Bite by Bite : : Nourishments & Jamborees

Locations
Call Number: Adult Book / Nonfiction / Cooking / Essays & Narratives / Nezhukumatathil, Aimee, 641.3 Ne
On Shelf At: Pittsfield Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Cooking / Essays & Narratives / Nezhukumatathil, Aimee	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	641.3 Ne	4-week checkout	Due 02-09-2025
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Cooking / Essays & Narratives / Nezhukumatathil, Aimee	4-week checkout	Due 01-20-2025

Contains bibliographic material.
In Bite by Bite, poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the way food and drink evoke our associations and remembrances--a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia. Nezhukmatathil restores our astonishment and wonder about food through her encounters with a range of foods and food traditions. From shave ice to lumpia, mangoes to pecans, rambutan to vanilla, she investigates how food marks our experiences and identities and explores the boundaries between heritage and memory. Bite by Bite offers a rich and textured kaleidoscope of vignettes and visions into the world of food and nature, drawn together by intimate and humorous personal reflections, with Fumi Nakamura's gorgeous imagery and illustration.-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Amazing submitted by manz on June 17, 2024, 12:29am Another fantastic book of essays by this author. Her words are dreamy, evocative, and laced with heart. I also love the little references to growing up in the 80s.

A worthy follow-up to World of Wonders submitted by redwood on July 2, 2024, 9:16am Nezhukumatathil’s parents are from the Philippines and South India. Her family’s food cultures, as well as those of her current home in the American South, shape this book’s objects (I’ve always loved Nezhukumatathil’s loudly professed love for often-maligned Mississippi). Thank you to whoever agreed to print full-color images in an ARC, because Fumi Nakamura’s illustrations are stunning, even more than in World of Wonders. Nezhukumatathil’s essays are shorter and more numerous, so there’s many of these gorgeous illustrations.

While reading this, I thought a lot about Asian American food writing discourse. I remember a few years ago, people were making fun of “diaspora poems,” using one about a mango as an example. In her “Mango” essay, Nezhukumatathil recounts an early workshop experience in which her peers told her mangoes were too exotic to work in a poem. But generally, she doesn’t wade into this “discourse” at all. She writes about food and family with absolute earnestness, braiding historical and scientific facts with personal experience. Lumpia, Jackfruit, Bing Cherry, Risotto—these things mean something to her for both how they taste and what they signify.

This is a theme for me, but can’t we just be more earnest like this? Earnestness doesn’t mean naivete. Food is fraught, which Nezhukumatathil addresses—one moment sees her and Ross Gay (another priest of earnestness) admiring red fruits, only to realize they are two people of color in a southern cotton field and feel the weight of history. Earnestness does mean communicating love—for parents, partner, children—unimpeded. I’d be honored if my parents or others I loved wrote about me this way. I learn a lot of interesting facts from Nezhukumatathil, but I study a way of being.