OPEN ASSEMBLY

The Assembly Line i.e. Mise En Place

The summer of 2025 was my first as an expatriate of Lebanon, a former insider watching events unfold from the outside, providing a distant affective lens. The three-month period embodied a microcosm of Lebanon’s contemporary condition, renowned for state-ordained complexity and externally imposed chaos. Lebanon has been wrought with a complex history since its inception. The civil wars (1975-1990) and Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon (1982-2000) marked the beginning of a prolonged, protracted state of conflict, economic strife, and sporadic violence, both internal and external in origin. Much like a dormant volcano, these deep-seated issues follow a rhythmic pattern of calm simmering only to erupt in unpredictable bursts. The key to navigating the country’s perpetual political and economic uncertainties remains in the hands of the powerful few, who, in response, hastily muffle oppositional voices with superficial distractions. Thus, the emergence of the tomato sandwich was never unprecedented, nor unexpected, but rather another absurd specter of neurotic joy pushed forward during times of absolute uncertainty towards a future.

Em Sherif Deli’s Sandwich of the Month: July’s star item is made with banadoura jabaliyeh (Lebanese heirloom tomatoes), toum (garlic spread), sumac, extra virgin olive oil, green chili, and spring onion layered between two slices of sourdough. $13

The ad first appeared in the early weeks of July, only to become an issue of national debate mere hours later. The country was peripherally divided into three cantons: those who believed that the quality of Em Sherif’s deli, a conceptual store widely regarded as a high end authentic Lebanese restaurant, justifies a higher end price that only a select few could afford, others who vehemently opposed the cost of a meager tomato sandwich being double that of a beef shawarma at any local vendor, and those who simply did not care to involve themselves in the conversation. Nevertheless, the sandwich overtook Lebanese media by storm. The tomato would become, I argue, a diagnostic symptom of a hedonistic happiness, a eudaimonism, treading societal neurosis, which defines the Lebanese ‘post-colonial’ reality. The implicit and explicit hierarchies and systems of authority at play in Lebanon materialize on a micro-experiential scale with the tomato sandwich, which functions as a system of signs that question the possibility of the future in the post-colonial world.

The Filling: The Heirloom, the Contemporary and Identity

The Arabic banadūra (tomato), from Italian pomodoro, is a univerbation of pomo (“apple”) + d’ (“of) + oro (“gold”). The name denotes the yellow variant color of the fruit that was first brought to Italy and presented to the Medici Court. Despite red variants arriving in Italy later, the name remained commonplace and spread across the Mediterranean, giving rise to the alternate Banadoura. The tomato is a staple of the Lebanese kitchen, especially for its use in home-made stews, stuffings, and salads.

The Lebanese variety of heirloom tomatoes known as Banadoura Jabaliye (translated to Mountainous Tomato) is a seasonal offspring of decades of agricultural history in Mount Lebanon. They are large, round, and marked with cascading ribbed tops. Few are produced each season, which marks up their price compared to an average tomato. They are luxury produce.

To understand the significance of this tomato, one must first investigate the agricultural practices that distinguish heirloom varieties from hybrid varieties. In agriculture, an heirloom refers to a traditional, old-fashioned variety of a plant whose seeds have been passed on through generations, often within a community, family, or a specific region. Analogous to an antique or a piece of jewelry, the seeds are considered a familial treasure in organic form, capable of producing life and continuing a cycle of production and consumption. Like an archive, these heirloom seeds contain a heritage, a history, as they were selected, saved, and cultivated simply for their unique flavor, shape, color, and size. Heirloom varieties are valuable and have been sustained for decades through preservation, as their pollination is critically dependent on their identity. To put it simply, heirlooms are purebred foundation stock. They are always pollinated from another flower on a plant of the same variety, creating a virtually identical plant to its parents. In some sense, it is almost like cloning, save for some minor genetic differences. Characteristically, the produced plant is always identical to its ancestor, its parents. Heirlooms are pollinated naturally by wind, insects, birds, or other natural mechanisms, allowing farmers to save their seeds and continue the self-sufficient cycle of production without necessitating dependency on seed companies every season. It is a linked chain of sustenance, as if the tomato produces itself and its future variants through a process of preservation. Temporally and ontologically, the tomato is the past, present, and future of its being. It retains its origin while propagating its preservation. Thus, for it to be (être), it necessitates a good life, a well-being (bien-être).

In essence, the tomato is a truly sovereign object that can only be endangered in exceptional circumstances, such as natural disasters or parasitic invasions. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt reflects on the human capacity of creation, of starting something new and usually unexpected. She is widely regarded as the “theorist of beginnings”, dwelling on her concept of vita activa (active life) where she designates three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. She writes, “All three activities and their corresponding conditions are intimately connected with the most general condition of human existence: birth and death, natality and mortality. Labor assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species. Work and its product, the human artifact, bestow a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time. Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history.”¹

Lebanon’s ties to action, as a condition to human existence, remain completely shackled to an object permanence towards temporality. The state functions in a persistent “empty present” that, unlike Arendt’s characterization, does not transition but remains stagnant. The colonial legacy of the Levant is one of disorientation and historical void. Modern Lebanese history remains undocumented, halted exactly at the moment of the dissolution of the French mandate in 1945, the foundational myth of Lebanese independence. This raises a pivotal question: why does the end of history begin at the nation’s founding? Scholars point to the civil war as a predominant concern. The state-sponsored policy of “no victor, no vanquished”, which actively discouraged a formal diagnostic process towards historicization, aimed to deter conflict from reemerging. But a proper foundation is not a simple one-time event, but rather, an ongoing active constitution of the public realm. In Arendt’s view, Lebanon persists within a foundational labyrinth, an era of complete fragmentation and alienation towards reality. In truth, Lebanon has no origin, it exists in a temporal dimension of static identity; of what Arendt would deem dark times. Theorist Ghalya Saadawi writes, “The dark, murky times are not the names and lists of twentieth-century tragedies, not the ‘genocides, purges, and hunger of a specific era. Instead, darkness refers to the way these horrors appear in public discourse and yet remain hidden.”

Much like the heirloom, Lebanon views itself as a static, unchanging object, cyclically regurgitating a narrative of purity, origin, history, and tradition sans the capacity to create something new, unexpected. The tomato in Lebanon represents a story of ethnic rootedness to the land, which is produced, packaged, and consumed as a commodity: a narcotic towards the fundamental uncertainty of a political realm that has failed to constitute itself. One consumes not a fruit, not a sandwich, but a palliative for a lost world, a lost future. Stuck in a state of heedless thoughtlessness, lacking the action which Arendt describes as the “the condition-—not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life”², Lebanon recreates its nonexistence perpetually through active post-colonial amnesia. The mundane takes precedence over the political. “In the same way that one might ask ‘where is the artwork: in the showcasing, the encounter, the conceptual, the discourse or the critical writing?’ so too one would ask, ‘where is identity, origin, being?’. It’s not, not here.”³

The Garnish: Deception and Wealth

“[…] while some comfort foods play to memories of childhood and home, others play to excess and indulgence, providing a ritual and illicit escape from the crushing constraints of reality and adulthood.”⁴

The Lebanese liquidity crisis, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, Israeli aggressions, and the 2020 Beirut port explosion, continues to impact a large majority of the nation’s population. The fragility of the economy became apparent with liquidity shortages in the years before 2019, which remained deceptively concealed by the powerful elite. In the years following the pandemic, the Lebanese Lira had devalued by over 98% after being pegged to the U.S. dollar at 1,500 LL per dollar. Currently, 1 U.S. dollar is equivalent to 90,000 Lebanese Lira. This collapse fundamentally restructured public opinion on private banking, patriotism, and allegiance to the state. Public services collapsed, and the safety net of private businesses simultaneously shrank as prices for electricity, water, and other infrastructural essentials skyrocketed. Private bank deposits were withheld, as citizens desperately attempted to withdraw what little savings they had accumulated over the years.

In the West, scholars have noted the emergence of little treat culture, an explosion of luxury, yet affordable items that mimic an inversion of economic reality. Where most cannot adequately fund a significant investment such as housing, more minor indulgences in non-essential purchases offer a viable, mass-produced alternative in a world of inaccessibility. Advertisers lure consumers by marketing their goods as essential must-haves, echoing tall tales of spice traders spinning fables of the ‘exotic’ origins of their wares to justify exorbitant prices.

Pierre Bourdieu expands on the notion of symbolic capital by analyzing how economic wealth does not simply act as wealth, but also as a “variable form of recognition extended to wealth, depending on societies and moments”.⁵ In short, raw economic power exhibits a symbolic effect through recognition. An objectified form of capital, for example, may legitimize prestige, honor, and reputation simply through exchanges of material. The sandwich becomes an object of symbolic capital driven by the context of placement: aesthetic qualities of being seen in certain places that evoke wealth, such as a high-end deli in a gentrified area of Beirut. In fact, the simplicity of the tomato sandwich and the humility of its ingredients are an indicator of its social status. Its pristine, stripped-down aesthetic mimics that of quiet luxury. But behind it lay a chaotic reality and a messy political landscape that cannot be disentangled without inconvenience. What changes when the interlocutor is not merely a subject of wealth disparity, but also an enduring victim of a persistent post-colonial condition? Here, the certainty of death extends beyond the state’s regulatory power over its body politic. We exist in a realm of systemic war and large-scale extermination. Does the little treat offer any consolation?

The Bread: Smile! It’s Ready-To-Eat

History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the ploughed fields whereby we thrive. It knows the names of the king’s bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly.  ~ Jean-Henri Fabre (1823 –1915)

The sandwich is an uncooked meal. It is a ready repast, easy to prepare, carry, and consume. It is simple and ubiquitous. In essence, the sandwich is deeply intertwined with capitalist consumption and profound hedonism. While ‘breaking bread’ may have begun as a group activity⁶, the current modular form of the sandwich is highly isolating. It is an ego-centric experience of hedonistic pleasure that is not meant to be shared. In turn, the subject who consumes said sandwich must intrinsically experience joy on an independent level, an example of self-discipline initiated by materiality. In her book, The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed investigates the premise of happiness by asking questions on the moral and affective expectations instigated by the ‘happiness duty’. She writes, “Even if happiness is imagined as a feeling state, or a form of consciousness that evaluates a life situation we have achieved over time (Veenhoven 1984: 22–23), happiness also turns us toward objects. We turn toward objects at the very point of “making.” To be “made happy” by this or that is to recognize that happiness starts from somewhere other than the subject who may use the word to describe a situation.”⁷

Lebanon’s model of post-coloniality is complex and arguably atypical, presenting deep-seated issues since its imposed formation. It is plagued by a political system that entrenches sectarian divisions and narrows solidarity. Defined by instability, weak centralized governance, corruption, and ongoing conflict, the institutionalized confessional system set in place by the French mandate (1920-1945) imposes a temporal expansion of persistent conflict and political paralysis, creating a dynamic of complete dependency on the “caring mother”, France, and Western colonial powers, for political, cultural, and social stability. “While Lebanon was once referred to as Switzerland of the East, and Beirut as Paris of the East, the country’s past must not be seen as one of flourishing prosperity which went off-course. It was never on-course.”⁸ Yet despite persistent economic, political, and social stagnation, the Lebanese mindset is drawn to joviality and acts of emotional ‘resilience’. The affective is at the core of social normativity in Lebanese society.

To show distress is to show weakness. Performances of happiness are not only present but encouraged and even mandated, functioning as a flawed sense of resilience against internal and external corruption. It is simply a persistence of denial so severe that the subject internalizes said affect as accurate, vehemently oscillating between objects of joy and the severe reality of protracted colonialism in a manic state. The fabricated belief of joy becomes easy to digest, simple, and portable, much like a sandwich. Thus, the object of happiness is passed around, “accumulating positive affective value as a social good”.⁹ All the while, anxiety, fea,r and loss are shunned. “They are expressed as vulnerability in the pervasiveness of trauma, as a constant low-level distress, and through a generalization of contingency.”¹⁰ If we do not fear the future, is there room for possible change? The illusion of normative happiness is an opium, a barrier to revolution. Laughter is the sigh of the oppressed creature. The object of false happiness lures the oppressed towards a negative experience of the sensational by dislocating the subject of happiness from the conditions of its arrival.¹¹ Thus, the purpose of the sandwich is multifactorial, as it perfectly sums up all these issues in a single micro-experience. A protracted state of neurosis coupled with passive ideological hegemony and protracted coloniality. The Lebanese subject is auto-inscribed with a disciplining sense of normative happiness, all the while persistently anticipating recognition (and later, prestige, honor, and even ‘humanity’) by the colonizer, the powerful, the few.

The Spread: Sensory Borders and Disturbances

In Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha, Quixote advises his “peasant” squire Sancho Panza, on how to behave after becoming the governor of an island. “Eat not garlic nor onions, lest they find out thy boorish origins by the smell.” Don Quixote’s advice, while satirical, reveals the pretenses of social norms and customs in aristocratic society, many of which are rooted in masking. One is expected to keep hidden their less refined habits, such as eating, especially when involving cheap, pungent ingredients. Food aversions, especially to garlic, onions, and other produce in the Allium family, are interlinked with performances of cultural capital¹².

Historically, there is a sense of abjection in the sensorial realm of odor. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva writes, “Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection.”¹³ The abject, according to Kristeva, is what disturbs systems and order, a non-object which does not respect borders, positions, and rules. Nothing comes close to abject disturbance as much as odor, especially that of pungent food. It is an assertion of the I/Other, a disturbance that crosses the borderline of personal space in a public sphere.

The Kick: Defense Mechanisms, Pleasure and Pain

Perhaps one of the most interesting examples of the human capacity for pain tolerance is the global affair with chili peppers. Defense mechanisms developed by plants don’t phase us, in fact, we go so far as to relish their violence. “[…] whereas corn developed that tough outer casing to protect its seeds and other berries developed thorns, chilies developed a chemical defense mechanism in the form of capsaicin, the principal function of which is to cause predators pain.”¹⁴

This is a phenomenon known in industry as directed deterrence, aimed explicitly at mammals such as ourselves. Put simply, our teeth are seed destroyers. We do not propagate the fertilization of these plants, and therefore, nature prefers animals that do, such as birds, which are immune to capsaicin. What the plant does is target something beyond our taste buds. It is a sensorial and temperamental chemical reaction, the same one that “alerts the body to the presence of harmful chemicals and bacteria”.¹⁵ Thus, eating chili is not dissimilar to injury, a sensation of exposure to harm, a chemical weapon. Repeated exposure to capsaicin can desensitize receptors that signal pain in nerve cells, which explains why some people tolerate the literal and literary heat better than others. The question remains, however, why do we enjoy the pain inflicted on us by these plants? Perhaps it is a thrill, a form of benign masochism, or an attempt at regaining sensation where it had been lost.

The Drizzle: Choice, Exclusivity and Escapism

Human beings are biologically wired to crave choices, the new, the personalized. We desire, in evolutionary terms, variety. ‘The scarcity environment in which humanity evolved prioritized appetite: whoever got the most sex, or food, or stuff was likely to be a successful spreader of the seed’.¹⁶ To crave is to want, rather than need. The desire for the new, for the unexpected, cannot be satiated with passing trends. Jalal Toufic expresses a passion for creativity beyond a ‘surpassing disaster’, a disaster that has surpassed the temporal immediacy of a death toll and destruction to long-term, latent physiological and traumatic effects in the depths of the body. He claims, “In the aftermath of the surpassing disaster, tradition is in some cases totally withheld from the thinker and/or artist; in other cases, it is withheld from him or her as a thinker and/or artist, but not as a teacher or historian or a person. We do not go to the West to be indoctrinated by their culture, for the imperialism and hegemony of their culture is nowhere clearer than here in developing countries. Rather, we go to the West because it is there that we can be helped in our resistance by all that we do not receive in developing countries: their experimental films and video art, their ontological-hysteric theater, their free improvisation, etc.; and because we can there meet people who can perceive, read or listen, and genuinely use pre-surpassing-disaster art, literature, music and thought without having to resurrect them.”¹⁷ Perhaps, this is the main issue at hand: a formal diagnosis.

Lebanese society is defined by terminal temporality, an extended, deeply unmedicated surpassing of disaster. We bandage prolonged injuries in the hope of resurrection. Yet a wound that never heals devolves from pain to apathy. Apathy, in this case, does not denote absence, but rather a cynicism towards the value of building a future or historicizing a past. Stuck in a recurrent moment of perennial hyper-consumption, the individual anchors their sense of identity in benign symbols of tradition: a tomato, a dance, a song, a flag. Yet these small comforts merely fuel a fragile retreat from reality. Perhaps, once every bite is taken and no crumbs are left, once even the phantasm of happiness is destroyed, and joy is rendered obsolete by impending peril. We may face the pessimism of our precarity to destroy the world imposed on us by our oppressors and hurl it back in their faces.  

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), Introduction ↩︎
2. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7. ↩︎
3. Ghalya Saadawi (2012) Not, not Contemporary, Third Text, 26:4, 379-382, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2012.692183   ↩︎
4. Matt Siegel, The Secret History of Food: Strange but True Stories about the Origins of Everything We Eat, (New York: Collins, 2022), 122. ↩︎
5. Pierre Bourdieu, On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989 – 1992 (Oxford, England: Polity Press, 2020), 191. ↩︎
6. Company (From Latin Cum “together” and Pānis “Bread”), signifying a group which shares bread, or “one who eats bread with others”. ↩︎
7. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 21. ↩︎
8. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2018/04/05/colonialism-and-imperialism-the-case-of-lebanon/ ↩︎
9. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 21. ↩︎
10. Andrew Culp, Dark Deleuze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 49. ↩︎
11. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 23. ↩︎
12. A concept by French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu which refers to non-financial assets, such as social skills, etiquette, knowledge and education, that may promote social mobility. ↩︎
13. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2. ↩︎
14. Siegel, The Secret History of Food, 144. ↩︎
15. Ibid, 145. ↩︎
16. Elizabeth Farrelly, Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness (London England: MIT Press, 2008). ↩︎
17. Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster, 13. https://jalaltoufic.com/downloads/Jalal_Toufic,_The_Withdrawal_of_Tradition_Past_a_Surpassing_Disaster.pdf ↩︎