About
Dining in Diaspora
A book and multimedia project documenting Armenian-American food culture — and the hidden history of how a displaced people helped shape the way America eats.
Armenians have been migrating to America for over a century — escaping genocide, war, and displacement, settling across the country from Los Angeles to Detroit to Boston and everywhere in between. They planted fig orchards in California soil, carried yogurt starters across oceans, introduced Americans to Near Eastern food before most had a name for it, and built one of the most layered and underdocumented diaspora food cultures in the United States. Most Americans have no idea where any of it came from.
Dining in Diaspora exists to tell that story.
Through reported narrative, documentary photography, and community fieldwork, this project traces how Armenian-Americans rebuilt themselves through food after catastrophic loss — and in the process, transformed the way America eats. It is a story about survival, adaptation, and identity. About what it means to carry a cuisine across borders when there is no homeland left to return to. About the church kitchens and backyard grills and family tables where an entire culture insisted on continuing.
It is about food. And it is about everything food carries.
Who Am I
About
I am an Armenian-American journalist raised in Los Angeles as a refugee from Iran — the most recent migration in a family history that spans several countries, generations, and bouts of displacement. I grew up feeling distinctively Armenian, Iranian, and American, spending a lifetime attempting to reconcile all of those identities. The food at our table was the most intact thing we carried.
I have spent more than a decade reporting this story across Armenian communities in Los Angeles, Fresno, Detroit, Watertown, Toronto, London, Istanbul, and beyond. I have cooked alongside church guilds, traced century-old yogurt starters to their origins, documented the women who kept recipes alive through repetition and communal labor, and created my own dishes from the Iranian-Armenian kitchen I grew up inside. This is not a project I came to. It is one I have always been living.
My reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Eater, CNN, TASTE, the Smithsonian, Food52, and elsewhere. Multimedia from this project has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York City, and Yerevan, Armenia.
I am currently working on The Armenian Table, a narrative cookbook about Armenian-American food culture and its largely uncredited influence on American eating. You can check out my reporting and writing work here.
Why Am I Doing This
"Home" is an elusive idea when the only constant you know is change.
This is true for most of the Armenian community forcibly scattered throughout the world. But far from being a monolith, Armenians encapsulate the varied, chaotic nature of "diaspora" perhaps better than anyone.
Armenia may be a country, but it is also a concept, one that functions independent of geography, making this narrative even more complicated than it already is.
Food is an underrated vehicle through which complex stories about communities with multi-faceted identities can be told, both to the world and the communities themselves, stories that span celebration and suffering, and everything in between.
This is my way of discovering and understanding who I am, those who came before me and how their legacies inform the future. It's about food, but it's also not about food. It's about displacement, alienation, exile and resilience. It's about exploring the intersection of race, class, identities, of nostalgia, the truth and who gets to own what. Through traveling across the country, it's an attempt to uncover the hidden history of how complex the Armenian diaspora is and the unknown impact it has had in America.
Excerpts from this project have been featured in Eater, Taste, Roads & Kingdoms, CNN’s Parts Unknown, Food52, Bon Appetit, The Smithsonian, Hour Detroit Magazine and Apartamento Magazine’s Cookbook #3
Multimedia from this project has been exhibited in shows in Los Angeles, New York City and Yerevan, Armenia.
For press and professional inquiries, email liana.agh@gmail.com