What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories about Food and Family

by Sun Yung Shin (Editor)

In What We Hunger For, fourteen writers from refugee and immigrant families write about their complicated, poignant, funny, difficult, joyful, and ongoing relationships to food, cooking, and eating.

Eating is an intimacy bound with language, family, and migration: travel far and near with these gifted writers as they share their flavorful, luminous stories.

Food can be a unifier and a healer, bringing people together across generations and cultures. Sharing a meal often leads to sharing stories and deepening our understanding of each other and our respective histories and practices, global and local. Newcomers to Minnesota bring their own culinary traditions and may re-create food memories at home, introduce new friends and neighbors to their favorite dishes, and explore comforting flavors and experiences of hospitality at local restaurants, community gatherings, and spiritual ceremonies. They adapt to different growing seasons and regional selections available at corner stores and farmers markets. And generations may communicate through the language of food in addition to a mix of spoken languages old and new. All of these experiences yield stories worth sharing around Minnesota cook fires, circles, and tables.

Genres: Nonfiction, Food, Memoir

224 pages, Paperback

Published April 5, 2021

About the author

신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, spent her early years in the Chicago area, and is now based in Minneapolis. She is the award-winning author of thirteen books for adults and children. She is 2026 McKnight Foundation Fellow in Creative Prose and a recent finalist for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her newest picture book Revolutions are Made of Love: The Story of Grace Lee Boggs & James Boggs is available for pre-order wherever books are sold, and will be available on November 4, 2025; her nonfiction book Heart Eater: A Memoir of Immigration is forthcoming in 2026. Her poetry has been included in the 2021 Gwangju Biennale and she was an invited presenter at the Korean Literary Translation Institute's 2018 conference on Korean diasporic literature. She is a frequent speaker and keynote presenter in community spaces and at academic conferences, most recently at the University of Salamanca, Spain, and University of Joensuu, Finland. She is on the advisory board for the Immigrant Writing Series at Black Lawrence Press. For more about her work, please visit sunyungshin.com or follow her on Substack, Instagram, Facebook, and Threads.

Reviews

[Laura Hoffman Brauman · Rating 3 out of 5]

“When I’m cooking Haitian food, I am in communion with my mother, my grandma, and all of my foremothers. . . . It’s like being in church, taking part in a spiritual act that grounds me in the entirety of who I am. It brings me back to family meals and special family dinners from my childhood. Food is history, memory, and love.” - from Haitian Kitchen by Valerie Deus

What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories about Food and Family is a collection of essays by 14 different writers, each exploring the way that food is a connection to family, culture, and identity. The authors explore their personal experiences both with food as well as with their experiences with family members, often their parents, and the way food was used to create and connect to a sense of place. Relationships with food can be complicated, they can also be incredibly evocative and in many of the essays, the writers spoke to how the full sensory experience of food, not just the taste, can transport them to both their current family homes as well as to the homes that they are now far away from. I enjoyed reading about the authors’ experiences - and since several of the essays included some recipes, I’m also hoping to try out some of their recipes that speak of home to them.

[Joe Bliven · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm very happy that Riverview library chose this as a bookclub book because I otherwise never would have read it. There were some really engaging essays in this anthology, definitely a couple of stinkers, but a lot of writing that will stick with me. Some great and enlightening perspectives are shared in this book regarding food, identity, belonging, culture, politics, family, and history. I love that all the authors have a connection to Minnesota because it made these people feel closer to me. I will definitely want to revisit some of these essays in the future, though some I will certainly never revisit.

[Katelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed and learned from these essays by immigrants about the importance of food in connecting them to their culture.

[Rachel H · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stories were meaningful and even more so in the Twin Cities setting. My issue with short stories is that I always just want more of each writers thoughts 🤷🏻‍♀️

[Jeanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What We Hunger For” is a collection of essays about food, written by a diverse group of authors whose families of origin include experiences as immigrants and refugees. Their reflections on food, identity, connection, and separation range from hilarious to scholarly; there are even a couple of recipes and at least one poem. The approaches and voices of the authors are just as varied, coming from backgrounds as diverse as Ghana, Laos, and Honduras. There were essays that made me hungry, evoked great empathy, and made me reconsider my relationship, as a white consumer, to “ethnic food” (check out “An Unfortunate Mosaic” by Michael Torres, or “An Open Letter to Banh Mi Wannabes” by Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen). I highly recommend this book, and commend editor Sun Yung Shin for insisting that the authors’ own voices and viewpoints be centered and undiluted, and applaud the Minnesota Historical Society Press for publishing it.

[Holly Ristau · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this collection of stories for bookclub. Each story, written by an immigrant or refugee, shows the link between the food we eat and our feeling of home and belonging.

The stories varied in writing quality, but we decided that the Minnesota connections.... these were all stories taking place in Minnesota...helped to keep us engaged with the stories. The stories also made ua hungry and introduced us to many, many foods we've never heard of!

[Emilee H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of stories surrounding food, family, and the immigrant and refugee experience(s) in the US.
This is one of my new favorite books! I randomly picked it out at the library and will be buying my own copy. There are also some recipes shared in the book that I think I will try to make as well. Overall this is just a great read.

[Yaoyao Chen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a big fan of this book. I was expecting something warm, fresh, and tasty, but most of these stories made me feel rusty, superficial and old. Most of these writers grew up in the US, but their stories were about their parents' generations. The culture piece was not deep enough and the experience piece was not engaging enough.

There was one story I like particularly, which was about a homosexual man in Southeastern Asian community. When the author told his own story, I really felt the emotion, and the struggle.

[mollie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The essays in this collection are wonderful and remind me that the richness of our communities within the Twin Cities are tied inextricably to food and care and nurturing. We are lucky to live amongst so much tradition and such diversity.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a phenomenal and beautiful collection of stories.

[Laura Wyatt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of essays about the intersections of food and culture.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written and thought provoking.

[Blythe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a far more serious book than I was expecting.

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it.