The Comfort And Joy Of Making Afghan Food

Afghan women living in the U.S. share the recipes and the memories that keep them going.

Afghanistan is framed as much by Hollywood and the media as it is by the war on the ground. The tropes are wearyingly familiar: newsroom visuals of gaunt men with rifles piled on moving trucks, movies using a murky yellow filter to cue locale shifts, photography that still hasn’t recovered from Steve McCurry’s essentialist gaze, like his problematic portrait of Sharbat Gula. Food doesn’t stand a shot at making it to the conversation.

Humaira Ghilzai agrees. Based in San Francisco, Ghilzai is an Afghan cultural adviser who helped writer Khaled Hosseini with the stage adaptation of his bestselling book “The Kite Runner.” She documents heirloom recipes from Afghanistan as part of her cultural literacy work. “Unfortunately, because Afghanistan has been connected with war for the past 40 years and more, not many people think of it in the sense of food,” she told HuffPost. “Like, this is what somebody said to me: ‘What do those barbarians eat, you know? Who cares about Afghan food?’” She’s hopeful, though, because in the diaspora, “the second generation is not so much in the fight-or-flight mode” that ails new Afghan immigrants and kills culinary enterprise.