A Yazidi Response to Best Ever Food Review Show

When I saw the title The Religion Where Eating Lettuce is a SIN!!, I braced myself. Once again, I thought, Yazidis were about to become somebody else’s spectacle: a strange people with strange rules, introduced through whatever would make an audience click.

Watching Sonny Side (William Sonbuchner)’s report for Best Ever Food Review Show, however, I found something more generous than the title had prepared me for. There was hospitality, patience and an interest in people whose lives are too often reduced to a few terrible images from 2014.

That deserves recognition. So do the moments when the report failed the people who welcomed it.

The People Behind the Headline

Sonny first visits a Yazidi family living in a tent in Sharia Camp, also known as Shariya, near Duhok. They were forced to flee Şingal (Sinjar) in 2014. They are internally displaced within Iraq, still waiting to return to the home they lost.

Early in the camp sequence, a man explains that Yazidis are surrounded by misinformation. Hearing that eased some of my suspicion. I had expected another outsider to explain us through prejudice; instead, someone was acknowledging that prejudice exists.

But I still wanted to hear from Yazidis themselves.

The report becomes strongest when it makes room for them. A mother prepares food. Sonny sits down to eat with the family. Their account of displacement gives the meal a context no description of ingredients could provide: they had expected their stay to be temporary. Months became years. Children were born into a life that was never supposed to become permanent.

What stayed with me was their wish to return home.

It is easy for viewers to mistake endurance for acceptance. People cook, raise children, buy necessities and receive guests because life has to continue. None of that means they have accepted the loss of their homes.

The family’s account of prayer also matters. As conveyed through the translation, turning towards the sun does not mean praying only for themselves. Their prayers include other people.

After everything they have endured, that generosity should command more attention than a lettuce taboo.

Lalish, on Whose Terms?

At Lalish, the report gives viewers a sense of the sacred place at the centre of Yazidi religious life. Comparing its significance with that of Mecca or Jerusalem offers an accessible starting point for an unfamiliar audience.

But a comparison between sacred places is very different from interpreting one religion through another religion’s account of evil.

For me, the report crosses that line when Tawûs-î-Melek is discussed through Christian and Islamic narratives about a fallen figure.

I am tired of encountering this framework. Why must we keep meeting somebody else’s D***l in explanations of our faith?

In the Yazidi understanding I am speaking from, Tawûs-î-Melek is a sacred being of divine light. The figure outsiders attempt to identify with him has no equivalent place in our faith. Their accusation does not become a neutral description simply because it is familiar to the audience.

A report can explain that such accusations have been used against Yazidis. But it must clearly distinguish the accusation from what Yazidis believe. Otherwise, it risks repeating the very distortion it is trying to explain.

I do not have to share Christian beliefs about Jesus to describe those beliefs accurately. Yazidis deserve that same discipline. Our faith should not have to pass through somebody else’s theology before viewers are allowed to understand it.

When Hospitality Becomes a Test

After Lalish, Sonny visits a different Yazidi family, also displaced from Şingal in 2014. They explain that they are allowed to live in a house because they look after an abandoned church. Having a solid roof over their heads does not mean their displacement has ended. Both families want to return home: one lives in a camp, the other in a house made available through caring for a church, but neither is living the life they were forced to leave behind.

The later family meal is another of the report’s warmest sequences. Food is prepared, vegetables are filled, the table is laid and a guest is fed. Sonny appreciates the meal, and that appreciation feels welcome.

Then he produces a lettuce.

For me, the atmosphere changes. The people who have just welcomed him are suddenly being asked to demonstrate and defend a religious boundary.

The interpreter compares differences in Yazidi practice with differences among Muslims over alcohol. That may be intended to make the subject understandable. But the family’s own explanation is already sufficient: this is how they were raised, and they continue to observe it.

They do not owe their guest an exception.

I read the hostess’s expression as startled. I cannot know what she felt, but I know how uncomfortable the scene made me. Imagine accepting a meal in an observant Jewish or Muslim household and then producing pork to see how the hosts respond. The point is not to predict whether they would object or ask the guest to leave. The point is that most viewers would immediately recognise the sensitivity of the gesture.

Why should a Yazidi table deserve less consideration?

Asking about a practice is legitimate. Bringing the prohibited food into the encounter turns that question into a test. The hosts’ patience does not make the test respectful.

Yazidis are not circus attractions. Our homes are not sets where visitors can stage encounters with supposedly strange beliefs. Welcoming someone to our table is not consent to being turned into a spectacle.

This is the danger: people welcome a visitor in good faith, hoping to be understood, only to discover afterwards that their hospitality has supplied material for another stigmatising portrayal. I cannot speak for these families’ reactions to the finished film. But I refuse to treat their generosity as permission to package their faith as a curiosity. The guest leaves with the footage; the hosts remain vulnerable to the stereotypes it may reinforce.

An Oral Tradition Is Still a Tradition

The explanation presented in the documentary connects the avoidance of lettuce to a massacre: Yazidis were killed by their persecutors in a lettuce field, and their blood soaked the ground and the plants. According to that account, the memory of the killings led to a vow never to eat lettuce again.

In this telling, abstaining is an act of remembrance. It connects a religious practice to people who were murdered and to the blood they shed. Leaving that out makes the practice look arbitrary and removes the grief that gives the explanation its meaning.

This is the account offered in the report, not a historical event I am claiming to have independently established. My objection concerns how the report frames the uncertainty. To my ear, its emphasis on oral transmission and the lack of written evidence diminishes the account rather than explaining the limits of what has been verified.

The absence of a written record does not establish that an event never happened. People are born, breathe and die whether someone writes it down or not. Violence happens whether an official records it or a survivor has the means to preserve it on paper. Writing records an event; it does not bring that event into existence.

Oral testimony can be questioned, just as a written document can. We can ask who preserved a memory, how it was passed down and whether different versions exist. But questioning evidence is different from dismissing it because it was spoken rather than written.

An oral tradition remains a tradition. It can carry memory, mourning and obligation across generations. The family explains its own observance through the way it was raised. That deserves to be heard without requiring its members to produce an archive at the dinner table.

When Dignity Feels Like a Gift

We Yazidis need to stop expressing gratitude for something that should be normal. When we thank outsiders simply for not reducing us to stereotypes, misinformation or sensationalism, we risk treating fair representation as an exceptional favour.

Several commenters identifying themselves as Yazidi thank Sonny for showing who they are and making their experiences visible; one identifies themselves as a survivor. I cannot know what each person felt obliged to say. But reading those responses, I recognise a painful relief: this time, perhaps, we have not been made to look monstrous or ridiculous.

And that is precisely what makes me ashamed as a Yazidi. Ashamed of how little we have come to expect, and of the position in which we feel we should thank someone simply for treating us as human. How much misrepresentation must a people endure before the absence of humiliation starts to feel like a gift?

We can appreciate the care someone puts into a report without surrendering our right to criticise it. Gratitude must never become an obligation to overlook the moments that hurt us, or a payment we make in the hope that the next portrayal will be kinder.

Accuracy is not generosity. Respect is not charity. Dignity is not a favour. And not being stigmatised should never feel extraordinary.

Better Than Its Title

Despite these objections, I came away with more appreciation for this report than its title had led me to expect.

It allows Yazidis to appear as hosts, parents, cooks and people with religious convictions. It connects the history of persecution with the continuing reality of displacement. Most importantly, it gives families space to describe their own lives.

Other viewers say they previously knew nothing about Yazidis. Reaching those viewers matters: the report gives them an opportunity to hear families whose lives they might otherwise never encounter.

The closing account of faith stayed with me: the family describes persecution as strengthening its determination to remain Yazidi. I hear conviction in that response, but it should not become an uplifting ending that lets viewers forget the conditions in which these people are still living.

Their strength does not make their displacement acceptable.

This is why my response is neither a dismissal nor uncomplicated praise. The report contains real warmth. It also shows how easily a welcoming household can become a stage for testing a taboo, and how quickly an explanation of Yazidi faith can slip back into an outsider’s accusation.

Sonny Side’s report gave its audience people worth listening to. I wish its headline had trusted them to be interesting without the lettuce.

Video discussed: Best Ever Food Review Show, The Religion Where Eating Lettuce is a SIN!! (watch on YouTube), hosted by Sonny Side (William Sonbuchner).