About the Author

By day, I am a marketer for a university press.  By night, I am a dissertating student of literature – 90% toward a doctorate and buffering.  When I’m not working toward the production of scholarly books from one end or the other, I might be found supporting the performing arts scene by taking tickets or buying them, or else standing around at farmer’s markets, squeezing all the peaches.  For me, food practices are synonymous with relationships: my health, sanity, and vivacity are vitally supported by the meals I cook, select, and eat with those dear to me.  Writing about food has always been in part a love song to these friends and the small but essential rituals of care we enact for ourselves.

I am an occasional contributor at Table Matters, a daily website that covers all manner of food culture and practice in Philadelphia and beyond. My writing about food has also appeared on Flyover Feminism and Food & Think.

Vita.

About the Blog

For the last few years, I have been reading and researching for a dissertation about scenes of eating and cooking in contemporary literature.  My project takes as its premise that eating is essential not merely to the physical well-being of the individual body, but also to the individual’s definition of self and relation to other bodies.  Eating can be an aesthetic experience, one that allows the eater to exercise judgment about what and how to eat, as well as who to eat with.  The choice to eat is made in a network of individual preferences and desires as well as cultural narratives, so examining scenes of eating can shed light on the interrelationships of identity and community.

The immediate purpose of this blog is to create an outlet for my response to miscellanous food-related scenes and images I encounter in my daily media consumption: the websites or scenes from books I’ve been reading for leisure, zietgeisty articles about food trends, images that are designed to stimulate or deflect desire for food.  These cultural artifacts and the accompanying commentary may never make it into my dissertation, but cataloging them creates a record for me and helps me stay aware of contemporary patterns.  The commentary that may be attached to them is not intended to be academically rigorous – just interesting, challenging, or funny – and it is my hope that these observations will occasionally spark casual but insightful conversation.

The  longer-term goal for this site is to compile resources – mainly links and bibliographic information – for other food scholars.  Both the blog and bibliography are currently under construction and will remain perpetually under revision.