Conflict Kitchen

Conflict Kitchen is a restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. Each Conflict Kitchen iteration is augmented by events, performances, and discussions that seek to expand the engagement the public has with the culture, politics, and issues at stake within the focus country. The restaurant rotates identities every few months in relation to current geopolitical events. Our past Afghan version introduced our customers to the food, culture, and politics of Afghanistan. Developed in collaboration with Afghans in Pittsburgh and Afghanistan, our food comes packaged in wrappers that include interviews with Afghans on subjects ranging from culture to politics.  As is to be expected, the thoughts and opinions that come through the interviews and our programming are often contradictory and complicated by personal perspective and history. These natural contradictions reflect a nuanced range of thought within each country and serves to instigate questioning, conversation, and debate with our customers. Operating seven days a week in the middle of the city, Conflict Kitchen uses the social relations of food and economic exchange to engage the general public in discussions about countries, cultures, and people that they might know little about outside of the polarizing rhetoric of governmental politics and the narrow lens of media headlines. In addition, the restaurant creates a constantly changing site for ethnic diversity in the post-industrial city of Pittsburgh, as it has presented the only Iranian, Afghan, and Venezuelan restaurants the city has ever seen. Upcoming iterations will focus on the U.S. involved boarder conflicts of North/South Korea and Palestine/Israel. Conflict Kitchen raised $4,178 from 139 backers in Kickstarter. You can check it out here! OUR CURRENT FOCUS IS ON THE FOOD, CULTURE AND POLITICS OF THE HAUDENOSAUNEE CONFEDERACY. “The history of fry bread goes back to when Native people were put onto reservations and given rations of dried milk, dried sugar, flour, fat or oil. They made the best with what they had. I see it as a traditional food because it is something that I’ve always had. Whether you had corn soup or nontraditional foods, there was always fry bread for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. And anybody I know who’s Indigenous has some kind of recipe for fry bread.” “I don’t consider fry bread a traditional food because it came from a time when the Indigenous Peoples were taken from their very resourceful lands, put on Indian Reservations and given rations. I’m going through a process of getting back in touch with the roots of our culture, giving up a little bit of those oppression foods. I think of those foods, too, as soul food: not particularly healthy for us, but ok as a once-in-a-while kind of thing.” “On reservations, the U.S. government experimented on us with salt, sugar, bleached flour and stuff like that, which is why levels of obesity are so high on reservations. Fry bread may be a big thing with Natives, but it’s pretty much the worst thing you could ever eat.” “Fry bread used to be called ghost bread, since it was served at funerals as a thick scone fried in lard.” “Our people went out West and saw Indigenous people serving ‘Indian tacos’ (flat fry bread filled with taco meats and toppings). Now they’re at every pow wow. You gotta have that, or you don’t have Indian food.” “At the center of the Akwesasne Reservation is Cornwall Island. The island sits in the St. Lawrence River, split between the U.S. and Canada. Just a year ago, you had to go through a customs check with Canadian officers just to enter Akwesasne – armed Canadian officers on Native land?! It’s not right. It’s colonial imperialism. It’s bullshit.” “Sovereignty means we govern our own people separate from the U.S. government, but I think that those lines get blurry. If I were to register to vote for the U.S. president, then I would feel like I was giving up my sovereignty even though I can legally register to vote. My son just turned eighteen, and he registered to vote. But he also grew up off the reservation, so we have different ways of looking at things.” “Each nation in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy has their own way of governing. In the Seneca Nation, we have an elected president system, which we adopted after colonization. The Onondaga Nation is governed by the traditional chief system, wherein their 14 chiefs represent the Nation’s interests within the Confederacy’s Grand Council. The clan mothers appoint the chiefs, and the chiefs are the voice of the people.” “I’m from Akwesasne, and I have American and Canadian citizenship. We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.”