How can a country be home to sectarian militias and yet also to people who are educated, sophisticated, and pluralistic? This is not a simple matter. It's the kind of dialectical inquiry that's impossible to present in the world of Twitter feeds and newspapers where stories are shorter and shorter and more simplistic.

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.

If you look at the list of the top wheat importers for 2010, almost half of them are Middle Eastern regimes: Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Tunisia. Egypt is the number-one importer of wheat in the entire world. Tunisia leads the entire world in per capita wheat consumption. So it's no wonder that the revolutions began with Tunisians waving baguettes in the streets and Egyptians wearing helmets made of bread.

There were a hundred booksellers in the old round city founded by the eighth-century caliph al-Mansur. The café and wine-drinking culture of Baghdad has been famous for centuries; there was a whole school of Iraqi poets who wrote poems about the wine bars of medieval Baghdad - the khamriyaat, or wine songs, that I quote in the book.

I'm optimistic, though. Now, with the Arab Spring, I think that people in the region are beginning to overturn some of these clichés, and Western editors are starting to catch up. We're seeing some exceptions to the stereotypes, like Elizabeth Rubin's great piecein Newsweek, "The Feminists in the Middle of Tahrir Square." But an article like that shouldn't be the exception. It should be the rule.

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. I wanted to show readers that the larger politics of war and economics and U.S. foreign policy are inextricably bound to the supposedly trivial details of our everyday lives.

Being an American journalist can put people on the defensive. In countries where people assume the press is partisan, like in Lebanon, or where it had essentially become an extension of the government, like in Iraq, people tend to see a journalist as an agent of his or her government. That can be dangerous if the United States military is occupying their country, or aligned with their enemies.