What Now? With Trevor NoahAsma Khan: Stop Calling it Curry | What Now? with Trevor Noah
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Asma Khan on food, identity, colonialism, and kinder kitchens today
- Asma Khan traces her drive and resilience to a childhood marked by gender bias, colorism, and feeling “unwanted,” countered by her sister’s quiet belief in her strength.
- She explains how migrating to Cambridge—lonely, cold, and culturally disorienting—pushed her to cook as a way to reconnect with her mother, ancestors, and a sense of home.
- Khan argues food is inseparable from history and injustice, using examples like Bengal’s poppy seeds and the opium trade to show how colonialism shaped what people ate and why.
- She critiques the fine-dining/Michelin value system as culturally narrow and class-coded, and challenges the “ethnic food” framing that diminishes non-European cuisines.
- Khan condemns abuse in professional kitchens as normalized and glamorized, and frames her women-led, open-kitchen model as a legacy project to make hospitality humane and accountable.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasFood can be an anchor for identity when everything else feels uprooted.
Khan describes learning to cook in Cambridge not from passion or tradition, but from homesickness—aromas became a bridge to her mother and matriarchal lineage when she felt isolated and culturally adrift.
Language around food often carries colonial power dynamics.
Her claim that “there is no such thing as curry” frames the term as an English umbrella that flattens thousands of distinct regional dishes, making a vast culture easier to categorize and consume.
Ingredients can encode trauma and exploitation, not just flavor.
Khan’s refusal to use poppy seeds is a deliberate ethical stance rooted in Bengal’s forced poppy cultivation for British opium exports, linking a pantry staple to empire and famine pressure.
Fine-dining standards can function as class gates disguised as ‘quality.’
She critiques Michelin culture and “one-inch food on a ten-inch plate” aesthetics as Eurocentric signals of refinement that marginalize cuisines built around abundance, sharing, and staples like rice and bread.
Visibility changes empathy—open kitchens challenge consumer detachment.
By moving to an open-kitchen restaurant, Khan wants diners to see the people and labor behind the meal, countering the basement-kitchen norm and the modern separation created by delivery culture.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesI want to bring the edifice down. I want to break every door and every window that keeps out people like me.
— Asma Khan
When the day you leave your mother's womb, we're all migrants.
— Asma Khan
My sister... would hold my hand in the darkness away from everybody and tell me, "Asma, you're the warrior princess. When you speak, the earth will shake. One day the world will know who you are." I believed her.
— Asma Khan
Food became then not, uh, not something I ate, but it became everything, my identity, my culture, my religion, my everything, my name.
— Asma Khan
There is no respect, and where there is no respect on the table, I will not serve.
— Asma Khan
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
