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Cover of What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women And The Food That Tells Their Stories

What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women And The Food That Tells Their Stories

by Laura Shapiro

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A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of The Year One of NPR Fresh Air's "Books to Close Out a Chaotic 2017" NPR's Book Concierge Guide To the Year’s Great Reads “How lucky for us readers that Shapiro has been listening so perceptively for decades to the language of food.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR Fresh Air Six “mouthwatering” (Eater.com) short takes on six famous women through the lens of food and cooking, probing how their attitudes toward food can offer surprising new insights into their lives, and our own. Everyone eats, and food touches on every aspect of our lives—social and cultural, personal and political. Yet most biographers pay little attention to people’s attitudes toward food, as if the great and notable never bothered to think about what was on the plate in front of them.…

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"Eleanor Roosevelt was famously indifferent to food: During her tenure, White House lunches were moments of dread, or at least digestive difficulty. But as food historian Laura Shapiro demonstrates in What She Ate, the first lady’s attitude toward White House meals was intimately linked to her troubled marriage; elsewhere in life, she relished things like crab legs or a “delicious Arab dinner” in 1952. Shapiro takes this culinary-detective approach to six prominent women, revealing rich details of their inner lives through their relationships with food (or, in Helen Gurley Brown’s case, the lack thereof)."
NPR Books We Love — 2017 · apps.npr.org