Nylah Iqbal Muhammad

I'm a James Beard Award-nominated food and travel writer with bylines in Travel + Leisure and Vogue. I write about no-fly travel — trains and ships for me! In my work, I explore culture, politics, food, history, and how they all intersect. 

My Recent Work

Contraband Camp •

Hunting While Black: Food, Freedom and Reclaiming the Great Outdoors

Lawrence Weeks, an executive chef and owner of Murray’s Creole Pub based in Louisville, wanted to learn how to hunt to gain greater self-sufficiency and connect to his family’s legacy as subsistence hunters. He joined Hunters of Color and now, with a mentor, he’s going on his first hunt in early September, starting out with small game like rabbits and squirrels and branching out to wild turkey and deer later in the season.
Eater Twin Cities •

As an Indigenous Barbecue Restaurant Takes Shape, Owamni’s Founder Has Even Bigger Moves on the Horizon

Take a moment to imagine it: the rich, woody scents of smoked turkey, bison ribs, and whole antelope cooked low and slow wafting down Franklin Avenue. If all goes well, the Twin Cities won’t have to fantasize about it. Chef Sean Sherman’s latest project, Šhotá Indigenous BBQ by Owamni, aims to bring Indigenous barbecue to the neighborhood very soon.
It’s part of a series of big moves for Sherman’s nonprofit organization NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems).
Vox •

How real is Shōgun?

Because of the fierceness of the warrior class and Japan’s distance from Europe, the Portuguese didn’t have the ability to conquer Japan through force, the way they did in places like Brazil and parts of India. Instead, they used religious conversion and trade to try to accomplish a cultural and economic conversion, exploiting the fractious nature of the warring lords to expand their trade routes. In fact, Japan still bears marks of Portuguese contact.
Vox •

What is life like in Palestine? These short films offer a glimpse.

That night, we see the residents of the house, a married couple, as they try to have sex. They draw toward each other, softly touching feet and thighs, but they are interrupted by the sound of bombs, which makes their infant cry. The husband then takes a condom, blows it up, and lets it float through the apartment wherever it may land — on the floor, on the bookcase, on their child. We realize this is his compulsion, a coping technique, a way of keeping score of what is taken from them.
Vox •

Atlanta’s third season explores the horrors of intimacy with whiteness

The theme of whiteness and how it haunts and damns its own recipients becomes almost cartoonishly apparent by the first scene of season three, later revealed to be a dream within Earn’s (Donald Glover) own dream sequence. Dreams have long been the perfect medium for surrealist art. A stylistic movement developed in the aftermath of World War II, surrealism uses discomfiting, contradictory, irrational images to evoke a dream-like state of being. The subconscious takes these images and reorders th...
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