Finding Founders

Food can serve as a means to bridge culture and conflict. This episode starts our Food Conflict and Unity series, so join us in exploring the power of food with Barbara Massaad, a Lebanese-American cookbook author, photographer, food consultant, and TV host. Barbara Massaad spent the first 10 years of her life in Lebanon and moved to Florida as a result of war. Her lifelong relationship with food began with Lebanese culture and at 15, she started helping her father in the family-owned Lebanese restaurant. In 1988, her family returned to Lebanon. Flashing forward, after getting an advertising and marketing degree in college and taking 7 years away from work to start a family, Massaad embarked on a new journey in the restaurant business. Determined to pursue this dream, she trained with several renowned chefs at Lebanese, Italian, and French restaurants. Driven by her love of using cooking and photography to tell stories, Massaad began the journey of creating her first cookbook called Man'oushé: Inside the St