The Ethics of Hummus by Omar Mouallem
I don’t have many rules around the food in our house. I’m not committed to organic or free-range,
so long as the ingredients are quality enough. Only on hummus do I have laws important enough to share them with my wife for whenever it’s her turn for a grocery run. She knows never to bring home gimmick hummus, the likes of which now includes gingerbread and key-lime pie flavours, not that she would ever bring home such aberrations. Personally, I don’t think hummus needs anything more than a well-balanced blend of chickpeas, tahini, garlic, lemon, and oil, but I’ll allow myself the occasional roasted red pepper blend for a taste of something resembling muhammara (a more delicate and supreme Middle Eastern dip only recently appropriated by Whole Foods). When it’s my turn to shop for hummus, I try for the small batch hummus you might find at a Lebanese grocer, but only if I have time to drive halfway to the other side of the city. But my firmest hummus rule is that, whatever the recipe, it wasn’t made by Sabra, the world’s top brand with up to 60 percent of North America’s $601.39 million market share, or Tribe, Big Chickpea’s number-two brand.
26
WINTER 2021/2022
My reasons are not to do with quality, at least not entirely. Tribe is too thick and soft on the lemon and garlic, but Sabra closely resembles the hummus my mom used to make before it became a grocery store section. My problem is with their ethics. Tribe and Sabra are two of one-hundred-plus products compiled by BDSguide.com, an exhaustive directory of pro-Israeli companies and groups to avoid as part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Israel movement. It was modelled after similar anti-apartheid actions against South Africa in the 1980s. While I don’t follow the BDS call, Sabra and Tribe are considered by many to be particularly bad offenders. Osem Group, an Israeli company that acquired Tribe from Americans in 2008, is tied to Jewish National Fund, a century-old colonial project responsible for the forced expulsion of thousands of Palestinians. They’re also set to launch more eviction proceedings of hundreds of families in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Sabra, for its part, has supported the Golani Brigade, a notorious Israeli military unit likened to a “renegade militia” by Haaretz after
