#FoodIsHope Chapter 1 - How it all begin
Rather than waiting for this book to ever become a reality, I thought maybe we can just share it here. So here is the first many chapters (I hope)
Rayyan Haries
3/6/20266 min read
When I was a child, I nearly burned down my mother’s kitchen.
We had had a relative staying over, and they were heading out the door. As adults do, they had lingered in the doorway, then made their way outside and lingered there. As children do, well, I got hungry. I wasn’t about to wait on the grown-ups to finish up—I’d seen the way these kinds of things went. Adults said their goodbyes abruptly or they took hours. My stomach didn’t have a high risk tolerance.
But it didn’t matter. I’d seen my mother frying frozen food a hundred times. I could do that! That was easy. I was adamant about giving deep frying a try.
Let me remind you, I was seven or eight years old.
If there is one thing we all know about eight-year-olds, it is how wholly we should trust them with hot oil and fire.
Things were about to get…bad.
In my mind, however, I was a chef. I mimicked what my mother had done: I took out her cast iron pan and filled it nearly to the brim with palm oil. I then proceeded to turn on the stove and threw in a couple pieces of frozen chicken nuggets, not bothering to wait for the oil to heat up. That seemed like a lot of fuss and a lot of waiting, and no thank you!
Then, I remembered that it wasn’t just any adult about to leave. This was family. And I loved them. I couldn’t let them leave without bidding them goodbye. I rushed out the door to hug them—completely forgetting about the chicken nuggets on the stove.
Perhaps the fact that I’d tossed them in cold oil gave me the extra few minutes that saved me from walking back in to a full-on inferno engulfing the kitchen. But when I remembered that I had something frying, I ran back in to find the poor chicken nuggets charcoal-black, the vegetable oil a raging fire.
The only logical response to a fire? Obviously, placing the burning pan under cold running water.
The only way I could have been more wrong would have been to douse the thing in another layer of burning oil. The pan itself immediately caught on fire and started shooting flames up to the ceiling.
I should have been panicked about the fire. But no, the thing that had me more concerned for my life was my mother’s beautiful, hand-sewn checkered-red kitchen curtain. The flames licked up and over it, consuming it nearly completely. This was it. This was how I died. Not the fire from the pan, the fire from my mother when she saw the horrors I had wrought upon her kitchen.
Knowing this, and fueled by fear of repercussion rather than the instinct to live, I did what any kid would do: I staunchly refused to call any adults for help. Instead, I swiftly pulled a bamboo broom from the nearby corner and start beating the life out of the fire. I was pretty sure I had never looked more like a comic book hero. And just like it would have in my comic, the fire did die out. (If it hadn’t, you would not be reading this here, eh?)
Covered in the sweat of exertion and the pride at defeating fire all by myself, I set to work cleaning up the disaster I had just created to the best of my ability. It is a testament to how thoroughly adults say goodbye that I never got caught. No, within the amount of time it took my parents to send my relative off, I had:
Tried to make lunch
Failed to make lunch
Started a fire in the kitchen
Vanquished said fire
Removed all the evidence with the thoroughness of a crime scene clean-up crew.
Well, a crime scene clean-up crew made of second graders.
In my defense, that was a long time to have tried to wait while hungry. To this very day, I am not sure if my parents ever found out about the incident. Guess the cat’s out of the bag now.
Mom, if you are reading this, I’m sorry about the curtain.
While that event left a lasting impact on me (getting the life scared out of you will do that), it wasn’t enough to keep me from finding my way back into the kitchen every chance I got. That might not be the traditional chef’s origin story, it is mine. Looking back now, maybe it was this moment that started me on the path not to cooking in a commercial kitchen or running a five- star restaurant—but to cooking in disaster zones. I guess from the very beginning, I was making food while the world burned down around me, then doing everything I could to clean up the mess. This has made for an interesting life, if not a particularly simple one, and I think my mother would tell you the same about raising me. I don’t think I was…an easy child. If that first story doesn’t tell you that, well, let me enlighten you.
This might come as a shock, but I had my fair share of shenanigans.
I was, more than anything, curious. And I was curious about everything when it came to food: taste, mixing different ingredient to see their reactions, particular sciences. I once put a hole in the freezer trying to satisfy my curiosity about whether cold freezer air could put a candle out. To this very day, my parents have lain the blame of that refrigerator’s death upon my shoulders. A heavy burden to bear.
May it rest in peace.
Despite my rather curiously naughty demeanor, my mother never kept me away from the kitchen. I can’t say why, except that she loved me, and she knew that I loved that room more than any other in the house. I was always either cleaning up after dinner or helping her mise en place her cooking or just stealing a freshly fried chicken. (Oh, her delicious turmeric fried chicken with golden fried yellow onions—I’m a step away from licking my fingers just remembering it).
As I grew older, I only got more fascinated with cooking. I would often scout for secondhand cooking books, excitedly browse through all my mom’s food magazines, and try my hand at making things from my reading. As a preteen, I could make rice and simple stir- fry—and everything exploded from there.
(Not literally.)
(That only happened the once.)
As a kid, as a teen, even now, I’ve always been a messy cook—I think it must say something about the passion of the chef. Or…something like that. And if that’s the case, I guess my relationship with food has always been like that: passionate and messy. I have been told I ate too little, I ate too much, I have not eaten enough, I emotionally ate…I should not eat this and that…you get the gist!
But despite all the turmoil of that relationship, it has always been one that mattered deeply to me. Always.
Maybe it is that I associate food with warmth. With family. My family, after all, has always loved food. We have built events and lives and relationships around it, and to a degree, I believe all humans have, haven’t we? Birthdays and weddings and funerals and the tiniest moments between two people, or perhaps just yourself. Food threads through our lives in a meaningful and almost magical way.
My grandmother gave me some of my earliest memories, feeding me when I lived with her for the first six years of my life, and my friends gave me more when I ate lunch in their homes. Strangers and family have fed me and I them, and I remember every meal. The smell and the taste and the beauty of human connection.
I couldn’t tell you if the best meal I’d ever had was in my grandmother’s kitchen in Kuala Pari, Malaysia, a dish straight from her tiny little blue kerosene stove that anyone can cook on but no one can cook like her. Or if it was the banana smoothie I had at a little roadside market in Krabi, made by an old woman I’d never met, who I stayed up to talk with all night long. Then again, maybe it was the simple rice and lentils I ate in Nepal, in a stranger’s home, riding out a horrible thunderstorm.
I don’t know that I could choose.
What I do know is that is the taste of every one of these dishes that has burrowed into my heart and stayed there for my whole life. I can recall every one of them even now. I have been so fortunate to be given the opportunity to explore the world through eating and cooking. I hope that this collections of my eating and cooking stories around the world will allow you to walk with me along the eight years I have spent on the road, and more than anything to allow us to share the semblance of a meal together.
Food has truly shaped my life, and shaped the way I have chosen to serve others, with dishes coated in dust from earthquakes and tsunamis.
Because it is air that gives us life. But it is food that gives us hope.