Did it change your sense of what it means to be Iranian?

I grew up in a suburb of San Diego that was adjacent to a very wealthy, very white suburb, and my mom figured out that if I took Latin I could go to the fancy school. So I took Latin, and that allowed me and my brothers to go to these fancier schools. It was very white. There were also a lot of Iranian immigrant kids, but we were never like them, because our family had left Iran for different reasons. My dad’s family is Baha’i, and my family were religious refugees. Whereas almost everyone else Iranian in our fancy school had families who left for political and money reasons, and they just were in a different socioeconomic reality. I felt so intensely this sense of, Well, I’m not like that.

It makes me think of the book “The Limits of Whiteness,” by the sociologist Neda Maghbouleh, about slippery notions of whiteness within Iranian-American identity.

That’s another thing that’s so weird: when I fill out any official documents, any census thing—technically, legally, I’m white. And yet—I mean, look at me. I have never once been made to feel like I fit in among white people. After the Netflix show came out, somebody from my high-school cross-country team posted a picture of all of us in a hot tub at somebody’s house the night before a meet. Sometimes I think, Am I over-narrativizing the extent to which I felt different? Am I just exaggerating? And in this photo there’s maybe twelve of us in the hot tub. Eleven very fair, young girls, mostly blond, and then me. And, looking at this photo, I was, like, Oh, O.K. I didn’t exaggerate. I didn’t make it up. If anything, I didn’t go far enough.

How does this come out in your work?

What I tried to do with my show is convey this idea that good food around the world is more similar than it is different, and that we, as humans, are more similar than we are different. The idea was that, maybe by learning about somebody’s food culture, maybe you’ll have some more compassion for them. Well, that all felt real great in the moment, but the world keeps getting darker.

At the end of last year, the beginning of this year, all of what’s been happening with America and Iran—it was really hard for me. Last year, I did a big feature for the Times on the ten essential Persian recipes, and we had such a wonderful and positive reaction to it. But then, well, it turns out that people can like our food and still want to bomb us. A long time ago, cooking and working in food stopped being about food for me, and it’s been about people, and I feel now like I have to really hold myself to task for what I’m trying to convey with my work—does it really matter? Can food make a difference?

Is your next book going to try to answer those questions?

The next book is all about going out into the world and cooking with other people, and helping them figure out their own circumstances in the kitchen. It’s a book that’s trying to answer the question “How do you know what to cook?” With “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,” in the end, I felt like I put every single story I had in that one book. And now I don’t have any more stories, so I realized that for this book I need to go make some new stories. Wendy MacNaughton, who illustrated “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,” is going to work with me again. I’ve learned so much about listening and storytelling from her—the power of just standing in a corner and letting people do their thing, and to do what you’re doing right now, which is to just let the person keep talking.

So, for this next book, we’re going to go out and report together, into a whole bunch of different environments: a Meals on Wheels kitchen, the Zen hospice, a harried working mom’s house, someone who just had a baby, someone who’s had an accident, someone who is other-abled. We’re going to see how everyone cooks, what their constraints are. Who knows what will come out of that, but I know it will be special and beautiful, and much more amazing than just some funny fart joke. Which we’ll probably also do.

Every cookbook needs fart jokes.

It’s funny—this Christmas, I had just gotten back from Mexico, and I gave Wendy a jar of epazote, because ever since the first book she’s come into really loving to cook certain things, including beans. I was so happy to give it to her and say, “O.K., so you add just a pinch for flavor—and also, it makes you fart less!”

Stuff like that always blows my mind: the realization that things serve functions in recipes that are way beyond just “this tastes good,” even if over time maybe we lose access to the knowledge of the functionality of an ingredient or a technique.

Or a tool! I didn’t know this until recently, when I was doing research for something, but there is a reason that beans are often cooked in ceramic pots. It turns out that a lot of ceramic cooking pots are slightly alkaline, and that alkalinity is what makes bean skins tender—that’s why I typically add a pinch of baking soda when I make beans. But it turns out that bean pots make good beans because there is alkalinity in the clay. It’s amazing. Someone figured it out along the way.

I love doing the homework on recipes and traditions and finding that stuff out. And I really love figuring out how I can best communicate this to you—how do I translate this to you? I’m excited to sit there and read and research. I love, as a reader, when I’m, like, Wow, there’s so much context here in what you’ve written, and I feel safer in your hands for it.

So much of saying things out loud in public, in whatever medium, is just asserting your authority. And it’s so comforting to me when people back up their authority.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, actually. I just recently was in Oaxaca, and at first I was really disturbed by what appeared to me to be a reorientation of local tradition to appeal to a very particular and very narrow American audience.

The tourist gaze?

Yeah. Did you read that article a few years ago about this idea of “airspace”? I’ve been noticing that, over the last few years, in my travels, there is this very specific type of café, a very clear visual shorthand for “Hello, we serve a certain audience in this establishment.”

“Here is a place where you can Instagram your cortado.”

Yeah, exactly! I had never been to Oaxaca before; I was really excited to go. And then I showed up, and I was really surprised by the degree to which I found a lot of businesses and traditional crafts oriented toward serving wealthy Western audiences and their particular aesthetic tastes. For example, in Teotitlán, a weaving town near Oaxaca, all the rugs we saw were in a very particular neutral palette, the same one that’s in every store of a certain kind, in cities of a certain kind. My best friend was with me—he’s an art historian, and a lot of his work has to do with colonialism and Mexico. He said that, when he’d been to Oaxaca last, five years earlier, this neutral palette hadn’t existed at all.

I found myself really disturbed by this, especially because I had gone into this trip so excited to share it somehow, to write about Oaxaca or to make a show there, but then I felt like what I was seeing was, in a way, not real. I was so conflicted about what my responsibility was. I was spilling my guts about it to my friend Niki Nakazawa, who was a producer for my show, and lives in Oaxaca. Niki was, like, “Samin, I really appreciate your earnestness, but there’s no black and white in Mexico. There’s no good and bad in Mexico. This has been happening since the beginning of time. For you to want traditional artisans to only ever do their tradition and never evolve is another form of colonialism.” And it turns out that half of the Navajo rugs sold in Santa Fe, where the Navajo rugs theoretically are authentic, come from Afghanistan anyway. It’s all just so complicated, and I am fully aware that I also have benefitted and profited from this by, for example, having a show with indigenous Mayan women, so I’m part of it, too. So I’m just trying to wrestle with what’s the responsible thing for me to do.