About 90 years ago, people risked prison for the sake of pasta.
Benito Mussolini launched a campaign against the staple in Italy, in the 1930s, and tried to promote rice instead. Rice grows abundantly there (Italy is currently Europe’s largest exporter of the grain), while most of the wheat needed for pasta is imported.
When word went out that their ruler wanted people to switch, pasta simply went underground. Restaurants took it off menus but still served it; grandmothers secretly made it for their families.
Mussolini eventually gave up his attempt to ban Italy’s favourite meal.
Food has always found a way around despots. Every ancient recipe we know has survived wars and displacement. Tucked into our favourite comfort foods are tales of rebellion, resilience and survival.
Yet, cuisine is also a fragile thing. Rewrite the lines in a recipe, and something may be lost forever. Raze a particular forest and a dish may never taste the same again.
Treat a culinary culture with disdain, and its people may lose some of the pride they felt in it.
So it is with India’s Dalits and Gaza’s embattled people; in refugee camps home to Syrians and Ukrainians, the Uyghur and Sudanese.
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Much of what we eat today has been shaped by violence, in some form.
Did you know that the rajma in rajma-chawal is a foreign import?
“The kidney bean arrived in India less than 150 years ago, carried by French soldiers returning from the Second French Intervention War in Mexico (1861-67),” says cultural anthropologist and archaeologist Kurush F Dalal. “The beans thrived in South America, and would also thrive in the cool, high-altitude regions of Himachal Pradesh and Jammu, eventually becoming integral to certain north Indian cuisines.”
We have, of course, had wars of our own, and fought colonisers over spices such as pepper and cinnamon. Around the world, battles are still being waged over food as identity: beef, pork, vegetarian, non-vegetarian, gluten-free and vegan are as much standards we fly about who we are, as they are expressions of what we prefer to eat.
Because cuisine is so core to identity, attempts to vilify, alienate or subjugate a community can often begin with food. Among the Uyghur, the Turkic community native to Xinjiang, butchers had QR codes engraved onto each knife, containing data that could be used as part of surveillance operations. That was in 2017. The QR codes have since turned up on the homes of indigenous families, containing the identification and biometric details of those that live within.
At the other end of the arc, the appropriation of ancient recipes can serve as a final act of erasure. We think of borscht as Russian but it has roots in pre-Soviet Eastern Europe; there are new narratives taking shape around hummus and falafel, as Gaza is flattened.
For marginalised communities, in such a world, the simple act of preparing a meal, preserving a recipe, or taking one’s seat at a communal table becomes an act of resistance.
This is the case at Zaatari in Jordan, the world’s largest Syrian refugee camp, home to about 80,000 since 2012. “We often joke that even though we are in a refugee camp, we eat as if we were at one of the world’s most exclusive restaurants,” writes ethnographer and former UN field researcher Karen E Fisher, in her book Zaatari: Culinary Traditions of the World’s Largest Syrian Refugee Camp (2024).
Her book brings together recipes, poems and anecdotes, and serves as a time capsule, documenting how food can unite, nourish and shapeshift, amid a civil war.
In The Last Sweet Bite (2025), Michael Shaikh, 48, a former human rights investigator, traces culinary loss and reinvention across conflict zones in nine countries, while also contending with all that his family lost in Sindh during Partition.
Chef and former Somalian refugee Hawa Hassan, meanwhile, uses her second book, Setting A Place for Us (2025), to trace how food can morph, rescue, and embody reinvention. (This work follows her debut cookbook, In Bibi’s Kitchen (2022), which plotted recipes from grandmothers from eight African nations, and won a James Beard award.)
Read on for an overview of the tales these authors have gathered: about how tragedy can reshape what we eat, but also of the pathos and humanity that food can embody.
“People are often surprised by the laughter, humour and joy in this book,” Hassan says. “But part of the reason for writing this book was to challenge the bleak stereotypes of displacement, and remind people that there is beauty, grace and love here too.”
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‘We eat as if we’re at one of the world’s best restaurants’: Karen E Fisher, author of Zaatari
There’s always something cooking in Zaatari, the Syrian refugee camp home to over 80,000, just across the border, in Jordan.
Mornings carry the heady whiff of qahwa sada (sugarless Turkish coffee) and the warm aromas of mana’eesh and khubz flatbreads, ready to be paired with jazmaz (eggs in a tomato-onion base) or makdous houran (pickled, stuffed baby eggplants).
Lunch might feature crescent dumplings in yogurt (shish barak), lentils with pomegranate, sumac and onion (horaa osba’o), a chicken-stuffed pastry (rgagah) and a spread of salads.
Evenings are for card games, music, chatter, and flaky baqlawah or creamy mahalabia pudding.
“We often joke that even though we are in a refugee camp, we eat as if we were at one of the world’s most exclusive restaurants,” writes Karen E Fisher, in her book Zaatari: Culinary Traditions of the World’s Largest Syrian Refugee Camp (2024).
On and off, for over six years, Fisher lived in the nearest city, Amman. She was then an embedded ethnographer (studying cultures and peoples) with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR; she is also a professor at University of Washington). She saw Zaatari morph from a tent city set up in 2012 to a sprawl of low-rise tenements and dirt roads.
Her book has been “co-written with over 2,000 Syrians”, Fisher says. It contains recipes, doodles, anecdotes and poetry.
It all started with one refugee’s diary. When Fisher first arrived in 2015, she handed out notebooks to people of all ages. In the diary of a 16-year-old named Nour (the last names of all minors have been withheld), Fisher would later find a recipe for cake.
Recipes for cakes would turn up over and over, in the diaries of girls and women. They had taken to making them, they said, for children orphaned by the civil war (which broke out in 2011).
Fisher realised, at this point, that a cookbook could document the distinct food practices of this community, and serve as a time capsule of this period in history. And so, the book brings together births, deaths, marriages, events from school life, religious feasts, ideas of spirituality, art and aspiration.
Some of the recipes reflect heartache. Umm Odai from Damascus shares one for Esh al-Bulbol or Nightingale Nests, a shredded filo pastry shaped like a nest, baked with pistachios and doused in syrup. It was her brother’s favourite dessert. After he died in 2015, she found herself making it over and over, she tells Fisher, “without knowing or feeling what I was doing”.
Other recipes trace the inventiveness it takes to cook in such conditions.
When pistachios and pine nuts are unavailable, the women dye peanuts or slivers of coconut green. Foods such as yogurt are dried to small pellets in the sun, as Syria’s nomadic Bedouins once did, to make them last longer. Other elements of that past have resurfaced too: ovens buried underground, the use of herbs and spices as medicine.
This book is meant as a celebration of the daily lives and collective resilience of this community, Fisher says. In today’s world, whether one is a Syrian refugee in Jordan or under attack in Ukraine, “documenting such traditions is itself a kind of resistance.”
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‘Food can be the canary in the coal mine’: Michael Shaikh, author of The Last Sweet Bite
“It felt like a pair of gnarly tentacles reaching out and taking something crucial from me,” says Michael Shaikh, 48.
He was in his 20s at the time of the incident, working as an English teacher in southern Japan. He had become a regular at a local izakaya (or traditional tavern) and the owner, Keiko Kawagoe, was teaching him how to make the deep-fried chicken karaage.
“As I stood there, an immense wave of guilt washed over me,” Shaikh recalls. “There I was, son of a Pakistani-Sindhi Muslim immigrant from the US, learning someone else’s family recipe. Meanwhile, I couldn’t speak a word of Sindhi myself.”
Back home in Ohio, his father would finally explain why he never spoke to his son in Sindhi. He narrated the tale of how the family had converted to Islam just before Partition. It wasn’t that he didn’t want Michael to learn their language, he said; it was that the violence he had witnessed had so fused onto parts of his Sindhi culture, including the language, that he couldn’t bear to speak of it any more.
“I felt those tentacles again then,” Shaikh says.
He would go on to study international policy and development, work as a human rights investigator with the UN and with the NGOs Human Rights Watch, International Crisis Group and Center for Civilians in Conflict. And he would come to recognise that wrenching feeling he knew so well, in others.
“Cuisine is akin to language,” says Shaikh, who now lives in New York. “And war narrows that language.”
After decades of watching how this hurts and robs people, Shaikh decided to document their pain, and his experiences.
The Last Sweet Bite (June 2025) is part-memoir, part-cookbook. It features the recipes and stories of communities reshaped by conflict in Afghanistan, the Czech Republic, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Bangladesh, China, Bolivia, and the Pueblo Nations in the US.
In the section on Xinjiang, China, for instance, Shaikh writes of the lives of the Turkic indigenous people, the Uyghur. He writes of how their master naan bakers or naway are surveilled, and sales of bread monitored and questioned. Police track those who buy large quantities, assuming they may be feeding someone in hiding. Meanwhile, butchers have had QR codes engraved onto their knives, since 2017. Similar codes have since appeared on Uyghur homes, carrying the identification and biometric details of those who live within.
“Food can be the canary in the coalmine,” Shaikh says; the thing oppressors often come for first, before they move on to the larger acts of subjugation and violence.
Part of the reason he wanted to write his book, he adds, was to build empathy and respect for the communities thus persecuted. “But mainly it was to underline our universal capacity for violence. And to emphasise that, in a world scarred by the kinds of wars we are seeing in Gaza, Sudan, Syria and Ukraine, we need to recognise the attack on cuisine could presage attacks on people, including genocidal intent.”
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‘There is beauty, grace and love in our kitchens too’: Hawa Hassan, author of Setting A Place for Us
We think of refugees as helpless people; sometimes stateless; waiting listlessly for their world to return to normal. There is so much more to the picture, says author, chef and entrepreneur Hawa Hassan, 39 (who was also once a refugee from Somalia).
These camps are places of buzzing kitchens, communal tables, and a steady exchange of ingredients, ideas and hugs as well, she says.
Some of this is reflected in her second book, Setting a Place for Us (May 2025). The collection of 75 recipes features food from across eight countries impacted by conflict: Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Egypt, El Salvador, Iraq, Lebanon, Liberia and Yemen.
Each chapter offers some history and a contemporary overview of the country, profiles of people either displaced or still living there, and eight to 10 recipes.
Among those featured are: Delayla Ndelela, a home chef from Kinshasa in DRC who turned a $20 investment into a bustling beignet (or mikate) pastry business; the Abdelhamid family from Egypt, who set up the first halal butcher shop in Queens in New York City; Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a Yemeni activist who wants to use his coffee company, Port of Mokha, to offer a counter-narrative to the one of devastation caused by civil unrest.
Some of the recipes are traditional: Afghanistani kishmish panir, or cottage cheese with raisins; DRC’s pondu cassava leaf stew. Some celebrate street food: Egypt’s beef liver sandwiches; El Salvador’s pupusas or flatbreads filled with cabbage slaw. And some are communal, like the maghmour, a Lebanese eggplant-chickpea stew meant to be shared.
Food is political, in that it symbolises human dignity and visibility, says Hassan. She knows what it is like to be on the losing side of that fight.
A native of Mogadishu, she fled with her family when she was five, amid the civil war. After two years at the Dadaab refugee camp in Nairobi, her mother managed to find a way to send her to the US, where she would be raised by a family friend.
Her mother was never able to follow, and eventually moved to Oslo. When Hassan stayed with her there in 2014, it was the first time mother and daughter had lived in the same house in 21 years.
Through it all, Hassan says, she kept her mother with her, by learning to make the meals she used to make. “It became a way of keeping her voice, her lessons, her tenderness alive in me,” she says.
Her first cookbook, In Bibi’s Kitchen, recreated some of those recipes, alongside stories and recipes from grandmothers across eight African countries, and won a 2022 James Beard award. Since 2015, Hassan has also run Basbaas Somali Foods, an online platform that sources and sells sauces and condiments from Africa in the US.
After years of trying to reach out, in these ways, to others like her — people who never quite fit in anywhere after being displaced — comes Setting a Place for Us, a compilation of similar sorrows, as well as joys and rediscoveries, from some of the most troubled parts of our world.
“People are often surprised by the laughter, humour and joy in this book,” she says. “But I still remember, from my time in the Dadaab refugee camp, the sharing of pots, exchange of dry goods, and strangers feeding each other. That is part of the reason I wanted to do this: to challenge the bleak stereotypes of displacement, and nudge people to see the beauty, grace and love that exists there too.”
