It was the sandwich that connected us. I don’t even remember what it was inside the sandwich: all I recall was plain, white bread (crust on) and it being on the dry side. Maybe it was a ham sandwich, or perhaps just jam and butter. Maybe peanut butter? Whatever it was, it was the most beautiful sandwich I had ever eaten.

I was a 13-year-old Malaysian girl feeling lost and confused in a new country. For months on end, I had eaten my school lunch alone, unable to befriend the teenagers around me. Everyone sat in groups for the hour-long break, laughing and talking loudly. They looked happy and carefree. Awkwardly, I would hover close by, silently hoping that there was some conversation I could smoothly break into. Or that people would just notice me. But even when I came close to such opportunities, I always had an unfortunate knack for jeopardising my chances for small talk. Without fail, when people finally noticed me, I would hastily busy myself with something in my lunch bag. Blasted lunch bag! Open your mouth and make conversation, Elaine! My name means ‘light’, but I felt like charcoal. Disconnection and loneliness were crushing feelings then.

One crisp winter afternoon, a blue-eyed boy appeared out of nowhere, handed me that fateful sandwich, and gestured for me to join him and his friends. Daniel. Brown haired. Smiling. That was the first of many lunches together over the course of several months. Daniel and I didn’t speak the same language but that never stopped us. Food was our common language. We would sit silently, chew on our food together, and smile shyly. The mere act of eating conveyed plenty: my desire for connection, his compassionate heart. I still remember how grateful I felt then, clutching the dry sandwich for dear life. I still feel grateful today. After all, the sandwich began my lifelong journey with food, peacemaking, and my passion to build bridges across cultural difference.

Food is my chosen mode for bringing together people of different ages, cultures, and beliefs in the various countries I have called home, whether Malaysia, New Zealand, China, Thailand, or Australia. Beginning difficult conversations with a meal or a drink – as a youth worker, prosecutor, government negotiator, entrepreneur, or mother – helped set a scene for connection, even amidst ongoing conflict. The connective potential of food was why it formed a central part of my youth group gatherings; why I prioritised coffee and tea with defence lawyers at the back of courtrooms; and why I continue to value mealtimes with family, even when tensions are rife. It’s why I would self-invite myself to Iftar meals, Passover celebrations, and Thanksgiving feasts. And why I always accepted an additional dish of Korean kim bap from such-and-suchs-friend-I-never-met-before-but-is-coming-too, even when my potluck menu was already brimming with excess. The gift of food is the most underrated act of kindness and a mode for bridge-building.

Hungry for peace 

On the flipside, withholding food from a hungry Other strikes deeper than any knife. This month’s news is full of reports of desperate Palestinians being killed as they frantically fight to access humanitarian food aid in Gaza. Young Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda—‘It's Bisan from Gaza and I'm Still Alive’—shares a video on Instagram of a man crying about the last time he ate bread made with white flour: 4 months ago. Another YouTube video clip documents how displaced communities use grains meant for animals to make food ‘treats’. Something about these videos—perhaps triggering subconscious memories of brown Ethiopian bodies and Live Aid’s triumphant 1980s ‘We are the World’—hurt more deeply than images of exploding cars and videos of doctors imploring for more medical aid. When workers in chef José Andrés’ humanitarian food group, World Central Kitchen, were killed by Israeli drones in April 2024, the world’s ire increased a few noticeable notches. Could there be a sacredness to food that is so sacrosanct, even in war?

While food plays a central role in this spectacular violence in Gaza, it also does so in the everyday homes of even middle-class families struggling to make ends meet in the era of a Coles-Woolworths duopoly and normalised food insecurity. Australian food banks are more stocked and yet more empty than ever before. Food access, food insecurity, food sovereignty are notions that affect us politically and personally in mundanely piercing ways. But how much food insecurity can everyday Australians stomach? Here I sit watching videos of Gaza and empty food banks, with my cup of now cold tea and stale chocolate biscuit, annoyed that my drink is too cold and my biscuit is too unacceptably stale. I am annoyed! The absurdity is not lost on me, but I do nothing. Food insecurity is a violence that begins in the stomach, spreading across borders and through the cracks of my ideologies and excuses.

Yet, despite the horrors of war and the pain of feeding hungry children, food still offers hope and joy in times of pain and suffering. Palestinian food blogger, Hamada Shaqoura—his face haggard but with inexplicable energy despite his measly daily calorie intake—has gone viral for his TikToks.  Using irony to effect, he showcases the creative and ingenious ways to make meals unique and pleasurable using only the aid packages he receives. For Shaqoura, his food reels draw neighbouring enemies and distant, apathetic observers into the insipid, banal realities of war and hunger. Using his lips, stomach, and gut, he gently advocates for peace at a time when all the high-level politicking in the world is failing. He is hungry for peace. What about me? He knows full well how food connects us across time and space, conveying pain and joy, and reminding us of our common humanity.

I wonder: perhaps we are inextricably joined together by our guts? Through our acts of ingestion, digestion, and excretion, food returns to the earth it once grew from. And in our own deaths, we become part of that endless cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. We are one because we eat! When we deny an Other food, we deny ourselves. When we feed an Other, we feed peace.

Fish 

During World War II, four-year-old Yit Shing was dying from rabies on a dirt road in what was then Japanese-occupied Jesselton but now known as Sabah, Malaysia. The boy knew Japanese soldiers frequented the road, but he no longer cared: death was close. Through the slits of his eyes, Yit Shing watched as a Japanese soldier approached him—tentatively, hesitantly, silently—before taking the severely malnourished child to a nearby clinic. After dressing the boy’s wounds, the soldier shared what he had—two small fried fish. Aside from cockroaches, this was the only protein Yit Shing had eaten in many years. Miraculously, he survived World War II, living to tell the tale of how fish changed his life. Through the generosity of a Japanese soldier and his fish, an uneducated, poor boy learns first-hand how one small act of food care can transform the narratives of war even amidst ongoing violence.

For my father-in-law, now ‘Frank’ (in remembrance of St. Francis’ ministry to the poor and underprivileged), that soldier showed more mercy and generosity than Frank had known in his then short life. Frank flinches when he recalls his father guiltily gulping down the few morsels of food in their house everyday, leaving Frank and his brothers with nothing. How strange that an enemy soldier should offer his rations to a stranger while a father steals from even his own child? For over a decade, Professor Frank Wong made it his mission to recount the story of the soldier’s generosity to Waseda students on exchange from Japan to Malaysia. Food enabled Frank to forgive—his food memory remains a constant reminder to go beyond simplistic characterisations of the enemy.  

Breaking bread, breaking prejudices 

Sharing food also disrupts our deeply-held prejudices. Seven-year-old Farhan had forgotten to bring lunch to school. He had missed breakfast one day and was weak with hunger by noon. Now, as a twenty-something year old, Farhan vividly recalls how his eyes had burned hot with anger directed at himself that day. Then, the unexpected happened. From the corner of his eye, he noticed a blind classmate, someone he barely knew, shuffle towards him. Without so much as a word, the boy handed Farhan his own lunch: bread and orange juice. Farhan’s voice was thick with emotion when he recounted that moment to me:

I met him a few times, less than ten times. He's blind...This is a very fond memory. I'm very little, like seven years. He's a blind child. One day, I didn't have any breakfast, and he brings me an orange juice and then food...That's a very distinct memory that I have, since my childhood, six or seven years. That's the last time...I met him, and I always think of where I can find him again because that touched me. I can't remember why I need to remember that, but it's always like...His conditions, and then he cannot see me. It's just like, okay, how can he be that generous?...I also dreamt about that sometimes. That's a different experience too. If you dream about something that you miss...I think it's your heart that is touched by that.[1]

Farhan is not a particularly emotional person. It was rare for him to share something so intimate and so raw. But, as he recounted that memory of bread and juice, he almost looked broken again. The boy’s generosity left an indelible mark that continues to visibly affect Farhan profoundly even to this day. It wasn’t brokenness from the thought of hunger that day. It wasn’t brokenness from just gratitude. Rather, it was brokenness from being confronted by his deeply-held prejudice.

For Farhan, the boy’s care defies logic. Farhan asked me incredulously: ‘how can he be that generous?’ Underlying this question was a sense of puzzlement: how can a blind person care for another who, by most accounts, is characterised as more privileged and with less need?

Daniel. The soldier. World Conflict Kitchen. The blind boy. They all implicitly recognised how their welfares were entangled with others. Without ever having read the works of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, they appreciated that ‘To recognize the Other is to recognize a hunger. To recognize the Other is to give’.[2] However, their giving comes at a price. Sharing food with others, especially when you are also famished, can be a costly act. Daniel and the blind boy went hungry, choosing to enact physical violence on themselves rather than allow another human being to be in want. The Japanese soldier had to wait for his next meal rations and most likely told no one about his transformative act of generosity. More recently, the World Conflict Kitchen aid workers transported food from Egypt to the Gaza Strip every day, knowing that their acts came with unappreciable risk to themselves. In the end, seven of their colleagues lost their lives.

Even so, the gift of food is important, particularly when it defies expectations about war, violence, and prejudice. Since 7 October 2023, World Conflict Kitchen has provided over 42 million meals to civilians affected by the Israel-Hamas war. In six months, they had dispatched over 1,700 trucks of food and cooking equipment from Egypt, 230,000 meals from Jordan, and 435,000 meals by sea. Food care is more than just sustenance but a symbol of hope and our common humanity.

For those living in seemingly peaceful countries, food care is also a powerful act of kindness and connection across cultural and ideological divides. What strikes me most is how food care can be enacted by the most surprising of people. Farhan’s subconscious understandings of power and agency are disrupted by a seven-year-old blind boy's generosity. His assumption that needy people cannot care for others is challenged. Like I did, through Daniel and his sandwich, Farhan learns first-hand the transformative power of a child’s care. Farhan is deeply touched, obliged to approach the world differently: ‘I need to remember that boy’.

Despite these poignant moments, Farhan’s encounter with the blind boy, and my own interaction with Daniel and the sandwich, are in many ways unremarkable. Ordinary and understated. Food care takes place every day across cultures, ages, and spaces. In how already exhausted mothers cook and freeze lasagnas for new mothers they have never met but only know of through the grapevine. In how itinerant dumpster divers jump into commercial skips and locked wheelie bins to salvage bruised fruit and dented cans, all used for the next make-shift soup kitchen. In how Rotarians break bread together every week, treasuring an hour of connection together amidst the bustle of work and life. In how Jewish families come together for Shabbat, recognising the power of food rituals to connect them to distant pasts and stories that live on through the Seder meal. And more personally for me, in my grandmother’s greeting, ‘Have you eaten yet?’, that communicates care and hospitality.

Food care is so mundane and sometimes so imperceptible that it often does not warrant scholarly attention. Yet, it is revealing how care through food can be so transformative. There is something about ‘breaking bread’ together that feels nurturing and caring and so powerfully life-changing. More so, sharing food across enemy lines during wartime has been a potent symbol of our shared humanity. When food is scarce and costs the giver everything, it is hard to escape the sense that an otherwise mundane moment of generosity is sacred.

Perhaps we have our priorities a little skewed? Instead of more diversity programmes and anti-bullying trainings that engage our hearts and minds, perhaps we should start with our stomachs. A neighbourhood potluck, an office tea morning, a dry, crusty sandwich from a stranger: building mutual understanding and connecting across cultural and political divides can sometimes begin with a single bite.

REFERENCES

[1] Pratley, E. 2023, 'Hungry for Peace: Food and Posthumanist Peacebuilding in an Entangled World', PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, p. 197.

[2] Levinas, E. 1961, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, PA, p. 75.