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.

For my generation - the "Children of Nixon," as I call us in the book - the Lebanese civil war was an iconic event. Downtown Beirut became a metaphor for so many things: man's inhumanity to man, what Charles Bukowski called "the impossibility of being human." It shaped our perceptions of war and human nature, just as Vietnam did for our parents. We used it to understand how the world works.

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.

The problem is that so many of them are not getting told. This is a massive problem, not just in the Middle East but for places from Africa to Afghanistan. There are millions of stories out there, millions of potential Booksellers of Kabul or Valentino Achak Dengs.

There's a long history in the Middle East of "bread intifadas," starting with 1977 in Egypt, when Anwar Sadat tried to lift bread subsidies. People rebelled and poured into Tahrir Square, shouting slogans against the government just like they did earlier this year. Sadat learned his lesson and kept bread subsidies in place, and so did a host of other Middle Eastern dictators - many of whom were propped up for years by the West, partly through subsidized American wheat.

Pedro Teixeira, the great Portuguese merchant-adventurer, wrote a beautiful description of a coffeehouse with windows overlooking the Tigris and the ruins of old Baghdad. That was in 1604, and he's visiting the same street that I write about in the book, named after Abu Nuwas, though it wasn't called that back then.

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.