The irony is that Iraq actually has one of the richest and most sophisticated cuisines in the world. So many classic American or European foods - cev….

How can a country be home to sectarian militias and yet also to people who are educated, sophisticated, and pluralistic? This is not a simple matter.….

There were a hundred booksellers in the old round city founded by the eighth-century caliph al-Mansur. The café and wine-drinking culture of Baghdad ….

In the Middle East, bread is so essential to everyday life that word for it in Egyptian Arabic is aish, which means life. It's always been the staple….

We're taught that domestic life is not a "serious" political topic, like war and peace, but the fact is that we spend most of our lives doing everyda….

As a journalist, or an anthropologist, the convention is that people are there for you to study, and they are your objects..

I'm optimistic, though. Now, with the Arab Spring, I think that people in the region are beginning to overturn some of these clichés, and Western edi….

There's a long history in the Middle East of "bread intifadas," starting with 1977 in Egypt, when Anwar Sadat tried to lift bread subsidies. People r….

You [can] become part of someone else's narrative. Every once in a while I would get people asking me questions like, "If your husband is a Muslim, t….

Rulers like Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser started subsidizing bread as a way to buy loyalty, or at least obedience, and this system became so pervasive ….

But how can you understand a war without any knowledge of the society where it happens? It's like trying to understand birth without knowing anything….

Which is one of the dangers of immersion journalism: you can find yourself getting sucked into battles you have nothing to do with, in this case an o….

But being an American woman married to an Arab guy - and a Muslim to boot! - put me in a different category. People would open up, and tell me things….

Being an American journalist can put people on the defensive. In countries where people assume the press is partisan, like in Lebanon, or where it ha….

The problem is that so many of them are not getting told. This is a massive problem, not just in the Middle East but for places from Africa to Afghan….

I chose to write about food: food is inherently political, but it's also an essential part of people's real lives. It's where the public and private ….

There is a feminist proverb I learned from my mother: The personal is political. There's a powerful literary stereotype that men write about war and ….

The Middle East is the only region in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa where rates of malnutrition actually rose over the past decade or two, ….

There hasn't been a lot written about it in the Western media. But in the Arab world, and Western Asia as a whole, Baghdad was always known as a famo….

Part of the reason you see so little about this in the Western media is that Iraq was closed off from the outside world for so long under Saddam. But….

If you look at the list of the top wheat importers for 2010, almost half of them are Middle Eastern regimes: Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Sa….