From KCRW, I'm Evan Kliman and you're listening to good food.

The thing that's interesting given that I've had two careers, one in art and one in food,

is that talking about food is a kind of perfect opener with anybody.

Almost anybody, even people who might not want to talk to you as soon as you start talking about food they will they will open up and they will talk

Aniseahaloo has made a career out of documenting food culture it's a process that often requires sitting down with the

matriarch of a family and asking a lot of questions. Anisa grew up in Beirut

where she sat around the family table for three meals a day, eating traditional

Lebanese food alongside her siblings, parents, and extended family.

At 21, she left home to pursue a career in art in London, but later focused her lens on the

cuisine and culture of the Levant, authoring 10 books on the topic.

This Mother's Day weekend, she joins us with inspiration for

anyone who's interested in documenting and preserving their own food culture.

Hi Anisa. Hi, Ebenice. Hi Evan.

Thank you so much for joining us.

You didn't start out pursuing food.

Your first career was in art.

What made you decide to turn your intellectual and actual lens

towards the culinary arts and food culture?

Well actually it was a desire to preserve my mother's recipes, together with a desire

to pass them on to the younger generation, you know, who grew up during the Civil War and a lot of them had to leave and who didn't have the chance that I had of seeing everything prepared at home not only like dishes but you know preserves and and like harvest because in the

summer we would go to my grandmother's village and you know we would see the olives

being harvested at the end of the summer or vegetables or you know even the kind of

...