The Falafel Bites Back: Informal Pedagogies of Gendered and Racialized Recipes of Arabic-Speaking Migrant Communities

This paper uses the falafel as a methodological anchor to explore how recipes operate as informal pedagogies among Arabic-speaking migrants and diaspora communities. Drawing on examples from Germany and England, it examines how everyday practices of cooking and recipe transmission become sites through which gendered responsibilities, sensory memories of home, and forms of embodied knowledge are reproduced, adapted, or contested. The analysis also considers how the falafel circulates within racialized urban food spaces and how its commercialization as an “ethnic” or vegan-friendly dish shapes public narratives surrounding Arabic-speaking communities. By tracing the movements of a single dish across domestic kitchens, migrant neighborhoods, and alternative food cultures, the paper highlights how recipes participate in broader struggles over belonging, representation, and the politics of migration. The falafel, in this sense, becomes a lens through which to understand the tensions and possibilities that structure diasporic identification in post-migration contexts.