Apparently, All Those Worlds Came With Me

Entered through Portal

Current Time

My name is Liat Portal, and I currently live in San Francisco. I was born and raised in Kiryat Ata, a small town in northern Israel. Food played a central role in our house, and many of my memories to this day revolve around Shabbat dinners and holiday feasts.

I learned to cook at a young age from my mom, grandmother, and cookbooks. I learned dishes before I understood their histories, and years later I started connecting the food I eat and cook to people, cultures, nations, places, and the memories we have around food that bond us and preserve those connections.

When I started writing online, food was one of the first topics I wrote about. What began as food eventually crossed into history. History crossed into culture. Culture crossed into technology. The subjects kept changing, but I kept finding relationships between things I had once experienced separately.

Over the years, I have woven together episodes from my life with the richness of Israeli and American culture through music, food, the arts, architecture, wellness, entertainment, education, science, technology, entrepreneurship, cybersecurity, supply chain, and more, including the story of the AI era.

Over time, I have learned that I have a stable cognitive signature that turns my work into one connected body of knowledge rather than separate posts. The subjects keep changing, but the way I move between them does not. Food, music, architecture, wellness, entertainment, education, science, technology, entrepreneurship, cybersecurity, supply chain, and AI have become different entry points into the same larger universe. The center is not one topic. The center is the way I read the world through them.

Today is my late grandfather’s birthday. The trip down memory lane led me to food and Algerian cuisine. My grandparents were born in Aflou, Algeria, and we have eaten delicious Algerian food since childhood.

The highlight of the week was the Algerian couscous that my grandmother served every Friday for lunch at noon until the day she passed away. That was a family ritual that we rarely missed, and our entire weekly schedule revolved around it.

I missed my grandparents so much. So writing about them, the food, and my memories was kind of therapy that helped me cope with my feelings and preserve their memories.

Writing helped me in many ways. So I wrote about many topics and published them online. For me, it was first a form of therapy to channel my feelings into words