Women Food

For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers - French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly - exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja's body changed and "began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand", their relationship grew tense.

Millions of us use restrictive diets, intermittent fasting, IV therapies, and Ozempic abuse to shrink until we are sample-size acceptable. But for the 30 million Americans who live with eating disorders, it isn’t just about less. More, Please is a chronicle of a lifelong fixation with food—its power to soothe, to comfort, to offer a fleeting escape from the outside world—as well as an examination of the ways in which compulsory thinness, diet culture, and the seductive promise of “wellness” have resulted in warping countless Americans’ relationship with healthy eating.

columnist who regularly contributes to The Nation and The Village Voice, Patricia J. Williams is also a professor of law at Columbia University and the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” award. In Open House, she shares her unique views on modern American culture and tells stories of her remarkable life. Her voice is powerful, provocative, and utterly charming.

Every day we are exposed to messages about health, food, exercise, and looking good. It's hard not to get swept along with it all; in fact, it’s easy to end up caring too much about these things and even to feel trapped trying to live up to the ideals that we see in the media. Author Stacy Reaoch points you to the Bible to find freedom! The Bible tells us that our physical selves do matter. But it also invites us to think about our bodies in a God-centered way—helping us to reset and find a balanced approach that is grounded in our faith.

Margo Everson sees the call out for the cookbook club and knows she’s found her people. Recently dumped by her self-absorbed husband, who frankly isn’t much of a loss, she has little to show for her marriage but his "parting gift"—a dilapidated old farm house—and a collection of well-loved cookbooks. Aja Alexander just hopes her newfound friends won’t notice that that every time she looks at food, she gets queasy. It’s hard hiding a pregnancy, especially one she can’t bring herself to share with her wealthy boyfriend and his snooty mother.

Longing for control over your body and emotions? Fed up with fad diets? Demoralized by relentless cravings? 'Rapid Extreme Weight Loss Hypnosis for Women' is your guide to sustainable weight loss.

Just before fiery food-critic Hayley Snow's mother's decadent flan is put to the test, Key West's most prized possession, Hemingway's Nobel Prize gold medal for The Old Man and the Sea, is discovered stolen from its case. Unsavory suspicions point to Gabriel, a family friend and one of the new busboys working the event, who mysteriously goes missing moments later. Anxious to clear his name, Gabriel's family enlists Hayley to help find him, but right as they begin their search, his body is found stabbed to death in the storeroom.

Anne Willan, multi-award-winning culinary historian, cookbook writer, teacher, and founder of La Varenne Cooking School in Paris, explores the lives and work of women cookbook authors whose essential books have defined cooking over the past 300 years. Beginning with the first published cookbook by Hannah Woolley in 1661 to the early colonial days to the transformative popular works by Fannie Farmer, Irma Rombauer, Julia Child, Edna Lewis, Marcella Hazan, and up to Alice Waters working today.

During the week between Christmas and New Year's, the year-round population of Key West, Florida, faces a tsunami of tourists and snowbirds. It doesn't help that outrageously wealthy key-lime-pie aficionado David Sloan has persuaded the city to host his pie-baking contest. Every pie purveyor on the island is out to win the coveted Key Lime Key to the City, and Key Zest food-critic Hayley Snow is on the scene to report it. Meanwhile, Hayley's home life is turning more tart than sweet.

Thanksgiving is nearly here, and Key West food critic Hayley Snow has just one more assignment to put to bed for Key Zest magazine before she gets to celebrate with her family and her police officer fiance, Nathan Bransford. Then, just days later, wedding bells will ring - if death doesn't toll first. The sweet potatoes and stuffing will have to wait when Hayley picks up a distraught phone call from her friend Analise Smith. On the last stop of a seafood tasting tour run by Analise, one of the customers collapsed - dead.

Every year, Key West’s week long Mardi Gras-style festival has tourists and locals alike lining up for costumed revelry and delicious eats. Key Zest magazine has assigned Hayley to write a piece on the fest’s grab-and-go food, so she’s planning on hitting up the mobile eateries while checking out the party preparations. Hayley’s office mate, Danielle, recently elected Queen of Fantasy Fest, is also buzzing between festivities and fundraisers. But then a former royal rival gets taken out.

Who’s really behind America’s appetite for foods from around the globe? This group biography from an electric new voice in food writing honors seven extraordinary women, all immigrants, who left an indelible mark on the way Americans eat today. Taste Makers stretches from World War II to the present, with absorbing and deeply researched portraits of figures including Mexican-born Elena Zelayeta, a blind chef; Marcella Hazan, the deity of Italian cuisine; and Norma Shirley, a champion of Jamaican dishes.

In this warm collection of personal essays and recipes, best-selling author Ann Hood nourishes both our bodies and our souls. From her Italian-American childhood through raising and feeding a growing family and cooking with her new husband, food writer Michael Ruhlman, Ann Hood has long appreciated the power of a good meal. Hood details recipes and more in Kitchen Yarns, along with tales of loss and starting from scratch, family love, and feasts with friends, and how the perfect meal is one that tastes like home.

Anna Del Conte brought Italian cooking to Britain at a time when the nearest most of us came to pasta was a Heinz spaghetti hoop. Sharply observant, evocative, full of tastes and talk of food, hers is a delicious, poignant memoir of an unusual life and the food she loves to cook, which launched a culinary revolution.She arrived in England in 1949 when much of Britain was a culinary wasteland, married an Englishman, and stayed on.

Did you know that eating fat does not make you fat? Did you realize that eating fat-free carbohydrates can make you fat? Have you noticed that Americans are getting fatter in spite of eating less fat and more carbohydrates?

England in 1932 is in the grip of the Great Depression. Stella Douglas, author of a much-loved but not very successful biography, is a bit depressed herself. When she’s summoned to see her editor in London, she expects her writing career is over before it’s even started. But much to her surprise, she is being commissioned to write a history of English food. It's to be quintessentially English and intended to lift the sprits of the nation. There's just one problem: a lot of English food is actually quite terrible (and anything good is usually imported from elsewhere).

The tastiest, most uninhibited memoir in years, Insatiable is a feast for the senses and an aphrodisiac for the soul. "I love Le Cirque, but can I be trusted?" writes Gael Greene, the highly respected restaurant critic for New York magazine, whose fierce wit and sensuous prose changed the way Americans think about food.

If you are sick and tired of complicated diets, calorie-counting, menu-planning, and tasteless food without achieving your desired goals, then there is an alternative for you. You can stop dieting and just follow the time-tested and very trendy intermittent fasting (IF). People are using that eating pattern to burn fat, improve their health, and simplify their lifestyles.

Food critic Hayley Snow and her pal Miss Gloria are overjoyed to welcome Violet and Bettina Booth, aka the Scottish Scone Sisters, to Key West. The sisters will host The UK Bakes!—Key West Edition. But the same day they arrive, the bed-and-breakfast the sisters are staying in gets torched. The contest begins the next morning featuring three local bakers. One is the inn owner’s wife, Rayna, who is not only the most talented chef of the group but now a person of interest in the fire. The next night, a dogwalker discovers a body near the bed-and-breakfast.

Hoping for some good publicity, Hayley’s boss at Key Zest magazine signs her up to help judge the Key West Topped Chef contest. Stakes are high as the winner could be the next cooking-show superstar. Hayley shows up for the filming nervous but excited, until she sees who’s on the judging panel with her: Sam Rizzoli, big shot businessman—and owner of the restaurant she just panned in her first negative review. When Rizzoli turns up dead, the police assume his killer is one of his business rivals.