The Fight to Protect Food Culture
A conversation with Michael Shaikh on conflict, culture, and the politics of what we eat
For those who celebrate, I hope you had a good Easter weekend.
Spring has finally arrived in my little corner, which means sunny blue skies, sitting outside without shivering, and a regular dose of Claritin most mornings.
The latest news is never far from my mind - an occupational hazard - so while I’m thankful we seem to have averted a nuclear war and I have the privilege of safety and security, I can’t help but wonder about those who do not share the same good fortune.
So it feels like the right time to speak with Michael Shaikh, a friend who has written a beautiful book about the need to protect our food cultures in the same way we protect physical buildings and artefacts in times of war and upheaval.
The Last Sweet Bite is a book that tackles a very heavy topic - the erasure of culinary traditions through state violence, including genocide - but does so with a lightness of touch that inspires as much as it enrages.
I also love how Mike’s writing shows food as something deeply political, even though it is often treated as apolitical or even trivial. Which is also what I’ve been trying to do in my journalistic work, including this newsletter, for nearly a decade.
I first met Mike more than 15 years ago when I gatecrashed his leaving do in Bangkok. We crossed paths multiple times in the intervening years - we have many mutual friends - but it wasn’t until around 2014 that we became friends while in Burma/Myanmar. Mike was doing human rights investigation and I was back home helping to set up a news outlet.
There was a group of us foodies who would regularly discuss the state of the world over home-cooked meals. For Mike and me, that would usually include the plight of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group that has endured decades of terrible discrimination.
We kept in touch after he and his wife moved back to the United States and I headed to Europe, so when I learned that he was writing a book about cuisines in conflict zones, I knew I had to read it, and then tell you all about it.
The conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
THIN: Let’s start with the main premise of your book. Can you take me through how you even got the idea that food, especially the kind of food that is cooked at home, is a form of culture worth protecting, comparable to, say, a manuscript or a monument?
MIKE: There were multiple lightning bolt moments that like coalesced into that idea.
In the beginning of the book, I talk about my father not teaching me Sindhi because of the legacy of Partition, and how that led me down this road of understanding the impact of violence on my family and culture. During a summer (before) going to graduate school, my dad and I had these conversations around Partition. The realisation that violence can linger long after the war is over and the guns fall silent was a big revelation to me.
Then in Afghanistan, with our mutual friend Tamim, I had this moment around a dinner table eating Saland-e Nakhod, this beautiful Afghan chickpea dish. When I asked if it was Afghan - kind of an arrogant question, when you think about it - it led to a conversation about why Afghanistan was at war in the first place.
In that conversation, I realised that culinary knowledge is as important as physical things. People take their culinary knowledge with them when they flee. They take their art, their music, their political philosophies. And if they don’t come back after a generation, it creates this kind of cultural amnesia.
Also in Afghanistan, I constantly drove past UNESCO projects trying to rebuild these old mosques and minarets. I understand why: it’s incredibly important to protect humanity’s shared culture. At the same time, I was interviewing Afghan victims of human rights abuses, of NATO and American airstrikes or Taliban bombings.
When you’re interviewing a victim of human rights abuse to collect testimony, to build a case to hold someone accountable, you’re often asking them to relive the worst moment of their life. I often did these interviews over a meal. It was a way to keep us focused, but also something to turn to outside the violence for a moment when needed a break. We’d talk about what we were eating and why we were eating it.
I remember this one moment where this family was talking about how hard it was to cook the meal we were eating: they couldn’t afford it, people were forgetting the ingredients. The way they were talking about their food disappearing was like losing a family member, and outside the door was this big UNESCO project. And it hit me: we spend all this money protecting physical culture, but nothing to protect this fundamental aspect of human culture.
We spend a lot of money protecting old art and architecture in wartime. There are even legal prohibitions against targeting cultural artefacts in war. But putting food culture on par with those other forms of culture, that’s really the crux of my argument.
To put it another way: food is more than just calories. It’s a language. It’s a way we communicate from one generation to another. It’s what, in a way, makes one community distinct from another. It shows our shared borders, it’s a way of dialogue, both positive and sometimes contentious. And because it’s so important, it should be protected in the same way we protect art and architecture in wartime.
THIN: Even as a foodie, I still found your argument quite revolutionary. Have others said the same and why do you think that’s the case?
MIKE: Almost uniformly, people have that reaction: “Oh my God, I haven’t thought about this.” But then, if you talk to Indigenous communities, they’re like, “We’ve known this is going on for 500 fucking years.”
It’s often new to people who write about food, and people who are interested in food. I wanted to use food as a bit of a Trojan horse to talk about human rights issues. But I also saw this really interesting phenomenon: even within communities experiencing this, there are people who haven’t necessarily thought about it in this way.
To be honest, there are a lot of communities where this is happening, and they don’t necessarily think about it either. But there are people who have thought about it, and it’s almost always women. They’re the ones doing the cooking, and they have that direct experience of the struggle of finding the ingredients in the midst of war to make the things that taste like home, to keep that taste memory alive in their family and for their children.
So I think if you want to be serious about protecting food culture more, you need to be serious about protecting the people who make food culture. And that’s women and girls. This boils down to a couple of things for me, particularly.
The laws of war - specifically the obligations around protecting cultural heritage in combat operations - were written by old rich white guys in Europe who didn’t contemplate the value of food culture, precisely because it was done by women and girls. Basically, because of misogyny, food culture hasn’t been put on par with other forms of culture in war. So if you want to protect food culture in war, you have to protect the people who create it. And that means better protecting women and girls in war.
But there’s another unspoken fact here: what surprised me while researching this book is the extent to which the powerful study their enemies’ food culture as a way to weaponise it against them when they want to erase or destroy them.
Look at what’s happening in Gaza and Palestine. Look at what’s happening in China with the Uyghurs, or what happened in Myanmar with the Rohingya. You see it in the Americas with colonialism. You can look at records from the founding fathers of the United States - they strategised about how to use food against Indigenous People to erase them.
To me, this says that if a community’s food culture is important enough to destroy it should be even more important enough to protect.
THIN: Speaking of wars and conflicts, you touched on the idea of providing culturally appropriate food aid to refugees, and why that’s seen as somehow a luxury in times of crises. I want to hear more about why that’s problematic.
MIKE: It is presented as “frivolous,” as “Well, they have enough calories to eat.” There’s also this colonial mindset: “They should just be grateful they have food to eat.” I know that’s not always the case, but it’s there.
Eating our own food is dignifying. It’s life-affirming. Why is this important? Embedded in art — music, writing, painting, sculpting, and cooking — are often the best of aspects of your community, its sense of beauty, history, culture, identity.
Art, and food is a form of art, is important in war, in times of violence, because you need to be reminded of beauty, your culture, your identity — because that’s part survival. If people can see beauty in time of violence, it gives them hope. And hope is the thing you need to survive. It’s the root of survival.
If we’re thinking long-term about refugees eventually going home, like the human right to life, their culture has the right to be preserved. They should have the ability to replant that culture when they get home. It’s frustrating that global institutions are able to pick and choose which forms of culture are worth protecting in war without fully considering the importance of others, like culinary heritage. Every community I talked to for this book, is frustrated if not angered by that too.
There’s also another fundamental fact: food helps maintain that sense of cultural identity and cohesion. It allows a community to see itself every single day and reaffirm its connections to each other. It’s often the last thing that breaks down and when it does, it’s like an accelerant on a fire of a community’s fracturing. It can lead to more violence, to people being preyed upon by human traffickers, armed groups, drug traffickers, prostitution, substance abuse - it just leads to all of this degradation.
Food is quite powerful in its ability to unite. If I was a leading a humanitarian aid agency working in a war zone, among the things I would try to do is help a community sustain its food culture. Why? Because food works to both keep a people intact and prevent more violence.
THIN: Your book covers quite a broad geographical space: from the Czech Republic to Rohingya communities to the Uyghurs to New Mexico. How did you decide which cuisines to include? I remember having this discussion with you a couple of years ago in Rome about Cambodia, but that didn’t make it into the book.
MIKE: The chapters in the book are places that I have lived and worked for the most part, and the ones that I could write within the timeline of my contract.
I wanted to include Cambodia, Syria, South Africa. I would also have liked to have written about Sudan, Ukraine, Palestine and even Indigenous Japan. I had a couple of life events that intervened and delayed the book, so I couldn’t get those chapters in there in a way that would be respectful to those communities.
There’s one chapter in the book, however, where I had never worked - Bolivia. But there was strong US connection. And being an American, I had long been interested in the impacts of the U.S. Drug War and wanted to show different forms of violence and their impact on culinary traditions.
In the end, I had to be selective based on time, money, my knowledge, my experience, and what would best show how different forms of violence can alter a food culture.
THIN: The Czech chapter is perhaps the least expected. Can you tell me what drew you to it? Was it to show, like you said, that it doesn’t have to be extremely bloody or violent for food culture to be affected?
MIKE: It’s one of the chapters I had a lot of fun writing. The chapter on the Czech Republic covers the Soviet occupation from 1968 -1986. That wasn’t a terribly bloody event, but it was brutal in other ways. I wanted to show that violence doesn’t have to be apocalyptic or genocidal to have profound impacts on memory and culture.
I also have a very strong personal connection to the Czech Republic. One of my dearest friends is from there, who ran a restaurant and hostel. I have spent a lot of time with him there in the past 20 years. Over this time, in very intimate ways, his family showed me the impact of the Soviet occupation and communism on both their family life and Czech and Slovak culture.
For instance, during the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, everyone was forced the cook from the same cookbook. It had a devastating effect on the taste and quality of cuisine. I heard these incredible and often hilarious ways Czech and Slovak chefs used food to subvert the authority of their communist overlords. I thought that was fascinating.
There’s also idea in Europe and the United States that Czech food isn’t that good, that it’s leaden and monotonous, just beer and fatty pork. But actually, Prague and parts of the Czech Republic are some of the most interesting places to eat in Europe right now. Chefs are recreating and updating the food of the First Republic, the 1918–1938 period, often talked about as the highwater mark of Czech culture, when there was a democratic and cultural efflorescence underway.
The double-punch of the Nazi occupation followed by the communists almost killed that culinary knowledge. But now you have these incredible archaeologist chefs who bringing back the cuisine in way that reflect both past and the present. It’s awesome.
THIN: On a personal level, I really appreciate you including the Rohingya cuisine because even though I’ve met many Rohingya and have been to the camps where they live, I’ve never actually tasted their food. How easy or difficult was it to capture a cuisine that doesn’t have a reference point even for people who were born and raised in that country?
MIKE: Rohingya cuisine is this beautiful amalgamation of South Asian and Southeast Asian cooking in its use of use of spices and cooking techniques. You can see Rakhine cuisine and the broader influence of Myanmar’s other cuisines in it.
Their food traditions are indicative of how the Rohingya have lived for a long time in this very small strip of land along the Bay of Bengal where a lot of history has taken place, where a lot of people moved to and through it.
Sittwe to Chittagong, if this whole area was at peace, would just be one of the most fascinating places for people to visits and experience these wonderful people and food cultures.
Rohingya cuisine really opened my eyes to the importance of writing things down, something Rohingya families urged me to do with some of their recipes. Because of decades of state violence and genocide, families are forgetting their culture; it’s cuisine that some Rohingya worry the world may never eat or know.
Their cuisine also challenged me. It taxes the idea of ‘authenticity’, given its interplay with other regional cuisines. What is ‘authentic’ Rohingya cuisine? It’s hard to say. It’s like any cuisine - it will naturally change and morph when it comes into contact with another culture. Chefs and home cooks expect and welcome that.
THIN: Speaking of authenticity, your book challenges the idea of “authentic” food. I find that topic fascinating because I’ve been in Italy for many years now and tradition is a big thing here.
MIKE: The Rohingya and Uyghur cooks I spoke to for my book said the same thing: “We’re not about our food staying the same. We understand it’s going to change, but we want it to change on our terms, not an invading army’s terms.”
That’s the idea of authenticity they have, they want agency over the change.
So it’s not about preserving things in amber. Cuisines change, that’s natural, but it should happen on their terms.
THIN: The chapters that saddened and infuriated you the most were Uyghur and Bolivia, because they vividly illustrate the inequality and power imbalances in the systems that enable this kind of cultural erasure.
MIKE: You’ve got it - power balance is the crux of violence. And in the context of food, it’s particularly acute.
The question of why food isn’t afforded the same attention and protection in war as other forms of culture comes down to this: home cooking, the kind of culinary culture that sustains communities, is primarily created and maintained by women and girls. There are arguments about gender inequality you can make here, and they’re valid, but as we discussed earlier, the fact is that women and girls have been the load-bearing pillars of our culinary cultures since time immemorial.
When we talk about why home cooking isn’t elevated to the same level as other forms of cultural expression - like fine dining or professional chef-driven cuisine - it’s because the work of women and girls has historically been devalued.
You know, the attack on the girls’ primary school in Minab, Iran has been angering me for weeks now. It’s the type of atrocity I investigated in other US wars but I was struggling to articulate why this had bothered me so much beyond the obvious. The other day, I was going to pull out Najmieh Batmanglij’s Food of Life, the Silver Spoon Persian food, and it kind of hit me.
The next Najmieh Batmanglij could have been among them, a woman who has shown the world not only the joys of Persian food but also joy of cooking itself. The next Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win a Fields Medal, could have been among them too. The next Shirin Ebadi or Nargis Mohammadi.
Those girls in Minab could have grown up to do what these other incredible Iranian women have done, and that was stolen from their parents, from the country, from humanity. You can say similar things about children dying every day in other contexts, but the thing that makes that different is this was entirely preventable and avoidable and predictable. Someone at the US Defense Department just had to go look at Google Maps to know a girls school was there.
When you flatten homes and villages and towns, you are flattening the places where culinary culture is produced, like home kitchens where women and girls spend most of their time.
When I wrote this book, I talked about including the crime of domicide - the intentional destruction of towns, villages and neighbourhoods - into international law. But now, we’re being forced just to defend the baseline, the basic Geneva Conventions.
You know, I woke up this morning and my president was talking about wiping out a civilisation to prevent it from ever coming back. That is genocidal. My secretary of defence is defending war crimes, saying the Geneva Conventions are “too woke,” that civilian protection is for weak people.
I hope we can get to a place quickly where Americans and our leaders realise the damage we’re causing and enabling, not only to other cultures but to our own. And find ways to correct it fast. If not, I fear the world may never forgive us… and they’d be right… We are led by dishonourable men.
THIN: Your book is on very heavy topics but the writing is very readable and poetic and lyrical. Did that come naturally, or did you have to find that balance on purpose?
MIKE: It was the latter. I have never written like this my entire life.
I wanted to draw in everyday people who aren’t familiar with what’s happening in your country, what’s happening with the Uyghurs, what’s happened in the United States over 500 years ago and is still happening today to Indigenous People, but also talk about this persistence of humanity to survive, to keep beauty moving forward.
THIN: What can foodies - people who love food and cooking - actually do to help protect food cultures and the communities behind them?
MIKE: There’s a lot we can do, but I think as an American in particular, one thing we can do is, call your congress people tell them the Geneva Conventions are important. I guarantee you, no congress person has ever gotten a phone call like that. It’s so mind-boggling and esoteric in some way but it’s where we are right now.
Food journalists and enthusiasts can write about these issues in a way that connects with people. They can highlight not just the recipes or the flavours, but the stories and the struggles behind them. Bret Anderson had a really powerful article in the New York Times recently about the role food played in Minneapolis in responding to the crisis there. That’s the kind of storytelling we need more of.
It’s also about cooking. The recipes in my book were given to me as gifts, with the express intention that readers cook them and learn about them. It comes back to simple thing: if you are interested in food, hopefully you’re interested in the people cooking food and what’s happening to them.
But ultimately what my book does is give you a way to participate in the good stuff making the world better. The idea that cooking can help us meet the better angels of nature seems quotidian or trite, but it’s not. Cooking and eating are easy entry points in tough subjects. They are incredibly meaningful and powerful way to hold off surrender.
THIN: Last question, I know you to be a fantastic cook yourself. Has writing the book changed the way you personally think about (or cook and eat) food?
MIKE: I’m a little bit more relaxed about cooking now.
Having to test all the recipes in the book - almost all of which were given to me orally, with measurements like “handfuls,” “spoonfuls,” “pinches”- I had to get the exact measurements. It just made me really understand and respect the flexibility of home cooking. It doesn’t have to be exact. Everyone’s going to cook differently.
I think that has forced me to be a little bit less rigid in my own cooking. If I can’t get an ingredient, I improvise. That’s what almost everyone in this book had to do.
I also had this bad habit: I’d only like to cook everything from the same cuisine. If I was making pasta, the appetiser had to be Italian-inflected, or if it was South Asian, everything had to be from the subcontinent.
I’ve become much more flexible about letting different cuisines express themselves on my dinner table. I used to think everything had to be in the same flavour palette, but now I appreciate pot lucks a little more.
The biggest lesson I learned is that: food tells truth. If you truly want to understand what a cuisine is saying, you need to develop relationship with it just like you would a person.
Thin’s Pickings - in brief
Eating: On Lamb by Alicia Kennedy (poignant), The Dogma of Meat by Lisa Miller (exasperating), A Brown People’s Version of White People’s Lives by Sharanya Deepak (brilliant)
Agriculture: The Limits of the UAE’s Push for Food Security by Jack Thompson (eye-opening), Agriculture is taking over grasslands, wetlands, and overlooked ecosystems by World Resources Institute (informative), Why Forest Loss in the Congo Basin Requires Immediate Action by Global Forest Watch (concerning)
Politics: It Was One of the Cold War’s Greatest Crimes. No One Has Paid a Price by Stuart R. Reid (infuriating, worth pairing with the Congo Basin piece), The president speaks genocide by Timothy Snyder (*speechless*)
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