The Last Sweet Bite: Stories and Recipes of Culinary Heritage Lost and Found
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This extraordinary book blends memoir, reportage, and culinary history to explore how conflict, displacement, and oppression shape the way people cook—and whether they can continue to cook at all.
Michael Shaikh spent two decades investigating human rights abuses in war zones across the globe. Alongside stories of trauma and resilience, he began to notice another pattern: people clinging to the foods of their childhood, even when war had made the ingredients scarce or the act of cooking itself dangerous.
In many of the places Shaikh worked—refugee camps in Bangladesh, post-civil war Sri Lanka, and communities fractured by colonial violence—he found that the erasure of culinary traditions was often not accidental. Suppressing food culture, he argues, is a tool of control. And in this book, he helps some of the people he has met resist that control.
Told through personal interviews, historical reflection, and recipes that anchor memory to method, this is a deeply humane work that shows how preserving the ability to cook is not just about survival—it’s about dignity, resistance, and identity.
Hardcover. Color photographic insert.
