About Pink Salt
Adaab, and welcome!
Pink Salt is a space where politics, food, and possibility are hand-mixed with care and curiosity by me, Sahar. As a journalist and desi mother, I explore what nourishes us: ideas, questions, resistance, and meals. This newsletter is for those trying to make sense of a changing, largely unequal, often dystopian world, while being mindful of what we consume in news and what we feed our families and community.
Whether you're here for political deep-dives, desi or colonial healing, culinary reflections, or silver linings, I'm honored to have you at my table.
Why "Pink Salt"?
I’m Pakistani, and so is pink salt. Yet, decades ago, a calculated campaign rebranded this mineral—mined exclusively from the Khewra Salt Mines in Pakistan’s Pothohar Plateau—as "Himalayan." This mislabels its true origin.
Pink salt isn't from the Himalayas, I am. My Pahari and Kashmiri grandparents came from the Himalayan region, but pink salt is mined hundreds of miles south of the foothills of Himalayas, in Punjab. Geologically, it's from an ancient sea that existed hundreds of millions of years ago.
This misrepresentation of pink salt mirrors the broader narratives that often distort, simplify, or erase the authentic stories of Pakistanis or folks with multiple hyphen identities like me. Pink Salt aims to reclaim these narratives, offering a space where the complexities of identity, culture, and politics are explored with nuance and care, and food.
Why Food? My Kashmiri roots demand I center food in my life, and my endometriosis demands I’m thoughtful about what I consume. Like pink salt, the disease is deeply misrepresented and misunderstood. In between mothering and my journalism escapades, I’ve had four surgeries for endometriosis in 14 years, it has colonized multiple organs, including my bowel and bladder. This has meant I’ve often had to be thoughtful of my diet. Each time I go under the knife, surgeons aim to cut my endometriosis out forever, but the legions creatively hide or come back with a vengeance. Kind of like how the effects of colonialism never really leave a country. It’s something that I will write about here too.
Who is Sahar?
I’m so glad you asked and didn’t Google me, because my Wikipedia entry needs an edit and my journalism hits do not tell my backstory.
I was born in Long Island, New York, but I’ve moved “back” to Pakistan three times. I've played musical chairs between my homes, Pakistan and America, my whole life, leading newsrooms and reporting across continents for over two decades. From 2021 to 2023, I served as South Asia Editor at VICE World News, where I helped launch our TikTok channel which grew to 3 million followers, led groundbreaking climate change coverage, and produced films for Showtime and another one that received an Emmy nomination featuring an exclusive interview with Imran Khan, before he was arrested.
My journalism journey includes reporting for The New York Times and serving as Deputy Editor then Managing Editor at Global Voices from 2012 to 2018. In 2017, after the Trump Muslim ban, I delivered a TEDx Stanford talk "The Muslims You Cannot See," which went viral. I was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 2011.
But most people on the internet know me as 2030Mama, from an Instagram account I launched in 2020. It’s about politics and food and my parenting approach. Counter to desi parenting wisdom, where parents infantilize their kids saying they know best, even as they become adults, I raise my daughter keeping in mind that she’ll be an adult (18) in 2030, a world that will be very different from the one I grew up in. This keeps me agile, humble, and learning in my parenting. I don’t know what’s best, but I’m doing my best to guide, support, and care for her. Often that requires a lot of introspection and healing from me.
Currently, I live in Berkeley, California, with my 12-year-old daughter on a hill that’s a far cry from the Himalayas of Pakistan and the ones branded on pink salt sold in the U.S.
Pink Salt is more than a newsletter; it's a community grounded in care, not clicks. Thank you for being part of this journey.
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