Briefly: This newsletter turned six years old last week. Thank you for being here. It has changed my life completely.
Michael Shaikh is a longtime human rights researcher and the author of the February Desk Book Club Selection, The Last Sweet Bite: Stories and Recipes of Culinary Heritage Lost and Found (notes here). We had a wonderful discussion with him about his book and the reasons it was important for him to chronicle the recipes from cultures experiencing war, genocide, and displacement. I thought this was an unfortunately timely discussion that I’d like to share with everyone.
I’d also generally recommend Raj Patel’s (author of Stuffed and Starved) recently launched newsletter, but especially this post that provides data connecting war, fossil fuels, and industrial food costs. Here is the conversation with Shaikh:
Michael Shaikh: “In the international human rights world, the term cultural genocide is kind of looked down upon. It's only if people are killed does kind of some sort of legal mechanism kick in, right? But attacks on culture are not necessarily penalized. You can blow up an old church or old mosque in war intentionally, and it's a war crime, but you're attacking a building. When you go after a culture—Raphael Lemkin, who was one of the fathers of the Genocide Convention, he originally envisioned cultural genocide as being the coup de gras of crimes. And it's gotten like when you talk about cultural genocide amongst human rights lawyers, they kind of scoff at you, but the thing is, is that culture is the game. If you control the culture, you control the economy, you control society, the social fabric and behavior of society, everything, the politics: Everything flows downhill from culture.
What's happening in the United States is the prime example of this. Donald Trump is not a political project; MAGA is not a political project: It is a cultural project, and he is trying to determine the direction of American culture, like many authoritarians do around the world. This is another thing that I'm constantly harping on: We’ve got to think bigger about genocide, and it gets into that kind of colonial mindset again, about the reason why cultural genocide—and not just colonial mind-set, this misogynistic mind-set about how the international legal system is set up.”
Members can access the full videos of every Salon: Anna Sulan Masing, Mayukh Sen, Carina del Valle Schorske, Layla Schlack, Pam Brunton, Jill Damatac, Anya von Bremzen, Alice Driver, “A Plant-Based Holiday,” “Is Cookbook Criticism Possible?” Anny Gaul
May & June Workshops +
a Preorder Discount
Newsletter Workshop 2.0 will take place on May 5 at 11 a.m. EST. The Self-Edit Workshop will take place on May 12 at 11 a.m. EST.
I’ve added a new workshop, titled Everything You Want to Know About Selling a Book, to happen on May 19 at 11 a.m. EST.
There will be another offering of the Food Essay on Tuesdays at 11 a.m. EST all throughout June. It is a five-week class on close reading with open discussion.
If you can’t make these workshops live, I always share the recordings and make myself available for questions after the fact.
For all of these, I’m offering a discount incentive if you’ve preordered On Eating: Upload your receipt to this form and I will share a discount code with you based on your membership tier: Members receive a $50 discount (up from the usual $25); Friends of the Desk receive a $75 discount; and non-members will receive a $25 discount. Upgrade or adjust your subscription at this page.
On Appetite, a Podcast
In anticipation of my forthcoming book On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites, I am talking to interesting folks about their own appetites and the origins of their food habits, pleasures, and beliefs.
For the second episode, I’m talking to Ashanté M. Reese: a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, co-editor of Black Food Matters and the author of Black Food Geographies and the forthcoming Gather: Black Food, Nourishment, and the Art of Togetherness.
Find the audio wherever you listen to podcasts or by reading this post on web. Here’s the Bookshop.org shop where you can find all guests’ books—past and future.
News & Events
I just found out via Beacon Press that my first book, No Meat Required, was a finalist for a 2024 PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers in the media and cultural studies category. Add it to the CV, darling!
I expanded on January’s “Monthly Menu” for EatingWell, writing about eating the same sandwich three days in a row and my philosophy of letting the city guide my eating rather than playing a hype game.
Signed preorder copies of On Eating are available from Kitchen Arts & Letters. Find all preorder links here—print, audio, and digital. Kirkus Reviews called it “a pleasure for foodies of all persuasions.”
Now, more bookstores—Now Serving in L.A., Omnivore in San Francisco, and Book Larder in Seattle, as well as Bookshop.org—are offering signed copies and recipe cards! Here are the details!
Desk Membership
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Friends of the Desk—$10 monthly, $30 quarterly, or $120 per year—receive all of the above, plus an annual 30-minute editorial consultation OR I’ll send you a specifically chosen book from my overstuffed library—just email me to claim.
The Desk Book Club & Salon Series
We’re reading Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live by Amber Husain. We will have the discussion with Amber on Tuesday, March 24, at 11 a.m. EST. Sign up here. Members will always join free and receive the full recording.
Recent farmers’ market fare.
Currently Reading
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