Synonym Magazine – Issue 02: Rice & Beans

At Synonym, we are telling immigrant stories through food.

As strangers in a new land, a taste of home can provide comfort and familiarity. Bringing those tastes together with the food at hand creates new traditions, a new heritage. 

We’ll spotlight these stories and share how trade, politics, colonialism, and capitalism have changed food cultures around the world, for immigrants and countries’ natives alike. We’ll explore all of this in the most intimate ways possible —through generationally shared flavors, the dishes placed on a table, the spices packed in a suitcase.  

Issue 2: RICE & BEANS

Issue Two of Synonym Magazine explores rice and beans through all the senses.

Omnia Saed profiles two chefs from Flavors from Afar, a restaurant that highlights and celebrates refugees and former asylum seekers-turned-chefs. Menal Kidane and Maria-Yvette Winters share their experiences as refugees and how their food and flavors help them find a sense of home. We dive into the percussive sounds of processing beans in Masii, Kenya, by Neema Syovata. “The rhythmic whack! whack! whack! of the group’s alternating strikes transforms the task into something of a musical performance.” Franco-Palestinian Chef Fadi Kattan of Akub in London talks about his new cookbook Bethlehem, and the act of sharing his culture and heritage by preserving food traditions. Ethel Shayne, a 100-year-old Baghdadi Indian Jewish woman, shares what her life in India was like, and the cultural and culinary shifts as her family moved from Baghdad to Kolkata to Los Angeles. We also got a chance to chat with all-female rock/punk band The Linda Lindas about life and food on the road. 

Amazing art and photography throughout the magazine, including work by Bethany Mollenkof, Souther Salazar, PatPatKate, Yudi Ela Echevarria, Joyce Lee, and Brian Guido.

102 pages, spiral bound, full color
Cover photo by Joyce Lee

Language: English