About Me

Hi, I'm Anna.  I started this blog as a way to engage with all the different ways that I love food. I grew up in a house where my Russian-Jewish Mama was always able to add a pinch of this and a dash of that to create flavorful, meaningful, natural dishes, that stood at the core of our family closeness. It was also a house where my Papa gardened, served plates of raw cabbage as a snack to his zichiki*, and ate a no-salt, no-sugar, no-oil, no-meat, no processed-food diet that embarrassed me even as it inspired me.  I became a vegetarian in high school after an assignment to write a speech of the "persuasive" genre ended up persuading me. I began to cook independently and think deeply about the politics of food during my days at Wash U, majoring in environmental studies and listening to Michael Pollan on NPR. And I became a person defined largely by food after moving to Madison, Wisconsin, a town with the largest producer-only farmers' market in the country and myriad opportunities to be part of some tremendous organizations that shaped me as a thinker and an eater (CHE, Community GroundWorks, PEOPLE, GreenHouse). I now live, teach, and write in Stillwater, Oklahoma, a town where food is often an afterthought. I am completing my book on the history of canned food, Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry, to be published with University of California Press in early 2018.

*Russian for "little bunnies"