Idaho Commission for Libraries

We Are What We Ate presents a smorgasbord of personal essays in which well-known writers share their memories of eating.  Funny, touching, nostalgic, irreverent, these pieces are delightful reading in and of themselves, but they also introduce readers to larger questions about food-related behavior.  Some of the writers speak of how food bound their families together and reinforced ethnic, regional, or class identity (Bobbie Ann Mason writes lovingly of her mother’s down-home cooking); others chronicle how their parents adapted quirky foodways (one black writer extolls her father’s Chinese spareribs); others even admit to changing their eating practices as a rebellion against their parents (Robert Girardi on adding sauce to his English mother’s unadorned pasta). One admits to being a junk-food junkie. Other essays describe the writers’ encounters with the food of other nations, other classes, commenting directly or indirectly on food as a cultural marker.  A few speak explicitly about hunger, and a few others touch on the politics of recent food trends–the gourmet revolution, the eat-locally movement.  As a whole, they present a provocative range of experiences, all of which testify to the symbolic, as well as the nutritional, importance of eating.

This book was published to benefit Share Our Strength, an organization that has donated more than $50 million to fighting hunger since 1984.

Book cover from WE ARE WHAT WE ATE, edited by Mark Winegarder, copyright 1998 Share our Strength, Inc., reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.  This material may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Author Information

Mark Winegardner is a literary novelist and creative writing professor at Florida State University.  A native Ohioan, he reports in We Are What We Ate that he grew up in a house that never had an onion in it.  After graduating from Miami University, Ohio, he completed his MFA at George Mason University, publishing his first book while still in graduate school.  He is the author of four novels (including The Godfather Returns) and two works of nonfiction, and he has edited three collections.  His short fiction has appeared in magazines ranging from Family Circle to Playboy to TriQuarterly, and his novels have been chosen as among the best books of the year by publications including the New York Times Book Review, the Chicago Sun-Times, and USA Today.

Discussion Questions

1. “All artists, I think, suffer from a mild form of synesthesia, that metaphoric condition where a taste or smell can call up the immediate image of something utterly different,” writes Robert Girardi.  What kinds of “utterly different” things do food memories recall for the writers in this collection?  Do you see patterns of memory?  Thinking about your own life, do particular foods call up images for you of things beyond the food itself?

2. In what ways are food and family bound for these writers?  What particular foods remind you of your family?  If you rebelled at all, did you use food as a way to dramatize your difference?

3. Some of these writers admit that their mothers weren’t very good cooks.  Can even poor food symbolize something about a family that makes affectionate memories? 

4. Some of these writers discuss how tasting new foods in new places opened their eyes to whole new ways of perceiving the world and themselves.  Do you identify with any of these?   Why?  Have new foods, and new food experiences, broadened your perspectives in any ways?  What have they taught you about different cultures, and about yourself?

5. Several of these essays (and Winegardner’s introduction) chronicle the bland food served in ordinary middle-class American families in the past.  What do the choices such families made suggest about that culture? 

6. Several of these essays discuss hunger and eating in extremity.  What do they teach you about human nature?

7. A number of these essays talk about how the food of a particular family or culture has changed over time.  Why do you think that such changes took place?  What do they suggest about the people who made the changes?