News from Iran today is dominated by war: airstrikes, retaliation, missiles, and the threat of a widening regional conflict. In recent weeks the United States and Israel have launched attacks on Iranian targets, while Iran has responded with missile strikes across the region, escalating a confrontation that has already caused significant destruction and loss of life.

When a country appears in headlines this way, it is easy for the place itself to become flattened into a story of conflict. Yet Iran is also a country of extraordinary cultural depth: poetry, architecture, gardens, hospitality, and one of the most beautiful food traditions in the world. The people I have met from Iran carry that generosity with them, and their cuisine expresses it better than almost anything else.

Persian cooking is built on balance and patience. Herbs, sour fruit, saffron, nuts, and rice appear again and again, layered carefully rather than loudly. Rice, in particular, sits at the centre of the table. But rice did not originate there. It travelled west from China along the routes of merchants, migrants, and conquerors, eventually reaching Persia where it entered a landscape shaped by ingenious irrigation.

Ancient Persian engineers developed the qanat system more than 2,500 years ago: underground channels that carried water from aquifers across dry land. A qanat is a gently sloping tunnel, sometimes stretching for kilometres, punctuated by vertical shafts used for maintenance and ventilation. Gravity moves the water slowly through the system, allowing agriculture to exist in landscapes that would otherwise be desert. These networks sustained towns, crops, and entire empires. Like the rice paddies of China, they required cooperation and careful management of scarce water.

In places where irrigation made it possible, along the Caspian coast and in parts of Khuzestan, rice became part of Persian agriculture. Because water was precious, rice also came to signal refinement. Persian cooks transformed it into something elegant rather than simply filling.

At the Safavid court in Isfahan, recently damaged by US-Israeli bombing, rice became spectacle. Banquets unfolded in palaces and gardens where dishes were arranged with architectural care. Pilafs glittered with barberries, pistachios, saffron, and pomegranate seeds. Serving rice in abundance demonstrated the Shah’s ability to command labour, water, and land. Politics was translated into food.

But the most dramatic expression of Persian rice culture is tahdig.

Tahdig, pronounced tah-deeg, literally means “bottom of the pot” in Persian/Farsi. It refers to a beautiful, pan-fried Persian rice that is fluffy and buttery on the inside with a perfectly golden crust.

For Iranians that crispy crust at the bottom of the pot is the prize of the meal.

Making it requires patience and nerve. The rice is rinsed until the water runs clear, parboiled, then piled back into the pot over butter and saffron, sometimes yogurt. A cloth is wrapped under the lid to trap the steam. The rice forms a tall cone while the heat slowly works on the bottom layer, transforming it into a golden crust.

And then comes the moment.

The pot is lifted from the stove. Everyone watches. There is always a pause, because what happens next matters. The platter is placed over the pot and the cook flips the whole thing in one decisive movement. For a second nothing happens. Then, if the heat, timing, and luck have aligned, the pot lifts away and the tahdig slides out intact: a perfect, burnished disc, crisp and fragrant, the colour of toasted saffron.

There is always a small gasp then hands reach in immediately.

Tahdig is more than texture. It is performance, generosity, and pride. Who gets the first piece matters. To serve it generously is to show hospitality; to hoard it would be unthinkable.

If you want to understand Iranian food beyond the headlines, a wonderful place to begin is The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen by the brilliant Yasmin Khan. The book has been described as a love letter to Iran’s people and its rich culinary traditions, capturing the scents, stories, and generosity of Persian kitchens.

In times when Iran is spoken about mostly in the language of conflict, its food reminds us of something quieter and older: a culture built around beauty, hospitality, and the shared pleasure of a meal.

Wars are usually reported through the language of strategy. News coverage follows missile strikes, air defence systems, and military targets. Analysts debate escalation, deterrence, and regional stability. But wars are lived very differently by the people caught inside them. For them, war is not about strategy. It is about homes destroyed, families separated, water and electricity failing, work disappearing overnight, and borders suddenly closing. It is about the slow collapse of the ordinary routines that make life possible.

The current war involving Iran is no exception.

As the United States and Israel carry out a sustained campaign of air and missile strikes against Iran, these human consequences are unfolding across the country. And among those most exposed to them are millions of Afghan refugees and migrants who have been living in Iran for years, often quietly and precariously, far from the headlines

For decades, Iran has been one of the largest hosts of displaced Afghans anywhere in the world. Successive waves of conflict in Afghanistan - from the Soviet invasion in 1979 to civil war, international intervention, and Taliban rule - pushed millions across the border. Many arrived believing they would stay briefly until conditions at home improved. Instead they built lives that stretched across years and sometimes generations. Children were born, livelihoods were created, and communities formed in cities and towns across Iran.

Yet for most Afghans, life in Iran has never been fully secure. My research on the experiences of Afghans in Iran has shown that many live with temporary documentation or without legal status altogether. Access to education, healthcare, and stable employment can be limited, and the possibility of deportation has long shaped everyday life. In research conducted with Afghans who later attempted to reach Europe, many people described living in a condition of permanent uncertainty: able to survive in Iran, but rarely able to plan a long-term future there.

To make things worse, deportations of Afghans from Iran have increased sharply over the last two years. In 2024, roughly 750,000 Afghans were deported from the country. By 2025 the scale had grown dramatically, with around 1.8 million Afghans expelled during large-scale deportation campaigns. At times the pace has been extraordinary. Humanitarian agencies have recorded days in which tens of thousands of people crossed the border back into Afghanistan as deportation drives intensified.

These deportations are taking place in a climate of rising hostility toward Afghan migrants. In moments of national crisis migrants often become convenient scapegoats, blamed for social and economic pressures that have far more complex causes. Afghan racism in Iran has long been widespread, both socially and institutionally. Reporting from inside Iran has documented how Afghans are increasingly portrayed as economic burdens or security threats, particularly during periods of political tension, including after the 12 day war when the US and Israel attacked Iranian nuclear and military sites in 2025. Afghans living in Iran were accused of everything from transporting and piloting drones to intelligence-gathering and planting bombs, with state-run media and X accounts even running unverified reports of Afghans “confessing” to being Israeli Mossad agents.

Afghans across the wider region are also facing pressure from multiple directions. Pakistan has launched its own large-scale deportation campaign targeting undocumented Afghans. Since late 2023, more than 1.7 million people have been forced to leave the country. Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have also deteriorated, with cross-border clashes and airstrikes contributing to instability along the frontier.

As the current conflict escalates, there are reports of thousands of Afghans leaving Iran for Afghanistan every day. A striking proportion of those forced to leave are children. Estimates suggest that roughly a quarter of those deported are under the age of eighteen. This means that hundreds of thousands of children are being uprooted, many after spending most or all of their lives in Iran.

For these families, Afghanistan is not necessarily a homecoming. It is another displacement.

Taken together, these developments are closing off the spaces where Afghans have historically sought refuge or work. For decades many Afghan families survived through a kind of regional mobility, moving between Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan depending on opportunities for work or safety. That fragile system is now breaking down as borders tighten and deportations accelerate.

Afghanistan itself offers few viable alternatives. The country remains in the midst of a severe humanitarian crisis and is struggling to absorb the growing numbers of people being forced back across its borders.

Yet deportation rarely ends migration. More often it simply redirects it.

Afghans have consistently been among the largest groups seeking asylum in Europe over the past decade. What is often overlooked in European debates is that many of these journeys do not begin in Afghanistan itself but after years spent living in neighbouring countries such as Iran. When people who have built lives there suddenly face deportation, discrimination, or economic collapse, migration can become the only remaining option.

This reality complicates the way migration is often discussed in Europe. Afghan arrivals are frequently portrayed as coming directly from Afghanistan. In practice, many have already spent years, sometimes most of their lives, elsewhere before deciding to move onward. Policies that increase insecurity in neighbouring host countries therefore do not necessarily reduce migration. In many cases they simply push people further along the route.

The war in Iran risks intensifying this pattern.

Military conflict does not only destroy buildings and infrastructure. It reshapes economies, alters political priorities, and heightens pressures on those already living in precarious conditions. For the millions of Afghans living in Iran today, these pressures are accumulating rapidly. And as they do, the consequences will not remain confined within Iran’s borders. They will move with the people whose lives are once again being pushed into uncertainty, people who have already spent years navigating the fragile spaces between safety and exclusion.

For many Afghans in Iran, the war is not simply a geopolitical confrontation unfolding in distant headlines. It is another moment when the fragile ground beneath their lives begins to shift again. Work disappears. Suspicion grows. Deportations accelerate. Families who have spent years building a life suddenly find themselves packing what they can carry and crossing borders once more.

And when they move, the consequences of this war will move with them, across the region, and often far beyond it.

For people who have already spent years navigating the narrow space between survival and exclusion, the choices are painfully familiar.

Once again, they find themselves between a rock and a hard place.

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Last year in Salvador, I encountered the work of Ayrson Heráclito at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Bahia. As the first capital of colonial Brazil and a central port in the transatlantic slave trade, Salvador remains one of the most visibly Afro-Brazilian cities in the Americas. Its churches, terreiros, markets, and kitchens hold overlapping histories of violence and invention.

Heráclito works directly within that density, foregrounding the legacies of slavery not through abstraction, but through matter itself. His practice turns to what he calls “sacred substances” — dendê (palm oil), sugar, salt, rice — materials that are at once ordinary and historically charged. Sugar and salt evoke the plantation economy and the Atlantic trade: sugar built fortunes and financed cities while consuming the lives of enslaved Africans; salt preserved food for ships and plantations. Dendê brought from West Africa, anchors Afro-Brazilian ritual life, particularly within Candomblé. It stains hands and pots a vivid orange, carrying West African cosmologies into the present. Rice, less frequently foregrounded in Brazilian historiography, nevertheless carries its own Atlantic story. African knowledge of rice cultivation travelled with enslaved people to the Americas, shaping agricultural systems from Maranhão to South Carolina.

These are not neutral ingredients. They are substances which accumulate meaning through touch, labour, ritual, and circulation. Sugar crystals contain the memory of cane fields and refineries; rice grains recall irrigation systems engineered through African expertise; dendê carries botanical and spiritual lineages across the Atlantic. To engage these substances seriously is to confront the afterlives of slavery not as distant past, but as material present.

In Heráclito’s installations and photographic series, bodies are placed in direct contact with these substances. Skin rests against rice grains, is enveloped in beans, framed by corn husks, bathed in oil. The images are formally composed, almost baroque in their attention to texture and colour. Yet they resist decorative reading. The materials are not props. They are agents.

The proximity between body and commodity is deliberate. Plantation economies depended on the conversion of human beings into labouring bodies and of crops into export goods. By returning these substances to the surface of the skin, Heráclito collapses the distance between abstraction and flesh. The viewer is asked to register that what appears in supermarkets as a neutral product is historically inseparable from coercion, racial capitalism, and maritime trade.

At the same time, the works refuse a narrative of victimhood alone. In Salvador, dendê is not merely a trace of displacement; it is a living ingredient in acarajé, a type of fritter made from cowpeas or beans (black-eyed peas) which originated in Yorubaland and is sold on the street by women whose labour is both economic and ritual. Rice and beans form the backbone of everyday meals. Salt seasons and purifies in religious contexts. These substances circulate through ceremonies of initiation, offerings to orixás, communal feasts. They are saturated not only with suffering, but with continuity. Heráclito’s practice draws explicitly on Afro-Brazilian religious traditions, especially Candomblé, in which food mediates between the material and spiritual worlds. Offerings are not symbolic gestures; they are exchanges. The sacred is ingested, absorbed, metabolised. By situating food at the centre of his work, he foregrounds a cosmology in which matter is animated and relational. This stands in contrast to the extractive logic that reduced land and labour to units of production.

Seeing the work in Salvador sharpened this tension. Outside the gallery, the city bears the marks of inequality that descend from slavery: racialised poverty, spatial segregation, uneven access to resources. Yet it also bears the marks of cultural endurance: music, language, cuisine, religious practice. The “sacred substances” move between these registers, a testimony to exploitation and to survival.

For those of us thinking about food and power, Heráclito offers a methodological prompt. To treat food historically is not only to catalogue crops or trace trade routes. It is to ask what forms of knowledge travelled with seeds. Who planted, harvested, milled, cooked? Under what conditions? And how were these ingredients re-signified in diasporic contexts?

In Salvador, these questions felt immediate and have shaped my writing in The Taste of Power.

A few years ago I spent a few days in Manila following a meeting of the MIDEQ Hub which I was leading at the time. It was there, following a rather lovely dinner on the end of a jetty jutting out into the Bay, that I discovered halo-halo and the incredible migration stories that lie behind it. Now my conversations about the Philippines more often than not end up returning to the subject of this bizarre and colourful dessert beloved by so many.

Halo-halo is one of the most popular desserts among Filipinos and available in virtually every restaurant and café you visit. By European standards, it’s a pretty crazy pudding! It brings together completely different – and seemingly random – ingredients to create something that somehow tastes rather wonderful and is often shared between friends. Whilst halo-halo is widely regarded as an authentically Filipino dish, it is actually the result of many different cultures and countries coming together with influences from Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and American migrants arriving in the Philippines at various points in the country’s history. According to most of the sources I read, halo-halo is most likely derived from a Japanese dessert called kakigori which is essentially shaved ice served with sweet beans. The dessert was brought to the Philippines by pre-war Japanese migrants and when the Americans built the first ice plant on Manila, Insular Ice Plant, in 1902 it rapidly became popularised in Filipino food culture.

The earliest versions of halo-halo were composed only of cooked red beans or mung beans in crushed ice with sugar and milk, a dessert known locally as mongo-ya. Over the years, more ingredients were added, resulting in the development of the modern halo-halo.

So what’s in today’s halo-halo?

The key ingredients are shaved ice, evaporated milk and sugar or syrup. After that it seems that almost anything goes but the ingredients most commonly seen in a halo-halo are:

• sugar palm fruit or kaong which are often dyed a red colour

• coconut sport (macapuno) which is the thick soft flesh of a ‘mutant’ coconut

• plantains cooked in syrup (minatamis na saging)

• candied jackfruit (langkâ)

• agar jellies (gulaman) often in a bright lurid green colour

• tapioca pearls which are also used in bubble tea which originates from Taiwan but is very popular in the Philippines

• nata de coco which is a essentially a firm jelly made from coconut milk

• caramelised sweet potato (kamote)

• sweetened beans

• pounded toasted young rice (pinipig) which closely resemble cornflakes in appearance and taste

• leche flan which is also a very popular Filipino desert eaten separately from halo-halo

Every version of halo-halo I tried during my time in the Philippines also included sweetcorn which was the weirdest part! But sweetcorn is a very popular and common addition to Filipino food – I’ve even seen sweetcorn ice-cream! Several have also included thin strips of young coconut.

Discussions of halo-halo generate wistful conversations among my Filipino friends. Joy explained how her grandmother used to spend hours carefully preparing all of the ingredients for halo-halo when she was a child, filling jars with candied vegetables and beans ready for assembly. Small stalls would also be set up on the side of streets at the height of summer and people would arrive with their own glasses which would be filled with shaved ice, evaporated milk and a variety of ingredients from the list above as a summertime treat. This still happens in some neighbourhoods.

But things have changed in the world of halo-halo and it is these changes that generate the most animated discussions. Few families now have the time or inclination to prepare all the separate ingredients, most often buying these ready made in jars from supermarkets or only indulging in the dessert when they are eating out. Sweetened aduki and mung beans have been replaced by the ubiquitous soya bean, cheaper but very different in both texture and taste.

And then there is the question of the purple yam (ube).

Ube has become extremely popular in the Philippines as an ingredient in ube jam (made by combining purple yam, butter and coconut milk) and ube ice cream, both of which give an intense colour and flavour. Whilst an ‘ordinary’ halo-halo includes neither of these two ingredients, the addition of ube jam and, more recently, bright purple ube ice cream have become associated with ‘special’ halo-halo and growing controversy around how the dessert should be both assembled and eaten. In general terms most of the ingredients (fruits, beans, and other sweets) are first placed at the bottom with the sugar or syrup, followed by the shaved ice. This is then topped with leche flan and/or ube jam. Evaporated milk is poured onto the mixture. If the halo-halo is ‘special’ the ube ice cream will then be added on top together with the pinipig, pounded toasted rice which closely resemble cornflakes, and possibly also a chocolate wafer (a topic potentially deserving of an entirely separate blog!)

One school of thought is that the mere addition of the ice cream destroys the very principle of halo-halo because when everything is mixed together, as it should be, the ice cream fundamentally changes the flavour of the dish. And if all the ingredients are not mixed together that fundamentally undermines the principle of the dish which is, after all, called ‘mix-mix’.

But purple ube ice cream was a feature of all three halo-halo that I came across during my time in the Philippines and it would appear that what was once ‘special’ is increasingly becoming the norm. This version is the one that is most popular and which has been internationalised as part of Filipino food culture. To give just one example, halo-halo was featured in an episode of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown when its host Anthony Bourdain visited a branch of the iconic Filipino fast food chain Jollibee in Los Angeles, praising halo-halo and describing it as ‘oddly beautiful’

The final word goes to the famous Filipino poet, journalist and screenwriter Jose F. Lacaba who has written a poem about halo-halo entitled “Pagkain ng special halo-halo: Isang palaisipan sa tag-init’ or ‘How to eat special halo-halo: A summer dilemma’. Reflecting on the challenges of ‘special’ halo-halo he concludes that in the end none of this matters: regardless of whether halo-halo is mixed in the glass it is mixed in the stomach. Better to simply order and enjoy than spend time and energy worrying about the point in the process in which all the ingredients come to be mixed!

On that basis I’m intending to have a go at making halo-halo one day, albeit that I haven’t yet worked out how to source all the ingredients and may end up replacing some of them with local variations. If you are interested in doing the same then this is a good recipe although it’s American origins are reflected in the choice of ingredients. This one is simpler for those living in Europe but I like this one best because it tells you how to make each of the individual components.

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This time last year I was in Salvador, in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia, researching rice for my book The Taste of Power.

Over time, I have come to understand how rice, so often treated as background food, has shaped landscapes, labour systems, and beliefs around the world. After completing my research in China, Ghana and Italy, I wanted to understand it’s history on the other side of the Atlantic. In Salvador, that history is not hidden in archives. It sits in the open, in markets, kitchens, temples, and on the beach.

In Feira de São Joaquim, the largest and oldest market in Salvador, I saw the history of rice woven into the city’s street life. This is the place where most Afro-Brazilian Salvadorians, who make up around 80 per cent of the city’s population, shop for ingredients to make the dishes that they love as well as items used for ceremonial rituals. Bags of rice sit alongside tables laden dried shrimp, brightly coloured chilli peppers, dendê (red palm oil), okra and waxed African fabrics. Beads, cowry shells, and bunches of herbs marks the presence of Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion rooted in Yoruba, Fon, and Bantu traditions and syncretised with Roman Catholicism. The market is not a backdrop but an archive: a place where Afro-Brazilian religious life and everyday survival remain visibly entangled, and where rice appears not as a neutral staple, but as a carrier of memory, labour, and belief.

What I saw in Bahia had not begun in Brazil but in the carefully cultivated wetlands of West Africa.

Enslaved Africans ripped from their families by Portuguese colonisers carried agricultural knowledge, culinary traditions, and rice itself across the Atlantic to the so-called New World. Techniques developed over centuries - how to grow rice in wetlands, how to cook it, how to season it - travelled with them, sometimes quite literally sewn into clothes or braided into hair. What survived were not replicas of African foodways, but echoes of slavery: methods, flavours, and ways of thinking about food that endured under conditions of violent displacement.

Brazil received more enslaved Africans than any other colony, around forty percent of the total, with profound and lasting consequences for Brazilian society and economy. In Maranhão and Bahia, Portuguese settlers saw promise in swampy lowlands but lacked the skills to exploit them. Africans supplied that knowledge, reconstructing in foreign soil the systems they had known at home. The work was brutal: mud sucking at ankles, mosquitoes thick in the air, the tropical sun unrelenting. As in other rice frontiers, rice became power and profit for some, endurance for others.

Harvests enriched planters and swelled exports, turning Brazil into one of the Atlantic world’s rice producers. Rice also fed the enslaved, planted in provision grounds that kept them alive even as freedom was denied.

That endurance is still visible in Bahia. Some enslaved Africans preserved African red rice on small plots, growing it alongside okra, cowpeas, and greens. It was a way to feed families, but also a quiet form of resistance. From these improvised kitchens came arroz de hauçá - named after Hausa traders from West Africa - and Brazil’s enduring staple, feijão com arroz, now treated as the bedrock of national cuisine. What emerged was not simply adaptation, but what food historian Jessica B. Harris has described as “the Africanization of the New World palate”: a blending of techniques, ingredients, and memory that created something new while remaining tethered to its origins. Enslaved Africans also dominated colonial kitchens, enriching them with flavours that would come to define the nation.

In Salvador, rice is woven into religious life as well as daily sustenance. In Candomblé, ritual foods known as comidas de santo are prepared for the orixás (divine spirits) and rice is offered to Oxalá, the orixá of creation, purity, and peace. Here, as in West Africa, rice is not only eaten but poured, scattered, and sanctified.

I remember being invited to a terreiro, a dedicated sacred space, during a Candomblé ceremony, watching women in white dresses carry bowls of rice to the altar, their movements measured and deliberate. As the drumming swelled and the ritual intensified, handfuls of rice were tossed toward the orixás, grains catching the light before falling like small stars to the floor. The image echoed scenes I had witnessed in Buddhist temples in Sikkim in northern India, where rice is also offered, scattered, and blessed: different cosmologies, the same grain doing sacred work.

The next day, I stood on a beach during the annual festival for Iemanjá, the Afro-Brazilian goddess of the sea, and watched thousands gather at dawn, slowly filling the sand with small shrines made of shells, ribbons, perfume, and plates of rice laid carefully as offerings. Women in white lace dresses knelt in the surf, pressing grains of rice into the water and letting them scatter with the waves, blessings carried out to sea. As the sun rose higher, the air filled with song, the crash of drums, and the hush of water collecting the gifts.

Rice appears as testimony in art too. In the photographs of Ayrson Heráclito, bodies are submerged in the foodstuffs of Bahian life: dendê, beans, rice. In one image, a woman’s face is veiled by white grains, rice transformed into both shroud and mantle, memory made material.

But rice in Brazil was not only sacred and sustaining. It was also foundational to inequality.

By the nineteenth century, much of the rice grown in Brazil was exported to Europe, feeding distant cities while enslaved people often subsisted on cassava. After abolition in 1888, mechanisation advanced, but workers remained landless, locked into poverty. The structures built around rice - ownership, labour extraction, racial hierarchy - did not disappear with emancipation.

Today, Brazil remains deeply marked by racial inequality, visible in income, education, political representation, and labour rights. Black and mixed-race Brazilians remain systematically disadvantaged, their labour undervalued, their traditions marginalised even as they define the nation’s cuisine and culture.

Rice in Brazil thus carries a double legacy. It enriched empires and deepened injustice. It also sustained survival, carried knowledge across oceans, and preserved memory across centuries. In Salvador, that history is still present, grain by grain, in markets, rituals, kitchens, and hands that know exactly what rice has meant, and what it still means.

For a long time, I thought I was studying people.

But again and again, I found myself paying attention to food.

What people were given to eat. What they carried with them. What they missed. What they recreated in new places. How a single grain, tuber, fruit, or sauce could anchor belonging or expose its absence.

Over the years, I began to notice the same foods everywhere: rice, maize, potatoes, tomatoes, apples. In places that shared little else. In kitchens shaped by empire, displacement, labour, and survival. Foods so ordinary they were almost invisible and yet absolutely central to how power was organised and lived.

I couldn’t have written this book earlier.
Not because the history wasn’t there, but because I didn’t yet have the distance - or the permission - to see food not as anecdote, but as evidence.

Now feels different.

We’re living through a moment when the fragility of food systems is impossible to ignore: climate shocks, supply-chain failures, land grabs, patented seeds, rising hunger alongside abundance. At the same time, food has become a language through which people are trying to make sense of belonging, loss, identity, and care — often without quite naming the power embedded in it.

This book is my attempt to bring those threads together.

The Taste of Power traces how five everyday foods helped build empires, sustain extraction, trigger collapse, nourish resistance, and shape identity. It’s not about nostalgia or cuisine. It’s about how the modern world was made quietly, repeatedly, in fields and markets and kitchens.

I’m writing it now because the questions it asks feel unavoidable.
What do we depend on without noticing?
Who pays the price for what feels normal?
And what might we recover if we learned to look more closely at the most ordinary things on our plate?

Comfort food. Staple food. Everyday food.

We eat them so often that we rarely stop to ask where they came from, or what stories they carry.

But these familiar foods have done extraordinary things. They have shaped empires, fuelled extraction, sustained populations, and redrawn the map of the modern world.

Rice, maize, potatoes, tomatoes, and apples each began in a particular place. They travelled across continents with traders, colonisers, enslaved people, and migrants. Along the way, they reordered landscapes and labour, anchored cultures and identities, and helped produce both abundance and inequality.

What interests me is not simply how these foods spread, but what they made possible as they moved.

For more than three decades, my work has focused on migration, inequality, and power — on how large systems are lived and negotiated in everyday life. Again and again, food appeared at the centre of those stories: as sustenance and control, memory and survival, comfort and coercion.

Over time, it became clear that food wasn’t just present in these histories. It was doing the work.

To control rice was to command labour and states. To extract maize and potatoes was to feed systems designed for expansion rather than nourishment. To grow tomatoes and apples was to shape taste, culture, and belonging. Power was being written into fields and kitchens, bodies and tastes, markets and meals.

These histories matter now. Today, the same foods sit at the centre of struggles over climate, trade, biodiversity, and inequality. They appear in supermarket aisles as timeless and inevitable, yet their pasts reveal how fragile and contested our food systems really are.

This space will sit alongside my current book project, The Taste of Power, as a place to think in public — to follow ideas in progress, to share moments from markets and travels, and to pay attention to the ordinary things that quietly shape the world we live in.

Food is one of them

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