On returns

In January 2011, I began a blog I decided to call Dining and Opining. It was partly motivated by Mark Bittman’s announcement that he was shifting from the New York Times Dining section to the Op-Ed section. He was still going to be writing about food, but rather than just sharing recipes, he wanted to engage with food as a political issue because of his “growing conviction that the meat-heavy American diet and our increasing dependence on prepared and processed foods is detrimental not only to our personal health but to that of the planet.”

I also then held (as I do now) that conviction, and wanted to bring the sensory pleasures of food together with the moral obligations. To dine (eat) and opine (offer opinions and analyses) in one space.

I maintained that blog for a full year, posting each and every week day, and then posted sporadically after that for several years. Then, a move to a new city and the arrival of two small children into my life put that blog on hold, for more than two years.

I’m now hoping to pick up where I left off, and take blogging in a new direction here at my personal website, continuing to think about food and its place in our lives and in our world, but also to bring in my other interests and commitments, to build online community and document what I’m thinking about and doing, in the academic and social world of food and everything it touches (which, it turns out, is . . . everything).

I’ll hopefully also be writing about my forthcoming book, to be published with the University of California Press in early 2018: Canned America: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry. I’m exciting to finally be in the very last stages of producing this book that has been in the works in one form or another for many years now!