Know What You Eat You Are: The Best Food Writing From Harper’s Magazine

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Join us on Tuesday, October 24th at 7pm, as Harper’s Magazine and Book Culture on Columbuspresent Know What You Eat You Are: The Best Food Writing from Harper’s Magazine with the book’s editors Giulia Melucci and Ellen Rosenbush.

Learn how a proper meal was served in 1875, the secrets of Jackie Kennedy’s seafood and potato chip casserole, and how to forage for wild mushrooms and survive. There are chilling accounts of efforts to innovate new foods (Fritos, for instance) and preserve them for the late 20th century’s burgeoning consumer culture. There are stories of foods coldly regarded as mere commodities (hello, Quinoa) and others that expound on how ensuring that we eat good, healthy food is a responsibility we all share. One of the latest pieces in the book is a hilarious crawl though the excess and absurdity of early 21st century dining in New York City that will have readers laughing deeply from their bellies while wondering if they might desire to fill it with an inflated pig’s bladder. Another is a moving elegy on eating after cancer has taken that pleasure away.

As the actor (Parks and Recreation), writer, documentarian and woodworker Nick Offerman states in his introduction, “this satisfying spread of essays, while an excellent tasting menu of the many-faceted relations between Americans and their foodstuffs, serves as a clear journal of ways in which we have done our eating right, and of course, how we have burnt the toast to a crisp.”

Ellen Rosenbush was managing editor of Harper’s Magazine from 1989 to 2010, when she became the first woman editor of the esteemed publication. During her tenure, Harper’s Magazine won two National Magazine Awards and received a total of 12 nominations. She is currently editor-at-large. She is also editor of An American Album: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Harper’s Magazine and The Sixties: Recollections of the Decade from Harper’s Magazine.

Giulia Melucci was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where she still lives, but in a more fashionable neighborhood. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1988 and is vice president of public relations at Harper’s Magazine. She is the author of I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti: A Memoir of Good Food and Bad Boyfriends, which was also made into a play.