What We Hunger for - by Sun Yung Shin (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"What We Hunger For is a gathering of voices from some of America's most exciting writers on food. Here is an exploration of our relationships to culture, place, and belonging through recipes, memories, and experiences of home. This is an anthology of how we care for ourselves and each other among those who see us as different, foreign, un-American. This book is for everyone who eats."
Kao Kalia Yang, author of The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father, and Somewhere in the Unknown World: A Collective Refugee Memoir