Roasted green wheat, known as farike, is a favored ingredient in Arab cuisine, where it is served as a cooked grain side-dish or used to enrich and flavor farike soup. The author describes joining a local Palestinian farming family (fellaheen) in a Galilee wheat field, in the traditional process of harvesting green wheat to produce farike. This involved topping off the wheat by hand using a sickle, and roasting the ears with an open flame. After drying and threshing, the kernels of roasted wheat were further milled, coarsely for cooking as a side dish and finely for using in soup. Roasted wheat is a food described in the Old Testament and the traditional system for producing farike that is still being used by a few fellaheen in the Galilee is based on age-old agricultural practices. Yet because of the intensity of the labor and poor economic returns of producing farike, the prospect that this tradition will continue into future generations does not seem promising.
University of California Press