Michael Shaikh’s The Last Sweet Bite: Stories and Recipes of Culinary Heritage Lost and Found is premised on a man stepping out into the world. Not quite like the ascent from Plato’s allegory of the cave, but on a more earthbound passage into the world’s conflict zones and refugee camps. Here, food becomes a “skeleton key” to lives and landscapes those of us at home rarely glimpse. A former human rights investigator, Shaikh spent over two decades documenting war crimes for Human Rights Watch, International Crisis Group, the Center for Civilians in Conflict, and the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Along the way, he traced what was literally cooking in the ruins, and turned reportage into memory work and resistance.

The Last Sweet Bite dwells at the fraught nexus of atrocity and sustenance, and is penned with the urgency of an advocate. Shaikh doesn’t simply include the voices of the silenced; he conjures a world around their tastes. Included in the book are “back-to-the-future” recipes: dishes remembered, reassembled, reclaimed. A dialogue between cultural grief and creative survival, where preserving cuisine isn’t an act of nostalgia but insurgency.

From the rambling Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh and the brutal civil war in Sri Lanka, to the drug wars of the Andes and the long trail of America’s imperial push westward, Shaikh’s lens is global. And the picture he captures is gruesome but, surprisingly, not bleak. There are moments of serendipity: a new taste; the clatter of a glowing bar on a frigid night; coca fields painting their own convergence; the glimmer of something green and growing in a refugee garden fenced like a cage; the quiet defiance of a woman cooking under siege.

What I took from my conversation with Shaikh is simple yet searing: food doesn’t fall at the margins of violence — it lies at its heart. And perhaps the most radical act for a reader at home is to look down at her plate and begin to see not only what she is eating, but what histories, hungers, and hands made its passage to the plate possible.

—Raaza Jamshed for Guernica

Raaza Jamshed: It’s striking that a book about culinary cultures in conflict zones opens with a meditation on language. You write, “my father was a magician,” referring to his fluency in Urdu and Sindhi, languages you weren’t privy to. “Whenever I heard my dad speak these other two languages,” you continue, “it was as if he crossed an invisible boundary into another world where I couldn’t follow.” For me, that early reflection on language echoes through the book. Was it a deliberate narrative choice to frame a book that centers food through the lens of linguistic longing? How do you see the relationship between food, a form of embodied memory, and language, which we might think of as narrative memory? I sense that food occupies a higher register in your work. Would you agree with that?

Michael Shaikh: For over half of my life, my father and my uncles and aunt never spoke of the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. My father is in his 90s now, and it’s only very recently that his generation has begun to talk openly about the horrors they witnessed during Partition, and the losses they endured. Attempting to uncover why my father didn’t teach my brother, sister, and me Sindhi, I learned that Partition was among the main reasons he couldn’t teach it to us. Sometimes speaking and hearing his native language, he said, conjures up ghosts from that time. When he told me that, my mind immediately formed this disturbing image of tentacles reaching down through time to steal my language right from my mouth.

A few years later, when I was in Kabul, a dear friend of mine, Tamim Samee, had invited me to dinner at his home. At that point, I had been living in Afghanistan for several years, and had been in almost every province, so I felt like I had a decent understanding of the food culture. But there was a dish on Tamim’s table that evening that I hadn’t experienced. Like many Afghans, Tamim had been a refugee in Iran and Pakistan, and later in the U.S. He was also an accomplished cook. I thought perhaps that dish was something he had picked up elsewhere. It was called saland-e nakhod, a golden chickpea stew thickened with sour yogurt.

I asked him, Tamim, if it was Afghan. He said it was. Asking that question led to a long and intimate discussion of war in Afghanistan, and how it has wreaked havoc on Afghans’ food and hospitality traditions; how it destroyed farms and food supply chains, causing ingredients to become scarce or disappear; and how nearly thirty years of continuous war had induced something like culinary amnesia in the country. I learned that when families fled, they took their recipes with them, and when civilians were shelled, their recipes died with them. Reflecting on all of this, he told me the war had narrowed Afghanistan’s language of food. In that moment, I saw the same tentacles that stole language from me, stealing Afghanistan’s language of food, one recipe at a time.

I also began to intimately understand that food is also a language, that our cuisines, our food cultures, are more than an expression of what society eats on any given day. They are a vessel of a community’s history and identity. Food is a language of implication. It’s not always as precise as the written or spoken version. But it can be equally profound. As I write in the book,  “In its most rudimentary form, a cuisine is a way of one society communicating to another where its cultural, and in some cases, territorial, boundaries begin and end. And like a language, a cuisine can change or even disappear when a community comes under intense pressure to integrate with another, more powerful group and is forced to surrender its identity.”

That’s why you see the interplay between language and food at various points in the book. But I don’t believe food occupies a higher register than language or other forms of culture. Though, in certain ways, food can be a more approachable form of understanding than language. For example, I still don’t speak Sindhi, but the way I’ve accessed that part of my cultural identity is by learning to cook our cuisine. That said, when it comes to the protection of cultural heritage in war, I would say that both languages and the language of food, our cuisines, are ignored at worst, and downplayed at best as forms of cultural heritage worthy of protection in war, and there are many reasons for that.  Food is an immensely powerful and important form of culture that people find refuge in during times of crisis. For this reason, it deserves as much attention and protection as other forms of culture.

Raaza Jamshed: This ties into one of the most powerful themes in The Last Sweet Bite, how food emerges not just as sustenance but as archive, pedagogy, and a form of cultural transmission. You recount how the Rohingya practice of biddya – the act of showing children which plants heal or nourish – takes on urgency in the camps, which are often likened by residents to “open prisons” or “animal cages.” In another instance, you describe Marian, an elder of Santa Clara Pueblo nation, guiding children through the artful making of the ancient bread, buwah. And Maryam, a Rohingya mother, cooks goru ghosu, a rich meat stew, with her daughters as a way of anchoring them in cultural memory. In your experience, how did these culinary practices function as forms of literacy or cultural transmission within displaced communities? And to what extent did they seem to succeed in carrying that meaning forward?

Michael Shaikh: In both cases, Tewa, the original language of Santa Clara Pueblo, and Rohingya are primarily oral languages. This in some measure places greater emphasis on learning and explanation through discussion while one is engaged in an activity, like cooking. From what I have learned about Pueblo culture from women like Marian Naranjo (Santa Clara Pueblo) and young activists and farmers like Tiana Suazo (Taos Pueblo), as well as by Rohingya women like Maryam, is that cooking can be a profound means of not only transmitting cultural values but also maintaining cultural pride, which is central to maintaining the cohesion of a nation.

Let me stay on the Rohingya case for a moment. Genocide and displacement have taken almost everything from the Rohingya in Myanmar. The one thing that that 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, people like Maryam are more than just home cooks; they’re living libraries of Rohingya food culture. Everything that Maryam knows about recipes and 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 it from their elders. Her goru ghuso is a culmination of a multi-generational process of learning and cultural transmission.

Increasingly, cooks like Maryam and other women in the camps see themselves as guardians of cultural knowledge with an obligation to teach younger generations how to cook so that Rohingya culinary knowledge can be reseeded in Myanmar when they go back. These culinary guardians are having an impact too. For instance, earlier this year, Rohingyatographer, a collective of young photojournalists living in the camps in Bangladesh, came together to publish a book called Food for Thought. It is the first book ever published by Rohingya exploring the cultural, social, and emotional significance of food in the camps with the aim of celebrating and preserving  Rohingya traditions, memories, and identity in the face of erasure and displacement. The project, in many ways, was the result of the collective influence of Rohingya women and home cooks like Maryam

Raaza Jamshed: This powerful image of preservation raises the question of what happens when culinary cultures collapse. A recurring thread in your book is the way food loss signifies more than just physical deprivation. It signals the erosion of moral and social worlds. This idea of culinary violence emerges vividly in your account of Rohingya camps. In the Rohingya camps you covered for the UN, did you find that hunger not only weakened bodies, but also dissolved older systems of governance? And what was it like trying to report on these realities? Were you able to bring what you saw to light in the way you hoped?

Michael Shaikh: You’re right, the degradation of a food culture can signal more than just physical deprivation. And you’re right it can signal “the erosion of moral and social worlds.” That’s a great way to put it.

First, I just want to clarify that I didn’t work for the UN in Bangladesh. When I worked for the UN, I did so in Myanmar. However, I did most of the research for the Rohingya chapter for my book in Bangladesh after I left the UN (though significant parts are drawn from my time living in Myanmar). I  conducted my research in Bangladesh primarily because some of the families I met while I was working for the UN in Myanmar – those who really opened my eyes to the wonders of Rohingya cuisine – had thankfully survived the genocide by escaping across the border.

Hunger was weakening the Rohingya people, and their communal bonds and systems of internal governance, long before they were expelled to Bangladesh. In Rakhine State in western Myanmar, the Rohingya indigenous homeland, the Myanmar state had routinely weaponized food as a means of ethnically cleansing the region of its Rohingya population, whom it stripped of citizenship in 1982 after years of falsely claiming they were illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

One of the clearest examples is Aung Mingalar. Aung Mingalar was an old middle-class neighborhood of traders, shop owners, and political leaders in the center of Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State. In 2014, a series of anti-Rohingya attacks ravaged the city and other parts of the state. Most of Aung Mingalar’s Rohingya population was driven into internment camps on the outskirts of Sittwe, but many stayed behind. In turn, the government laid siege to Aung Mingalar. For months, it prevented food and medicine from getting into the neighborhood to force the remaining Rohingya out. Food was similarly weaponized in the Sittwe internment camps.

While food hasn’t been intentionally weaponized in the refugee camps in Bangladesh where over one million Rohingya now live, the Bangladesh government restricts their right to work and freedom to move, which severely impacts what and how Rohingya eat. The situation has become so dire there that thousands of Rohingya are resorting to dangerous sea journeys to find work and dignity elsewhere. Nearly one in five Rohingya die on these trips. The cumulative effect has been near collapse in traditional Rohingya leadership and communal structures.

As to whether I was able to bring what I saw to light in the way I hoped, it’s complicated. In terms of my work at the UN, no. My time at the UN was marred by ineffective and deeply politicized leadership. Very few top UN officials in Myanmar then understood what they were seeing when they went to Rakhine State to the internment camps. They didn’t have a solid background in human rights, and thus didn’t have the language. Barricades and movement restrictions were not understood as expressions of apartheid. If something isn’t understood as the crime of apartheid, it isn’t understood as a crime against humanity. These things were taking place, and the top UN leaders there didn’t want to or couldn’t understand them. They silenced those ringing alarm bells. It was sheer incompetence, and I believe they bear responsibility for the conditions that led to the genocide in 2017.

I am more optimistic about stories being told by Rohingya poets like Mayyu Ali and activists like Sharifah Shakirah at Rohingya Women’s Development Network, and to some extent those in my book, in drawing in new audiences unfamiliar with Rohingya people and the conditions they endure but also the beauty they are trying to protect. I think, at least I hope, that readers will be able to see the beauty of Rohingya culture – that sophisticated beauty exists even in squalid refugee camps – and perhaps we can finally begin to imagine what the world would be like if the camps were closed and Rohingya people were able to finally live on their terms.

Raaza Jamshed: Many of the stories in your book do highlight the beauty, but they also point to the gaps in humanitarian systems meant to care for Rohingya people. You describe how fuwana mas, a once popular condiment, became a symbol of survival under duress for Rohingya people. Its overuse was no longer a matter of want, but of necessity. Do humanitarian agencies like the World Food Programme ever engage with food as cultural memory, or is it always framed as logistics and calories? What blind spots in the global aid system does this story ask us to confront?

Michael Shaikh: I love this question. Yes, UN humanitarian agencies are beginning to engage with food as cultural memory, seeing it as more than just calories. But that engagement is still dawning in practice. The main way I’ve encountered aid agencies doing this is by trying to provide culturally relevant food to the people they’re in the business of helping. But aid agencies have a huge blind spot when it comes to the bigger idea of protecting food culture in war. Governments and global institutions like the UN have historically prioritized the protection and restoration of tangible treasures like art and architecture, like 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. These types of heritage should absolutely be protected, but so should other parts of culture with the same enthusiasm.

The one rare example is the Rohingya Cultural Memory Center (RCMC). The RCMC is a unique entity, funded by the UN and managed by the Rohingya community in the Bangladesh camps. It endeavors to document and preserve the heritage of the Rohingya people, like art, music, and architecture. In Myanmar, each officially recognized culture has its own museum. Denied the right to belong there, the Rohingya were also denied an institution in their homeland that recognized and celebrated their cultural contributions to the world. The RCMC was designed as a partnership between the UN and the Rohingya people to rectify that.

For a while, the UN was funding Rohingya refugees at the RCMC to document their food culture in the camps until it abruptly stopped a few years ago. Other projects like the one to create a Rohingya cookbook were shelved, despite staff having collected and edited most of the material years ago. And a plan to build and staff a canteen on the center’s grounds, where community members could gather and experience the diversity of Rohingya cuisine, I am told, has also been scrapped. It’s unclear why, but from what I am hearing, the RCMC has gotten bogged down in the sludge of internal UN petty politics. It’s unfortunate too because the RCMC could be a model for how the world protects at-risk cultures in conflict settings going forward.

I think the one humanitarian aid organization that is getting this right is World Central Kitchen (WCK). It works with local restaurants, chefs, and cooks who understand where the local food is and how to cook it, and who leverage community resources to prepare and distribute cooked food. Inherent in this approach is a natural respect for the local culture. It’s an approach that Big UN should learn from.

Raaza Jamshed: In the same way that organizations like WCK are beginning to understand food’s cultural weight, your book is inviting us to recognize how food, and the language used to describe it, have political implications – especially in terms of how cuisines are named, claimed, or erased. Eelam Tamil food, for instance, is so often flattened into vague terms like “Sri Lankan” or “South Asian” in Western food writing. What does this say about how Western multiculturalism metabolizes trauma without acknowledging its political roots? And in that light, do you see naming and writing about Eelam Tamil food as a kind of postcolonial nation-building or an act of reclaiming identity and history through the language of the kitchen?

Michael Shaikh: I don’t really consider myself a food writer. Maybe others will now because of this book. But I am a consumer of it, and I think Western food media has gotten a lot better lately with how it writes about non-Western food cultures. However, it still struggles with contextualizing food and politics. Look, we have the world’s biggest food story unfolding in Gaza, and food outlets aren’t covering it. The food media doesn’t see it as a “food story” – when it’s a story of a people who have one of the greatest food cultures in the world where food is being turned against them to erase them. India is another example. Hindu extremists there are attacking the food cultures of Muslims and Dalits as part of their supremacist project. In the U.S., the government is basically disappearing immigrants who are central to making American food great at the same time as Congress is voting to cut food assistance to the poor. Like India, these attacks are part of a supremacist project to remake the culture of the U.S. These are food stories, or at least have a tight nexus to food.

I don’t want to use too broad of a brush here since there are some very, very good food writers who contextualize food and its political roots. But generally, the food media doesn’t see issues like Gaza, the dismantling of USAID and SNAP, and ICE raids, all of which have a very profound nexus to food, as its journalistic beat.  Instead, it tends to see these issues as mainly the responsibility of politics and foreign correspondents, human rights organizations, and food studies academics. And that’s unfortunate because food journalists tend to have a wealth of cultural knowledge. They can often tell really engaging and vivid stories, and like other reporters, some do know how to hold the powerful to account; they did so pretty skillfully with the #MeToo abuses in the restaurant industry. I think the food media has a responsibility to interrogate food from all angles, not just from the standpoint of taste, labor, carbon emissions, and ethics but from a political one as well. If we care about food, we have to care about the people making our food, and write about what’s happening to them – and why.

On the question of writing about Eelam Tamil food, I see it not so much as an act of reclamation but as an act of respect. Eelam Tamil cuisine is distinct from other regional cuisines. The cuisine, as any Eelam Tamil will tell you, conveys its own values and should be referred to as such. I started with that fact in my head and just wrote.

Raaza Jamshed: Let’s flip that lens around, and consider how communities themselves use food naming to signal the histories embedded within it. For example, there’s something unsettling, and darkly fascinating, about naming a snack mithivedi, which translates to “landmine,” after something that wreaked so much havoc in Sri Lanka during the civil war. Do you think this naming was a way of minimizing the horror? In communities living with ongoing trauma, is this a form of coping, turning devastation into something sarcastic, even humorous?

MICHAEL SHAIKH: I didn’t sense that Tamils in the Vanni named the dish mithivedi as a way of minimizing the horror of landmines. If anything, it appeared to be a means of coping, humor, and even, a strange, albeit unintentional way, of raising attention about landmines and UXO. More than a few people on trips to northern Sri Lanka intimated that edible mithivedi had morphed into an informal daily reminder about the explosive weapons. Similarly, in Johannesburg, South Africa, there is a huge sandwich called the AK-47 because the way you hold the loaf in one arm could resemble an AK-47. The AK-47 is a takeaway food, which in South Africa is deeply linked to apartheid because Black people were banned from sitting in restaurants, so the food they ordered had to be taken away. Researching The Last Sweet Bite, I heard so many stories about new dishes created out of necessity during wars that themselves didn’t survive the war. What I find fascinating about the mithivedi and the AK-47 is that both are a form of culinary creativity forged in violence that have been powerful and delicious enough to maintain their cultural cachet postwar.

Raaza Jamshed: Your book also documents instances where foods are threatened not only by war, but also by what follows in its wake. You describe how naval blockades and global demand have turned something as traditional and ordinary as nandu kari, crab curry, into a luxury beyond reach for the Tamil communities who sustained it. What does it say about the afterlife of violence – when war ends, but capitalism finishes the job? And for those of us scrolling through images of artisanal crab far from these realities, what responsibility do we carry?

Michael Shaikh: Violence often lingers long after the war is over. I really can’t think of many places I’ve worked where there has been an equitable peace both politically and economically. In the case of Eelam Tamils, many of the underlying issues that led to war in the first place haven’t been addressed, which has allowed capitalism, particularly the international demand and trade of blue swimmer crabs, to price Eelam Tamils out of aspects of their own cuisine. For the Sri Lankan state and the international community, peace in Sri Lanka meant the destruction of the Tamil Tigers, not a plan to address the rights and dignity of a minority in a unified Sri Lanka. I think in many ways, Sri Lanka has set a terrible precedent for how contemporary wars are fought and brought to an end and what postwar peace and accountability look like, including respect and protection for minority cultures.

That said, if someone is cooking you an Eelam Tamil crab curry, eat it. It’s probably one of the most delicious things on the planet. In some form, someone’s politics are always on the dinner table, and likely politics you don’t fully agree with. Think about the story it tells. Acknowledge it but don’t let it paralyze you. Learn from it. I am constantly looking up the origins of ingredients, wondering how they first started moving around the world. The next thing I know, I’ve ordered half a dozen books about sheep or salt or saffron! The stories aren’t always pretty but I come away a more knowledgeable and often a better cook.  I also take inspiration from people like Chef Ray Naranjo (Santa Clara Pueblo). He is at the forefront of decolonizing his Pueblo cuisine. But also making some really incredible dishes fusing both precolonial and colonial ingredients as a way to bring people meaningfully into unfamiliar territory.

Raaza Jamshed: One of the most powerful insights in your book is the way cooking, especially by women, becomes a form of resistance through care, continuity, and instruction. You write that for many Rohingya women like Maryam, cooking in the camps becomes “a process of rebellion against forgetting.” Elsewhere, Maryam explains that if something isn’t grown or caught, “it isn’t cooked,” and if it isn’t cooked, “it dies.” How did traditional roles, especially for women, shift or adapt during periods of crises in the places you included in the book?

Michael Shaikh: Violent conflicts, particularly protracted ones, commonly tear at communal and family structures, the structures we rely on for sources of care, stability, predictability, and protection. While writing my book, I often heard from Indigenous women how settler colonialism undermined the traditional power of women in their nations. They explained to me how the imposition of European patriarchy on Indigenous communities had a profound and deleterious effect on women and which has contributed to previously unknown rates of domestic violence. In pre-colonial and early colonial times, the structures and practices that would have mitigated this violence were dramatically weakened by settler colonialism – though, I am told in some instances, that power is beginning to shift back.

That said, when it comes to culinary and other forms of art, more often than not in conflicts, elders, women, and girls are the gatekeepers of this cultural heritage, and that role has provided them in some instances with greater flexibility, respect, and power within their community. I think women elders like Marian Naranjo and Roxanne Swentzell from the Santa Clara Pueblo nation are powerful examples of that. To me, 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. To me, the most urgent thing the world can do is outlaw domicide, the wartime tactic of systematically destroying homes and leveling entire neighborhoods and towns, as has been done with to the Cherokee and other Native American nations in the 1800s in the United States, and more recently in Chechnya, Palestine, Syria, Sudan and Ukraine. Home is where women from many cultures spend most of their time. The protection of women, food, and homes is simply part of the same equation.

Raaza Jamshed: You write about refugee shelters being deliberately kept unsafe – because, as a UN official said: “The Bangladesh government doesn’t want to give Rohingya culture a permanent foothold here. They’re uninvited guests. IOM (International Organization for Migration) defers to this.” What does this reveal about the role humanitarian agencies play in shaping not only what displaced people eat, but how, and under what conditions, they are allowed to live and cook at all?

Michael Shaikh: Humanitarian agencies follow international laws and standards when it comes to caring for the displaced, but the quality of that care is often determined by what the host country wants and will allow. And in many cases, countries hosting refugees don’t want them there, particularly for the long term. This is commonly the driving force behind how refugees are treated, which can create a lot of tension between aid agencies and host governments. This often leads to the bare minimum of assistance required to keep people alive, let alone help a displaced community maintain its cultural heritage.

In Bangladesh, for example, in the world’s largest refugee camp system, the two biggest factors influencing what and how the Rohingya eat are donor funds and restrictions on the refugees’ right to work. Donor countries are constantly shortchanging the Rohingya. At one point, they were funding a monthly food stipend of roughly $13 per person. Now it’s $6. Try to buy a single cup of coffee with that in NYC, LA, or London. This is made worse by the fact that Bangladesh won’t allow the Rohingya to work in the country, meaning there are almost no opportunities to make additional money to supplement their meager food rations.

As a party to core international human rights treaties, Bangladesh is obligated to ensure everyone in the country, including refugees, has access to fundamental rights, including livelihoods. But ever since refugees started seeking safety around Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh has denied the Rohingya the right to work in the country, arguing that job opportunities would encourage more Rohingya from Myanmar to cross the border.   That logic appears to backfire however, when you consider that among the most common reasons Rohingya give for risking their lives to be smuggled out of the camps to Thailand or Malaysia is their inability to work.  The donor and aid agencies really don’t push back on this either.

A former Rohingya cook, named Shafi, who is something of a labor rights activist in the Rohingya camps, once told me: “Jobs equal income and the ability to provide for our families. Jobs mean we can buy food on our terms. Jobs mean we can cook on our terms. A job can keep a person alive. A job gives a man a purpose. And a job can give the Rohingya a chance to keep our culture active.” Shafi’s story didn’t make it into the book, but it’s worth recounting here.

Raaza Jamshed: Your exploration of coca, and to some extent amaranth, reveals that the politics of edibility are shaped not by taste, but by power. Who has the authority to decide what is edible, what is gourmet, and what is criminal? You write, “It’s not about taste – it’s about who gets to decide whose foods are prestigious and whose are dangerous. In that sense, a recipe can be a battlefield.” This becomes especially stark when you describe how Coca-Cola has maintained a legal monopoly on the global use of coca leaf, while Andean communities are criminalized for producing them. Could you speak to how this kind of racialized gatekeeping reveals the colonial logic still embedded in our global food systems?

Michael Shaikh: The UN drug treaties are a live example of this. They intentionally create a false equivalency between coca leaf and cocaine. That false equivalency was based on a group of white guys working for the UN who went to the Andes in 1950 and decided chewing coca was a disgusting habit of brown Indigenous Andean people. These assholes then determined coca was the cause of their racial degeneration. The racist analysis was then written into UN drug treaties criminalizing coca leaf, saying it was the same as cocaine. That is despite the evidence that coca leaf has been chewed, brewed, and eaten by Andean peoples forever and it hasn’t killed a single person in history. If there’s a silver lining to this racist history, it’s that the UN is now reassessing this colonial crime and may delink coca and cocaine. But that could be years away.

This plays out in other ways too. For example, the Han colonization of the Uyghur lands in western China today is following the same playbook of European colonization of the Americas five hundred years ago. Similar to the Spanish introducing cattle and pigs to the detriment of the American bison, the Han, with the backing of the Chinese Communist Party, have introduced cattle in Xinjiang at the expense of fat-tail sheep. Pastures that Uyghurs once used to raise sheep have been taken to raise cattle. In turn, this caused a decline in mutton, the basis for many treasured Uygur dishes, and priced Uyghurs out of their own food.

Another way this plays out is simply not acknowledging the Indigenous roots of the food we eat. In North America, foods like chilies, chocolate, corn, beans, tomatoes, squash, amaranth, wild rice, and many types of berries, just to name a few, have been de-Indigenized. The same is true when it comes to vegetables like okra, watermelon, the kola nut (the other half of Coca-Cola), that were brought by enslaved Africans. Those too have become decontextualized. It’s appropriation and erasure.

While it’s important to point out these problems, I am also deeply inspired by people trying to solve them. I am constantly looking to chefs and activists like Sean Sherman (Lakota) in Minneapolis and Kealoha Domingo (Hawaii) on Oahu who have been trying to rebuild Indigenous culinary traditions as a way to call out the abuses and inequities in the American food system. I Iook to educators like Michael Twitty, drawing connections between food, race and religion in the United States. I often look to Marsia Taha, and her organization Sabores Silvestres, who works across Bolivia to preserve both biodiversity and ancestral culinary cultures by working with Indigenous farmers to provide restaurants and markets with sustainably produced, high-­quality ingredients. Cookbook authors too are doing really good work, like Reem Kasis, Leila al Hadad and Irina Janakievska, who are raising attention about Palestinian and Balkan food ravaged by war, and Tim Anderson, whose cookbook Hokkaido celebrates the cooking of Hiroaki Kon, an indigenous Ainu chef. The native Ainu and their cuisine have long endured forced assimilation in northern Japan so it’s inspiring to see these recipes in print moving around the world.

Raaza Jamshed: It’s heartening to know about these chefs and activists striving to keep culinary traditions alive but their efforts often unfold against the backdrop of larger, destructive global policies. You make a compelling case that the U.S.-led war on drugs industrialized cocaine use. Can you explain how this policy failure simultaneously devastated Indigenous livelihoods and fueled violence, both in South America and in North American inner cities?

Michael Shaikh: It’s important to note first that for decades, safe coca-based products were developed and sold throughout the US and Europe. But the temperance movement in the early 20th century, coupled with irrational racist fears of Black “cocaine fiends,” turned Congressional opinion against both coca and cocaine. When the US and then the UN conflated coca and cocaine and outlawed both, it destroyed any chance of Andean and Amazonian farmers making a living supplying a global industry with safe and enjoyable coca products. The thing is, drug laws didn’t deal with demand for narcotic cocaine and just pushed the cocaine business underground, spawning what is today a multibillion-dollar illicit cocaine economy. That said, not only did the drug war push the price of drugs to record lows, but it also sent drug use in new and perilous directions, unleashing horrifying violence and human rights abuses on low-income people of color across American cities. This racial war on the poor not only failed to curb U.S. demand for cocaine but also impoverished, wounded, and killed countless Bolivians, primarily Indigenous Andeans. A similar fate is still being inflicted on Colombians and Peruvians.

Raaza Jamshed: The recipes that accompany the chapters in your book are marked by a certain generosity. They are carefully detailed, and gently accommodating. But when you arrive at the recipe labelled, Juana’s Mate de Coca, there are no accommodations. You write, “unfortunately, there are no substitutes for coca leaf.” The unavailability of coca seems like a glaring signal towards its need – it’s your way of helping your readers imagine its presence in their kitchens, or perhaps, sense its absence. How can ordinary readers or eaters in the global North participate in building a more ethical coca economy? Are there acts of solidarity – culinary or political – that you’d encourage?

Michael Shaikh: It was a deliberate choice to do that. I wanted readers to feel coca’s absence in their kitchen, even to feel annoyed (hopefully not at me!) but at the inane policies preventing them from having easy access to such an incredible ingredient. Even though the chapter is about coca and its culinary uses, I also wanted readers to see the extraordinary things happening with Bolivian food and drink right now, of which coca is just one part. Among the Andean countries, Peruvian cuisine gets all the attention, but Bolivian chefs are taking it to another level. Part of the reason why Bolivian chefs are not entirely getting their due is because of Bolivia’s tough relationship with the U.S. For a variety of reasons, many related to counternarcotics, the two countries don’t have a normal functioning relationship, which impacts just about everything from trade to cultural exchanges. Not that Bolivian chefs need American validation for their incredible cooking, but it does put a damper on interest in the country and its food. That’s why I included a non-coca recipe from Marsia Taha, who was recently named the best female chef in Latin America. There’s something incredible happening in Bolivia with food right now, and more people should know about it. If  you can, I think the best thing you can do is visit Bolivia and see this creativity for yourself.

Raaza Jamshed: You write: “Amaranth is not my family in that sense. But I have spent so much time with her… that I can’t help but show her that same grammatical respect.” That’s such a powerful line. And the care and beauty in your description of red amaranth – down to the rain-darkened color of her flowers – echoes the Indigenous ethic of relationality. Do you see your descriptive style as part of a broader decolonial method of writing?

Michael Shaikh: Yes, but it’s more than that. It reflects a relationship and respect that I have developed with the non-human world. It’s a relationship, and a way of being in the world, that I’ve learned to build over time and one I’m still learning to build properly. It’s based on understanding that non-humans also have rights, and on the essential fact that we all need to rely on the interdependence between humans and non-humans for our happiness, well-being, and ultimately, our survival.

Raaza Jamshed: Roshan, the Tamil Canadian chef, says, “Our people are living under military occupation, where just being Tamil is a crime. We have a responsibility to the people back home to keep our traditions alive and moving forward here.” That act of sharing his crab curry recipe freely online feels like a form of service rather than self-promotion. This is a stark departure from how we usually see conversations about culinary appropriation, often centering on ownership and credit. Let’s talk about social media and culinary culture: How do you see platforms like Instagram or TikTok changing the way recipes function – not just as personal or communal memory, but as a political offering, especially from communities in exile? And what are the ethical stakes for those of us receiving and cooking these recipes from positions of safety or distance?

Michael Shaikh: Very thoughtful question. If someone is sharing a personal recipe freely, or has indicated they are sharing one for which they have received permission to do so, I think you have an obligation to cook it if you’re open to receiving what the recipe could teach you. In turn, if you share those special recipes with others, ask for permission when necessary and add the necessary context. My book contains  recipes that were given to me by people persisting through violence. In almost all cases, they insisted I take them and share them with people not only as a means of preservation but also as a way to understand their lives, their people, and, simply, what brings them so much joy. I think if you’re presented with such a wonderful and intimate gift, the best way to offer gratitude is by cooking the recipe.

Raaza Jamshed: You write, “food and home are truly connected and indivisible. You can’t think about them separately. They are simply part of the same equation. For outsiders trying to help peoples with primarily oral cultures, like the Rohingya, understanding this is critical. Without cookbooks, biddya in a camp kitchen is the primary way their cuisine lives on. In other words, donors, UN, Bangladesh government, it’s time to afford the Rohingya the dignity these people and their culture deserve: Build them better homes. Better yet: End their statelessness. Close the camps and put them on a path to citizenship.” It’s one of the few moments in the book where you step out of your role as witness and take a decisive stance as an advocate. How did you balance the different ethical roles you occupy in the writing of this book: journalist, storyteller, participant, cook, advocate?

Michael Shaikh: Another very thoughtful question. I was writing about human rights, but I wasn’t writing a human rights report, so I was freed up to have a personal as opposed to institutional point of view and to reflect upon the work I’ve done in the past and see if it still stood the test of time. Other times, it felt necessary to have an opinion about an issue, particularly when it came to the Rohingya. It’s a community I’ve been around for a long time, and the world has for too long neglected the root of the problem that is driving the genocide, and so I felt a responsibility to be clear about the world ending their statelessness. I also felt compelled to reflect on my work with Eelam Tamils. I think the policy community screwed up by not taking seriously solutions proposed by Eelam Tamils to end the war humanely.  And I felt compelled in the Epilogue to speak more forcefully about the social abandonment project that is the U.S. Congress, and its ongoing neglect of the victims of America’s nuclear weapons program. It just made me angry.

The concept of the book is rooted in personal experience, so it felt natural to begin and return to that perspective when called for. For example, in the Bolivia chapter, a childhood memory of learning about coca and cocaine helped me unpack the US policies about coca, race, and queerness. At other times, writing the straight facts as a journalist felt like the right thing to do because the facts are so powerful that they told the story themselves. The facts could be both horrific and beautiful; they just sung for themselves. Most importantly, the voices of the people we meet in the book ultimately tell the story that should be told. And to be honest, I really tried to stay out of their way.

Raaza Jamshed: Let’s circle back to language and your Sindhi heritage. You open the book with a sense of rupture, a feeling of distance from your Sindhi heritage due to the inaccessibility of its languages. Did food serve as a bridge where language faltered? Is there a particular dish that evokes a connection to that cultural lineage when words did not? Could you describe it for us?

Michael Shaikh: Food has indeed acted as a bridge. I still don’t speak Sindhi, but the way I have learned about the aspects of my heritage is through cooking Sindhi food. When I think about food in Sindh two formative food memories come to mind. The first is when I ate one of my favorite foods – a pomegranate – for the first time. Pomegranates are incredible. Whenever I look at one, they make me happy; I nearly bought an old run-down house in Italy once simply because it had a pomegranate tree in the yard.

I was about six or seven years old, and we were in Larkana, Pakistan, at my grandmother’s house. I remember always loving being in Larkana as a kid but also being slightly afraid of it, primarily because I didn’t speak Sindhi and couldn’t understand what was going on. One afternoon, I sat on the couch with my parents watching my cousin cut into a huge pomegranate on a cutting board placed on a coffee table in front of us. As each half opened up to us, all this red ruby juice spilled out along with these little red seeds.

My mind was racing to figure out what I was looking at. I had all these disparate thoughts, that the seeds were jewels, or little red Legos. The whitish webbing pith holding the seeds in place was strange, I thought it was an alien fruit from outer space. Like Pakistan, I was drawn to it and scared of it at the same time.  But when I put those red little jewels into my mouth, and they popped between my teeth, right then and there I felt this confidence well up inside me and I said to myself, “Alright, I cannot be scared of this fruit or this place anymore!”

Not long after eating that pomegranate, on another trip, came my second favorite food memory from Sindh. I’ll never forget eating my first Chapli kebab with my cousin on the street in Larkana. It was flat and crispy and caked in fennel seeds. I can still taste the fennel seeds cracking between my teeth. Looking back, the flavors of that kebab were formative, creating an interest in Sindhi and Pakistani food that would last for the rest of my life. In turn, I became more interested in my Sindhi and South Asian heritage, and in the connection between India and Pakistan, especially the effects of Partition.

Growing up in Ohio as a little kid, a lot of my friends were Indian. I was the half-Pakistani, half-white, half-brown kid. My parents would drag my siblings and me to cocktail parties often; almost everyone there was from India except us. Academically, I understood there was tension between India and Pakistan; I understood there was bad blood because of Partition. But there was never a hint of the politics of Partition anywhere at those events, and if there was, it was like Partition was a fucking mistake.

I go back to those memories of pomegranate seeds and fennel seeds cracking in my mouth every once in a while, mainly because they were seeds of an understanding in a lot of ways. The fennel seed in that Chapli kebab has particular resonance. As an adult, I lived in Afghanistan while working for International Crisis Group and later Human Rights Watch. That time was one of the most formative periods of my life and made me who I am today. One Friday afternoon in Kabul, on a day off, I went down to Ka Faroshi, the bird market. Off to the side, down in a dark nook and cranny of the bazaar, there was a guy making Chapli kebabs.

I went into the shop with some friends to eat. The Chapi kebab immediately took me back to my childhood. As I was eating, I recounted my childhood memory to the cook. I must have said something about how it was weird to be eating something I thought came from around Karachi in Kabul. He told me I had it all wrong; that Chapli kebabs are more Afghan and Pashtun than anything. In that moment, a rush of history came forward, and I realized that the man who made that Chapli kebab for me and my cousin on that street in Larkana was probably an Afghan refugee from an earlier phase of the Afghan war, trying to survive. I was dumbfounded; that’s when my own sense of history had to be reevaluated…that Chapli kebab flipped my world upside down. But it also made both Chapli kebabs more special because, like Pakistan, Afghanistan had become part of my own history.

Raaza Jamshed:  That moment seems to mark a turning point – not just in your relationship to food, but in how you understand its entanglement with history. You’ve mentioned that reading Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz changed how you see something as ordinary as a highway – recognizing it as part of a deeper colonial infrastructure of control. In The Last Sweet Bite, you show how similar systems of domination have weaponized food – regulating, criminalizing, and even erasing culinary cultures as a means of silencing entire peoples. Did writing this book change the way you yourself perceive a meal? And what kind of shift in perception do you hope your readers experience about food, but also about power?

Michael Shaikh: I could write another book about the ways writing The Last Sweet Bite changed my relationship to food. I am far more curious about what food can tell us about ourselves and others, for starters. I thought that years of writing about food and war and testing recipes would drive me away from it. But it just made me appreciate it even more. I have always been reluctant to ascribe food mystical powers. However, this book has forced me to admit now that food is indeed something of a skeleton key. In one way or another, food opened new areas of the world, revealing people I would never have otherwise met. Perhaps what has struck me most 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 another people understand that fact. If a food culture is so important to destroy, it should be even more important to protect.