Interview with Michael Shaikh, author of The Last Sweet Bite

Michael Shaikh is a writer and human rights investigator who has worked for twenty years in areas marred by political crisis and armed conflict. He has worked at Human Rights Watch, International Crisis Group, the Center for Civilians in Conflict, the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the New York City Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice. Michael is also the author of The Last Sweet Bite: Stories and Recipes of Culinary Heritage Lost and Found. Michael holds a BA from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and an MA from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. He is on the board of Adi Magazine and Fortify Rights. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, he lives in New York City.

Michael is the author of The Last Sweet Bite: Stories and Recipes of Culinary Heritage Lost and Found. His new book explores cuisines in conflict zones, highlighting the courageous persistence of people struggling to protect their food culture in the face of war, genocide, and violence.

Food Policy Center: What inspired you to write The Last Sweet Bite, and why did this book need to be written now? In what ways do our current political, social, and ecological crises shape the urgency of your work?

Michael Shaikh: A few things. Among them was an urge to remind the world of people whom it seems to have forgotten, and that there is beauty in places often overlooked. Another was personal. The violence of the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 had deeply affected my family; the violence prevented important aspects of my Sindhi culture, especially language, from being passed on to me and my siblings. 

As a human rights investigator, I saw the same thing happening in the war zones I was working in. I saw how the violence I was investigating was changing not only the lives of people but also their culture; it was altering and even disappearing the art, architecture, and music. But I also saw how it was changing the food. Families were losing treasured recipes to the violence, and it was really painful for them. 

Food is more than just calories. Our cuisines are more than expressions of what we eat on any given day; they are a repository of people’s history handed down from generation to generation. The world spends huge sums protecting other forms of culture in war, like art and architecture, but almost nothing to protect food cultures that are equally, if not more, important to us. As we watch the world’s three most important and trendsetting countries – China, India, and the United States –  embrace, to varying degrees, violent cultural authoritarianism, as well as a UN Security Council unwilling to halt horrific wars and atrocities, I believe we have a responsibility to interrogate what’s on our plate, not just from the perspectives of health, carbon emissions, and ethics but also from the standpoint of political violence, to fully understand why it’s there and why it might not be in the future. 

(On that note, if you want to see the tragedy that could befall Ukraine and its unique culture if Russia takes over that country, you should read the chapter on the Czech Republic in The Last Sweet Bite.)

Food Policy Center: Your book draws powerful connections between state-sanctioned violence and food cultures. How do policies, such as embargoes, food apartheid, or land dispossession, contribute to the erasure or endurance of food traditions? Why is it important to broaden our understanding of violence when we talk about food justice?

Michael Shaikh: A community’s food culture, its cuisine, is linked to just about every aspect of its broader culture and survival. When a community’s food culture is attacked, it can have cascading and devastating implications not only for its emotional and spiritual well-being but also for its physical existence. Intentional attacks on a community’s food culture may presage more violence. In some cases, an attack on culture may become an attack on a people. Indeed, attacks on heritage are often intended to demoralize and intimidate a community or weaken and erase it altogether. This was the case with the genocide of the Indigenous peoples in the Americas and is the case today with the Uyghurs in western China.

Food Policy Center: Why do you think food cultures—especially those built through women’s labor and memory—hold such weight as historical records? Can food memory act as a form of resistance or policy critique?

Michael Shaikh: I mentioned above that cuisine is more than an illustration of what a society eats on any given day; it’s a repository of history, culture and ways of being in the world.  I see cuisine as akin to language in that way. In its most essential form, a cuisine is how one society communicates with another, where its cultural and even its territorial boundaries begin and end. When it comes to culinary culture, more often than not, in conflicts, elders, women, and girls are the gatekeepers of this heritage. I think women elders, like those you meet in The Last Sweet Bite, are powerful examples of that. What I’ve learned through writing this book is that the story of food and war is also the story of women and girls in war. If we are to be serious about protecting food culture in war, we have to be better at protecting women and girls. Among the most urgent things we can do is outlaw domicide, the wartime tactic of systematically destroying homes and leveling entire neighborhoods and towns, like we’ve recently seen in Syria and Myanmar, and like we’re witnessing in Palestine and Ukraine right now. Home is where women from many cultures spend considerable time. To me, the protection of women, food, and homes is simply part of the same equation.

Food Policy Center: The title of your book is drawn from Joy Harjo’s poem, “Perhaps the World Ends Here.” How does this poem inform your understanding of food’s place in political grief, generational trauma, or cultural continuity?

Michael Shaikh: Thanks for asking this question. It is an incredible privilege to be able to include Ms. Harjo’s poem in my book. Her poem puts us around a kitchen table, a place of ceremony and sustenance, a place that braids the best and worst of our humanity. The fourth stanza of Ms. Harjo’s poem really says it all. Referring to food and the kitchen table, she writes:  “It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human.” Our food is an umbilical connection to our cultures and their world-orienting philosophies. 

For me, this gets at the fact that food is an immensely powerful and important form of culture that we find refuge in during times of crisis, both small and large. I often turned to this poem for motivation when tempted by complacency while writing my book, for inspiration to take risks when I was afraid, and crucially, to listen (and relisten) to what people were saying to me.  Even now, I still turn to it to remind me of our shared humanity in this divisive moment. In the most basic sense, Ms. Harjo’s poem reminds us that our food cultures ground us and connect us. The poem’s magic and truth are sprinkled throughout my book. So, it seemed natural that its last words would become the title.

Food Policy Center: Many of the recipes you include carry the weight of conflict and loss. Is there one that you return to often—either emotionally or personally—and why does it stay with you?

Michael Shaikh: I dread this question! I adore all the recipes in the book because they were gifts (and they are all really good too). That said, the ones that stick with me are probably Marian and Ray Naranjo’s recipes from Chapter 6 about the cuisine of the Pueblo Nations and the Epilogue, which looks at the legacy of the Manhattan Project on New Mexico’s food. These recipes reflect the Pueblo Food Experience, an event (memorialized in a cookbook by the same name) where members of Marian and Ray’s Santa Clara Pueblo Nation came together to reconstruct their indigenous pre-colonial Pueblo cuisine. For three months, they ate and cooked the way their ancestors ate. It was not only an act of cultural rejuvenation but one of survival: eating the way their ancestors ate helped reverse some of the terrible health effects of U.S. colonial and contemporary food policies forced on Indigenous Americans. It showed me that saving a food culture is the same as saving lives. Which was another motivation for writing this.

Food Policy Center: What makes a recipe or food tradition endure through war, displacement, and genocide? Is it the ingredients, the act of making, or something else entirely?

Let me answer by way of an example. For decades, the Rohingya of Myanmar have been persecuted by the state. They have this beautiful, intricate culture that the government has tried to erase through laws, expulsion, and outright murder. There are only two million Rohingya people in the world, and over half of them have been forced to leave their country and seek safety in squalid refugee camps in Bangladesh. Genocide and displacement have taken almost everything from the Rohingya. The one thing that the violence hasn’t completely destroyed is the knowledge of the elders. And that is something incredibly valuable in the refugee camps in southern Bangladesh and in the Rohingya diaspora. 

When it comes to cuisine, Rohingya elders, especially women elders, are more than just home cooks; they’re living libraries of Rohingya food culture. In The Last Sweet Bite, you meet an incredible woman named Maryam, whose family I met in Myanmar while working for the UN there.  Everything Maryam knows about her culture’s recipes – their ingredients, the properties of plants and when and where they grow, and the customs and values around sharing food, particularly on Islamic holy days – she learned from her elders, who in turn learned them from their elders. Her recipe for guro ghuso, a rich, fragrant, and fiery crimson beef curry (which is in the book), is a culmination of a multi-generational process of learning and cultural transmission.

Food Policy Center: You write about how cooking changes in the face of violence, how recipes shift, ingredients disappear, or rituals are suppressed. What does this tell us about the resilience of food culture, and what does it demand of policymakers?

Michael Shaikh: This is an excellent question. Our cuisines are an immensely powerful and important, but historically undervalued, form of culture. They can be as important as language. For this reason, they deserve as much attention and protection as other forms of culture. Yet there is little international sympathy for attacks on culinary heritage. 

As I write in the book, “Governments and global institutions like the UN have historically prioritized the protection and restoration of tangible treasures like the Raubkunst, the Jewish art looted by the Nazis; the Old Mostar Bridge in Bosnia and Herzegovina, destroyed during the Balkan Wars; and, more recently, the ancient Timbuktu mausoleums in Mali, razed by Ansar Dine and Al Qaeda.” 

There is no doubt that these types of heritage should be protected during war. But so should our food cultures. But they aren’t, and that is largely because the people who wrote the laws of war were men who saw food and cooking as a domestic chore done by women. Home cooking is not valued in the same way as other forms of culture. This sexism partly explains why the international community recognizes neither war’s impact on culinary culture nor the value of culinary culture as something to be protected from violence. What has struck me most in researching this book is how much our food functions as a place of refuge when very little is left, and how the powerful who are hell-bent on destroying a community understand that fact. If a food culture is so important to destroy, it should be even more important to protect.

Food Policy Center: Why do you think food production and culinary culture are so often overlooked in discussions of war, colonialism, and state violence? How can food policy scholars and practitioners help shift that narrative?

Michael Shaikh: Again, I think this has to do with sexism. Cooking has largely been seen as a chore for women and so not understood as a form of high culture worthy of dedicated policy, financial, and legal protections. That has to change. I think food policy scholars tend to understand this, at least those I am in contact with. Food media is another issue. There are some really great food journalists out there, but the industry tends to see Gaza, ICE raids, the destruction of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department, cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and climate science, and plans to revoke citizenship not as its beat when these are arguably some of the most consequential food and culture-shifting stories out there. Humanitarian organizations need to change their approach, too. There’s a lingering flaw in the global refugee response in that aid agencies define the humanitarian imperative too narrowly. Food, shelter, and clean water are crucial, but the ability to practice one’s culture as fully as possible is also a means to survive. That’s one of the messages I hope comes through in my book.

Food Policy Center: Your work implicitly raises the question: Who has the right to remember, and who gets to feed the future? How do you see food sovereignty movements or reparative food policy fitting into that conversation?

Michael Shaikh: In a lot of places, seed savers and food sovereignty activists are the ones not only fighting to keep food cultures alive but also saving the actual DNA of the biodiversity we’ll need to keep the planet alive. And they do this for all of us with very little funding, recognition or public gratitude. I can’t praise them enough.

Food Policy Center: What role do you see artists, cooks, and writers playing in shaping food policy, especially when it comes to centering lived experience and historical memory in policymaking?

Michael Shaikh: Another great question. I see artists, activists, cooks, writers, and filmmakers as having the power to move policy discussions beyond abstract data and economic models. Their work can evoke empathy and understanding in a way that statistics alone cannot, making abstract policy issues resonate personally with a wider audience and policymakers. The artists I admire most will examine the legacy of the things around us — like our food culture — showing us how it reinforces the gender, class, caste, and racial hierarchies that feed violence. In my experience, violent conflicts are frightening and hard to fathom for just about everyone, even for those who have experienced them. But food is a way to enter a tough story through a common act.  Creatively depicting how violence can disappear a treasure dish or how the act of cooking itself can at the same time be a form of resistance and healing offers us a path through the complexities that violence into our shared humanity. What’s more, the perspectives that artists,  cooks, filmmakers, and writers provide can also be a form of accountability, helping us to avoid repeating past mistakes as well as a guide to building more resilient and just food systems.

Some of the best music I’ve heard, the best writing I’ve read, and the best food I’ve eaten have been in or emanated from conflict zones. I think that’s because those things capture the best of our humanity; it shows us what we’re capable of. Because in war, you need to see your dreams, be reminded of your future, because that’s part of survival.

Fast Facts

Grew up in: Cleveland, Ohio
City or town you call home: New York City
Job title: Writer and human rights investigator
Background and education: BA from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and an MA from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
One word you would use to describe our food system: Profligate
Food Policy Hero: Sharifah Shakirah, the founder of the Rohingya Women’s Development Network (RWDN). She and RWDN created what is perhaps the first-ever Rohingya cookbook.
Your breakfast this morning: Cherries and an iced coffee mixed with soda water.
Favorite food: The pastrami Reuben at Larder in Cleveland, Ohio.
Favorite food hangout: The bar or counter of any good restaurant.
Food policy social media must follow: Andi Murphy and her Toasted Sister Podcast all about Indigenous food.