Part of the reason you see so little about this in the Western media is that Iraq was closed off from the outside world for so long under Saddam. But I think there's a deeper reason, which is that it messes with our assumptions - not just about Iraq, but about culture and human nature.

But how can you understand a war without any knowledge of the society where it happens? It's like trying to understand birth without knowing anything about pregnancy or conception. Or like trying to understand our current economic collapse without knowing what a derivative is.

So much of what we see and hear about the Middle East focuses on what we call politics, which is essentially ideology. But when it comes to the Middle East, and especially the Arab world, simply depicting people as human beings is the most political thing you can do. And that's why I chose to write about food: food is inherently political, but it's also an essential part of people's real lives. It's where the public and private spheres connect.

In the Middle East, bread is so essential to everyday life that word for it in Egyptian Arabic is aish, which means life. It's always been the staple grain. But the predicament is that the Fertile Crescent, where wheat cultivation began, has now become the part of the world most dependent on imported wheat.

Americans are curious about the texture of everyday life in the Middle East because they rarely get to see it. I wanted readers to feel like they were sitting around the dinner table with me and my friends, hearing what average people really say and really think, [where] the dinner table is the best place to find out.

Rulers like Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser started subsidizing bread as a way to buy loyalty, or at least obedience, and this system became so pervasive that the Tunisian scholar Larbi Sadiki described countries who used it as dimuqratiyyat al-khubz - "democracies of bread." But the problem with this system of offering bread in exchange for genuine democracy is that it can never last - sooner or later, the bread will run out, and people will start demanding bread and roses too.

The Middle East is the only region in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa where rates of malnutrition actually rose over the past decade or two, instead of falling.