I keep returning to one image. A woman stands in a narrow kitchen, balancing a pot on a stove that barely works. Behind her, a child does homework on a crowded table. Outside, the air is heavy, not with famine, but with exhaustion. There is food in this home, but there is also hunger. Not the kind that comes from empty shelves, but from systems that no longer see how everything connects: how housing and health, emotion and appetite, technology and policy, all shape what ends up on a plate....

In the Middle East, family is not just important, it is everything. From shared meals to lifelong loyalty, closeness is often seen as the...