Matt McAllester 
Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar 
Stories of Food during Wartime by the World’s Leading Correspondents

These sometimes harrowing, frequently funny, and always riveting stories about food and eating under extreme conditions feature the diverse voices of journalists who have reported from dangerous conflict zones around the world during the past twenty years. A profile of the former chef to Kim Jong Il of North Korea describes Kim’s exacting standards for gourmet fare, which he gorges himself on while his country starves. A journalist becomes part of the inner circle of an IRA cell thanks to his drinking buddies. And a young, inexperienced female journalist shares mud crab in a foxhole with an equally young Hamid Karzai. Along with tales of deprivation and repression are stories of generosity and pleasure, sometimes overlapping. This memorable collection, introduced and edited by Matt Mc Allester, is seasoned by tragedy and violence, spiced with humor and good will, and fortified, in Mc Allester’s words, with ‘a little more humanity than we can usually slip into our newspapers and magazine stories.’

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Introduction: The Name of the Third Chicken: Kosovo

Matt Mc Allester


Part One: Survival Rations

Night Light: El Salvador and Haiti

Lee Hockstader


A Diet for Dictators: North Korea

Barbara Demick


Siege Food: Bosnia

Janine di Giovanni


Miraculous Harvests: China

Isabel Hilton


Part Two: Insistent Hosts

How Harry Lost His Ear: Northern Ireland

Scott Anderson


Weighed down by a Good Meal: Gaza and Israel

Joshua Hammer


The Price of Oranges: Pakistan

Jason Burke


Jeweled Rice: Iran

Farnaz Fassihi


The Oversize Helmsman of an Undersize Country: Israel

Matt Rees


Part Three: Food under Fire

Same-Day Cow: Afghanistan

Tim Hetherington


Eau de Cadavre: Somalia and Rwanda

Sam Kiley


Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar: Afghanistan

Christina Lamb


Munther Cannot Cook Your Turkey: Iraq

Rajiv Chandrasekaran


Part Four: Breaking Bread

The Best Man I Ever Knew: Georgia

Wendell Steavenson


Dinner with a Jester: Afghanistan

Jon Lee Anderson


Sugarland: Haiti

Amy Wilentz


My Life in Pagans: Ossetia

James Meek


The House of Bread: Bethlehem

Charles M. Sennott


Biographies

Acknowledgments

Index

Over de auteur

Matt Mc Allester is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a contributing editor at Details magazine. He is the author of Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother’s Kitchen, Blinded by Sunlight: Surviving Abu Graib and Saddam’s Iraq, and Beyond the Mountains of the Damned: The War Inside Kosovo. He is also Visiting Professor of Journalism at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches international reporting. His website is www.mcallester.com.