This book began with the kind of thought, an argument really, that most people would consider an unpopular opinion. It’s the kind of argument you only bring to the table if you’re prepared for groans and rolling eyes. It goes something like this.
We, the modern humans, eat from too many cuisines. In 2026, we have come to a time where we have access to too many ingredients from too many places. There is an overabundance of cooking content teaching us new ways to do old things. All of this serves us well in that we have never before had such ready access to global diversity.
But the side effect of all this is a kitchen overpacked with too many disparate and diverse ingredients. Our minds vacillate between pasta at home, a plate of pad thai from down the street, an order of butter chicken, supermarket sushi and who knows what else.
It was an argument I launched into with my editor Simon a few years ago, long before the idea for the book was formed.
“People cook from too many wildly disparate cuisines every night,” I told him.
“So–that’s bad?”
“Not bad, per se,” I replied. “Just deeply limiting. And it clutters up the kitchen. My grandmother cooked from one cuisine her entire life, meal after meal, day after day, and never once opened a cookbook to do it.”
We are dabblers now. We dip in and out of cuisines. We rely on recipes because we don’t settle in long enough with any of them to know them in our muscles the way our grandmothers did.
“Okay,” Simon said. “So what does that actually look like in your kitchen?”
I didn’t have a perfect answer for him in the moment. But it got me thinking.
“You can’t just argue this,” he said. “Show me the kitchen and demonstrate why it works.”
Simon’s question sat with me for a while. That summer, I read my way through Nigel Slater, Tamar Adler, MFK Fisher, Anthony Bourdain. It was Adler’s An Everlasting Meal that did it, in the end. Her whole case is that a kitchen run on a small, repeated set of movements produces more freedom than a kitchen stocked for every possible cuisine at once. It frees your mind from all the decision-making. It frees up your time.
I came up for air in the fall of 2023 with a notion of a deeply practical book: not an argument for constraint in the kitchen, but a demonstration of it.
I didn’t set out to write a Punjabi cookbook, exactly, though How To Eat With Your Hands is one. I set out to show a particular kind of domestic practice that is slowly going away. It’s one that favours a smaller pantry, fewer decisions and bends to the purpose of a busy Tuesday night just as easily as it does to a celebratory feast. Only a few generations ago, all kitchens were like this, centred around a single cuisine, handed down from one generation to the next, unconfused by a constant barrage of new recipes to try.
It may seem odd that a food writer (with a new book, no less) is arguing that we already have enough of all that. The irony isn’t lost. But How to Eat With Your Hands is not a book about doing more. It’s actually an argument for constraint.
Photos from Khalil’s kitchen
From left to right: roti, salad and kebabs; Aloo gosht (lamb and potato curry); saag with a puddle of melting butter
From left to right: green mangoes for achar, moongray growing on a radish plant, ripe persimmon.
From left to right: a plate of salad, tomato harvest.
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Khalil Akhtar is a Canadian journalist, broadcaster, and cooking instructor. Akhtar was born in the United Kingdom to a Punjabi family and grew up in small-town Atlantic Canada. He has spent two decades working in radio newsrooms across the country. He is the host of CBC Radio’s Information Morning in Moncton, New Brunswick, and a past co-host of CBC On the Island. He created and hosted the CBC summer radio program, The Main Ingredient, and developed a long-running syndicated food column that aired on CBC morning shows across the country. How to Eat with Your Hands is his first book.
Photo credit Rob Arsenault
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