LEILA FADEL, HOST:
For a decade, Michael Shaikh chronicled the human cost of war. He documented war crimes and human rights abuses in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, genocide in Myanmar, deadly coups in Bangladesh, in Thailand. And later he counted the civilians killed in violence in Mali and Syria. But beyond the life lost, the structures destroyed, Shaikh watched the way war, occupation and violence stole something else from a people - the food they treasured. His new book is called "The Last Sweet Bite: Stories And Recipes Of Culinary Heritage Lost And Found." And he joins me now. Hi.
MICHAEL SHAIKH: Hi, Leila.
FADEL: This is really quite an incredible book, actually. Having covered so much conflict myself, it made me think about it a lot.
SHAIKH: Thank you.
FADEL: How did you first come to understand the way violence changes cuisine?
SHAIKH: Well, it actually had a lot to do with language. My father survived the partition of India and Pakistan in the late 1940s. And he didn't pass down his native language, Sindhi, to my brother and sister and I. Fast-forward, I'm in Afghanistan working for Human Rights Watch. And I saw the same kind of tentacles of violence that had, like, reached down through generations to steal language from my brother and sister and I were doing the same things to Afghans but with recipes, and stealing their recipes one at a time.
FADEL: So one day you decide, OK, I'm going to go from documenting literal genocides to looking at how that violence that I'd been documenting changes food and, really, culture. Why is that so important?
SHAIKH: When you're in the midst of seeing people going through generations of war, the lengths they will go to, to keep their food cultures alive. And it was just, like, incredible persistence.
FADEL: Yeah.
SHAIKH: It was heroic. And it showed me how important food was to us as humans. I had this Rohingya family that I met in Bangladesh, who had fled the genocide there in 2017 in Myanmar, tell me that they had lived in the jungle on leaves and grass for several days if not weeks. And when they got to the camps in Bangladesh, they had a plate of lentils and rice, which is very much central to Rohingya cuisine. And they said to me, I became Rohingya again in that moment - I became human again. That sentiment was everywhere. Food is more than just calories. The culture around food was so important to everybody. It was a language in which the older generations could talk to younger generations. It was identity.
FADEL: Yeah.
SHAIKH: It was, in some ways, a way for a community to draw a border around itself and say this is who we are.
FADEL: You chose to document six places. How did you make the choice to look at cuisine in those specific places?
SHAIKH: Those are the places where I had familiarity with, where I had worked for a long time. There were a couple, though, that I didn't have much experience with at all, one being Bolivia. I was always very interested in the impact of the drug war on Andean cuisines, and particularly in Bolivia. And then I have to say that the final chapters of the book, where I was invited into the lives of the Naranjo family in New Mexico, the Santa Clara Pueblo nation, the legacy of the violence there is both kind of the legacy of the Spanish colonialism and American violence. And so I kind of, as an American, wanted to turn the lens on my own country.
FADEL: Yeah.
SHAIKH: And look at the violence that has been perpetrated against people on this land in order for us to better understand the legacies of colonialism, how it's playing out today.
FADEL: What did you find? That colonialization and land-grabbing, how did it impact these communities and their food?
SHAIKH: It was one of the hardest chapters I had to write because it really forced me to explore the implications of American policy that were developed at the beginning of this country that are still playing out today. And even after 500 years of colonial violence, people are still finding ways to survive and persist. And they've done amazing things to rebuild and relearn and rejuvenate an entire cuisine that had been intentionally destroyed by not only Spanish colonialism but American policy.
FADEL: In your chapter on the Czech Republic, it's titled How the Communists Tried to Kill a Cuisine. It was interesting because you also explore menus in that chapter. And you quote a celebrity chef there who says menus are mirrors of the public mood of a time. They're a way to see what a society values, what they are thinking, their creativity as well as their darker sides. I mean, what did he mean by this when he talked about menus being a mirror of the public mood?
SHAIKH: The gentleman you're talking about is Roman Vanek. And he's this kind of Julia Child/Anthony Bourdain figure in the Czech Republic. But what he meant by that was that when the Nazis invaded the Czech Republic prior to World War II, they had two menus, one for the Czechs and one for the German occupiers. And they had different things on them. The Czechs and also Czech Jews, as well, were forced to eat far inferior foods than the German occupiers were allowed to eat. And what Roman meant by that is that by looking at the ingredients, by looking the dishes that you could serve, you could really see who was in charge.
FADEL: Yeah.
SHAIKH: And you could see whose politics were on the table at that time.
FADEL: Was there any particular recipe that surprised you, that delighted you, that terrified you?
SHAIKH: I think if I had to pull one that I found really interesting, it's probably the Rohingya garam masala. The ingredients are like the Rohingya. It straddles both South and Southeast Asia cuisines, and it's just a spectacular garam masala. It uses ingredients that you normally wouldn't see.
FADEL: What would you say to the reader who picks this up? What is this book to them, and how should they read it?
SHAIKH: Yeah, it's a nontraditional book, but I also think it speaks to our moment right now. We're looking at these cuts to humanitarian aid across the world, the wars in the Middle East and Europe. What I think this book speaks to are the consequences of what happens when these policies and these politics go unchecked. Peoples persist, and they survive and try their best. But at the same time, they're up against all odds. It's this, like, David and Goliath story, but also a love story at the same time.
FADEL: Michael Shaikh, the author of "The Last Sweet Bite: Stories And Recipes Of Culinary Heritage Lost And Found." Thank you so much for your time and for this book.
SHAIKH: Thank you very much.
(SOUNDBITE OF ANNELIE'S "LOST") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
