The Last Sweet Bite: Stories and Recipes of Culinary Heritage Lost and Found

by Michael Shaikh

Overview

A powerful and heartwarming exploration of cuisine in conflict zones, highlighting the courageous persistence of people struggling to protect their food culture in the face of war, genocide, and violence.

“The Last Sweet Bite tells the powerful and personal stories of the heroic home cooks fighting to keep their food—and their identity—alive.”—José Andrés, founder of World Central Kitchen

War changes every part of human culture: art, education, music, politics. Why should food be any different? For nearly twenty years, Michael Shaikh’s job was investigating human rights abuses in conflict zones. Early on, he noticed how war not only changed the lives of victims and their societies, it also unexpectedly changed the way they ate, forcing people to alter their recipes or even stop cooking altogether, threatening the very survival of ancient dishes.

A groundbreaking combination of travel writing, memoir, and cookbook, The Last Sweet Bite uncovers how humanity’s appetite for violence shapes what’s on our plate. Animated by touching personal interviews, original reporting, and extraordinary recipes from modern-day conflict zones across the globe, Shaikh reveals the stories of how genocide, occupation, and civil war can disappear treasured recipes, but also introduces us to the extraordinary yet overlooked home cooks and human rights activists trying to save them. From a sprawling refugee camp in Bangladesh and a brutal civil war in Sri Lanka to the drug wars in the Andes and the enduring effects of America’s westward expansion, Shaikh highlights resilient diasporic communities refusing to let their culinary heritage become another casualty of war.

Much of what we eat today or buy in a market has been shaped by violence; in some form, someone’s history and politics is on the dinner table. The Last Sweet Bite aims to tell us how it got there. Weaving together histories of food, migration, human rights, and recipes, Shaikh shows us how reclaiming lost cuisines is not just a form of resistance and hope but also how cooking can be a strategy for survival during trying times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593442852
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/24/2025
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	17 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Michael Shaikh is a writer and human rights investigator who has worked for twenty years in areas marred by political crisis and armed conflict. He has worked at Human Rights Watch, International Crisis Group, the Center for Civilians in Conflict, the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the New York City Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice. Michael is on the board of Adi Magazine. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, he lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Author's Note

This is a book that celebrates food and the people who make it. But it is also a book about how violence changes our treasured food cultures. Most people I’ve written about in these pages felt safe and comfortable sharing the details of their lives and personalities; others did not. Yet they still wanted their stories told without putting them at greater risk. Therefore, I’ve occasionally changed names, dates, and locations, as well as other details, to give cover to people I’ve written about. We are talking about violence, after all, and some of the people you will meet are still at risk, even those in exile. For example, as recently as 2023, the Chinese government has been operating undeclared police stations in New York, London, Rome, Tokyo, and Toronto to harass and silence critics, such as the Uyghur activists you’ll meet later in this book. It’s not just the Chinese Communist Party that is guilty of this. Dozens of other governments have targeted their critics living abroad.

Second, I have limited the book to only a handful of cases where violence changed cuisines. I chose those that I thought were the clearest examples of the phenomenon to make the strongest case (at least to me) for why the world should be more proactive in protecting our culinary heritage during war. Moreover, I chose them because they involve people whom the world seems to have forgotten. There are, unfortunately, countless examples, old and new, of violence wreaking havoc on our food cultures. In fact, new wars broke out every few months while I was writing this: the civil wars in Myanmar and Sudan; the Russian invasion of Ukraine; the attacks on Israel by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran; and Israel’s assaults on Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. And each day, a ceasefire in Kashmir feels more fragile. Food traditions are at risk in all these conflicts. I wish I could have included many more chapters.

Finally, there are recipes at the end of each chapter. I endeavored to keep them as close as possible to the original versions provided to me. That said, I did make a few adjustments with the help of the skilled editors at Crown to adapt the recipes—some of which were developed in restaurants—for home kitchens.

Editorial Reviews

Michael Shaikh knows what our mothers and grandmothers have known for generations: that our recipes tell the stories of who we are so that we never forget. The Last Sweet Bite tells the powerful and personal stories of the heroic home cooks fighting to keep their food—and their identity—alive.”—José Andrés, World Central Kitchen

“An examination of the role political violence plays in shaping culinary traditions around the world . . . Shaikh travels the world to portray loss and recovery . . . A revealing inquiry at the intersection of food, culture, war, and power politics.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Shaikh’s sources speak to the human spirit encouraging persistence when hope is not in abundance.”—Booklist

“The power of food cannot be underestimated! Whether it’s children eating together at school or parents preserving a cherished family recipe in a refugee camp, The Last Sweet Bite beautifully demonstrates how a cuisine can not only hold communities together but also help them rebuild after a crisis.”—Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse and New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Simple Food

“Thanks to Michael Shaikh the world will now be able to further appreciate and amplify the food, culture and resilience of the Rohingya, Uyghur, Tamil, Quechua and many others buried behind the front page.”—Michael W. Twitty, James Beard Award-winning author of The Cooking Gene and Koshersoul

“Countless cultures around the world, past and present, endure the destruction of their identities and foodways. It’s important we learn how to celebrate and protect these diversities globally, by taking the time to learn from those cultures who have survived atrocities and attacks on their food systems.”—Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota and award-winning chef, author and founder of The Sioux Chef and NATIFS

“Michael Shaikh takes readers on a vivid journey of cultural and culinary discovery. With the same care and curiosity he employed as a human rights investigator, he uncovers how food nourishes not just the physical body but how it enlivens memories, shapes identities, and carries hope from one generation to the next.”—Rachel Martin, award-winning journalist and host of Wild Card on NPR

“A rare and brilliant examination of the abuses of state power against marginalized cultures through the destruction of their culinary heritage.”—Grace M. Cho, author of the National Book–award nominated Tastes Like War

“Through intimate stories of community and resistance, Michael Shaikh shows us how violence is erasing beloved food traditions and how people are risking it all to save them.”—Nathan Thrall, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

“Michael Shaikh . . . shows us how communities facing repression not only lose their political freedoms but also parts of their culture.”—Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch and author of Righting Wrongs

From the Publisher

2025-04-04
An examination of the role political violence plays in shaping culinary traditions around the world.

The Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains thrived on a diet that included bison—until, that is, the U.S. Army opened the door to the extermination of the species and the loss of that long interaction. Today, as international human rights activist Shaikh writes, Native American chefs and food historians are working to restore some of those traditions, as with one Pueblo entrepreneur who follows the traditional view that “people arewithinandpartof their ecosystem, not separate from it.” Food is often wielded as a weapon: Shaikh writes, for example, of the German right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party’s campaign to promote alcohol and pork with an ad campaign showing baby pigs and the slogan, “Islam? It doesn’t fit in with our cuisine.” In Xinjiang, Han Chinese impose pig raising on the Muslim Uyghur population, knowing full well, as Shaikh writes, that “it’s hard to exaggerate how much Uyghurs are repulsed by pigs.” Not just a cultural shibboleth, food speaks to who holds power and who doesn’t: As Shaikh writes of once-iconic Czech cuisine, when the Nazis arrived they feasted on meat, confining Czechs to “flour dumplings and thin, watery sauces.” There, too, Czech traditionalists are doing much to restore a cuisine battered by the Nazi invaders’ rule on the one hand and “decades of communist conformity” on the other. Shaikh travels the world to portray loss and recovery, documenting how Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are laboring to keep their food traditions from disappearing, how Czech farmers are rediscovering the virtues of “fresh Moravian asparagus, both the white and green varieties,” and more—with the bonus of recipes from his interlocutors.

A revealing inquiry at the intersection of food, culture, war, and power politics.

Kirkus Reviews