Erin Lyall, Conflict Producer For CBS News

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1:27Ruthie's Table 4 brought to you by Sky and Montclair. We went to Yemen in 2015, like not long after the Houthis had taken over. We did go to the presidential palace to interview the new head Houthi. Being in the presidential palace of a government that nobody wanted there is a dangerous place to sit. The Saudis could have bombed it any time. So we wanted to leave quickly. So we did our work very fast. We packed up our equipment and we were heading out the door and they were like, you're not leaving. We said, what do you mean? You're not leaving. There's lunch. We said, we don't want lunch. I know, we don't want lunch.

2:01We just want to leave. And our drivers were at this point going, guys, we can't say no. They're not going to let us go.

2:13For over 40 years, my life in food has been a story of adventure, excitement, education, and comfort. Erin Lyle, who is with me today, is a conflict producer for CBS News. Her life in food has been a story of survival, danger, and hope. She has eaten with Ukrainian soldiers on the freezing front line, cooked with families in their homes in Gaza, and shared food on the battlefield in Syria and Iraq, with bullets sounding in the distance. From these experiences in the field, Erin has created Food Under Fire, a unique and beautiful food blog full of recipes, anecdotes, photographs, memories, and portraits of the people she's met on her journalistic travels.

3:00Today we're here together in the warmth and the safety of the River Cafe, two women with different experiences, but with the same values and a shared knowledge that food brings us together in war and in peace and brings us together today. We were just talking about that we met. Tell them how we met. Well, I normally cover breaking news and war and conflict for CBS, but once in a while I get to do lovely features, and we did a feature on you for CBS Sunday Morning and about this podcast and about the book that came out of the podcast. And while we met on that day, I told you about the blog, and you said, you've got to come back, so here I am.

3:39I thought, you know, what a great story to tell. I say everybody has a story, and this is a story to tell. Well, when I first started going to war zones, my parents and my friends would say, where are you staying and what are you eating? And after a while, I realized actually the food experiences I was having in the field were so unique and that people were interested in it because how are normal people surviving when bombs are going off, when things are chaotic? And so that's why I started it. Food does tell us about a culture. Absolutely. Does it also tell you about a war? It does, yeah. I mean, food is survival, food is comfort, food is intimacy.

4:18I mean, it's always so surprising to me when we go to a place that's at war, that's under siege, that has very limited resources, and people share with us. They share. You know, because they have, I say it a few times in the blog in various anecdotes, but in a lot of these places, they have so little, and then they share everything. with us, you know, and that is always a bit of a wow experience because the generosity is always astounding. And someone shared, was it Nella, that shared a recipe for this borscht, and I thought, we thought, why would we want to hear a recipe from the River Cafe? When you can hear it straight from the front lines.

5:01So we went to Zaporizhia. This was, I think, in 2022. Where is that? Zaporizhia is just past Dnipro. So it's sort of in the east of Ukraine, not quite the front line, although the Zaporizhia nuclear plant is obviously Russian held. So it's very near the front line in Ukraine. And at this point, they were getting all the refugees from Mariupol, whoever was able to escape. They were driving to Zaporizhia first. So we went to Zaporizhia to find those people and hear their stories. and our fixer who's from Kiev had a contact in Zaporizhia named Nella. And she met us in her little Lada car and from the beginning she was feeding us.

5:48We showed up on arrival and she had made these mashed potato donuts that morning and kept them in her car in a rag. What were they like? They looked almost like a knish. A little dumpling, fried dumpling, and inside was this warm, spiced mashed potato mixture. She met us and immediately handed these out, and so we stood in the cold eating her potato dumplings. And then when we went back for a second day, we shot in the morning, and then she said, okay, that's it, you're coming to my house for soup. And we go into her apartment building, which is a classic Soviet style. You know, it looks incredibly decrepit from the outside, but when you're in her flat, it's warm.

6:28She had five cats wandering around, and she just shoved all six of us around her tiny glass kitchen table and ladled out a borscht that she'd been cooking since the morning. So that is a recipe on the blog. Going to a home tells you so much, doesn't it? It is just going. I always say that. When somebody said, what is the best restaurant in London, I'd say home. Yeah. If you go to someone's home. Or your house. And it's my house. But it's anyone's home. I think that there is something. We were once in Prague. Richard, my husband, got an honorary degree from the University of Prague. And we were walking down the street, A woman came up and said, I was at your ceremony yesterday, and it was so moving, and I loved your architecture.

7:10And she said, would you ever think of coming to my home for lunch? And we said, yes, you know, immediately. And the next day we found ourselves in this little home in Prague with a kind of family silver. It was very, you know, that had been handed down, tablecloths that had been ironed for hours, it seemed, with embroidery. and we had this meal that she'd cooked and her children were there. I remember it more than probably any restaurant I've ever been to. Absolutely. To get that kind of closed-door experience is really unique. And the generosity, as you say, and the trust. Actually, the trust to say, I'm going to take strangers into my home and feed them is massive.

7:50It's beautiful. And to have it compounded by being in a war zone. So this is called Nella's Famous Borscht. Yes. And I was wondering whether you would read the recipe. It's the first recipe that we've ever had that didn't have the ingredients in a list. She wouldn't give us any measurements. Any measurements. Exactly. I like that. She also cautions that it doesn't have giant chunks of meat because that's not the kind of borsche she makes. But I suppose you could pull the meat off the meat that's simmering in here and keep them. That is interesting because my father, as a big event in our lives, would drive us to New York to see theater when we were kids from upstate New York.

8:28and we'd go to the Russian tea room as a treat. And the borscht was always very red, very smooth, and not much, you know, texture in my memory. And then the sour cream. But this one is quite a meaty potato-y. The Ukrainian borscht is very different. It's closer to like a goulash. Yeah, that's what I thought. It's more like a stew. Yeah, yeah. And the Ukrainians, I've met the chef, Yevkin Klopotenko, who's lobbied the UN and UNESCO to name Ukrainian borscht as a heritage product. So they take it very seriously. Okay. All right. We're going to hear the recipe for Ukrainian borscht. So this is Nella's famous Ukrainian borscht.

9:12Simmer a large piece of either pork or beef in a large pot of water. Skim the fat, then add a whole onion and bay leaves. Simmer until you have a stock. Scrub and peel two potatoes, two carrots, and two beets. Add them to the boiling stove. After the vegetables are softened, remove and let the stock continue to simmer. Cube the potatoes, carrots, beets, and onions, adding tomato juice to the pan. Remove the meat from the stock and add vegetables. While they simmer, add sliced green cabbage and dill to the pot. Boil for 10 minutes. It's then ready to serve with sour cream, or you can let the flavors meld and eat it the next day.

9:48Simple. Simple. Sounds simple. But I think my boards should probably not equal Nellas.

9:58From game day crowds to memorable meals, Genius by Global Payments keeps your kitchen and floor perfectly in sync. Real-time menus, seamless updates, big league reliability for any business. That's Genius. So you've only worked for CBS and CBS sent you to London. So I moved to London in 2014. My first story once I moved here was the revolution in Ukraine, the Maidan. And my boss came to me and said, look, we haven't covered Ukraine in 30 years. Nobody in this office has ever been. We don't really have any contacts, but the story's yours if you want to go. And so I went and it was an amazing time.

10:40I mean, we'd go out to the square every day. and I mean the Ukrainians are so sort of creative in how how they manage these things you know the guys would be kitted out in in sort of mattresses as a as a shield and little colanders on as helmets and they'd be out there sort of throwing bricks against the government police and there would be little old grandmothers pushing around carts I've never seen anything like them they looked like mini trains and they were sort of uh soup tureens that were that were kept hot with wood, I think, and they just pushed them around and they were dishing out soup and others would be wandering around with hard-boiled eggs and it's just kind of amazing.

11:20Do you remember the soup, what it was? Yeah, it was borscht. It was borscht. And what was that revolution? I'm sorry to be ignorant, but what was that revolution? Sure, they had a pro-Russian president at the time, Yanukovych, and he was moving closer to Russia and away from the EU, and so they were protesting that. And in the end, he fled and the protesters sort of, quote-unquote, one right and um and that was that was that and that was the start of sort of everything we've seen and that was your first kind of intervention your first experience that was my first how big was the crew when you it's usually do try and take small it's usually four of us it's usually producer correspondent cameraman and um security advisor if it's a dangerous place and then once we're on the ground we pick up a local fixer translator who helps us get around from there I went to Crimea and then eastern Ukraine because at this point Russia was invading in the east.

12:16And so I've been covering Ukraine for 12 years. Is that who Ukraine been your focus? Yeah, Ukraine. Well, the Ukraine in the Middle East generally. But that is also when I started the food blog because I thought there's some interesting things happening out here. What else did you eat in Ukraine? Do you remember? other than the boys? There's a lot of really sort of hearty, bone-sticking food, which is perfect when you're fighting a war in winter. So there's kasha, which is a sort of buckwheat. I know kasha. My grandmother made kasha. Yeah, that we used to have. So there's a lot of kasha around.

12:51The mountainous regions make something called banoche, which is like a polenta. It's cornmeal, and then they mix it with cheese and they top it with mushrooms or sort of bacon. It's really, you eat it and after six or seven bites, you can't eat anymore because it's just expanding inside you. And then, you know, if you get sort of toward the front lines and you're with the soldiers who are cooking, there's a lot of boiled eggs. There's a lot of stews, soups on the stove. How do they get the food to the front line? They have an amazing logistics. Is Ukraine particularly strongly there? They're very nimble and they pivot very quickly.

13:36So they've been very good at keeping the logistics running. There was one trip we made close to the front line and it was sort of set back a little bit and they had a proper food set up there where they were bringing in sort of volunteer chefs. This guy, a Ukrainian guy had come in. He was a head chef in Sweden somewhere and he had flown back to volunteer his services after the invasion and was just there again making borscht. Do you know Jose Andres? Yes. Did you ever meet him? I haven't. Yeah. He's amazing. He is amazing. He's my hero. Yeah, World Central Kitchen is pretty special. He just flies the World Central Kitchen.

14:11They fly in. And we run into their people in more places than any other charity out there, actually. Yeah, like you'll be really frontline-ish and you'll see a guy in a World Central Kitchen t-shirt. It's amazing, actually. they really are and they do it in an incredible way which is he just goes he doesn't bring a whole team with them i think and then the whole idea is that they hire locals and the locals source everything locally so so it's really really yeah yeah excellent because you you sort of started by talking about how very often you go to a war zone and life is going on but that must train change from when you get then to the actual absolutely to the front line absolutely and And it gets harder the closer you get, obviously, to get fresh produce and varied products.

15:03But somehow they're all doing it. One of my most amazing experiences in life, I mean, at work for sure, but in life as well, was when Kherson had been taken over by the Russians in the early days of the invasion. Where is Kherson? It's southern Ukraine. It's southern Ukraine. And it's sort of right on the way to Crimea. And that's why I think the Russians took it because they had Crimea and so they came in. And it was liberated. The Ukrainians liberated the city. I mean, on the other side of the river in that part of Harrison, the Russians are still there to this day. But the Ukrainians took back the main city.

15:42So we were in Kiev and we wanted to get to Harrison, obviously, because the pictures were amazing. People were dancing in the streets and singing. so we started driving and um then we passed through checkpoints to get closer and closer and finally we get to the final checkpoint outside of Harrison and they said sorry we're closed the president is coming tomorrow so we're not letting anyone else in you can come back tomorrow morning uh when Zelensky arrives we said okay and at this point we had driven for hours and I was not going to drive back to our hotel in Odessa which was again hours away so I said, all right, team, let's go to the nearest village.

16:17Let's shoot a story, see what we can find. And maybe we can find a guest house. So we go to this village and we see this little old man and he approaches us and he starts crying. And he basically tells us a story of how the Russians had taken over his mother's home and they were living there, the soldiers, and they were trashing the place. I mean, it was turning into a pigsty. And finally he said he had had enough. And so he went to to the house and said guys you've got to get out of here this is so disrespectful please leave my mother's house and they said okay old man here's a shovel why don't you dig your grave so so they made him dig his grave for two nights he didn't tell his wife about this he just went they went they were like you're coming back or we're gonna find you so he went back and he finished digging his grave and he shows us this i mean it was like a perfectly rectangular grave and finally he says okay i'm done and he fully expected you know to get shot and thrown in the grave and they were kind of drunk and laughed at him and said whatever nice get out of here so he left so he he tells us this story he shows us the grave he shows us the trashed house um and uh and it was sort of an amazing story and then i said to him listen we're a team of seven because we had some drivers everything involved um is there a place around here we could spend the night like we have our own food we have a generator we have a starlink we just need a place to crash is there guest house and he said well you're staying in my house like of course you know we have food we have a place for you to sleep and we even have lady wine for you it's a lady wine what is lady wine he said well we have hard wine for the men and like a softer wine for the ladies okay that sounds amazing so he brings us back to his house which is essentially a junkyard he's got all these cars on blocks and seven dogs and sort of you know a little shack there and he brings us in and his wife is turning one room into a bedroom for seven people, and she has taken everything in her kitchen and cooked it and put it on this little rickety table.

18:19And we sat around this table, you know, all seven, nine of us, however many we were, eating just a plain pasta topped with a sort of spicy tomato-pepper mixture and bread with salo, which is the pork fat that they eat. Getting me hungry. garlic you have some bread um and and of course lady wine which we so tell me about lady wine so it tastes like wine i mean it's homemade they everything where they were serving us was basic they had moonshine vodka um they had homemade lady wine and a harder wine so it's i guess it's just the level of fermentation so it tasted like wine but maybe slightly fizzy amazing in a big jug i think the men also ended up drinking it as we made our way through the uh through the supplies But, you know, it's those kind of moments where you just go, oh, my God, you know, humanity is an amazing thing sometimes, right?

19:14And for them as well, because they could unload the trauma of occupation, right? They finally had people sitting around their table going, like, tell us everything. So for them, it was our poor fixer was going a mile a minute back and forth in English and Ukrainian. But it was pretty special.

19:37So we're taking Ukraine, which is a very strong image of the food, the culture, the whole atmosphere of war. If you shifted to Syria, would that be a very different mindset in terms of? No, I mean, the hospitality is sort of a universal gift. And in many of the cultures, particularly in the Middle East, hospitality is taken very, very seriously. So, again, I've had amazing experiences in Gaza where families have taken us into their homes. Tell us about Gaza. My last time in Gaza was, I think, 2017 or 2019. We haven't been able to go in for this current conflict. And at the time, our producer there has a very big family, and they invited us to their watermelon farm, and we would sit around eating watermelon and salty white cheese.

20:31and then all the women in the family would cook and invite us into the apartment and it would be rice and meat and stuffed grape leaves and dips and fatouche and all the yummy things. And it's just, I mean, it's pinch yourself moments because you're in a place and you have a vision of a place, particularly if you haven't been, if you're just watching TV and you're watching war in Afghanistan or Syria or Gaza or whatever, you think it's 360 degree destruction. But actually when you're in it, there's these amazing moments. What is the nearest you've come to a kind of death experience? In 2014, my team and I were taken by Russian separatists, blindfolded at gunpoint and taken to a place and held.

21:22It was really only probably half a day, but it felt like forever. And when you're sitting there in a blindfold, time passes very slowly. Wow. That was in 2014. Were you together in a room? They separated the men and the women. So I think the men were more worried than we were because they didn't know what was happening to us. But honestly, they sat us down in chairs. The men, they didn't give chairs to, but they sat us down in chairs and gave us a cup of tea. And then what happened? How were you? I think at the end of the day, those of us who had been taken had been able to alert our bureaus back in London that it had happened.

22:03So there was a lot of phone calls being made behind the scenes. And I think they just realized they made a mistake. What country were you in? This was Ukraine. This was eastern Ukraine. And you talked about Yemen. Did you also have an experience there? We went to Yemen in 2015, like not long after the Houthis had taken over. And we didn't have a near-death experience there at all. I mean, it was perfectly fine, but we did go to the presidential palace to interview the new head Houthi, whoever he was at the time. And we wanted to do things as quickly as possible because obviously being in the presidential palace of a government that nobody wanted there is a dangerous place to sit.

22:46The Saudis could have bombed it any time. So we wanted to leave quickly. So we did our work very fast. We packed up our equipment and we were heading out the door and they were like, you're not leaving. We said, what do you mean? you're not leaving there's lunch we said we we don't want lunch i know we don't want lunch we just want to leave and they're like no no it's not it's not possible there's lunch you're sitting down and you're having lunch we said and and our drivers were were at this point going guys we we can't we can't say no they're not going to let us go so we said okay let's sit down and have lunch and uh and so we were sort of forced to have lunch with do you remember what you ate i do it was uh Rice and meat and actually a really great Yemeni dish that I didn't know existed until I was there, which is a sort of shrimp stew.

23:31I didn't know they ate a lot of shrimp in Yemen, but it's sort of tomatoes, shrimp, spicy peppers of some kind sort of cooked down until it's kind of pasty. You eat it with a really nice bread. So lunch was great, but I ate it probably too fast than I should. Do you think you get used to danger? Do you get hardened? Do you feel... I don't. Other people might. But every time I'm in a dangerous situation, I get that pit of stomach feeling and I sort of punch into myself, into my body armor, and it's not very pleasant. We don't make stupid decisions to go to unsafe places. Have you lost people? CBS has lost people, yeah.

24:17We have. And so we take it very seriously. Most networks have lost people. and it's it's it's dangerous work but we try to be as safe as possible if anyone on the team doesn't feel safe we turn around and and we try to give as accurate a picture of what's happening without undergoing the risk as much as possible i was talking i was talking to someone about in journalism about about what we are about news at the moment you know what we see in news and there's so many people with opinions that you listen to telling you what to think or helping you that you know navigate a very complicated situation but he was saying that the really important reason we still have television is the people on the ground that if you turn on and you see a reporter from exactly the city that is being bombed from the country that has been attacked that that is the real yeah you need the facts in order for the opinion makers to have the opinions right so so it is important we do need to show what's actually happening yeah what was Syria like Syria I spent most of my time in Northeast Syria we have other teams that did the sort of Damascus part of things so Northeast Syria is a Kurdish region they're at war with Turkey as well.

25:47And, and we were mostly there in the fight against ISIS. And in that situation, I have a blog post about the breakfasts we would make ourselves because as ISIS got pushed back further and further into Bagus, which was that little tiny pocket at the end there, we were further and further away from a place to stay. So by the end, we actually slept in the street, not far from the Bagus front line. We just brought these army cots and slept wrapped in these big, fluffy Syrian blankets. And every morning someone on our team would make porridge. Porridge. With just a little camping stove and a little ring.

26:27And he would boil water and coffee mate and then add in the oats. And then we had a whole supply of sort of nuts and dried fruit and peanut butter. And, you know, every day we would make something different. One day it would be banana nut. One day it would be peanut butter and jelly. One day it would be dried strawberries and hazelnuts. And we'd try to pimp it out as much as we could to make it interesting. But by the end, we were all kind of expanding out of our pants. Because if you're eating boiled coffee made every day, it was like injecting pure cream into our veins. I went to Syria in 2008, quite a long time ago.

27:06Where were you? We ate so well. We were in Damascus and Aleppo. and Palmeira. And it was an incredible culture of food. You know, you talk about culture and the artifacts in the museum of pottery or you see the paintings or you see the architecture. But the culture that you learn through food, the way they would cut a piece of cake, the way people would share. I remember Richard and I went to a park and people really wanted us to try things. From their own picnics. It's that hospitality again. Yeah, and I know it's really beautiful. Yeah. Do you think it is very Middle Eastern? Absolutely. In fact, I find sort of the Anglo hospitality is one of the worst, sort of American and British.

27:52It's a little bit more closed off. You bring in your friends and family, but strangers not so much, whereas the rest of the world tends to be a bit more open-armed. Yeah, but we're very, very impressed. And also how delicious the food is. Yeah. Do you ever bring back recipes and cook them when you come back? I do. Yeah, I do. And my most recent recipe that I've learned is Ukrainian pickles. Okay, what's that? Tell me. It's so simple. It's like crazy. And my kids love them. They eat them all the time like candy. You basically take a Tupperware. You slice small cucumbers into spears, throw them in the Tupperware, throw in a handful of big sea salt flakes, throw in a bunch of dill and a couple peeled cloves of garlic.

28:36That's it. Put the lid on, shake it, put it in the fridge, and in two hours, they're like the most amazing, fresh, quick pickle. There's no liquid. No liquid at all. Wow. Yeah, the salt just makes it all happen. And restaurants, when you're in these wards, you go to – Sure, all the time. You go out. Yeah. They're so interesting because, again, I've been reassured so many times by people who are living in a place that we think is just like over. Mostly my children have been backpacking or traveling. I want to say come home. it's fine we're okay absolutely and even in in ukraine um we were in uh denipro and a couple years ago which is again not far from zaporizhia so not far from the front line and um and i met a guy who had just opened a restaurant and i said what like it's 2022 you just yeah what are you talking about and he he had been an egg distributor yeah and literally the russians uh bombed his egg warehouse in Kiev and destroyed all his eggs.