Watch to see Danny Dubbaneh present a history and study on za’atar at a presentation for Afikra in Washington DC on March 17th 2024 at the Kennedy Center
So before I start I want everyone to close their eyes for a second go back to your childhood remember those weekend mornings your parents your grandparents are cooking breakfast in the kitchen and you smell that smell coming from the kitchen and there’s that one distinct smell that’s
Probably come to your mind right now uh for me that was awful you can open your eyes so we grew up eatings outter all the time uh I was always told it’s good for you it’s super food and all these help benefits and most of all I was told
Z makes you smarter uh my mom would always have us eat it for exams worked with varying results and even though I wanted to believe my mom uh I’m a man of science so I said let me research this and find out for sure before I do that uh we’ll go
Through the present responses again I want to clarify that I am not an expert I did do some research uh but a lot of this honestly is just an stuff I’ve come across over the years um and I think there’s well there’s you know some
Academic back to this as well I have a specific disclaimer to my presentation specifically and that is because there’s so you know spread throughout the Middle East throughout the region people have contradictory opinions they argue about what’s true or what’s not what they think uh so Au there’s no exception so I
Want to get that out of the way right now if you think something different you heard so and so say it’s fine uh one now again also this little housekeeping is on spelling so because obviously author is transliterated from Arabic contains a phon that doesn’t exist in English there’s wildly
Different spellings you can see some of them here I believe the last one is the most accurate and that’s what I’ll be using uh if you think the various in spelling is kind of crazy you should hear the way people pronounce it okay so what led me to this it’s it’s
My brother not me so thank you so we grew up in a family that was always focused on food and food was so important I think the most important app is what I call like kind of the erab breakfast so it’s a shared table you have a lot of little dips cheeses fresh
Veggies and the most important is that you gathered together as family or friends and you’re sharing a meal at the center of that table for us was always z uh and so I always was eating it we we would take do sandwiches for lunch um we
Would eat in the morning when I was Z was always there we never really knew about it plus I just ate it and I asked what is z z okay great so I got to go find out myself that just brings us here we’ll do a quick outline so you guys
Know what to expect first we’ll just do a little quick background on zor uh we’ll do zor I’ll teach you how to eat auor we’ll talk about the cultural importance of zor because in order to understand how we get to these conclusions like oh you smart you need
To peel back players history and society and whatnot next is z medicine it’s historical background there and then last but not least is a z science experiment with an unwitting audience and if you haven’t CAU on now that’s you okay little is off to 101 and quick
On of photos I don’t have sources in a lot of them most of them are taken by my brother on various trips or whatever we’ve done he’s good at taking photos I take photos really quickly but they’re kind of Glory so I use this so little intro and so a lot of the
Confusion why people are oh I don’t know what zor is because it refers to two things so one it refers to the plant that’s called zor as well as the spice PL so the spice BL is one of the most traditional and famous spice BL in the
World it’s been used for centuries all the way back to the 12th century as both a culinary and medicinal herb and then like I to before it’s always been believed to increase your C we find out label why last but not least I found it interesting because it was used kind of for
Has antiseptic properties remains Au actually found in ADV bandages in the Tom of so it goes that way back okay so we get into PL so like I zor is the plant zor as well as the the blend zor so there’s Z which is a plant which is sometimes time or wild Z
There’s also something people called Z which I think usually associated with oregano and then there’s also zi which is Roman out there which people associate with time I might go backwards the important thing is that they all come from the same family so they’re in the L same M family which
Includes mint oregano margarum so they have a lot of those same flavors what they really have in common is essential oils primarily an essential oil called Thal which gives it the flavor uh so it’s made to the Middle East it’s a short Shu that go has these little nice
Cute little white flowers and a very fragrant cotton leav so you can almost see the texture of image so simple right one plan well no it’s not that simple so there are 22 different Earth species referred to as Al region and again what’s common in them is essential oils and again this is
Kind of telling you why there’s always so much confusion about what people want to call us out there um and so there’s there are all these different variations but the part I want to focus on is the last sentage is I can use Al anytime Al
What opens our pallets so you start to kind of get the idea of this Central role that’s out place with people so now we’re going to talk you establish Z the plant you know what it is we’re going to talk about the blend and the key to making a z blend is
What’s known as the big three oh no not this big the big three here so the main GRE is the off the plant it’s dried and ground up then there’s toasted sesame seeds there’s salt at the bottom which is just Supporting Cast and then the
Bright red there is Sumac and so you may have had sumac but also like me I didn’t really know what it was what looks like so that’s suac in the beginning sorry in the middle it’s a bright red Citrus Berry add very lemony Tangy flavor and
It’s essential to be inop so it adds a lot of bright red color it adds that kind of that punch that it gives it it’s very important a lot of kind of not SOS will replace it with citric acid so that’s a big no no for
Me the flavor one are not as complex and then two you don’t have the same color so I mean if you often taste like sour patch kids it’s because they’re CCI and then just take a second to admire the beauty of this aued okay so now I kind of set the stage
Uh what’s author is why it might be more than just a food and I think you’re going to really understand the significance of it after this really nice video Is for Is For For I the Simp For Z Speee simp For Fore such a beautiful video and I mean that L really encapsulates how important it is people in the region people that grow up on it you know not only for eating it livelihood also for identity that’s car rest t night just very quickly because I think he showed just because he showed the
Process a little bit in the video but to do a recap if you want to understand how it goes from plant to spice plant it starts gets harvested usually in the summer months and that’s when the flavor is that it’s Peak the essential oil content is highest in drier regions like
Jordan get kind gets picked a little earlier in the spring after it’s harvested and picked on grab it it’s left to dry indoor so it cannot dry under the sun because it damages a flavor it can burn the leaves which obviously does not make for a good
Flavor next step is picking which is very labor intensive there are some tools used but still a lot of it is just kind of pick by hand next is Si thing to kind of get all the purities out until you’re left with nothing but the
Pure ex Lees that you want and last but not least the ex Le of ground and mix with the other ingredients and if you want to make it yourself you can you start leav and then just follow those steps um and then of course like anything else in the middle a lot of
Regional variations different recipes different ingredients that come to play um and a lot of this is because there’s always kind of closely guarded secrets and sources of Pride from people from household to household they’re very palan Jan glends tend to be quite similar a little bit focus more on the
AL so what changes quite often is not necess ingredients but rather the ratio of ingredients so how much sumac I put for example in Lebanon they might increase the amount of sumac I have an image here and I’ve seen on a couple food block that says Lebanon they add
Orange zest to it I’ve never seen this in real life but I don’t think anyone’s surprised about Le zesting things up uh and so next we go to kind of what I call like the Zur adjacent category and so there’s something called zi which is a
Course cityo and this is very similar so it has the same kind of Z core starter pack if you will and then it’s added to crust spices roasted nuts and it tastes very good it’s delicious but it’s used different ways than sof sell the next one of course is Egyptian
Dka which is name for the word kind of pound because it’s made usually in I always mixed up these mortar vesal and so there also you know sometimes the chickpeas in there different spices mixed in you know Egypt always going to be a little bit different next very exciting part uh my
Favorite part is how to EAS author so I want to say that this author is amazing tastes delicious improves everything but if you’re going to eat it there’s one thing that must be there and that is olive oil so it’s author and olive oil are destined to be together
Need to be together cannot be a part if you’re eating author do not eat without olive oil please to further illustrate my point I have a piece of iconic music from time past I want to share with you so that you really get why Al oil need to be together yeah Uhhh F Yeah All say look like ass I say chill Man I make no apologies if that’s stuck in your head all but now you get his author all oil author must be together okay and so the first and most common use case is what we professionally call the dip and dunk and so that’s when you take your
Favorite piece of bread take a nice Good Dip soap in the olive oil tap it on the side of the hole before you move over so you don’t drip everywhere and then dunk it in the doler and don’t be shy and then pop it back and enjoy and then
Repeat this as many times as you want until you run out of bread this is like the most traditional way it’s a very simple breakfast make it like 5 minutes it’s always delicious nutritious um I mean I think people eat whole L after that it wasn’t too long oh sorry
Before that if I can’t talk about Z I miss not to mention Leon or what I like to call the a PB&J so Le is a strained creamy Tangy yog and it goes beautifully with s the flavors really compliment each other um we my grandm always make
Us leemon off the sandwiches every time we go over she put spread leemon that’s off our tomato cucumbers mint from garden and you just eat them and they’re delicious um she would even pack them in her purse on road trips even if they’re only for like half an hour just in case
Some them love sandwich um but you can see you know it’s a great topping on top of Le and those sandwiches and then next with olive oil again somebody I guess along the way fig out hey why I not mix them you know I don’t
Want to dip the dunk I want to just get it over with they made it into a paste and then they spread it on top of a flat bread and this is called AA which comes from the air for it to carve or to sculpt because when you’re stretching
Out the bread you make these little pockets of flavor uh and you can fill it with ingredients like Sala I do want to take a moment uh if you take only one thing of this presentation is that this is a USA and it’s not Z Pizza uh this is another version of the
Membership a lot people do it very thin cook on the side they roll it up wrap it up uh both are delicious both are amazing if you want to get into which one’s better that’s for another presentation okay so for the longest time and my young child the only ways I
Ever Saw s eaten were the ways you just saw but I think with the rise of food media and people generally more Curious or internationally traveled people start to use Z in really creative ways you see a lot of chefs using it popping up on a
Lot of menus so you started to see things like Z popcorn Z french fries Z on eggs inevitably Z made it way to an Al toast even people are using even Z cocktails like at the Greeno which is amazing uh but the flip side of that is
As this stuff starts getting trendy and popular is it loses some of its identity and so this leads us to kind of some of these big topics of food appropriation arranger and honoring kind of the origins of where these plants are IND to where they’ve grown and how they should
Be preserve how they should be shared and that their ingredients and the way they’re prepared matter and to further illustrate that I have one more video uh to show you uh because once office start getting popular obviously a lot of big companies to take advantage of its popularity but what they did did
Not do zor justice I don’t think it should be allowed to be called zor but we will talk about that later enjoy I you to try it what’s wrong I Do you like it the the deepest For Okay so I know that’s a fun video but I think there’s serious T in there and that that is a shame you call that out there it is very important that we take these things seriously that you know God forbid that’s someone’s first time trying off there TRS I
Mean it’s just totally different the flavors the ingredients they don’t represent it um and there is a lot of work being done in this space in the wine world where because of GRA of heart it matter re has been very proactiveness with their Greek yogurt and their feta
Cheese and things like that um so it’s important that people know and I’m hope that I’m helping to do that a little B tonight what off should be what it is what it always has been and what it should continue to be because it’s tied
Into so much more than just the food uh it’s really integral to the identity and culture of the people that grew up on it and who live in those lands and that’s the next part of presentation which is we’ll take a little bit more of a
Serious Stone but then we’ll go back to having fun at the end so we talked a little about live we saw in the video this was an economic initiative by the UN after series of Wars Lebanon to try to help the economy uh they found that Z and sumac were both
Very viable props obviously the climate’s perfect for it because it’s always grown there um and the part I want to hang on to here is and zor is resilient um and I think that’s important to remember because I think it represents the people who grew up in those
Lands uh we a quote here from pass him again so he was able to kind of harness the power potential exop that was always going the wild kind of bring it in and now he’s able instead of just harvesting once a year he can Harvest four or five
Crops a year um producing out there in a more kind of sustainable scalable way which is good because more is off for more people and then now he’s shown kind of the opportunity it’s given him and his family he gets to go to Italy and Jordan even Libya to talk about z uh
Which is really amazing for me I just get to come here to DC uh this is a quote from a writer and filmmaker I’ll let you read it for a second and the part I want to focus on is it’s a blend made by mixing the solid
With necessity even as a dip with olive oils Au uqu staple and breakfast table paltin we had nothing to eat but our Z olive oil is an expression meaning we had only our Staples so these are very humble Foods it’s olive oil it’s herbs Sesame sumac but it’s still important
Because it’s at the center of the table of family gathering and most importantly because those herbs grow from the ground and then next even though Zer is extremely popular and important in the region it has always said to be powerfully associated with palesa many people say that the most Savor Z in the
World grows wild in the mountains of J palan and we have a quote here uh again to e his author all one of is to partake of our land and it’s no coincidence that ol oil comes from olives and the olive trees that are so symbolic in palestin those two things go H
And and so again this is kind of further emphasizing the point the famous Ed um this is a meal that’s eaten everywhere but when he’s having as pal see this is a sign of Palestinian home that has alter in it so for Palestinians it takes on an additional layer of
Meaning because of this connection to the land that’s been separate for so many years and of course like anything else Zur became the target of some campaigns uh much like the olive trees were with the planting camps to knock out all the trees and kind of
Erase the history and replace it um with a new history so Z been targeted by being placed on the protected plant list allegedly is because it was an endangered plant but I think anyone who knows know that it’s Target for a different reason uh it was illegal to
Pick Wild’s author and it was illegal it would be confiscated at check points and I think it was just another example of this loss of agency even picked the wild herbs that have been growing on their soil for centuries this is a quote along the same topic in
For it also relates to the tradition of going out into nature and of the Harvest that part cannot be underplay so going out into to land grabbing Wild Harvest this commercialization process that was related to legislation this connection between man and his land was broken so it’s impossible to understand abandon
Injustice without the cultural context meaning significance at auor and harvesting it had pal culture and shaping pal this is a photo we took when we were in Jerusalem in 2018 so loosely translated uh Jerusalem is ours rally in y the land is for us Jerusalem is for us
And God with his might power is with us we are staying with whatever is left from the olives and the and so this shows just how powerful those two things are that they can the land forever we’re not leaving as long as they’re still here they’ll be here
Forever um and it continued to take on even more kind of iconic status caring a lot of poetry uh literature and of course in songs this album is from the famous poet darish with the composer M Lea the album’s amazing the en time great this song Hands of Time and stone
I think is really beautiful tell again how important this author is you know you’re getting your hands in it and I’ll just read the quote Qui for the lyri to those hands of Z and darken Stone I a voic this cry to ahed forgotten and alone the passing clouds
Have left me homeless and unknown and only mountains dare to hide me in a baren home so as you have started to gather just how important zare is you can understand that it’s always played a large role in people’s lives in the region and generally when that’s the case it’s
Because it was used for many years not just as food but also as medicine and so a lot of it started so Zak’s oldest recorded name is the biblical name H and so there’s many references using his Bible for different cleaning rituals for treating different things and I think
From that he starts of people using it in different cases so we see throughout history there was a few different people first the philosopher of Hindi he used it in medicine to treat a bacterial infection called St Anthony’s fire sounds very painful um then of course the physician Eli thought about as an
Apti enhancer stomach purifier and treatment for flatulence which is different than the video showed I don’t know look into that later and then of course uh the famous Mones he said that prescribed into his patients to treat of Vari of ailment and a lot of people think he really started
Pushing for this idea that s has all these different health benefits and can be used to kind of just in all sorts of different instances and it seemed like he was on to something because later studies looked at the essential oils author the benefits that they have and these
Essential oils are high antioxidants that can protect cells the sumac sesses also have extremely high amount of vitamins and other benefits I ared someone also told me that sesame seeds like a basal Dil dilator which can bring more blood into the brain which will be helpful later uh this author also anti
Activity again so a lot of cleaning against sound The Long Word which if you heard of staff infection that’s what that okay so these are just a few of the Cure alls I’ve heard or come across that sofware can be used for there’s many more uh prevents Digestive
And allergic reactions to bread so if you are gluten intolerant allergic or insensitive I think the problem is not the bread just have not been putting it us off there uh stomach problems looping cough sore throat cold flu fevers C and bronchitis menstrual CR internal parasites indigestion too Fame and
Depression so I think the question is what can’t s do and you can see theme if you know it of course none of these just want to get that out there so now to the question everyone I’m sure has been sitting on the edge of their seat waiting to find out does auor
Really make you smarter so this is like one of the largest spice shops in Jordan uh Jordan Alone which is the largest exporter of Z in the world we sell five tons z a month it’s a bunch of part we are all our mothers like mine used to make us eat Z
Sandwiches before exams because everyone believes Z you smarter now what they believe it I found some stories that said this originated during the Le Civil War when food was low and mothers encourag their kids to eat which have plenty of saying it make them smarter and I guess it spread from
There so there is a little bit of science though so one of the active fenals uh in author it’s called car and there’s this study here from the medical journal called molecules and it found it’s a brain active molecule basically through a lot of these fancy words to
Determin feelings of well-being it could possibly have positive reinforcer effects there’s another Journal uh PR Journal nutrition which also did the study with a regano which of course is in the same family as Z is brain active and it has moderate triple retic inhibitor activity and if you don’t know
What that means you probably need to eat more Sal and Exhibits positive behavioral effects in so they Poss you like that such an extract may be effective in enhancing mental well-being in humans and what most of these Studies have in common as most studies do they all have
The same conclusion further research is needed and that’s why I’m here today so just a quick recap of those studies I know is a lot of big words confus so Z PLS have high sensal contact especially time on and then this phenol called Carol so studies followed Carol
Given to mice for seven days and found that it significantly increase the dopamine and serotonin levels and so I know it’s been a while since science C A lot of people so a reminder dopamine that’s brings reward system and serotonin is important to learning and Bel a very important
Stuff and so now is the interactive part of the presentation and is where we’re going to test uh the question and so pass around little samples of off for you I B them this morning so I was you know orology just please don’t e it
So as I pass those out I’m just going to go through the experim the design real quick very very Advanced my hypothesis is if you need auor then you will be smart or more smart the independent go of course is your auor consumption which will please
Do not eat it yet we mess up experiment wait a second if you have it uh and if you’re fasting I’m sorry I know it’s close um but you can just pretend to take it and see thebo like works and then the last thing rep the dependent variable as intelligence I’m
Going to wait till everyone has it to start the experiment yeah for all right all right all right I need everyone’s undivided attention I’m going to start the experiment now everybody has one you don’t raise your hand okay good don’t eat yet first is the control
Question you don’t know no one knows the answer obviously you have off so of course you don’t know this is you right now okay and now time to administer the treatment please open your little cup and take your medicine okay so now the should be in your system bying it buz uh next
Question Dave my six off no one likes to sh author but he’s feel kind of generous on this day so he gave two bows to Z how many BS author now had off so I see a couple people count on their fingers I’ll give you a second and so conclusion the only
Conclusion we can come to doler makes you SM thank you okay and we have a little time for Q&A two questions you happen to know where in the DMV can buy I’m not supposed to disclose that sounds like start to please I Bak those this morning at our
Bakery in rock Maryland uh so I am in the Offa business we make stuff and if you like to try more of those you can come to our bakery or you can find them in local another round of applause for [Applause] danal we make an exception for DNZ
Because they are just so excellent and the science really proves their conclusion so we feel fine with it okay so we just wanted to maybe take two seconds of your time to conclude for those of you who’s first time welcome to a girl we hope that this was helpful we
Hope that you learned lots of new things um we do these again on a monthly basis within the DMB and there’s chapters across the world in the US we have chapters in LA in New York in Boston um and in Canada we have in Toronto Ottawa
So check us out here you scan our code you can find all of our social media one place um and today’s presentations will also be uploaded onto our blog eventually and you can reach out to the presenters directly after this they’ll be mingling feel free to ask them any
Questions and yeah there’s a question for us we’ll take it we do we have chapters in Morocco the UAE Egypt Lebanon Kuwait Saudi thank you for helping me Tunisia yeah we have chapters across the Arab world we have chapters in Europe in France in Germany um London so we really
Are Global we have a chapter in Mexico um so we are trying to spread our our our our seed not our Z seed but um yeah and you can start a chapter in any city as well we help you through the process and again it’s a really Community Driven
Process so thank you everyone for your time today we’re really grateful again to Chris and the Ken Center thank you to our host for helping us with all the technology um and we hope you guys are excited for our star break I’ll give it to Chris to break us thank
You team um this the first half of our show um it is now a time we have some