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Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, September 5th, and I'm Cynthia Connolly, director of programing here at the City Club.

And pleased to introduce today's forum, which is the Ibn Sina Society Forum at the City Club of Cleveland and part of our Authors in Conversation series.

One of the most underreported casualties of any war or conflict is culinary culture.

It's not just family recipes that might get lost.

It's also health, sustainability, and human rights.

Anthony Bourdain knew exactly what he was doing as he trucked the world to remind us all about the joy of food and its role in finding common ground and bridging divides by recognizing how important food is to our essential humanity.

You can see how the loss of culinary traditions lead to an erasure of culture and identity.

This is the terrain author and human rights investigator Michael Shaikh.

Our guest today explores in his new book, The Last Sweet Bite Stories and Recipes of Culinary Heritage.

Lost and found.

Raised in Cleveland in Karachi, Shaikh has worked for nearly two decades in areas marred by political crisis and armed conflict like Asia and the Middle East.

He has worked at the Human Rights Watch and International Crisis Group, the center for civilians in Conflict and the UN's office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, just to name a few.

Joining him on stage and moderating the conversation is chef and Marine Corps veteran Ben Roth, founder of Spice Kitchen and Bar and Spice Acres.

His award winning culinary talents and farming experience make him one of the most sought after local food authorities in Northeast Ohio, and their conversation today, we will hear more about the impact of conflict on the most essential of human traditions what we cook and how we nourish ourselves and our souls.

And about the inspiring home cooks, chefs and people just like you and me, who have defied odds to keep culinary traditions alive.

A reminder for our live stream and radio audience.

If you have a question during the Q&A portion of the forum, you can text it to (330)541-5794.

Again, that's (330)541-5794, and city club staff will try our best to work it into the program now.

Members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Mich Think.

Michael, it was awesome to meet you.

I loved our time that we spent just, like, chatting through the book.

And as I told you, sometimes food people don't read a lot of food books, right?

So when Dan asked me to do this, I was like, absolutely.

And I was like, I don't know if I want to read a food book.

And, and and of course, in true fashion, I procrastinated.

And as soon as I cracked it open, I was like, oh my God, these stories have so much depth, so much human ity, so much humility.

And it pivoted me off of thinking, oh, this is a food book.

This is actually not a food book.

So you're background in a lot of ways shaped this becoming a food book.

And I just thought, man, tell the people what you've seen, where you've been and how this kind of came to be.

All right.

Well, first, thanks to the city Club.

Thank you to all of you for coming.

And, Ben, just a plug for you.

Ten years ago, you catered my wife and I.

His wedding.

Thank you for your trust.

Thank you.

As well as my my sisters last year.

Oh, nice.

But we recently celebrated with a our 10th anniversary.

A few friends, and they still talk about our food at our wedding.

So thank you.

I'm honored.

Yeah.

So a little bit about me.

I, for a long time was a human rights investigator for organizations like Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group and the UN.

A lot of my job focused, initially on, documenting and investigating war crimes, mostly around civilian casualties in places like Afghanistan or Pakistan.

And I, helped to, do the initial investigations for the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar for the UN, in 20 1413 and 14.

I worked in places like Syria as well, Molly.

And a lot of, this book is based on that time.

In fact, there was a dinner that I had in Afghanistan.

And kind of, I want to say 2008 or 9, I had been in the country for about four years.

I've been working for Human Rights Watch.

My job there was documenting civilian casualties, both caused by NATO and the US, as well as the Taliban.

And I had nearly been blown up.

And a friend of mine investigating one of these, these these, one of these instances.

And a friend of mine kind of took me in for the weekend.

And, you know, we're going to see we're going to calm you down.

And he cooked me this incredible dinner, and his name was Tamim.

And Tamim is an Afghan.

And like many Afghans, had been a refugee many times in his life.

Here he, fled the Soviet invasion in 1979.

Went to Pakistan, went to Iran, later, went to the United Europe and then the United States, and had come back after the Americans, came to Afghanistan and, that rebuilding process was underway.

And Tamim had this incredible meal on the table.

And there were things I had never seen before.

I had been in the country and almost every province and had eaten all over the place, and there was just food I hadn't slept, food I hadn't seen.

I was kind of thrown.

I was really confused.

And I asked him if it was Afghan and it was kind of arrogant question if you think about it, how can you know a country's entire cuisine just in four years?

But to me, the reason I asked was if it was Afghan was because Tamim had been in all of these places in the world, and he's an incredible cook and brought it all.

I started brought it all together.

And this dish, this golden stew of chickpeas, it was so beautiful.

I'm like, is it Afghan?

He's like, no, it's not.

And in that moment, he started explaining to me that the reason I hadn't seen it before was because Afghans had taken a lot of their culinary knowledge with them when they had fled the wars, and people had been forgetting about the dishes, the old dishes.

Ingredients got too expensive because of the war, so people couldn't afford to make certain dishes like this.

And it brought us back to the reason why Afghanistan was at war in the first place.

And after that moment, I started really doing a lot of my investigations, over a meal.

Interviews over a meal when you're interviewing, a victim of a war crime or someone who's experienced genocide, you're you're usually asking them to recount the worst moments of their lives.

So I'd often do it over a meal to kind of break up the, the conversation, because it can get really intense and you can focus on something outside the violence for a few minutes.

And inevitably, the conversation would turn to the food and people had these would start telling me, like where?

Ask, where did you get this food?

Why did you choose this?

And they would start telling stories about how this ingredient was disappearing or how hard it was to get certain dishes.

And I just started asking everywhere I went, how is the violence changing the food?

And people had these incredible stories.

I would have people rip notebooks out of my hands and write down recipes to have me take them out of the war zone so they wouldn't be lost.

And it happened multiple times.

And I went back one day a few years ago to, like, get one of these recipes to cook it for some friends.

And I found notebooks like this with few recipes in the margin of like, oh my God.

And that's kind of how the book came to be.

I wanted to write a story.

I wanted to write stories about human rights that brought in a broader community, not just human rights activists and policymakers, but everyday people like ourselves to build bridges between communities that don't necessarily don't have connections between them and food.

Was that bridge?

And so I wanted to I intended to kind of write a cookbook, but I had all these recipes.

I'm like, well, I can't tell the stories about the people in the book.

And I said, well, what happened to them?

And I ended up writing these entire chapters around these recipes.

So that's the story of the book.

For those who haven't read it yet.

Great answer.

You know, as I opened the book, in true ADHD form, I just opened it to the middle, and, you know, see what's in there.

And I opened it to the chapter, of cooking with the coca leaf.

And as a student of the 90s and the just say no and the dare programing and all that, I was always fascinated by the war on drugs as a war on culture.

Yeah.

And what was most shocking and revealing to you, I'm interested in about the experience of being in Bolivia and cooking with the coca leaf.

That's a really great question.

And actually, that was one of my I had the most fun researching that chapter in a lot of ways.

And I okay, you see where you go and see where you go and take on.

I was very interested in, the war on drugs.

And I was very interested in its impact.

That type of violence on culinary traditions.

And I had read these stories about chefs in the Andes cooking with coca leaf, coca leaf, as many of you may know, is the, the, the the, the plant, in which cocaine alkaloid is derived to make cocaine.

It is a plant and a leaf that has for forever been a spiritual, and cultural, plant and ingredient for a lot of Andean peoples, primarily indigenous peoples in the Andes.

And it was only really, with kind of the Western gaze and on the Andes that cocaine became what it is today.

It wasn't cocaine is not not really a thing in these communities.

And chefs in the Andes, were cooking with coca leaf.

And I was reading these articles and I thought it was a bit of a gimmick, to be honest with you.

And I really just wanted to explore it.

And my wife and I went down to, Bolivia for a month or so and met some really incredible chefs like Marcia Taha, who I mentioned in the book, who were kind of who had been cooking with coca leaf at her restaurant.

Then, just to and it it kind of opened my eyes to one when she brought out the coca leaf for us to eat the first time, it was it was almost it was like deep fried and it was like a potato chip almost.

And it was placed in this brown butter that she had infused with coca leaf and had, like, stacked them in like it would look like a Stegosaurus, almost.

It was really great.

And and it and it was the first time I had eaten coca leaf.

And again, I had this kind of gimmicky thing and I was like, oh my God, is, you know, I'm eating the a drug and, you know, but it forced you to confront all those stereotypes right away.

And the moment I bit into it, I immediately thought of Curry Leaf, which is from South Asia.

I immediately thought of bay leaf, and I kind of immediately thought of macro lime leaf, which is used in Thai cooking.

And right then in there, all the stereotypes melted away.

And like you could see, it was like a really true awesome ingredient.

And it was more than just an ingredient for a lot of these chefs and the Indian and the Indian peoples, it was like a celebration of their own culture.

It was taking Bolivian culture in a new direction and away from the violence of the drug war.

And they were using coca leaf and cooking with it as a way to beat back these stereotypes as a form of political resistance against the US imposed drug war.

And it was just the most amazing thing, about how food became an act of resistance.

You know, I'd also like to point out in the book I pulled this line.

Studies also show the coca leaf is packed with essential minerals like calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, as well as vitamins A, B1, B2, B6, C, and E. Yeah, there are also critical nutrients such as fiber and protein.

So the idea of the war on drugs, which is equal to rule change, to recalibrate who is inside of and outside of that rule.

Right.

And these efforts always felt very exclusionary to me.

And reading it in your book, I was really visited with how the more connected to nature based societies are, the more inclusive we are.

How do you see today's war on immigrants being executed through a war on food?

That's a really great question.

Very timely.

One.

Let me come at this slightly broader and come narrow and, and get to your question.

One of the, when I was in Afghanistan and I had that, realization, that the violence was changing cuisine and started going around and talking about asking that question, how was the violence changing the cuisine and other, war zones?

I had been in while I, while I was asking that question, seeing how the food was being changed and people giving me these recipes, I saw how deeply personal the loss of these recipes were to people.

They were family recipes, right?

They're not necessarily recipes that are indicative of the entire culture.

I'm not trying to preserve an entire culture's recipe with this book at all.

It's, to show how important food is and if our food culture is as a language between generations and between people.

Our food cultures, our cuisines are territorial boundaries culturally and sometimes, even physical.

But where one culture begins and ends and I saw how important this was to so many people, and people lost a recipe.

It was like almost like a family member dying with tears in their eyes.

And that's why they gave me these recipes many, many times at the same time, I saw the UN spending millions of dollars protecting and rebuilding old churches, old minarets, spending money trying, spending millions, trying to reclaim stolen art from the Nazis still to this day.

And that that cultural protection and that endeavor is incredibly important for all of us.

But we were spending nothing on protecting and preserving our food cultures in times of war.

They just got we're getting erased.

And part of that, I think, has a lot to do with the when you think when we think about food and we think about how it's written today and we talk about it and what it also does erase is not just our cultures, but it races the role of women and girls and producing our food cultures.

Women and girls make our food culture hands down.

We can have feminist arguments about it.

And I agree with a lot of that's what this as a factual thing, our food, our food cultures have historically and forever been made by women and girls and still are in many ways.

And that history gets erased.

And so I wanted partially to bring this to the attention of the global community.

Like we need to spend as much attention and protection on our recipes and food protection, and also better protecting women and girls and more, because if we're very serious about protecting our food, we have to be very serious about protecting women and girls and I and there's a couple of ways this can happen.

And one is we were seeing where many women in the world girls spend most of their time is in the home and in the kitchen.

And we're seeing right now this phenomenon called domiciled domicile is this phenomenon.

It's a terrible phenomenon in war in which entire villages and towns and cities are flattened.

Think of Aleppo.

You can think of Gaza right now when you have homes destroyed on that scale.

Where is your food culture made?

Right?

It's like if you want if we want to better protect women and girls in our food culture, we need to better protect our homes and our villages and our towns where we come from.

And we need to outlaw that.

That needs to be an international crime on par with genocide.

And so that type of erasure is happening in different way.

That's a policy decision that has been made to exclude that type of crime from from the international law.

And we have policy decisions that are being made, not just here.

And we want to I want to talk about the United States, but just in Europe as well, and which are targeting the people that make our food cultures really interesting.

You know, the what's happening here in the United States, we talk about it in political terms and bipartisan and polarization terms.

But what is happening is really a cultural project.

It is an it is a it is rejigging and retooling American culture.

And it has real impacts on our food culture.

Ice agents are going after our farmers.

They're going after the people who work on farms.

They're going after people who work on vineyards.

They're going after the people that grow and pick and package our food.

These people that work in kitchens, in restaurants, here in Cleveland, in New York City, where I'm from, they make our food culture great, and they need to be better protected.

And we have to be more curious about what like about these people and their food.

Go to these restaurants, support them.

Call your congressman.

I know you bring a bring the next person up here a senator, a congressman.

Like what is going on?

You know, roast anyone.

You know, roast them.

I mean, it's.

Great.

You know, it's this has huge consequences, right?

And it's not just the the ice raids, right.

It's the meat, the the how.

We talk about our culture at museums is being affected.

Right?

But also are like we've just defunded snap right to feed low income Americans.

Like we are destroying programs that help Native Americans reclaim their cuisines.

Right.

And we have Congress just defunded that right.

Like it is destroying America's food culture.

And there is a health aspect of it, too.

You can look at what RFK Jr is doing, and we're going to have you screw your ideas on health and diet that we already have in this country, and that has an impact.

I mean, I'm not saying we're going to have a white supremacist cookbook anytime soon.

I don't, but we went too far off from that.

But it will like these things do rejigger and re retool culture.

And this is what this what this book talks about.

It can't happen here.

You had a chapter in the beginning of the book about the Soviet Union, Czech Republic and the line I was welded to was coffee, the fuel of Prague's cultural life.

That's where I draw the line.

You with coffee.

Oh.

I'm sorry.

Disappeared because of high import costs, but also because of the Nazi cult.

Viewed caffeine as an unhealthy evil that could poison the Aryan race.

Yeah.

You in the green room?

We were talking about the parallels between what happened in Prague and what's happening in the United States.

Now, let me just give a minute or three on that.

Yeah, I, I would, the Czech Republic chapter is it's something I've been thinking a lot about.

It's the first chapter in the book, and it's, a chapter that looks at how the Soviet occupations, how the communists tried to kill Czech cuisine, and how they tried to do that, was forcing everyone to cook from the same cookbook they had.

They have they had the Communist Cookbook.

I got a copy of it at home and and and Brooklyn and it's a gigantic tome.

It's like it's a leaden thing, like, I mean, if it fell, I need to die like it's that big communism or the book for both of them.

Okay.

Yeah.

But it goes back a little further because, and in many ways it's kind of interesting.

We're talking about the Czech Republic here because, Cleveland and Pittsburgh in the Midwest was where the idea of the first independent Czechoslovak Republic was birthed.

Yeah, it was here in Cleveland and in Pittsburgh.

There was a Cleveland agreement and the Pittsburgh agreement, which kind of, finalized it.

But the and that, after those agreements are signed, the Czech Republic, the first Czechoslovak Republic was like the high watermark of Czech cuisine.

And Prague at that time, between 1918 and 1938, was one of like the best places to eat in Europe.

It was on par with Paris, you know, and Vienna.

And people would go all around from all over Europe and eat there.

It was a fantastic place.

And, you know, these gigantic kind of ballroom style restaurants.

And there's champagne glasses, like, clinking everywhere and awesome food.

They were using gnocchi in ways that they had.

That one writer said to me, I wrote that before the Italians ever kind of thought about, you know, that's how kind of creative Czech cooks were at that time.

Elizabeth Smith, she wrote a fantastic article about it.

But the Nazis, you know, when the Nazis, when they took over the Czech Republic, or Czechoslovakia and divided it really did did a lot of damage, you can imagine, to Czech cuisine.

They kicked out a they, deported a lot of Jews.

Killed a lot of them.

Had two different menus for Czechs and Germans.

Obviously, the Germans had a much better menu in restaurants than Czechs had, and it just created this downward spiral of Czech cuisine.

And then the communists, took over after World War two and incredible amounts of Soviet influence and, a process called collectivization, in which they took private farms and collectivized them to, homogenize the cuisine in a lot of ways and homogenize, farming practices.

And what was was grown.

So a lot of, like, interesting things disappeared, like asparagus, you know, it just wasn't it was seen as bourgeoisie food.

So they didn't eat it.

You know, pork was introduced because it was are more pigs are raised.

It was cheaper than cattle.

So kind of beef declined or beef production cleaned.

Then there was this period in the 1960s where kind of there was this opening of, kind of Czech politics and culture.

This is the era of like Milan Kundera and of, and Milos Forman where they kind of got their start, these, you know, movie producers and great Czech writers that we all, we all read in movies you watched.

And then in 68, in Moscow, kind of like, you know, enough is enough.

These checks are getting out of control a little, getting a little too liberal.

And they rolled in the tanks and quashed everything and really tried to flatten the culture and homogenize it in such a way that everyone kind of eight and looked the same.

And to your point about this and why I think about this, because I live in a city, I live in New York, and I think about what's happening in Washington DC.

I think about Chicago, I think about L.A. You know, it it we're waiting for the National Guard.

Right.

We're bracing for that kind of rolling into our towns and and and that's in the context of this kind of cultural project that I see happening coming out of Washington.

Right.

Like this conformity that is being forced on us right now.

Like we must think the same.

We can't criticize a dear leader.

You know, it's the the the museums.

I'll have to say the same thing.

They can't criticize and they can't recognize the past.

Let not.

I'm not talking about criticizing the past.

Recognizing the truth of the past.

Right.

Not being able to protest.

Speak your mind right.

So I do see that conformity of those of the years, the checks we talk about and the oppression of that and it wasn't, you know, in the Czech Republic between 68 and 90 and 1989, when the Velvet Revolution, happened and the, the communist, the push back it wasn't it wasn't a it was violent but not an it wasn't, it wasn't kind of Gaza violent, which was in Baghdad violent.

The way that we think about well, our we're all calibrated unfortunately to violence.

It was kind of this low hum of everyday people being picked off the street, thrown into prisons, beaten, tortured, the conformity, the monotony.

You can't underestimate the violence of monotony in your food and your life and that that's what kind of happened.

And I, I see it's not a perfect analogy, but I see the contours of that, at least in our in our big American cities, which, you know, because of freedom, because of freedom of politics, we we have voted for a party or a mayor or people who just come from another party have a different opinion.

And that's why, you know, the National Guard might be rolled in, just like the Soviet tanks are rolled into Prague in 1968 because people have different opinions.

Interesting.

You know, on the heels of that, I kind of shifted on my questioning.

But I feel people have indigenous roots and dark skin tones tiptoeing through a very sharp, masculine culture today, desperately seeking connections with the divine feminine and the roots of natural systems.

And I see culinary as a feminine art, if you will.

And I think you attributed a lot of where food comes from.

And who cares for food, as in the whole in the holding hands of the mothers and, daughters of the world.

One of the quotes, by chef Ray Naranjo written around.

Yeah, from the Pueblo nations, people are written are within and part of their ecosystem, not separate from it.

And then chef Ray referred to amaranth as her not in a gender plate, but out of respect.

So in the context of this sharp, masculine society that we're walking through right now, in which of these cultural and culinary immersions did you feel the most respect and connection to the feminine nature of this planet?

Oh, that's a really good question.

Yeah.

I mean, I would say in Bolivia and as well as within the Pueblo nations, I was fortunate enough to, to, to be invited into.

And I think because both of those chapters really, I was able and given permission to tell stories about indigenous peoples and families and nations, and that and you quickly learn that, the world is not divided into plants and animals.

It's divided.

If there is a division, it's very blurry between the human and non-human world.

And so there is a natural respect in organic respect for not just humans, but the landscapes.

The landscapes are imbued with the spirituality, with a being, with the politics.

Plants and animals are the same.

They're talked about as ancestors, they're talked about as relatives.

And it creates a respect for where you live and how you live, and ideas that we now talk about as that are fashionable.

Sustainability.

Right.

These are old, old ideas, that Western culture has departed from.

And I think it would behoove us to go ask for permission to learn from them again about things, about how to understand the world, not necessarily life as a whole, as linear and, but maybe circular.

And I think that, you know, that drives a lot, a little bit with, with the way that kind of we're starting to think about our lives and climate change now, and thinking about the planet in a more holistic way and how we are act within it.

So I do I think, you know, those.

Those two chapters and the people that I met researching them, I think were the clearest in terms of both of, you know, talking about plants, using pronouns, the feminine and the femininity.

At around amaranth, I refer to amaranth as a her, too, because I've spent so much time with her that I kind of feel like I know her right.

Like we grow so much of it on our balcony.

Like it's we have it has blown.

I have seeds that are blown into, like, the brown to the apartments behind us and kind of lodged themselves in the brick.

And there's this big amaranth plant growing out of.

So, but don't tell anybody that that's its big field.

But anyway, yeah.

So it's like I, I've developed my own relation to that because of this.

So I think because of that.

But they've also taught me a lot of lessons as well.

Like, and I, you know, just go back to the Czech Republic a little bit.

This is going the, the, the Czechs have, you know, it's been 20 or 20 some odd years since the Velvet Revolution, and they're still kind of trying to relearn, what their cuisine was like before the Nazis rolled in.

Right.

What it was like in the, in the First Republic, there is this incredible curiosity amongst a lot of chefs right now there and Prague.

In some ways, there are some restaurants that I've eaten in Prague that are some of the best in the world.

Right.

I think Alma in Prague is one of it's one of my favorite restaurants.

I think, it's this other beautiful restaurant in Prague, I think has some of the best food in Europe.

Maybe.

Yeah.

It's wonderful.

But that curiosity, these chefs to go back, it's kind of this back to the future, this kind of archeology, this archeology.

Of food.

And they're learning.

They're really curious.

And I and I hold on to that lesson about keeping that kind of curiosity.

And then I look at what I've learned from people like Marion Naranjo, who is Chef Rey's mother, and the people, the Santa Clara Pueblo, and other, indigenous chefs and activists like Sean Sherman up in Minneapolis, Brian Yazzie, Kilo Domingo, in Hawaii, these really wonderful chefs like, are rebuilding their food traditions almost from scratch after several hundred years of colonial domination.

And, you know, we talked about the the big, beautiful Bill and how it stripped out snap.

It also, I think has or there is an effort to undermine some of the, programs that were federal or federal programs that were supporting indigenous countries for growing their own, growing or sourcing their own food or culturally relevant food.

And that's being undermined.

And they're kind of in this face of abandonment, which, you know, indigenous peoples in North America have dealt with, unfortunately, their entire since their entire relationship with the West, like there is this persistence to survive, there is this persistence to get through it.

And I like that word persistence better than resilience, because resilience is kind of like a you can call someone resilient.

And this kind of like, well, that community over there is the only they use.

We use resilience about victims of Hurricane Katrina to kind of leave them by the wayside because they could fend for themselves.

They were resilient.

And I say, I see this with the UN, too.

They talk about refugee communities as, oh, they're resilient.

They can kind of fend for themselves.

So we don't need to pay enough to support them with good food.

So I kind of I don't use it.

Well, I thought persistence is persistence.

There's there's activity.

There's intelligence is thoughtfulness to it.

And that kind of persistence that I see within the Pueblo nations, that I was fortunate enough to be invited into other indigenous communities in Bolivia.

And I see kind of that curiosity, the checks and the persistence of the pueblos.

Like, that's kind of what keeps me going.

And the lessons I've taken when I look at what's kind of what's happening to our country.

And so, like, that's one of the things I would love for you guys to take away are those two words like curiosity and persistence.

Like, be curious about what's happening to our food systems here.

Be curious what's happening to the people that are producing our food and making our food and delivering our food.

And, you know, there's lessons about persistence.

We just have to fight and keep moving forward.

The line I think that, underlines that the most, which I have already pulled for this, is, from the chapter Eating the Atomic bomb.

There is no alternative to justice.

Yeah.

The lab has to take responsibility for what it has done.

Talking about the lab at Los Alamos where atomic bomb testing was done, for the desecration of our bodies and our land.

But we can't wait forever for it to clean up its mess.

This place is our church, and it always will be.

We must do what we can now.

I think that's awesome.

Like, it's a persistence is like, these things have thousand year half lives, but somebody has to grow spinach now, you know.

And it's it's it's important.

Yeah.

All right.

I got to do the, the, question quote here.

We're about to begin the audience Q&A.

Okay.

For those, just joining our live stream and radio audience, I'm Ben Levine Roth, chef and founder of Splice Hospitality Group.

I'm moderating today's conversation.

Joining me on stage is Michael Schaake, writer, human rights activist, and author of The Last Sweet Bite Stories and Recipes of Culinary Heritage, Lost and Found.

We welcome questions from everyone City Club members, guests and those joining our live stream at City club.org or live radio broadcast at 89.7.

You idea stream public media.

If you'd like to text a question for Michael, please text it to (330)541-5794.

That's (330)541-5794 and city club staff will try to work it into the program.

First question please.

Could you please give me an example of how food can bring people together who ordinarily would not like each other?

Sort of an icebreaker?

Example of food.

Not.

Well, I'll tell you where is the story that my mom and dad should probably plug their ears.

Say I have.

Two people probably shouldn't be brought together as me in the Taliban.

I was briefly held by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

And I will tell you that, it opened my eyes to.

How culture is ingrained.

The Taliban aren't a terrible organization, but they also these men were Pashtun.

They were ethnic Pashtuns.

One of the group, from Afghanistan and Pashtuns and South Asians, generally Afghans are known for their hospitality.

Right.

There is this it's kind of ingrained.

It's a habit.

And it was a really awkward moment to be in the presence of people that probably wanted to kill me, but fed me, and they fed me a really fantastic meal.

I don't know if it was my what was going to be my last meal or not, but but it was a really spectacular Afghan meal.

And, it was like, I'm like, oh my God.

Like, they can't stop being pashtu.

They can't stop being Afghan.

Like they're like like that.

Was it like it was this.

It was it was so stark of this, like moment of fear, but yet like, I was like their guest at the same time.

So, that's this is weird as weird anecdote I think you're trying to get at, a broader thing about kind of bringing enemies together to eat.

I, I haven't seen that personally, like enemies eating together.

And then something magical happens afterwards.

But I don't discount the power of food to be able to do that.

My question for you is, since you have traveled Rohingya and Serbian, all of those places, what is your take on Gaza?

Is that really a genocide, or is that one of the worst human disaster that we are going through?

A Gaza is a genocide, in my opinion.

And when it comes to food, I mean, this is this is the biggest food story happening right now.

We are seeing a population.

We're seeing a nation and another nation withholding food in order to weaken, if not erase them, erase the Gazans.

And let's be clear, the State of Israel has used food and Palestinians food traditions against them for a very long time.

It has attacked the military, has attacked orchards.

It has prevented fishermen from going out to sea.

Recently I listened to, a Palestinian survivor talk about how the Israeli government was preventing food with seeds from getting into the Palestinian territories and now think about that.

Food with seeds.

That's the ability to grow your own food.

And seeds also carry memory.

And so if you can't do that, and that was really powerful and I heard that.

But if you start taking away the Gazans ability to fish, they have been seafaring people forever.

Like you destroy that.

You start destroying those people.

And I think, you know, we're looking at starvation.

That is a weapon of war.

I also think that we need to look at the flip side of that.

And that forcing people to eat foods that are not of their, of their own.

And right now we're seeing this in western China, in Xinjiang, with the Chinese Communist Party forcing the Uighurs, who are of Islamic heritage, to eat pork and drink alcohol, in order to adjust their food tastes.

They're doing very much what the Canadians, the Australians and the Americans have done in our earlier phases of our country stealing children from their families, taking them, putting in boarding schools very far away, forcing them to speak another language and eat other foods in order to erase their weaker heritage.

And so we're seeing that not just in using food as a as starvation, as a weapon of war, but forcing people to eat different foods as a weapon of war.

Hi, my name is Jennifer Brash.

I was a U.S. diplomat for 30 years.

Thank you.

In war, in conflict zones in the Balkans.

Oh, wow.

And so I was in Sarajevo in 1992, where one of my new friends happens to be from.

And, we were there after the city had been under siege for two years, was under siege for another two years, four years total.

So this Bosnians used to smuggle meat under the tarmac, and they'd get it to one little kiosk at an open air place.

And in our embassy, we were each delegated one person a week to go to that kiosk and pick up some meat, dodging sniper fire.

So I remember when it was my turn, and, it was one of the most terrifying and stupid things I've ever done.

Running from door to door, you know, trying to run over to this kiosk to pick up this meat so we could have our Sunday picnic.

Well, I did it, and I survived and continue to eat.

But when I got back to the embassy, I was a hero.

You know, I brought back the meat for that day.

And I'm thinking, as we look at the immigrants and refugees, just look at Cleveland.

They've been doing that for years, trying to be a hero every day of their lives, just to bring food home safely and risking their lives to do it.

So thank you very much for this book that you've clearly written just for me.

But it's it's a wonderful book.

I'll write the Bosnia chapter later.

Please.

But here in Cleveland, what can we do to embrace that immigrant and refugee culture, to have them share with us their recipes, their customs, their traditions?

Global Cleveland, I think, is here.

I think there are a lot of organizations that do work to assimilate refugees and immigrants into our culture.

Of course, they're facing enormous pressure not to let them in.

But do you have any suggestions about what we can do locally to, embrace our immigrants and refugees and help them to keep their, culinary culture alive?

Sure.

I think, I mean, I grew up in Cleveland, and I am a proud New Yorker, but I was you proud to be from this town.

And I think Cleveland has done a has embraced its immigrant community pretty well.

And it's something that makes Cleveland what it is.

I think first and foremost, if I had if I just had to keep it very simple is just make sure that they have, there's a legal defense fund for them, right?

When they get, when they get picked up that they have lawyers and there's someone, something keeping an eye on what's going on.

I'm sure I'm not very familiar with this, that landscape here in Cleveland and, and the organizations doing that.

But if Ice officials are waiting outside of courthouses or waiting outside of restaurants or waiting outside the Home Depots or the Lowe's, right.

And they get picked up, have eyes on where they're going and make sure they have a lawyer and someone can defend them.

my question is how did you choose or how did you narrow down to the six countries that you talked about in the book and what countries will be in the sequel?

Two good questions.

So the first, the first one about how did I choose the countries in this book?

It was mainly of the places that I had lived and worked already.

So I had all those relationships, and places that I had looked at from a strictly have, human rights do like I had a that's like, like a legal human rights perspective.

Right?

I was doing my job as a human rights investigator, but I wanted to look at a broader issue around human rights, around food.

And so I went back to those communities where I already had those relationships so I could do it a little bit faster.

You're on a timeline when you sell a book, and you got to meet the deadlines.

So I chose the ones that I was most familiar with also that were, that were, that were connected to me, the ones in which I had already had some recipes and I had some familiarity with it that spoke to me, like the Bolivia chapter was one that I had put in because I was just I was curious about it.

There were a few chapters that got left out.

And I, I like I lose sleep over it.

I wish I had South Africa, Syria.

And I really want to do Cambodia.

Like, I think if there was one is a great story, tragic story.

But if there is one conflict that is very much like that, that was about food.

Like food was the starvation was the central component of the Cambodian genocide.

And today what is happening?

And pen and and Bong, I was just there in March and it is incredible.

The food is outstanding.

And you have young chefs that are just so interested in learning what the older generations knew and what had been lost and trying to recreate it.

And there's, there's a wonderful chef in California.

I, night young, I think her name is.

I could get it wrong, but I've she's got a new cookbook that has just come out, and she had.

I saw her, on Netflix recently, but like these what's happening in the diaspora here with the Cambodian diaspora also, and in Lowell, Massachusetts?

I just think there's one that's a wonderful story.

And Irish I wish I had was able to write about it.

And so, yeah, if I could get an opportunity to, to add those in, I would there's a lot of reasons why I couldn't add them.

Book two.

I was I would love to, I would love to write about this.

I would like to go deeper into.

What it about statelessness and what that and how that impacts our ability to form and create and move cultures forward.

There are so many people in this world who have, don't have citizenship that are stateless, and we we don't.

We often forget how much of our civil and political rights and economic rights derive from our citizenship and legal status.

And when that is taken away, what happens?

And I think you look at the Rohingya chapter a little bit, you get a sense of that.

And I think, you know, in the moment we're living in we're talking about citizenship in this country in a way that I never thought we would be.

When we're talking about naturalizing people who have been citizens in here for generations, you know, like we are now, we're having this conversation now for the rest of our lives.

And I think, you know, I would like to talk to my fellow Americans about the different experiences of statelessness around the world and what it means and how we can cope with it, and citizenship issues and the different models for how people deal with it.

I just think it's a very fascinating thing about the link between not having a state, not having a citizenship, and how you can keep your food cultures and other forms of culture alive.

On the heels of that, I think it's an important thing to mention that, and from a veteran's perspective, a lot of the forces that the current administration is relying on to do this dirty work of isolating people and terrifying people are made up of a large percentage of non-citizen sons that are in the military to gain citizenship.

Right now, they're sending these people into their own neighborhoods to point guns into their home streets.

And that's not going to work out very well for very long.

So I just wanted to drop that in my opinion.

But hello.

This question is going to circle back actually to your mental health.

I've been listening, like many people here, for 45 minutes or so, and I am viscerally moved emotional.

I have not read the book yet.

I have not read the book yet, so I don't even know if I'm going to be able to handle it.

But my question to you is when you lay your head at night on your pillow and you think about people that you've met, some of these people I'm sure are in, places where you can shoot them an email or you can communicate with them.

Maybe you stay in touch with them.

But based upon your wealth of work, your body of work, prior to being an author, I'm guessing that there are people that you have encountered whose stories live with you, that are very difficult to reconcile.

Maybe you don't even know what happened to those people.

So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you handle that, how you reconcile that with yourself and, you know, just share maybe some of your coping mechanisms that you've had to develop in unearthing some of these really difficult topics.

As you wrote, what I think is an extremely important and positive book for all of us to read.

Thank you for that question.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So just I know we're talking about some heavy stuff, but there's really like it's a, it's it's heavy and light at the same time.

I really like the recipes are wonderful.

I really like and it really adds a lot of texture to the stories.

You hear it.

In some ways, I wish I had put the recipes first and then you get the the story rather than.

But anyway, yeah, it's it's, you know, I had some really fantastic mentors, and my professional line of work, that we're all constantly watching out for me and making sure that I wasn't putting myself in too dangerous of, spots.

But in terms of, like, you always carry those people with you.

I mean, I think about that.

I think about the first interviews that I ever did in Afghanistan, I can tell you all their names, but, yeah, it's.

It's harrowing.

Star Trek, but, you know, they the fact that I was talking to them, they survived, you know, so there was there is and there is a darkness and a light as well.

But you never, you know, you don't you don't lose them.

And, you know, and I remember talking to my dad about this, my dad's a cardiologist, and and he, people died and, and, and, Margie's room tables and, like, how do you deal with this?

Like, you always deal with it, you know?

But you can't save everybody.

And my my job wasn't to save people, so it's like, it's not as gravitational as my father's line of work or my brother's, my mother's and my mother and sister and my aunt to our emergency room.

Nurses like that kind of stuff.

Like, my job was a little, you know, it wasn't as intense as that, but, you know, you came across that stuff, and so they it lives with you.

But I had good bosses who watch out for mental health.

And I think most importantly, like, I had a really great family, who was, you know, they're always up my business, so I'm making sure of it.

My wife comes from a very similar line of work and is very even keeled.

So we watched out for each other like, I also like I, I was around a lot of people, and war zones, war correspondents and others and my fellow human rights colleagues who, who dealt with us in unhealthy ways, because it was one of the only ways to cope with it, you know, drugs, alcohol, other ways.

I, I didn't I it just it wasn't just the way I coped with it in other ways.

And I. Yeah.

I, it's not, all of those things.

I mean, they're all a mix of all all of that.

I just had never.

I never medicated myself in that way.

I felt that I wanted to sometimes, but I didn't need to.

And yeah, it's a very tough question.

I don't have a very clean answer to all of it except that, you know, it's a combination of very good people that watched out for me in a good family and just trying to keep my own, you know, head, you know, screwe Michael Shaikh and Ben Bebenroth please.

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Today's forum is part of the City Club's Authors and Conversation series, in partnership with Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and the Cuyahoga County Public Library.

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The City Club would also like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by the guests of Playhouse Square.

Lake Ridge Academy and the Sheikh Gary families.

Thank you all for being here today.

And coming up next week at the City Club on Thursday, September 11th, we will mark Ohio Space Week in partnership with the Great Lakes Science Center and welcome not just one, but two NASA astronauts.

Euclid, Ohio native Sunita Williams recently returned from a lengthy nine month stay aboard the International Space Station, and she'll be joined by NASA astronaut Doug Wheelock.

It's a big homecoming kind of thing we got this month.

I think they will discuss leadership, perseverance and the importance of space exploration today.

Thank you once again to Michael and Ben and to our members and friends at the City Club.

I'm Cynthia Connolly, and this form is now adjourned.

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