Street Food Brought Together My Muslim and Jewish Families

I generally scrunch my nose at the whole “food brings us together” trope. But two-ish weeks ago, I found myself tangled in that cliche as my very practicing Muslim parents and my husband’s more or less spiritually Jewish parents met each other for the first time.

This union was 13 years in the making, prefaced with periods of discord and discomfort between me and my parents (a saga for another day). Once the dust did settle, we decided on a vacation that I puppeteered with the neurosis of an anxious, type-A, pathetically unchill millennial — against the very chill, utopian backdrop of Phuket, Thailand. 

(Go ahead. Make your White Lotus jokes.)