I was genuinely excited to watch The Feast. At first, the idea seemed clever and different: a group of Lebanese media figures, representing different outlets and political viewpoints, sitting around the same table. No conventional studio, no confrontational setup, and none of the tension that political programs usually manufacture by placing opponents face-to-face and waiting for an explosion or for someone to overturn the table. As a friend put it while we were discussing the episode, the image seemed to say: “The country is at the table.”
Indeed, the episode tackled issues that, when discussed outside the prevailing narrative, can sometimes expose those who raise them to accusations of treason or of betraying their sect or community. Yet here, the conversation unfolded smoothly. I will not delve into the details of the discussion, because what drew me to write was not so much what was said around the table as the table itself: what the image chose to place inside the frame, and what it left outside.
In an episode of The Feast, broadcast on YouTube by Al Mahatta, a channel associated with the “resistance” camp, journalist Radwan Mortada hosted journalists Ali Hashem, Jad Ghosn, Adam Shams El-Din, Firas Hatoum, and Qassem Qassem, along with, of course, Dr. Hassan Ahmadian, a Middle East specialist representing the Iranian perspective who has become known in recent months for his appearances on Al Jazeera. The episode ran for nearly three hours.
Seven speakers in a single episode is something we are not accustomed to. But this time, there was food, and the idea of talking over a meal is not an incidental detail. Eating has social and psychological functions that go far beyond satisfying hunger. We do not sit around a table merely to eat. It is where we get to know one another, negotiate, celebrate, reconcile, and welcome others with generosity.
In our culture in particular, there is an expression most of us use: “There is bread and salt between us.” It is as though sharing food creates, even if only temporarily, common ground between people who may otherwise have little in common. This was precisely what made the idea appealing to me: watching media figures with different political views eat, debate, and talk without the usual shouting of television studios. Food can break some of the tension, making conversation more spontaneous, less performative, and simply more relaxed.
But from the very beginning of the episode, from the very first minute, it is the food that dominates the image. The “feast” itself: the sheer quantity of food, the different kinds of meat, the way they are presented, the visual abundance filling the frame, and the deliberate sense of generosity built into the scene.
Perhaps if the episode had been filmed at another time, these details would not have struck me in quite the same way. But an image does not exist outside its time. A table that, under one set of circumstances, might signify hospitality, generosity, and intimacy can take on an entirely different meaning under another, especially when it is a “feast” where our wars and tragedies are being discussed.
Today, Lebanon does not view food from a neutral perspective. Since the economic crisis began in 2019, we have been talking about poverty, the collapse of purchasing power, food security, and families changing their eating habits not out of personal choice, but because their very ability to choose has diminished. Then came years of war, displacement, and the loss of homes, livelihoods, and land, making the reality even harsher.
I do not know how many people in Lebanon go to bed hungry today, and I do not want to use hunger as an emotional argument. Perhaps we do not see many people publicly saying, “I’m hungry.” In our society, admitting need is still, for many, tied to the idea of dignity, as though saying that you cannot afford food somehow diminishes you, rather than simply describing the circumstances in which you live. But we do know that some people are eating less, that families have reduced the number of meals they eat, that people are going without foods that were once ordinary staples in their homes, and that some families may not have had meat or chicken in their kitchens for a long time.
I am reminded of a small scene that has stayed with me from one of the schools that had been turned into a shelter in recent months. I was interviewing a displaced person, while some of those staying there were talking about the food they were being served. “Off the record,” of course, they said: “We’re sick of rice.”
Taken out of context, the sentence might sound funny to some. Whenever I spoke to people about the kinds of meals being provided to displaced families, and said that more attention should be paid to this, some would respond: “It’s war. You eat whatever is available. You don’t get to be picky.”
Perhaps they were right. There is little room for luxury in wartime. But I know that “we’re sick of rice” says a great deal. It says a great deal about what poverty, displacement, and war actually mean.
The problem is not the rice itself. It is the loss of choice: eating the same thing over and over because that is simply what is available, and watching food transform from desire, pleasure, memory, and family ritual into nothing more than something that keeps hunger at bay.
That is why, as I watched The Feast, with its table overflowing with every kind of delicacy, I could not treat it as mere set dressing, or as a detail that could not have been dispensed with, or at least replaced with something else.
What makes it particularly troubling to me is that those seated around the table are not celebrities completely detached from reality. They are journalists and media figures, people who, by the very nature of their profession, should remain connected to what is happening on the ground and to the conditions people are living through.
Some of them come from the very communities that have paid an enormous price over the past few years. One of them runs a media platform followed by tens of thousands of people, and a significant part of the audience watching this episode will be precisely people from those same communities.
This is where the question becomes a different one. The issue is not whether a journalist has the right to eat meat while someone living in poverty cannot afford it. Of course, that is not the point. The question is: how could a journalist fail to notice what the image they are creating is saying? Journalists, of all people, are supposed to know that images are never neutral.
What appears behind the speaker, what is placed in front of them, and what is excluded from the frame are all elements that communicate something, even if no one says it out loud.
As I watched the episode, I found myself wondering about a simpler alternative. Perhaps a conversation over tea would have worked better. Not because tea is somehow more morally “modest,” nor because media figures are expected to perform poverty, but because tea carries an entirely different symbolism.
Tea is the “wine” of southerners and of people across the Levant. It is present in almost every circumstance: at home, in times of prosperity and in wartime, in mourning and in celebration, out in the fields during harvest and planting, in an intact home and in a house with only one room left standing. And if there is no tea, we try to find some so that we can offer it to a guest.
A cup of tea could also have served the function the episode wanted food to perform: bringing people with different views together, easing tension, and creating a sense of intimacy. But it would have kept the conversation at the center of the frame, rather than allowing the abundance itself to become a message running parallel to what was being said.
Who Eats at the Top?
While watching the episode, I found myself thinking again of the Spanish film The Platform. The film is set in a vertical prison with numerous levels. Every day, a platform carrying an enormous feast descends from the top. Those on the upper levels eat first, and then the platform gradually makes its way downward. The farther it descends, the less food remains, until it reaches the lowest levels with almost nothing left.
In theory, there could be enough food on the platform if everyone took only what they needed. But the problem is not simply the amount of resources available. It is our relationship with those below us. The people at the top know that there are others beneath them. Their suffering is no secret. And yet knowledge alone does not necessarily produce solidarity.
This is where the film becomes more than a story about hunger. It becomes a story about position: Where do you see the world from? What can you see from where you stand? And what happens to your sense of others when your own position is secure?
What makes it even more unsettling is that the characters’ positions in the film change. You may be at the bottom today, starving, only to wake up tomorrow on a higher level. But experiencing hunger does not guarantee that, once you rise, you will remember those you left below. You may begin eating too, precisely because you know all too well what it is like down there, and because you are afraid of returning.
This is why I am not invoking the film to suggest that the media figures around the table represent “the top” while the poor represent “the bottom.” I thought of it because of the question it raises: What do we do with what we know about the lives of others?
Because journalists know.
They know that some families have been displaced more than three times. They know that people have lost both their homes and their livelihoods. They know there is a farmer who can no longer reach his land to make a living, and another who has lost his crops. They know that families have exhausted their savings paying rent. They know that some people have returned to devastated villages only to find that the livelihoods they once depended on are gone. And they know that others have returned to neither a home nor a village, and remain displaced, alone in all of this, struggling.
For journalists, knowledge is not optional. It is their profession. We enter these homes and ask people about their losses. We photograph their kitchens, their destroyed rooms, and their burned fields. We ask them to tell us how they live and what they are going through. Then we return and produce the broader image through which they, too, will see themselves.
I believe a journalist’s visual responsibility is somewhat different. Journalists are not expected to live the lives of the people they cover, nor to perform austerity as a way of proving solidarity with them. But it is reasonable to expect them to be more sensitive to the distance between the image they produce and the reality they know so well.
And that is precisely what made the scene in The Feast stand out to me. Not because there was meat and “American burgers” on the table, but because those sitting around it know exactly what is, and what is not, on so many tables outside the frame.
Ironically, after the episode aired, journalist and Al Mahatta director Radwan Mortada wrote on his page, promising his audience more feasts, without addressing the criticism that had spread across social media since the episode was released, with many activists criticizing the extravagance of Mortada’s feast.
This makes the same lack of sensitivity likely to be repeated for the sake of spectacle and virality, at a feast where people’s tragedy becomes just another dish on the table.
Human beings cannot remain in a state of heightened responsiveness to the suffering of others at all times. As images and news reports are repeated, a certain desensitization sets in. What shocked us the first time becomes less likely to reach us the hundredth time. We grow accustomed to war, to displacement, to hearing the numbers, to the phrase “a family lost its home,” until what was once exceptional becomes part of the daily news cycle.
For journalists, this desensitization may be even more pronounced. We move from one story to the next, from a destroyed home to a funeral, from a shelter to the tents of displaced people along the roads. Then we turn off the camera and move on to the next assignment. To some extent, this creates a coping mechanism that allows us to keep going.
But what can be understood psychologically should not become a professional norm. Because one of journalism’s functions is precisely to resist this desensitization: to give the number back its face, displacement its home, and poverty its table.
And Who Was Invited to the Table in the First Place?
I will not go into the details of the political discussion that unfolded during the episode. I found it striking, and there is much about it that could be criticized. But something else in the image caught my attention before I even began thinking about the substance of the discussion.
Look at the table: seven participants are seated around it, all of them men. Not a single woman among them.
Once again, the question of the frame emerges, this time in a different form: Who do we consider worthy of having a voice when we set out to bring together Lebanon’s “different viewpoints”?
The seven men may differ radically in their politics: one from this camp, another from that, with opposing views and conflicting positions. But political diversity does not necessarily mean a diversity of voices. You can bring the far right and the far left to the same table and still end up with a table that is remarkably homogeneous in every other respect.
This is not a superficial matter of including a woman in every program simply to achieve an artificial numerical balance. The issue runs deeper than that. Women in Lebanon are not absent from politics or journalism, and they are certainly not absent from war.
Women journalists have reported from the front lines and covered bombardment and displacement, while women researchers, writers, correspondents, and photographers work in the field every day. Women, too, have shouldered an enormous share of the social and economic burdens of war and displacement.
So when an episode is built around the idea of bringing together diverse media voices to discuss the country, yet every one of those voices is male, the question is not simply: Where are the women? It is also: How do we define diversity in the first place?
That is why, for me, the issue was no longer whether I liked the episode or not. The scene opened up a larger question about the image the media creates of itself and of the society it addresses. At the table, there is abundance and extravagance; outside it, a society is struggling. And those seated around the table are journalists, whose fundamental task is, one way or another, to see what lies outside the frame. Here, I return once again to The Platform.
In the film, each floor appears to those living on it as a world unto itself. But the reality is that there are floors above it and others below, and what a person sees from where they stand is never the whole world.
The media, too, creates its own floors. There is the Lebanon of packed restaurants, and the Lebanon of shelters, displacement, poverty, hunger, war, destruction, and Israel’s campaign of annihilation. There is the Lebanon that can order “this many dishes and this many different plates,” and the Lebanon that calculates the cost of a meal before ordering it. There is the Lebanon that discusses war and politics around a lavish table, and the Lebanon where war itself has determined what is left on the plate. All of these worlds are real. The problem begins when one of them appears on screen as though it were the whole world.
In the end, perhaps the question the episode left me with is not: What did they eat? Nor even: What did they say? The question is: Who was absent from this table? Who could not afford to eat like this? Whose voice was missing from around it? And who knows better than journalists themselves that all these absent people exist?
That is why, when we choose “the feast” as the setting for a conversation, in a country like Lebanon today, perhaps before taking our seats around the table, we should look for a moment at those who were left outside it.
