In this episode, Leyla sits down with Yasmin Khan — the acclaimed British-Iranian-Pakistani food writer, activist, and author of *The Saffron Tales*, *Zaitoun*, *Ripe Figs*, and her newest cookbook, *Sabzi: The Beautiful World of Persian Vegetarian Cooking*.
Yasmin takes us back to her childhood in Birmingham, where her mother — a Gilaki nutritionist from a small town near the Caspian Sea — organized an Iranian community association so her kids would grow up with Nowruz, Shab-e Yalda, and Farsi language school. She shares the story of her grandfather driving hours to find the perfect oranges, bringing a five-kilo bag of Gilani rice on the plane to England because he didn't trust the rice abroad, and how a family farm still tended by her uncles ended up shaping the way she writes about food today.
She and Leyla trace her unlikely path from a decade of human rights campaigning in conflict zones — Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine — to the burnout that pushed her toward her grandmother's kitchen in Gilan, where she recorded her first food-and-story interviews on an iPhone. That project became *The Saffron Tales*, launched on Kickstarter, and set the template for everything she's written since.
The conversation turns honest and difficult as Yasmin speaks about the toll of being a public Iranian voice — the pile-on she received during Woman, Life, Freedom while she was quietly recovering from her fourth miscarriage in Thailand, the trademark lawsuit that nearly derailed the launch of *Sabzi* (yes, someone tried to trademark the word for "greens"), and the anti-Arab racism she says the Iranian community needs to be honest about. She and Leyla discuss the difference between the UK and US Iranian diasporas on Palestine, why she believes bombing your way to democracy has never worked, and what she's learning from an Iranian art therapy group in London that's teaching her to hold space for people she deeply disagrees with.
Throughout, Yasmin returns to her core conviction: culture — food, language, literature, art — is not a luxury in polarized times. It's the way through.
A warm, honest, and quietly radical conversation about heritage, empathy, and what it means to keep a culture alive.
RELATED LINKS:
• Yasmin Khan's website
• Yasmin Khan's instagram
• Sabzi: The Beautiful World of Persian Vegetarian Cooking — Yasmin's newest cookbook
• The Saffron Tales — Yasmin's debut, a Kickstarter-funded travelogue and cookbook of Iran
• Zaitoun — her book of Palestinian recipes and stories
• Ripe Figs — recipes from the Eastern Mediterranean
• Yasmin's Guardian article on the Sabzi trademark dispute — search "Yasmin Khan Sabzi Guardian"
• Yasmin's essay on miscarriage and pregnancy loss — worth reading alongside this episode
• Gilan province — the Caspian region Yasmin's family is from, known for rice, tea, and its progressive politics
• Chai and Conversation Cookbook Club — where we'll be cooking from Sabzi this season