What’s this all about?

America Eats! is a place where you’ll read stories from many perspectives about the role food plays in our lives. The stories can be about history or extensive travelogues; personal essays or memoir. This is the way I have written about food for about forty years as a journalist and author of four books. Each book is very different: a memoir about pies; an exploration of historical invalid recipes, a history and travel guide to saffron, and an extensive road trip across America to retrace the steps of the writers in the WPA’s Federal Writers Projects as they explored how our country’s food came together from all the people who settled here. My books have garnered recognition from the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker as their book-of-the-year choices, and by the International Association of Culinary Professionals for literary food writing.

What you can expect. . . .

Tuesday, subscribers receive the week’s main story that explores all my interests—re: history, travel, memoir.

Starting this year:

Saturday, a weekend grab bag of oddities presented in photography, art, folklore, walkabouts, historical tidbits, and everyday hearsay.

Occaional Thursdays, snippets from writing and research projects that may include additional reporting and revisions, published work, and deep research dives that tend to be all over the map.

If I miss a day it’s only because the Tuesday stories are harder to write that usual. It doesn’t happen that often, but it’s fair enough to mention.

Something annoying to tell you

Every week’s edition of the newsletter will appear in your inbox but not necessarily in your primary folder. If you don’t see it there then it has landed in your promotion or spam folders. If you still don’t see it, email me directly and I’ll help figure out what’s going on. I hear Substack is working on this bug because it is very annoying to subscribers and writers alike.

Subscribe to America Eats!

A strangely great newsletter for everyone who is curious about American food, its culture and history, and the delights of cooking in our everyday life.

People

Grew up in Philadelphia. Live in Brooklyn. Written four books best described as memoir, culinary and social history, along with some pretty good recipes.