Fashion Supermodel Gigi Hadid was answering questions under the hashtag of #askgigi on Twitter when she was asked about her favorite Palestinian food, to which she answered with Lebanese most famous traditional dishes.
A twitter user asked the Palestinian-American model of her favorite Palestinian food. She quoted the tweet adding: “Kibbeh w labneh and tabbouleh or just simple eggs and zaatar breakfast.”
Twitter users were quick to correct Hadid’s mistake of mixing up Palestinian food with Lebanese food, such as tabbouleh and few types of kibbeh that the Lebanese cuisine takes pride in for centuries.
User @farahsai replied to Hadid tweet saying: “Tabbouleh is Lebanese habibi.”
Another Twitter user @stuckinafrenzy tweeted: “Sis, these are all Lebanese dishes but we stan multiculturalism.”
A third user @AbdallahSh sarcastically asked; “So my whole life I thought that tabbouleh is a Lebanese dish but it turned out Palestinian? Either I am wrong or you are?”
Hadid did not hesitate to correct her innocent mistake and tweeted back at the many comments that had rushed to correct her; all insisting that the conflict is not culturalism but rather just crediting the source of origin of these dishes.
“To every1 saying all of these foods are Lebanese only. My dad was born in Palestine in ‘48, where his family lived for many generations before that & ate these foods their entire lives. B4 borders & ownership of land, the region’s dishes & ingredients were always the same,” Hadid tweeted.
She concluded with another tweet; “I should also add that my family and I support many family-owned Lebanese restaurants to enjoy the food we all love !!!!!”
Lebanese food can be sometimes mistaken as Syrian or Palestinian because of the Levantine cultural and regional similarities.
The kibbeh, for example, is said to have originated in Halab, Syria, and that Lebanese towns at the border recreated the Syrian recipe into several new Lebanese ones.
According to CNN Arabia, there are 70 types of kibbeh recipe originated from different Arab countries.
The name of tabbouleh originated from the source of the word “spices” (tawabel), and from the act of “seasoning” food, which is the name that this salad acquired because of the adding of different spices and the mixing of its ingredients.
The tabbouleh is very much part of the Lebanese traditional cuisine. It was carried along with the Lebanese migration to nearly half of the hemisphere to also settle in Latin America, among others.
In many countries today, it is also known as “the Lebanese Salad.”
Lebanon has been celebrating National Tabbouleh Day on the first Saturday of the month of July every year since 2001 in an attempt to preserve the culinary heritage of the Lebanese dish.
It remains that Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine share several similar foods in their cuisines, some with slight differences and some with significant differences, whether in their spices or their components.