I'm Francis Lamb, and this is the show for curious cooks and eaters.

There's sort of a funny shorthand that we all use when we talk about food, I think.

We talk about Chinese food. Like, that term really means something. Or French food, or Italian food, or Mexican food.

I mean, what I'm saying is that we talk about food like it's bound by borders.

But French food starts to look a whole lot like Spanish food when you get towards Spain.

And if you're heading west in China, the Chinese food starts to taste like Turkic food.

Today, we're talking to two extraordinary authors who've written books about different parts of the

world, but I think are, in a sense, about the same thing. They're about how borders matter

and don't matter in food.

The author Riem Kasiz has a gorgeous new book, The Arabesque Table.

It's about modern Arab food.

It's one of the most exciting cookbooks I've read in a while.

The writing is smart and the recipes are thrilling. We'll talk with her later in the show.

First, we're talking with Yasmin Khan about her new book, Ripe Figs, which I devoured in a single

afternoon. And you know, the pictures that cookbooks paint are sometimes in the most romantic,

idealized versions of the world. But Yasmin, who spent 10 years as a human rights campaigner before

she started writing about food, approaches her books in a different way. She travels,

she talks to people, she has lunch with them, she gets the recipes, but she walks away

with a bigger sense of what the real life of regular people means.

You know, it's not always happy and it's not always pretty,

but the stories she tells are rich and complicated, and they're beautiful in that way.

Yasmin, it's great to talk with you.

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