Eating is an intimacy bound with language, family, and migration.
Travel far and near with fourteen gifted writers from immigrant and
refugee families as they share their flavorful, luminous stories.
Food can be a unifier and a healer, bringing people together across
generations and cultures. Sharing a meal often leads to sharing stories
and deepening our understanding of each other and our respective
histories and practices, global and local. Newcomers to the United
States bring their own culinary traditions and may re-create food
memories at home, introduce new friends and neighbors to their favorite
dishes, and explore comforting flavors and experiences of hospitality at
local restaurants, community gatherings, and spiritual ceremonies.
People coming to Minnesota from all over the globe must adapt to
different growing seasons and to the regional selections available at
corner stores and farmers markets. All of these experiences yield
stories worth sharing around Minnesota cook fires, circles, and tables.
In What We Hunger For, fourteen writers from refugee and immigrant
families write about their complicated, poignant, funny, difficult,
joyful, and ongoing relationships to food, cooking, and eating. They
journey to Algeria, to Thailand, to Uganda to soothe body and mind;
connect with generations past and present through rituals and recipes
handed down from parent to child; and savor the flavors of home, whether
creating familiar dishes in less-familiar places or coming to appreciate
ancestral wisdom translated into modern foodways.
Contributors: Valérie Déus, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Roy G. Guzmán, Lina
Jamoul, Simi Kang, May Lee-Yang, Ifrah Mansour, Ánh-Hoa Thị Nguyễn,
Zarlasht Niaz, Junauda Petrus-Nasah, Kou B. Thao, Michael Torres,
Saymoukda D. Vongsay, and Senah Yeboah-Sampong.
