What local dishes should I try in Libya, and where should I look for them?

Libyan food divides along the same lines as the country's geography. The coast from Tripolitania to Cyrenaica produces grain, olives and fish; the Jabal al Akhdar uplands behind the eastern coast catch enough rain to support orchards and grazing, which is why Ramsar's listing for the region describes a landscape of coastal salt marsh and wetland sitting below rocky hills inside Kouf National Park; and the Saharan south, where Ghadamès stands as a World Heritage property placed on the danger list in 2016, is date and irrigation country.

What you actually eat reflects that. Bazin is a stiff barley dough served with a tomato-based lamb stew, eaten communally from a shared dish. Shurba Libiya is a lamb soup thickened with chickpeas and small pasta and finished with dried mint — the standard first dish at Ramadan iftar and the most widely cooked soup in the country. Couscous appears with lamb, with camel, and in sweet versions with dates. Usban, a stuffed and simmered tripe sausage, and mbatten, potato slices sandwiching spiced meat and fried in batter, are the two dishes most often made for guests. Bsisa — ground roasted barley with olive oil — is a breakfast and a provision food at once. Green tea served thick in small glasses, often with roasted peanuts, closes the meal.

Finding it is the harder half. There is no restaurant culture of the kind that makes a food itinerary possible in Tunis or Cairo, and the FCDO's description of the payment landscape is the practical constraint: cash withdrawals are restricted, dinar is hard to obtain through official channels, Central Bank-approved exchange offices operate at black market rates, and informal exchange risks arrest.

A dish of bazin arrives as a smooth barley mound in the center of a wide plate with the stew poured into a crater at the top, and everyone eats inward from their own edge — the shape of the dish is the shape of the meal.

Taking Libyan dinar out of Libya is illegal, and cash over the equivalent of US$10,000 must be declared to customs or it may be confiscated and the carrier detained. For anyone planning to eat their way through a country where cards do not work, that puts a hard frame around how much currency to convert and when — over-converting at the start leaves money that cannot legally leave with you.

• Breakfast — Bsisa and tea are the early meal; bakeries sell flatbread through the morning.
• Main meal — Bazin and couscous are midday-to-afternoon dishes, cooked at home far more often than sold.
• Evening — Shurba and grilled fish on the coast; tea with peanuts after, served in small glasses rather than cups.

The FCDO advises against all travel to parts of Libya and against all but essential travel to others, which removes the premise of an eating tour before any question of hospitality arises. Dietary assumptions should be checked rather than guessed: lamb and camel are common and pork is absent. And because the economy runs on cash that is difficult to obtain legally and illegal to export, food spending has to be planned as part of a currency plan, not separately from it.

The Libya trip-planning answer in this group sets out entry, registration and customs rules; the places answer covers the desert and coastal sites you would be eating between.