Food can give an escape from reality
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In new cookbook Ripe Figs, campaigner and food writer Yasmin Khan illuminates the food and people – migrant, refugee and local – of the eastern Med.
As you’d expect, there’s many a plum-coloured, tear-shaped fig in Ripe Figs. More so though, there is strength, pain, hope and heroism.
It took four separate trips to the eastern Med – each two to seven weeks long, over the course of a year – for Khan to pull together the stories she shares from cooks, restaurant owners, volunteers, migrants and refugees across Turkey, Cyprus and Greece. These encounters sit between ideas for hot yoghurt soup, sour cherry cheesecake and Afghan spiced pumpkin.
Take Lena – a teacher by day, restaurateur by night – of social enterprise NAN on Greek island Lesbos, which feeds locals and refugees alike and Katerina, of Home for All, also on Lesbos, where equality is paramount, and people from the Moria refugee camp – prior to Covid and the camp burning down – were served meals on proper plates.
However, having worked as a campaigner on human rights issues for almost 20 years, covering everything from UK deaths in custody to the occupation of Palestine, Khan says researching Ripe Figs was arguably hardest – because “it’s so abstract, the refugee and migrant story”.
Ripe Figs, she hopes, will help change the persistently negative narratives around migration.
“Don’t get me wrong, with the climate crisis, we are going to see huge numbers of people moving because they have to,” says Khan, but “it’s also really important to realise that throughout human history, for the thousands and thousands of years we’ve existed on this planet, we have always moved; people have moved through empires, for trade, for agricultural reasons.
“This notion of statehood and nation states is pretty modern.”
Covid has of course added a layer of complication to an already complicated situation.
“We’re in a pandemic, there’s a lot going on,” says Khan ruefully, acknowledging that the global context has shifted since she started writing the book.
But food – sharing it, cooking it, eating it – can, she believes, cut through all that.
“Amid this really difficult situation that many of the people I was speaking to found themselves in, we could always find ourselves smiling or laughing when we started sharing recipes, or when we were working in the kitchen,” Khan recalls.
“Food and cooking; it’s one of the few ways you can escape the reality of what is going on around you. It can provide huge solace and comfort.”
Ripe Figs: Recipes and Stories from the Eastern Mediterranean by Yasmin Khan, photography by Matt Russell, is published by Bloomsbury, priced £26. Available now.
