My grandfather, Dr. Kamal El Din Hussein Motawi, knew more about expiration dates than most. With a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in food science, followed by thirty years of work in the industry, he was a bastion of food knowledge. He also joined the Muslim Brotherhood at 17.

Back then, according to my father, that’s just what you did. It was normal for someone like him, a kid growing up in rural Egypt, to want to help his country and make a difference by “going to the desert.” 

When I was young, we were told the cover story of his joining the army, which is what is stated in his obituary. It was easier to say that than to say he was a freedom fighter/terrorist. Either way, we aren’t quite sure what he did in those years. His favorite story to tell (and the only one he told) was one of him diving under a moving truck to avoid a bombing. Especially near the end of his life, the story changed every time he told it, and nobody has any evidence it even happened in the first place, but the story lives on.

Based on when he joined the Brotherhood, there were two things he could’ve been doing. The first was fighting against the British presence in the area. It was a success, leading to Sudan’s independence and the British’s removal after a successful military coup. However, the Brotherhood was then outlawed, and the first president of Egypt was removed just two years later. The second project the Brotherhood pursued when Kamal was on the inside was a very contentious project, and one that is still very contentious today.

The Muslim Brotherhood, along with the rest of Egypt, were staunch supporters of Palestine, opposing the United Nations and the establishment of the Jewish state. Kamal may have been part of the fighting force trying to protect Palestinians in the West Bank over 70 years ago. Descendants of the Muslim Brotherhood are still fighting in Palestine today, as Hamas was formed as a militarized offshoot of the group during the First Intifada.

All that to say, Baba was intimately familiar with expiration dates from a human-life point of view before he was twenty, and that experience changed him. For the next sixty years, he was fundamentally different. He knew the value of life and lived it to the fullest. Russia and the United States were trying to build goodwill in Egypt by getting Egyptians into their premier colleges, and Baba was a part of it. His first option was to study in Moscow–but a friend told him Moscow was too cold, so he used the help of Benjamin Franklin (which is completely different than paying a bribe, trust me) to ensure that his commitment letter was “lost” in the mail. He then got put on the waitlist to attend Harvard but wanted more in his life than to wait around, so he ended up at Michigan State. I can’t blame him for choosing MSU over Harvard; who knew how long the Egyptian government was going to be paying his way, and he had learned young to value all of the time he had.

He spent a decade getting his degrees from MSU, learning more about food and food science than is probably healthy. If you have ever wondered why peaches turn brown, maybe some of Baba is inside you. The first thing he did to try and find out was to search the internet. He was unsuccessful because the internet didn’t exist. Next, he tried books, which definitely did exist, but they didn’t have the answer, either. Anyways, the name of his 156-page thesis that earned him his doctorate is “Enzymatic Systems and Substrates Involved in Freestone Peach Browning.” I don’t know half of those words, but the last two words are “Peach” and “Browning,” so I’m pretty sure he eventually figured out why peaches turned brown and that the answer is somewhere in there.

When Baba was cooking, he could name the acids in every food and explain every chemical reaction needed to cook a meal. Not to be cliche, but he had food down to a science. He put all of his hard-earned skills to use, spending thirty years at Gerber making baby food in the Michigan countryside. Before that, he had to spend some more time in Egypt, but it wasn’t memorable.

Because the government of Egypt so generously paid for his degrees, he was obligated to go back, much to the chagrin of Karen, my grandma. Egypt has historically been quite serious about making sure people come back–you can be banned from the country if you don’t. So he moved back to Egypt with Karen, and the work he did during the few years he was back in Egypt was, let’s just say, stimulating. Once he got back there, it was clear that Egypt was “really” desperate for food scientists. He showed up to the office building, hung up his jacket, put on his lab coat, and sat at his desk.

It was like a school desk. He sat there for around fifteen minutes, and then he was on with his day. He would find a newspaper somewhere, make some coffee, share a smoke with the guards, that sort of thing. Stimulating, literally. Egypt had nothing for him to do. Not a man to waste time, the pair was back in Michigan two years later. Travel was a lot harder for them on the way back, now that they had three kids.

At Gerber for the rest of his career, he researched and tested recipes for baby food–the only U.S. food regulated by the federal government. Baby food doesn’t have a “Sell By,” “Best By,” or even a “Best if Used By” date. It has a “Use By” date. The FDA requires that the nutrients in baby food are an exact match to the label, meaning it’s vital to test the formulas and find out the exact date on which the food degrades past an acceptable level so it can be taken off the shelves.

The other food labels are just recommendations. The labels aren’t federally regulated, nor are they even made for consumers. They are designed so that the shelve-stockers have an idea as to the freshness of the food, not so consumers can judge safety. The manufacturers basically make the dates according to whatever they are fancying at the time. What I’m trying to say is that general food labels are food science without the science. They contribute to food waste, not to food safety.

Anyway, Kamal spent thirty years making baby food, the hardest-to-engineer food in the United States. I assume he was pretty good at it; It’s hard to work somewhere for that long otherwise. However, I never knew him during those thirty years of his life. I didn’t know him as a food scientist; I knew him as Baba. 

By this point, he was a retiree living in a family-built home on the plot next to his brother-in-law. He worked in the garden, cracked jokes, and snuck into the garage for a cigarette every once in a while (except it was more often). Everything I knew about Baba still revolved around food, just differently. His reciting every amino acid in a protein while cooking dinner is my dad’s story, not mine.

All of my memories come from the two weeks we used to spend with him every Christmas. We were always the last family to arrive. It was a three-hour drive for the families of his other four kids; we had to fly across the country. We could never go early; we always had to fly on Christmas day for cheaper prices. It was never that big of a deal. The other half of my family is Jewish (which Kamal was fine with), and Baba most definitely didn’t care that much about Christianity; it was just the time when the whole family could get together. The house was built for a large family, and in those weeks, the house was full. 

Every morning, for breakfast, we would eat Baba cereal. I think that was named by my grandma because there is no way he invented Oatmeal Squares, but man, when I call them Baba cereal, they just taste better. 

My favorite Baba recipe is his hummus recipe. I am no food scientist, but I am definitely a hummus snob, and it’s his fault. His recipe has way more ingredients than any hummus you can buy at the store, and the extra ingredients aren’t preservatives either. Every time I mix the recipe, which usually involves having to call my dad or grandma to help decipher his handwritten notes, I truly feel like a food scientist. His recipe has a lot more oomph than other hummus, and I’m sure it started as a family recipe he spent years perfecting. When I wanted to find the recipe and make my own a few years ago, it was hard to find the right one. Each version of the recipe my relatives had was slightly different, and I couldn’t ask him what the right one was. 

The question was, were any of these recipes more correct than the others? Was there a best and most recent version? We knew he was a lifelong tinkerer and food nerd, but we also knew that his memory faded quickly in his old age. Were the changes intentional, or did he just make the recipe different every time? He never wrote it down for himself, he just knew the recipe. Or so we thought.

Beyond the hummus recipe, we also make Baba rice. As far as I know, it’s just rice with broken spaghetti noodles mixed in, but I’ve never made a version of it anywhere near as good as Baba’s, and neither has my dad, so I think we are missing something.

We recently experimented with making fava beans, which Baba grew up eating in rural Egypt. We first thought of trying them when we were at the special Middle-Eastern market buying grape leaves to make dolmas, another family tradition. One of my fondest memories of Baba is when a huge group of us were sitting at his dining room table, rolling grape leaves together. We would get as big a group as possible and make a ton of them, yet we could never make enough of them to get through the weekend. We still make it a point to roll grape leaves as a family a few times a year. We can never get a group as big as the old days at Baba’s house, and of course, we can never make enough to last the whole weekend.

My version of Kamal, of Baba, is not of a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s the person who ate fava beans every day in Kafr Moselha. My version of Baba is not the sanitized Christian one. It’s the person who read the Arabic newspaper every day of his life, even once he could no longer read the paper in English. My version of Baba is not a person who kills time at some random office in Cairo. It’s the person who would tell us to “reach for the sky” and “spread our wings.” It was to make us swing our arms out so he could tickle our sides while shouting “ALLAH!” but I’m sure it was legitimate advice as well. When the house was full of kids, he invoked God’s name pretty much all day. It was the only thing he ever shouted. Whenever you heard “ALLAH!” in the house, that was the place you wanted to be.

Kamal got a lot done in his life. From growing up in rural Egypt and joining the Muslim Brotherhood at 17 to being Baba and getting all five of his kids through college (even though four of them went to Michigan and not Michigan State), he knew the value of time. He chose to spend it with my Grandma Karen in the middle of nowhere Michigan, and while it wasn’t always easy (her best joke came at their fiftieth wedding anniversary when she was asked for tips on how to spend fifty years happily married and she said “ask me again in twenty years”), he accomplished some incredible things and never waste a moment of his time. His vocation was as a food scientist researching baby food, but when he was in his own home, he never acknowledged expiration dates. He made his career off hitting strict definitions of freshness and even wrote his Ph.D. on one of those chemical reactions, but that’s not what I remember about Baba, nor is it what he would want to be remembered by. What I remember is the three-step process of judging food he taught me that works better than any expiration date ever has. In the words of Ph.D. food scientist Kamal El Din Hussein Motawi,

If it looks good, smells good, and tastes good, it’s good.

Alex Motawi