Last fall, I found myself standing in my kitchen surrounded by bulbous, dripping cheesecloths hanging from every conceivable surface. Twenty-five jars’ worth of labneh were fermenting at the same time. I kept track of each batch with Post-its labeled “Ready Tomorrow,” although I couldn’t always recall which “today” they were based on.
The “todays” began when I moved to Missoula, Mont. — a city where I was seemingly the only Lebanese person for miles around — for grad school earlier that year. It has been a habit of mine to maintain whatever threads of my heritage I can through its culinary tradition, so I went to the local health-food store and asked for labneh.
“Leb … what?” an employee asked.
“Leb-neh,” I responded. “A thick dairy spread from the Levant? Good with za’atar?”
“Zah … what?”
His perplexed squints sent me trudging to the dairy aisle, where I gathered the ingredients needed to make my own labneh from my grandmother’s recipe. The spread is a simple enough mix of salt and strained yogurts, with the main trick being proper fermentation time.
By the second batch, I realized I made far more labneh than I could get through, and I wondered if others would be interested in buying my excess. More than 40 people responded to my first-ever Reddit post. Though most were interested in paying my suggested fee — $9 a jar, $8 if they returned the glass jar — some offered me things they were willing to part with.
Before I knew it, I was bartering left and right, making my Phoenician ancestors proud. I asked traders if they had any allergies I should know about — a more graceful way of saying, “I want to know if I might accidentally kill you” — and on each lid I scribbled “Sahtein!” the Arabic version of “Bon appetit.” I taped notes on the jars explaining that labneh was best enjoyed on toast, with olive oil and any combination of tomatoes, cucumbers, mint or za’atar. I was hyper-conscious that, for some of these people, I might have been the first Arab they had ever interacted with.
I landed a motley group of barter partners. I made weekly swaps with a sourdough baker, meeting drug-deal-like at downtown corners, whispering, “Bread for spread?” A record-store employee traded me an unscratched Charlie Parker record for two jars. I marveled to friends back in New York that, for a single labneh jar, I scored a dozen fresh backyard-coop eggs from a man I saved as “Egg Guy Missoula” in my phone. These meetings were not just perfunctory exchanges: Strangers offered me grocery-shopping tips, intel on good backpacking spots and opinions on Montana land politics. I made friends with people well outside my academic bubble.
Before I knew it, I was bartering left and right, making my Phoenician ancestors proud.
One of my two favorite encounters, sparked by the initial Reddit post, was with a fellow Lebanese woman who had recently moved from Beirut. Our za’atar-and-labneh swap led to a diasporic friendship that made us both feel less isolated in an ethnically homogenous state, during a fraught time when it felt like our very race was being rejected in America. I’ll also never forget when the local Tamale Lady surprised me with conchas featuring charmingly hand-drawn Palestinian and Lebanese flags on them. Her wordless expression of sympathy and support for those affected by Israel’s onslaught in both regions that November moved me — and reminded me that the suffering of Arabs was not a load we carried alone.
Bartering, in addition to reducing waste and saving money, can be a form of political resistance. The libertarian activist Karl Hess extolled it as a way to avoid taxes. (My favorite of his barters: metal sculptures to settle his accumulating lawyer’s fees from litigating Hess’s tax resistance.) Bartering has also been common during times of economic strife like the Great Depression and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Argentina’s recent recession gave rise to organized barter clubs known as “turques.” Historically, the less people are able to rely on their governing structures, the more they turn toward their community and neighbors.
When I told classmates about my barters, I learned I was actually late to the game. One of my grad-school peers had traded a 12-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon for an old mountain bike (“I offered an I.P.A., but the man’s got taste,” he told me). Another person regularly swapped Warhammer miniatures, figurines from the tabletop board game. (“The Warhammer world has a vibrant bartering community! I don’t even want to tell you how much a box of goblins cost!”) A third told me of a domino-like bartering experience: In trying to spin a wool sweater, she traded kale for unprocessed wool, compost for wool mordant and volunteer time at her friend’s bar in return for help fixing her broken spinning wheel. Throughout Missoula, I began to notice more official bartering systems, like a beloved bike shop, Freecyles, where people can get free bikes through volunteering.
My barters continue to take place regularly, a year after my Reddit post and even after the local grocery store began to stock labneh. By introducing others to a slice of my heritage, I have been able to help them better understand my ethnicity through our cuisine — and, at the same time, anchor myself more deeply in a place that was initially foreign to me. Bartering also showed me how pleasantly open-minded and curious strangers can be, and it’s through these new connections that I’ve developed a truer sense of belonging in Missoula. Sometimes all it takes to start feeling at home in a new town is a limited grocery store, a touch of cultural homesickness and some cheesecloths.
Stevie Chedid is a Lebanese-American writer pursuing her M.F.A. at the University of Montana, where she is the recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship.
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