Bite by Bite: Nourishments & Jamborees is a great book with forty brief essays about food

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the new books section at the Hillcrest branch of the Boise Public Library I found poet and writer Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s 2024 book Bite by Bite: Nourishments & Jamborees. Her father is from India and her mother is from the Philippines. Almost half of her 40 essays are about fruits. I have enjoyed reading them. One on pages 154 to 160 is about concord grapes. It begins with:

 

“For fifteen years I lived near the grape belt in western New York, which means each fall, it almost smells like someone is holding a cup of grape Kool-Aid under your nose – that’s how fragrant and fine the roadways become that time of year.”

 

That sentence instantly transported me back to graduate school in September of 1976. The Metallurgical Society (TMS) of AIME held their fall meeting in Niagara Falls, and I was giving a presentation at it about hydrogen embrittlement. So I drove up there from Pittsburgh. Along the southern shore of Lake Erie grapes were piled up within ten feet of the highway. My brother Harry was living in Olean, New York, and I stopped to visit him.

 

She ends her book with a dozen food writing prompts. Her odd-numbered ones are:

 

1] What is the earliest memory you have of trying a new (to you, at the time) fruit? Describe where and when this happened and try to explain the texture and smell as precisely as possible.

 

3] Spice is nice: What is your favorite spice? Coriander? Cardamom? Cumin? Look up the healing properties and/or folklore of that spice and create a scene where a character uses that spice to heal someone.

 

5] Describe what your perfect last meal would be on this earth. Make as many courses as you like, right down to beverages and dessert.

 

7] Write about your favorite guilty pleasure food.

 

9] Try growing your own food or herb – something you’ve never grown before – and take notes! Use a pot and a well-lit window if you don’t have access to a garden plot. Write two or three journal entries a week tracking the progress of what you grow. If it doesn’t work out, try another herb! Tomatoes and strawberries work great in pots! Basil and parsley grow easily for herbs!

 

11] What food or drink sends you immediately back to childhood, no matter where you are? Write why it captures your childhood, and see if there are any connections to your present day. Let us smell, feel, taste, hear, and see what it is like to eat/drink this too. 

 

An image of harvested concord grapes is from Agne27 at Wikimedia Commons.