The more chats I have with artists, the easier it gets to guess where they will say the inspiration comes from: life. The small things. The little joys that are quietly there all along. And what is more quietly there, day in and day out, than food? It feeds us, obviously — but it also holds us up. It is comfort when we are tired, memory when we are homesick, and, whether psychologists approve or not, sometimes it is the only thing keeping the day from falling apart.

So simple, and never quite the same twice. Rather like a cup of tea, really — depends entirely on who is making it.

Today, we are having a look at how food turns up in the work of artists from our region — not as garnish, but as memory, identity, and inheritance. How does food creep into their practice, and how, in turn, do they find their way back to it?

We have had Hassan Hajjaj in these pages before — about a year ago, when we were talking about artists and their relationship with colour. This time round, it is the same artist but an entirely different angle. Because when it comes to food as inspiration, Hajjaj isn't just another example — he is essential.

For Hajjaj, food packaging isn't just a reference point. It is practically his native language. Every artwork he creates comes with a frame, and those frames are built from olive tins, sardine cans, tomato paste tubs, tea boxes and soft drink cans. Before you ask — no, that isn't a random scrap-heap aesthetic. Every item is the sort of thing you would find in a Moroccan corner shop or kitchen cupboard. Remember where we started — the small, unglamorous things that quietly shape everyday life? This is exactly that, simply transformed into art.

One of Hajjaj's favourite tricks is flattening hierarchy. A museum-worthy photograph, housed in a frame made from supermarket tins — suddenly "luxury" and "everyday" stand on equal footing. That tension sits at the heart of his work: global consumer brands standing shoulder to shoulder with the humble objects people associate with home, family, the neighbourhood shop and the daily ritual of putting the kettle on.

And that is where all of his themes come together. His work brings Western and Middle Eastern visual culture into conversation, offers a sharp commentary on consumerism (there is a reason he is often called "the Andy Warhol of Marrakech" — repetition and consumer iconography are very much his territory), and wraps it all in a genuine affection for Moroccan culture and its everyday symbols.

Moza Almatrooshi is the Emirati artist, chef and cultural practitioner whose work refuses to sit neatly in one lane — part contemporary art, part food, part heritage archaeology.

Her earliest food memories trace straight back to her father, who ran the family kitchen with proper, unguarded passion. He was the one who showed her that food wasn't just about feeding people, but about translating love in real time. Not a bad place to learn your craft.

In the UAE, Moza is best known for her project Ballad Table. Though calling it a "cafeteria", as Instagram captions often do, undersells it enormously. During the right season, Ballad shifts gears, becoming a full cultural experience guided by the idea of "landscape to table". And that idea sits at the heart of everything it does. This isn't about plating up Emirati classics for the sake of it. Instead, Ballad asks a more interesting set of questions: what actually grows in this landscape? What stories does the land itself hold? And how might a single meal tell them?

Central to all this are the UAE's micro-seasons — the small shifts in local flora that once quietly guided foragers and farmers long before anyone was writing tasting menus. Rather than simply drawing inspiration from them, Almatrooshi uses them as the starting point for her practice. Unlike many other chefs, she doesn't begin by taking a recipe, recreating it, and seeing whether the cultural essence comes through in the final dish. She flips that entirely. Her work becomes less about cuisine and more about cultural memory, built from native plants, seasonal ingredients and the logic of local ecosystems. The result feels less like dinner and more like immersive cultural theatre, with the plate as the stage.

As she says, rather than seeing art and cooking as separate disciplines, she allowed them to overlap until they became impossible to untangle. The kitchen became a studio, the table a stage, and recipes a form of archive. Art wasn't abandoned for food, nor food for art. Instead, the two were left to shape one another until something entirely hybrid emerged.

At first glance, Sara Abou Mrad might seem like an unexpected addition to a story about food. The Lebanese artist is best known for creating dreamlike worlds filled with recurring characters and playful symbolism, where meals and dining tables are hardly the obvious protagonists. But in 2023, food took centre stage with Rester ou partir (Stay or Leave), a solo exhibition in which the dining table became a powerful metaphor for migration, home and belonging.

But before we dive into this particular series, a quick heads-up: Sara's paintings aren't meant to be taken in at a glance. If you are used to conventional composition, with clear foregrounds and backgrounds, tidy shadows and geometric stability, give yourself a moment to adjust. In Sara's world, chairs take flight and food dances across tables that seem to shift and breathe beneath your eyes. It is all part of an imaginary universe rich with symbols — joyful, vividly coloured and populated by playful, curious creatures — where the longer you spend looking, the more the story begins to unfold.

Within that universe, the dining table becomes far more than a piece of furniture. Throughout Rester ou partir, it stands for reunion, belonging and all the quiet comfort that comes with sharing a meal. The series grew out of Sara's own experience of leaving Lebanon, but the feeling reaches far beyond her story. Anyone who has ever lived away from home will probably recognise it: suddenly, it is the smallest rituals you miss the most. Sitting around the table with family. Sharing food, stories and ideas. Simply not being so far from the people you love.

Nazanin Rajabdoust is a Middle Eastern artist whose work is arguably the most literal embodiment of this article's headline. She has a gift for making food feel like portraiture — not overthought, not weighed down with layered backstory. She calls them, simply, the Food Series.

But don't mistake simplicity for a lack of substance. You will rarely find her food lying passively on a table, waiting to be sliced up. Instead, it takes centre stage, woven into nature as though it had always belonged there — like the subject of a portrait, quietly holding your gaze.

What also sets her apart is her wonderfully rich palette. Deep reds, warm ochres, emerald greens and earthy browns dominate the canvas. Rather than chasing photographic realism, she lets colour do the emotional heavy lifting.