The Last Sweet Bite: When War Changes the Menu, Michael Shaikh, Footnote Press, £20

A reliable place for lunch in Istanbul is Ficcin, located in the alleyway of Kallavi Sokak just off the heaving shopping street of İstiklâl Caddesi. It is run by a family with roots in the North Caucasus, specifically in mountainous North Ossetia. At the end of the 19th century, more than a million Muslim highlanders and Tatars from the North Caucasus were forcibly deported by Russia. Sent away by ship across the Black Sea, thousands died of disease, starvation and dehydration on their journeys. Many survivors ended up in Turkey’s Black Sea cities – such as Trabzon, Samsun and Sinop, as well as Istanbul. In memory of their ancestors who perished in its waters, some descendants of the victims refuse to eat fish today.

Later, in North Ossetia, Soviet rule and cultural cleansing destroyed the habits and culinary traditions that families had cherished, but what was lost in the Caucasus was retained within Turkey’s North Ossetian diaspora. Beliefs were held onto and were handed down, along with inherited recipes for the signature dish ficcin, a baked pastry filled with ground beef, ‘Circassian ravioli’ (potato dumplings) and sour cream porridges.

I thought of Ficcin as I read The Last Sweet Bite: When War Changes the Menu by Michael Shaikh. As a human rights investigator for nearly 20 years, Shaikh is well placed to explore how violence alters food culture in war zones. While chronicling the human cost of war, in countries such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Mali, Syria and Bangladesh, he learned that cuisine is ‘akin to language’. Something fundamental and essential.

Conflict, he notes, not only changes how society operates when dealing with devastation to basic infrastructure; it also fundamentally alters social norms and cultural values, including how people eat. Disruption to food production, distribution, and access also reshapes long-practised recipes if cooks no longer have access to certain ingredients. This threatens the very survival of ancient dishes. On assignment for Human Rights Watch, documenting war crimes in Afghanistan, one contact named Tamim tells him that the wars have ‘narrowed our language of food’. It was Tamim’s recipe for saland-e nakhod, the richly spiced chickpea dish Shaikh ate at his Kabul home in the summer of 2007, that sparked the idea for the book. He includes a recipe for it in the text.

The book opens, somewhat unexpectedly, in the Czech Republic, though the chapter’s sub-title, ‘How the Communists Tried to Kill a Cuisine’, hints at the reason for its inclusion. ‘In 1948, the new communist government suspended imports of luxury ingredi­ents while quietly buying food from capitalist countries to feed its people. Food shortages prevailed, and eating out for pleasure be­came an indulgence few could afford, as well as out of step with socialism, which was fast becoming the sole acceptable ideology of postwar Czechoslovakia.’ Shaikh discusses the impact of two books called the Standards, published by the Ministry of Trade. The Standards for Warm Meals, a 700-page tome, ‘laden with impenetrable tables’, containing 900 recipes, ‘dictated what people could eat in restaurants for much of the communist era’. Flattening traditions and inventiveness, it provided a miserable template. But it wasn’t just the Communists who squashed the food culture. ‘Coffee, the fuel of Prague’s cultural life, disappeared, in part because of high import costs but also because the Nazi cult viewed caffeine as an unhealthy evil…’

The book moves from central Europe to Asia – Sri Lanka and the Tamil Diaspora, China and the Uyghurs –  before leaping to Bolivia and the Andes, and the Pueblo Nations. This does result in slight geographical whiplash for the reader but it is fitting for the subject: the aid worker, or investigator, must go wherever help is most needed.

In Myanmar and Bangladesh, under the government of Aung San Suu Kyi, the military began a sweeping campaign of arson, rape and massacres targeting Rohingya Muslim communities in northern Rakhine State. Separated from their land, where many were farmers, and living in refugee camps in Bangladesh, families  found themselves without access to the food they were used to, dishes that Shaikh describes so artfully, such as isamas salan, a fragrant prawn curry (‘vaguely reminiscent of a Thai tom yong, this prawn dish is often made with lentils, long beans, and crescents of bitter gourd. Some versions call for bottle gourd and banana root, vegetables that give the curry a cucumber- and rhubarb-like freshness’). Blockades of fishing grounds, shortages and price spikes all mean that ‘a dish that was an everyday comfort is quickly becoming a costly extravagance’.

One family that the author has known for years manages to cook what it can with utensils provided by aid agencies, but there is no running water, no sink and no refrigerators. Yet still, the Rohingya find ways to garden, ‘on roofs, between shelters, and on walls’. It is a cherished pastime and a reminder of home. A little joy in camps where sex-trafficking and disease is rife.

Food writers are fond of saying that cuisine and the art of cooking brings people together no matter what, but increasingly this feels like wishful thinking. Food is often a major factor – and weapon – of war and we are seeing this right now in Gaza and Sudan, as well as in Haiti and Mali. During periods of Russia’s ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine, ships containing grain destined for some of the world’s poorest, were blocked. Wheat from Ukraine has long been shipped across the Black Sea, where it is milled into flour in Turkey, shipped to Pakistan and then trucked onwards to Afghan villages, where hunger is widespread. Then there are the thousands of smaller stories, those we rarely hear of, such as the Ukrainian man who was killed by a floating mine, close to Odesa’s beaches, as he was diving for sea snails, a local delicacy.

The personal stories Shaikh recounts of home cooks trying to keep their food – and their identity – alive are distressing, vital and moving. But so is Shaikh’s own family story.

At the beginning of the book he discusses how, for most of his life, he was unaware of the effects that the Partition of the Indian subcontinent had had on his family:

During my time in Paki­stan, even when I was living there as an adult, my aunts and uncles never discussed it, despite how profoundly it had altered their lives. My father disclosed only recently that he was the first Muslim born in his family. Shortly before his birth in 1935, the idea of a Muslim­-only Pakistan was gaining ground. His family had been Hindu forever. But my great­-uncle, the patriarch of the family, per­haps predicting the precariousness Hindus would face in a future sectarian country, converted everyone to Islam.

He quotes the historian Aanchal Malhotra, who wrote, ‘Partition is not yet an event of the past.’ The violence meant his father found it painful to think about Pakistan and to pass the Sindhi language on to his son. The pain persists, passing from one generation to the next. ‘That is why I don’t speak Sindhi’, Shaikh states plainly.

This element of personal struggle provides the memoir strand of this unique book that straddles several genres including travel, history and current affairs. Each of the well-researched and approachable recipes Shaikh includes at the end of the chapters are not only relevant to the stories but they also add a little levity, a little breathing space between the tales of catastrophe.

No meal can stop a bullet or end festering hatred, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep talking, keep sharing and recording these invaluable traditions, and hoping for an end to food being used as a weapon of war.