You and I Eat the Same: On the Countless Ways Food and Cooking Connect Us to One Another

'You and I Eat the Same' proposes that immigration is fundamental to cuisine, and that good food is the common ground between different cultures. The book comprises long-form writing about the ways in which immigration has shaped food, and shorter features that point to our similarities, including the many ways we wrap meat in flatbreads, a basic primer on fire, and a catalog of all the species of animals that we eat.

Series information:
Dispatches will be a biannual publication, produced by Chris Ying, MAD, and Noma. Twice a year we’ll choose a topic—the ocean, home cooking, insects, history, or farming, for instance—and identify the single most urgent and interesting issue surrounding that topic. The book will differ in form from one edition to the next, depending on the subject at hand and what we determine to be the most effective way to explore it.

Volume 1 will assert that immigration makes food better. It is fundamental to cuisine—to all human endeavor, really—and essential to innovation and more delicious things. We’ll do this by putting forward the idea that cuisine should not be divided by ethnicity but rather taken as a collective human effort. As a reference point, think about those incredible old Time Life cookbooks from the sixties. Each volume reported on the cuisine of a different country or region for a curious American audience. In a celebratory, earnest, naive way, they were part anthropological study and part recipe book. Now imagine another volume in the series, one that documented cuisine not as a phenomenon of a specific country or culture but of humanity as a whole: The Cuisine of Humanity.

The book will have some entertaining and informative features that drive home the similarities between different culinary cultures: photo essays on all the different ways humans like to wrap meat in flat breads; a basic primer on fire; a catalogue of every species of animal humans eat, etc. But the heart of the book lies in long-form writing that encourages readers to view immigration as necessary to cuisine. We’ll have pieces from respected writers from various fields that explore the ways in which food and people move between cultures, and the ways in which this freedom of movement makes cooking and eating better.