman” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” were written); and, finally four decades at 433 E. 82nd St. There, amid “piles of her correspondence and practically every pay stub, telephone bill and canceled check ever issued to her, were notebooks and manuscripts” and eight previously unpublished early short stories and eight once-published essays and magazine articles. Those writings, discovered in her New York City apartment after she died in her Alabama hometown nine years ago, have been gathered into the welcome hybrid compendium “The Land of Sweet Forever.”

The short stories take up the first half of the collection, but it’s an unusual selection in the second half, “Essays and Miscellaneous Pieces,” that may reveal as much about the burgeoning author as the fictional juvenilia. In a contribution to “The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook” (1961), along with entries by Lillian Hellman, William Styron and Marianne Moore, Lee offered a one-page recipe for crackling bread, complete with the authorial observation, “some historians say by which alone fell the Confederacy.” The opening instruction is, “First, catch your pig.” After that, the ingredients (water-ground white meal, salt, baking powder, egg, milk) and directions might just as well function as an analogy for the process of writing and editing a manuscript.

In her introduction, Lee’s appointed biographer Casey Cep observes that it “takes enormous patience and unerring instincts to refine a scrap of story into something … keen and moving.” Lee admits to being “more of a rewriter than a writer.” In a 1950 letter to one of her sisters, she outlines her typical writing day, working through at least three drafts:

From around noon, work on the first draft. By dinnertime, I’ve usually put my idea down. I then stop for a sandwich or a full meal, depending on whether I’ve got to think more about the story or just finish it. After dinner, I work on a second draft, which involves sometimes tearing the story up and putting it together again in an entirely different way, or just keeping at it until everything is like I want it. Then I retype it on white paper, conforming to rules of manuscript preparation, and run out & mail it. That sounds simple, but sometimes I have worked through the night on one; usually I end up around two or three in the morning.

It’s all rather like testing, perfecting a recipe. If the product was these eight short stories, then “yes, chef” has baked a perfect loaf.

Each story illuminates Lee’s quintessential talents as the “balladeer of small-town culture” and the chronicler of city life. They display narrative skills, an acute ear for dialogue (especially the vernacular), development of fully rounded characters and vivid descriptions of settings. They also introduce subjects and significant themes — family, friendship, moral compass — that reappear in her nonfiction and novels.

Country life imposes restrictions on childhood characters in the first three stories. In “The Water Tank” anxious 12-year-old Abby Henderson, reacting to schoolyard rumors, believes she’s pregnant because she hugged a boy whose pants were unbuttoned. Anti-authoritarian first grader Dody (one of Harper’s nicknames) in “The Binoculars” is chastised for not tracing but writing her name on the blackboard. Early glimpses of “Mockingbird’s” Scout and Atticus Finch appear in the amusing “The Pinking Shears” when third grader “little Jean Louie” (without the later “s”) undermines gender rules when she whacks off a rambunctious minister’s daughter’s lengthy locks.

In New York City, where “sooner or later you meet everybody you ever knew on Fifth Avenue,” urban stress leads to a shocking monologue with an incendiary conclusion about feuding neighbors in “A Roomful of Kibble,” a frivolous kind of parlor game involving movie titles in “The Viewer and the Viewed,” and a humorous parking incident when one friend agrees to help another with lighting for a fashion show in “This Is Show Business?”

The closing title short story, “The Land of Sweet Forever,” adeptly merges locations and themes. It opens with a satirical nod to Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”: “It is a truth generally acknowledged by the citizens of Maycomb, Ala., that a single woman in possession of little else but a good knowledge of English social history must be in want of someone to talk to.” When adult Jean Louise (now with the “s”) leaves the city for home, she has a hilarious church encounter with someone she hadn’t seen since they were children, 21-year-old Talbert Wade, now with the taint of three years as an economics major at Northwestern University and a patina full of Europe, looking “suspiciously as if he had returned from a tour and had picked up a Brooks Brothers suit on the way home.” Together, they are trying to understand why the doxology, always sung “in one way and one way only” suddenly has been “pepped up” with an energetic organ accompaniment. Before it’s resolved there is an amusing anecdote about a cow obituary in verse and a concluding bow to Voltaire’s “Candide” when Jean Louise concedes that “all things happen for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.” The story is a resounding example of Lee’s scintillating sense of wry humor.

Big themes of love, family and friendship recur in the eight previously published essays and articles (from 1961 to 2006) that appeared in Vogue, McCall’s, an American Film Institute program (about Gregory Peck), a Book of the Month Club newsletter (on the “little boy next door” Truman Capote and “In Cold Blood”), Alabama History and Heritage Festival, and O, the Oprah Magazine (a letter about the joy of learning to read). In addition to the crackling bread recipe that serves as a fingerpost to Lee’s writing process, the standout essay “Christmas to Me” details how she received a generous gift that changed her life, allowing her to become an accomplished, published writer. In 1956, best friends, lyricist-composer Michael Brown and his wife, Joy, surprised her with an envelope on the tree with a note, “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” That meant $100 every month, covering more than five times her rent.

Juvenilia is tricky. It can be evanescent, exposing weaknesses or revealing strengths and talent. “The Land of Sweet Forever” reinforces Lee’s indelible voice, contributing a rewarding addition and resource to the slim canon of her literary legacy.

The recipe for crackling bread:

First, catch your pig. Then ship it to the abattoir nearest you. Bake what they send back. Remove the solid fat and throw the rest away. Fry fat, drain off liquid grease, and combine the residue (called “cracklings”) with:

1 ½ cups water-ground white meal
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 egg
1 cup milk

Bake in very hot oven until brown (about 15 minutes).

Result: one pan crackling bread serving 6. Total cost: about $250, depending upon size of pig. Some historians say by this recipe alone fell the Confederacy.

Papinchak, a former English professor, is a freelance book critic in Los Angeles. He has also contributed interviews to Bon Appetit.

Tony Shalhoub is loath to compare his upcoming CNN series, “Breaking Bread,” to the travel food shows hosted by his frequent collaborator Stanley Tucci, who directed him in the gourmand classic “Big Night.”

“I don’t consider myself a foodie,” Shalhoub says in a video interview. “He is the ultimate foodie, amazing chef. He really knows what he’s talking about and I don’t know anything.”

But Shalhoub, best known these days as one of the stars of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” makes up for his lack of knowledge with utter enthusiasm. As host and executive producer of “Breaking Bread,” premiering Sunday at 9 p.m. Pacific, he traipses the globe trying different breads and bread-related products while uncovering stories of how these staples relate to migration, labor and his own family history. In fact, the legacy of Shalhoub’s father, who settled in Wisconsin after leaving Lebanon, is present in multiple episodes. The elder Shalhoub’s love of the stuff served as one of the inspirations for the whole enterprise.

“We were eating most often bakery bread rather than just commercial store-bought packaged bread, and he really had a great appreciation for it and wanted to model that for us,” Shalhoub says.

Still, Shalhoub’s goals go beyond food porn. Days before the premiere, Shalhoub spoke about why he sees “Breaking Bread” as being about something bigger. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

How did doing a food show even come to you?

Well, I was so enamored of Stanley [Tucci’s] show.

I was going to ask if Stanley had something to do with it.

We never really talked about it a lot, but I’ve been inspired by Stanley for so many things. But even prior to his travel food show [“Searching for Italy”], a nephew of mine [Michael Matzdorff], when I lived in Los Angeles, came to me and he was making bread at the time. This was way before the pandemic, when that became the thing to do. We got into talking about bread, and I was so impressed by what he was doing in his own kitchen, and he just casually mentioned, “Wouldn’t it be cool to explore bread making all over the globe?” We got a pitch together. It didn’t really get a lot of traction then, and this was a couple decades ago, but the idea stayed with me. I mentioned it to another friend who’s a producer on the show, Tamara Weiss, and she just kind of had this great idea to reformat it, and I guess the timing was right.

Was this your nephew that appears in the Tokyo episode or a different nephew?

This is an older nephew than that. I have many nephews and many nieces and they’re all geniuses. But there’s another leg to this too, aside from my fascination with bread and bread around the world. I’ve been acting for so many years and felt very fortunate with all of the breaks that I’ve gotten. But I’ve been starting to feel a little bit like I wanted to reconnect to the world again, in some way. When you are working and your experiences are mostly coming through scripted, mostly fictional stuff, after a while, there’s that possibility that you start to feel a little disconnected from actual life and the world. That also was one of the main drivers here. I wanted to meet new people, travel to new places or even familiar places, but with a different point of view. In a lot of ways, it’s been eye-opening. The food component aside, I’ve found it’s been really good for me. You get out of your own head and out of your own sphere, and you’re reminded that there’s so much else going on out there.

How did you choose where you were going to go? So many of the places have a personal connection for you: You said you wanted to start in Lebanon, where your father is from, but the political situation didn’t allow for it so you went to Brazil, where there is a large Lebanese population. You spend time in New York, where you live, and Wisconsin, where you are from.

We initially had a list of about 12 different locations, and some of those were locations that I just thought, “Boy, it would really be fun to travel there.” When we got into it with CNN, you know, especially for the first season, they wanted for me to have a personal connection to each of these locations. We gave them a list of about 10 places, and they chose six. So obviously New York, because this is now my second time living here in the city, and I love it. I consider it my home and where so much of my career has taken place. I think Marseille, because even though I traveled to France several times, is a place where my father, when he was immigrating from Lebanon over a hundred years ago, as many immigrants did, had to stop in Marseille in the process. We’ve always been curious about that part of his journey because we knew about his departure from Beirut, and we knew about his arrival in Ellis Island, but we didn’t know about the middle part of his journey. So we were able to explore that and get some more new information about that.

Members of your family also show up, including your daughter Josie Adams and another nephew. Why did you want to involve them?

Whenever there’s a discussion about bread or about food in general, it mostly stems from or grows out of my childhood, growing up, my parents, my other older relatives, and I guess that’s the closest connection for me. It has been such a part of what connects us all.

Tony Shalhoub with his daughter Josie Adams and pastry chef Pierre Ragot in the Marseille episode of “Breaking Bread.”

(CNN Original Series)

How did your relationship to bread, clearly something you love, change over the course of making the show?

The main takeaway was that the show, for me, really became more about the people that I met than the product itself. There were familiar things, some of them done in a kind of innovative and new way and other things that I had not experienced before or tasted before, but [it was] really more about the people and their devotion to that work and the reasons that they become so obsessed and so devoted to that kind of work. For me, the show really becomes about those stories and those histories, whether it’s a family history or a story about immigration or a story of a war-torn country. To be really frank about it, bread is really more the vehicle that brings us into these other discussions.

I want to say this in a very tactful way, but the risk of doing this kind of show is that there is a point, I believe, of diminishing returns when we talk about food. This is my fear. It was like, will someone stand up and say, “Stop it.” There’s so many important things that are going on that deserve our focus and our attention, but because we’re talking about food, it’s inevitable because we have to have it every day. It sustains us, and that’s all fine and good, but I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I want bread to be that thing that sparks other conversations.

In the Marseille episode, you uncover part of your father’s story, discovering details of his trip to America in the municipal archives. What was that experience like?

It was quite moving and also doing it with my daughter and having those discussions with my daughter. She didn’t know my father because he passed away before she was born. But I don’t think I would’ve had the opportunity or the access to uncover these things had I not been doing this show at this time in that city. It would’ve just gone undiscovered and unknown.

Obviously, you’ve eaten on screen before, that’s part of an actor’s job, but did you think about how you were going to react to what you try?

I didn’t really think about it or plan it. I wanted to figure out ways to avoid or sidestep stock reactions. “God, that’s delicious.” Of course, that’s what everyone says when they’re eating something exciting and new. But I was really trying to stay open and rather than using words, a lot of times I just felt I let it go into my body and my body kind of did the work.

There’s a moment when you almost do a little dance.

Because some of this stuff just transcends words.

Was there something you tried that truly surprised you?

Certainly, I think given the amount of pastry I consume and have consumed in my lifetime, I thought that Mary O’s Irish Soda Bread scones were kind of a revelation. I’ve made scones. I’ve had scones. I love them, but this was revelatory. In Brazil they couldn’t grow wheat for a time, and before they were importing it, they were relying on cassava flour everywhere. They make a cheese bread. They were making it out of cassava flour, which is delicious, not heavy, and no gluten and all of that, and with cheese. Somehow miraculously, you’re eating these things and you’re never feeling full or bloated.

Kingsmill’s owner has said it has agreed to buy rival Hovis and plans to merge the companies in a move that would create the UK’s biggest bread brand.

Associated British Foods (ABF) which also owns Primark, Ryvita and Twinings, said it would cut costs to make the two currently loss-making businesses profitable.

The Unite union represents workers at Hovis and Kingsmill and warned it would “not tolerate attacks on jobs, pay or conditions”.

Warburtons is the current market leader in UK breadmaking and the deal would need approval from the competition watchdog in order to go ahead.

Sales of Kingsmill and Hovis loaves are thought to have fallen flat due to a drop in demand for basic pre-packaged bread, as speciality breads such as sourdough and ciabatta took a bigger slice of the market.

Sandwiches and toast are also off the menu for some British consumers who are cutting back on carbohydrates in favour of high-protein diets.

ABF told investors on Friday it had reached an agreement to buy historic brand Hovis from private equity owner Endless.

It said the combined business would be “better placed to compete effectively” and to create new products “as a result of changing consumer tastes and needs.”

ABF’s Allied Bakeries business, which makes Kingsmill and Allinson’s bread, first confirmed talks over a potential deal three months ago.

Hovis, which was founded in 1890, was bought by Endless in 2020 from Premier Foods, which owns the Mr Kipling brand.

ABF said the deal would lead to “significant costs synergies and efficiencies” in an effort to create a sustainably profitable bread business.

George Weston, chief executive of ABF said: “This solution will create value for shareholders, provide greater choice for consumers and increase efficiencies for customers.”

But Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: “While there is still a long way to go before any buyout happens, Hovis and Kingsmill must ensure that jobs are protected.”

She said Unite would be working to ensure the two brands fully involve the union in any decisions that impact its members.

The deal requires approval from the Competition and Markets Authority.

Gaza City, Gaza Strip – Hani Abu Rizq walks through Gaza City’s wrecked streets with two bricks tied against his stomach as the rope cuts into his clothes, which hang loose from the weight he has lost.

The 31-year-old searches desperately for food to feed his mother and seven siblings with the bricks pressed against his belly – an ancient technique he never imagined he would need.

“We’re starved,” he says, his voice hollow with exhaustion.

“Even starvation as a word falls short of what we’re all feeling,” he adds, his eyes following people walking past.

He adjusts the rope around his waist, a gesture that has become as routine as breathing.

“I went back to what people did in ancient times, tying stones around my belly to try to quiet my hunger. This isn’t just war. It’s an intentional famine.”

The fading of Gaza’s heartbeat

Before October 7, 2023, and the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, food was the heartbeat of daily life in Gaza.

The days in Gaza were built around communal meals – breakfasts of zaatar and glistening olive oil, lunches of layered maqlooba and musakhan that filled homes with warmth, and evenings spent around trays of rice, tender meat and seasonal salads sparkling with herbs from gardens.

Abu Rizq remembers those days with the ache of someone mourning the dead.

The unmarried man used to love dining and gathering with family and friends. He speaks of comfortable dining rooms where home-cooked feasts were displayed like art and evenings were filled with desserts and spiced drinks that lingered on tongues and in memory.

“Now, we buy sugar and salt by the gram,” he says, his hands gesturing towards empty market stalls that once overflowed with produce.

“A tomato or cucumber is a luxury – a dream. Gaza has become more expensive than world capitals, and we have nothing.”

Over nearly 22 months of the war, the amount of food in Gaza has been drastically reduced. The besieged enclave has been under the complete mercy of Israel, which has curtailed access to everything from flour to cooking gas.

But since March 2, the humanitarian and essential items allowed in have plummeted to a frightening low. Israel completely blocked all food from March to May and has since permitted only minimal aid deliveries, prompting widespread international condemnation.

Watching children suffer

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, at least 159 Palestinians – 90 of whom are children and infants – have died of malnutrition and dehydration during the war as of Thursday.

The World Food Programme warns of a “full-blown famine” spreading across the enclave while UNICEF reports that one in three children under five in northern Gaza suffers acute malnutrition.

Fidaa Hassan, a former nurse and mother of three from Jabalia refugee camp, knows the signs of malnutrition.

“I studied them,” she tells Al Jazeera from her displaced family’s shelter in western Gaza. “Now I see them in my own kids.”

Her youngest child, two-year-old Hassan, wakes up every morning crying for food, asking for bread that doesn’t exist.

“We celebrated each of my children’s birthdays with nice parties [before the war] – except for … Hassan. He turned two several months ago, and I couldn’t even give him a proper meal,” she says.

Her 10-year-old, Firas, she adds, shows visible signs of severe malnutrition that she recognises with painful clarity.

Before the war, her home buzzed with life around mealtimes. “We used to eat three or four times a day,” she recalls.

“Lunch was a time to gather. Winter evenings were filled with the aroma of lentil soup. We spent spring afternoons preparing stuffed vine leaves with such care.

“Now we … sleep hungry.”

“There’s no flour, no bread, nothing to fill our stomachs,” she says, holding Hassan as his small body trembles.

“We haven’t had a bite of bread in over two weeks. A kilo of flour costs 150 shekels [$40], and we can’t afford that.”

Hassan was six months old when the bombing began. Now, at two years old, he bears little resemblance to a healthy child his age.

The United Nations has repeatedly warned that Israel’s siege and restrictions on humanitarian aid are creating man-made famine conditions.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, only a fraction of the 600 truckloads of food and supplies required in Gaza daily, under normal circumstances, are coming through. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system has placed northern Gaza in Phase 5: catastrophe/famine.

Amid a lack of security, the trickle of humanitarian aid allowed to enter Gaza is subject to gangs and looting, preventing people in need from accessing scarce supplies.

Furthermore, hundreds of desperate aid seekers have been shot dead by Israeli soldiers while trying to get humanitarian aid provided by the United States- and Israeli-backed GHF since May.

Abundance as a distant memory

Hala Mohammed, 32, cradles three-year-old Qusai in a relative’s overcrowded shelter in Remal, a neighbourhood of Gaza City, as she describes how she has to watch him cry in hunger every morning, his little voice breaking.

“There’s no flour, no sugar, no milk,” she says, her arms wrapped protectively around the child, who has known only war for most of his life.

“We bake lentils like dough and cook plain pasta just to fill our stomachs. But hunger is stronger.”

This is devastating for someone who grew up in Gaza’s rich culture of hospitality and generosity and had a comfortable life in the Tuffah neighbourhood.

Before displacement forced her and her husband to flee west with Qusai, every milestone called for nice meals – New Year’s feasts, Mother’s Day gatherings, birthday parties for her husband, her mother-in-law and Qusai.

“Many of our memories were created around shared meals. Now meals [have become the] memory,” she says.

“My son asks for food and I just hold him,” she continues, her voice cracking. “The famine spreads like cancer – slowly, silently and mercilessly. Children are wasting away before our eyes. And we can do nothing.”

This piece was published in collaboration with Egab.