Some community organizers are hoping the changes driven by the pandemic will improve Ramadan for years to come
by Mehreen Karim
(EATER.COM) When I broke my fasts at mosques during pre-pandemic Ramadans, I basked in the unspoken agreement among the strangers in the room that filling everyone’s stomach was an urgent and shared responsibility. Iftar gatherings worldwide take pride in providing copious amounts of food every night for 30 days. At each iftar (the meal eaten at sunset to break fast), every person was guaranteed water, dates, fruit, and if they were lucky,
a warm pakora. I’d arrive no later than sunset for the pakoras and stay past twilight for the steaming pots of Palestinian makloubeh, an aromatic rice dish layered with chicken and vegetables.
Community iftars are almost always planned in advance. Families race to sign up for a day to sponsor the iftar, often cooking it themselves. For other iftars, mosques use their budgets to book catering from halal restaurants. On any given evening, one could expect to be greeted with giant trays of a neighbor’s home-cooked biryani, or spicy chicken burgers sponsored by a halal fried chicken joint, and typically that food would nourish upwards of 500 people per night.
But COVID shutdowns last spring halted any possibility of people breaking fast side by side at mosques, and as a result, in-person donations to mosques declined.
A year after Muslim community leaders and volunteers scrambled to create a sense of togetherness in the midst of the first lockdowns in the U.S., thousands of Muslims are reviving traditional Ramadan customs with pandemic-safe initiatives. These range from socially distant community service projects to drive-thru iftars served in to-go boxes. And despite operating on historically low budgets, organizers are contemplating ways to best serve a new set of needs that have emerged from the pandemic, recalibrating their communities’ relationships with food and Ramadan for the future.
Roswell Community Masjid (RCM)
In Metro Atlanta, stopped holding community iftars in 2020 due to lockdowns and financial constraints. “When suddenly everything stopped, we had to focus on how we’d sustain the money,” says Lubna Merchant, RCM’s operations manager. “We started planning for this last July.” Regaining their losses wasn’t the organizers’ only consideration; they also believed they could improve on their usual Ramadan programming from an ethical standpoint.
In Islamic teaching, Muslims are instructed to break their fasts with humble portions of food, motivating those who fast to avoid gluttony. But food waste plagues countless Muslim communities, the historical practice of breaking fast with no more than a simple date and glass of milk. Merchant recalls the exorbitant food waste she witnessed during pre-COVID iftars at the mosque. “When you’re fasting and opening your fast, you’re just trying to stuff your plate,” she says.
