The title Eating Grass refers to and questions a remark made by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in regards to Pakistani development of a nuclear bomb. Bhutto stated that, should India develop nuclear technology, Pakistan would go hungry, would eat grass or leaves if necessary, in pursuit of its own nuclear arms. The two countries – with so rich a shared past and so conflicted a shared present – are today pitted against each other and as such, Syed seems to say, the only possible result is to the detriment of each.  At a more personal level, the film and its title can be construed as referring to the diasporic experience of living in two cultures at once, of negotiating between two worlds and multiple identities. Its pace emphasizes the permeability of identity, and of the instability of the zone of “multiculturalism.”

Filmed in London, Karachi, and Lahore – one city, Syed has said, falls into another – Eating Grass is organized around the five daily prayers of Muslim traditional practice. Syed, who is also a poet, compliments this pace of the day as punctuated by calls to prayer with an underlying poetic and lyrical rhythm. As per a 2012 interview with LACMA assistant curator Julie Romain, Syed originally wrote a short story in relation to the early morning call to prayer, inspired by her realization one day in Karachi that the call she had originally taken to be the traditional one of a muezzin was actually a distorted tape recording. She then went on to write four additional short stories that relate to the remaining daily calls to prayer; together these five visual and audio vignettes comprise the film.