Cooking to Survive
by Laurie Woolever
“Food itself is not political, but the people who put it there, their politics, the story behind it, that is political,” says human rights activist and author Michael Shaikh, who has spent the last two decades working in areas marred by political crisis and armed conflict. His first book, The Last Sweet Bite: Stories and Recipes of Culinary Heritage Lost and Found, published on June 24, is about how wars, occupations, and genocide erase culinary traditions.
“But it’s really about the persistence of humans to save what they love,” Shaikh says. “It’s a love story.”
I spoke with the author over the phone recently. Our conversation has been condensed for length and clarity.
MICHAEL SHAIKH: When I was a little kid, I really wanted to speak Sindhi, my father’s language. My father is from Pakistan, and when he came to the United States, he married my mom, who has Eastern European heritage—Transylvania, Hungary and Romania. We would go to these parties when I was a kid, and my dad was always speaking another language with his doctor friends; it felt like he had magic powers, and I wanted them. We would go to Pakistan to visit my grandmother. I had cousins there, roughly my age, and they would pick on me in this language I couldn’t understand, and I wanted to even the playing field.
I asked my dad, “Can you teach me, Sindhi?” And he’s like, “No, I’m too busy, you’re an American kid and you don’t really need to use it, your mother doesn’t speak it; it’s just too hard for us to do.”
I was like, “Okay, fine,” but it still kind of stung, and after that the language bug never left me. I picked up a few other languages, and I studied Japanese in college; I went to Japan and lived there for three years, in this little fishing village, and I was one of the only foreigners in town. One night I walked into this tiny little izakaya, and the mama-san, Keiko, just took me under her wing, and she became my Japanese mother for two years.
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