Giving Thanks ~ Anna Badkhen's Peace Meals...

War reporter Anna Badkhen remembers both friendly hosts and epic meals in her Boston Globe Magazine piece, Giving Thanks...

"In a war zone, no one can guarantee that your next meal will be there when you’re hungry. No one can guarantee that you will even live to have a next meal. So when you do break bread together, the most heart-wrenching conversation is elating simply because you are alive to have it. Every shared meal delivers more than nourishment -- it delivers comfort, and the simplest fare becomes a celebration. Every meal becomes a Thanksgiving. [...] Hala and I met in Baghdad two years ago [and she] invited me to dinner [Inside] there was Hala’s happy embrace; there were boxes of chocolate on an out-of-tune piano; there was warm homemade bread and eggplant stew and tabbouleh -- tangible and fragrant acts of human defiance against wartime depravity. [...] This fall, Hala came to Massachusetts to visit her son, a freshman at UMass Boston. I invited her for a Saturday meal [since] I wanted to return Hala’s hospitality, to offer my friend temporary shelter from the violence that continues to wrack Iraq. [So] for an afternoon, Hala became an emissary of all the people who have broken bread with me, an outsider, on the world’s most destitute edges. The food I kept piling on Hala’s plate -- the way so many war-zone hosts have done for me, motioning with their hands that I eat, eat, eat some more -- was my thanks offering to them all."

That's beautiful. See also Anna Badkhen's travelogue about war and food, Peace Meals. Here she speaks at MIT's CIS...