IRES’s Kate Reynolds situates Palestinian identity within relationships to plants, place and food

For Kate Reynolds, a master’s student at IRES, memory is aromatic. Her work on Palestinian displacement and ecological identity takes memory from the abstract into the sensory, exploring how taste and smell bring land and people closer together.

For Palestinians, the majority of whom live outside of their ancestral homeland, details about foods and plants, like the scent of jasmine petals and the tanginess of oranges, become conduits of memory and resistance.

“Za’atar, for example, is really important in my thesis because it is such a quintessential flavour profile of Palestinian identity. Food is not simply knowing where one comes from,” said Reynolds. “Food is also a kind of imagination. It reflects a hope for the future and of return.”

Za’atar and everyday resistance

In her work, Reynolds found that za’atar, an thyme-like herb and namesake of the fragrant herb blend of za’atar, oregano, sumac, sesame seeds, and salt, is not just a seasoning but a story. “Something that you find in every Palestinian home is these two bowls that are conjoined. One has olive oil and one has za’atar,” she explained. “For breakfast sandwiches or quick snacks, you spread some olive oil on flatbread and then slap some za’atar on it, maybe with some cheese, and that’s it. It’s so good!”

Yet even this most humble ingredient is complicated by history. Inspired by conversations with her host mother in Jordan, Reynolds began tracing how access to za’atar itself has been restricted.

A documentary by visual artist Jumana Manna and human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah highlighted Israeli regulations governing za’atar harvesting. These laws criminalized what had once been an ordinary act of sustenance, permitting foraging za’atar for domestic use but penalized foraging for commercial purposes. In practice, however, almost anyone harvesting za’atar was treated as though they were doing so for mass consumption.

The regulations, Reynolds said, “were creating environmental injustice, more than being a simple conservation regulation.”

Reynolds’ research engages deeply with the political life of plants and foods, exposing how policies in the name of conservation can perpetuate dispossession of land, mobility, and traditional practices in settler colonial contexts. These practices are increasingly being termed as green colonialism and slow violence. “I’m inclined to say that green colonialism tends to be an overlooked aspect of conservation and related research,” said Reynolds. “It is an emerging field especially in political ecology, where the focus is on the political dimensions of plants, land, and engagement with the land.”

Memory through taste and touch

Reynolds’ fieldwork methods are as tactile as her subject matter. Her interviews, or “oral life histories,” often took place over shared meals, spaces where stories flowed naturally from sensory experience.

In focus groups, she used pomegranates, olives, and other tangible items to evoke memories. “I held a focus group of second-generation Palestinians, between the ages 20 to 30 years old, who had never been to Palestine before. And yet I found they had such a rich sensory description of Palestine,” she said.

One participant who had never set foot there described the sweet oranges and jasmine that hung over her father’s childhood street.

For Reynolds, such stories reveal how memory can resist erasure. Attempts to erase histories and memories with the land, she observes, is at the heart of the settler-colonial project, while keeping memories alive is about connecting to a feeling of belonging to the land through actively resisting forgetting.

Poppies, cacti, jasmine, figs, and olives can be found decorating Palestinian flags, posters, and textiles. Reynolds’ research identifies these symbols as carriers of lived histories. One of her participants recalled picking poppies on the hills of Nablus for her mother, transforming a national emblem into an intimate family story.

These moments remind Reynolds that the connection between people and land stays alive through the small sensory details. During a focus group discussion, participants confronted a sobering truth: the olive groves that one member’s grandfather planted in Palestine would likely no longer be there.

But with plants, participants noted, there is something grounding even in the midst of loss. They noted that plants carry a sensory element that people can return to. One participant captured this sentiment poignantly by saying to Reynolds that, “The only plant that makes me sad is one that’s been cut down, one that’s thirsty, one that’s been taken away.”

The researcher’s own roots

Reynolds’ own family’s displacement from postwar Vietnam shaped how she understands the Palestinian experience. Like many of her participants, she learned her culture through food because of the language barrier between herself and her grandmother. She sees parallels between her grandmother’s kitchen and her host mother’s in Jordan, both brimming with care expressed through abundance.

The impact of her work on the relationship between Palestinian plants and landscape for displaced Palestinian women, and the theoretical zone of memory, has stayed with her.

“Now, when I look at the figs blooming in Vancouver, I think about my host mother’s father having a giant fig farm and her playing there,” said Reynolds. “This sensory memory has trickled down to me. I now have these plants that I associate really deeply with the women that I’ve spent time with and care about.”

As she continues her studies, Reynolds carries those associations between displacement and belonging, food and memory, and plants and politics, like small seeds of return.