Carolyn Steel is an architect, writer, lecturer, and director of Kilburn Nightingale Architects. She has taught at London Metropolitan University, at the London School of Economics where she was inaugural studio director of the Cities programme, and at Cambridge where she ran her own lecture series on Food and the City. Her book, Hungry City, which won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction, examines the relationship between food and the city. She talks to FiveBooks about how we can use food to understand who we are and the way we live.
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Chris Moss lived in Buenos Aires from 1991 to 2001, where he worked as an arts writer for the Buenos Aires Herald. He is travel and books editor at Time Out magazine, has edited several books for Time Out Guides, and regularly contributes travel features to the Daily Telegraph and Condé Nast Traveller. He is a music writer, specialising in Latin American rhythms, and reviews and compiles world music CDs – especially tango. His book Patagonia: A Cultural History was published by Signal Books/OUP in July 2008 and he is now working on a book about tango, psychoanalysis, sex and steak.
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Ivan Day is a celebrated food historian and the author of several books on the history of food. He has worked as a broadcaster, in both television and radio. His collections of antique books and equipment and re-creations of historic table settings have been exhibited at venues including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of London. He is also a talented cook and confectioner with 40 years’ experience in period cookery, and runs courses for the public at Wreay Farm in the Lake District.
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In his first book, campaigner, and historian Tristram Stuart looked into the rise of politically motivated vegetarianism in the 18th century. His second, Waste, is an urgent call to action. Nearly one billion people in the world go hungry every day while in North America and Europe, our farmers, manufacturers, supermarkets, and consumers discard between 30 and 50 per cent of our food supplies – enough to feed the world’s hungry more than three times over. As a result, freegans like Stuart are able to live on what is thrown away by our supermarkets. He’ll only stop taking food out of supermarket bins, he’s pledged, when they cease to throw good food away.
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Nigel Slater is a cook who writes. He has been food columnist for The Observer for 16 years and is presenter of BBC1’s Simple Suppers. He has just been voted Food Personality of the Year at the BBC Food and Farming Awards. He is the author of eight cookery books, and his latest book is called Tender. Almost a thousand pages and four years in the making, it is published in two volumes. The first – the story of his vegetable patch – has just been published. The second volume is due in 2010.
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A graduate of Cornell University and NYU, Sung J. Woo’s short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and KoreAm Journal. His debut novel, Everything Asian (2009), has been widely praised and his short story “Limits” was an Editor’s Choice winner in Carve Magazine’s 2008 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. He lives in Washington, New Jersey, and today he tells the browser that the egg roll is now as American as apple pie.
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Helena Frith Powell is the author of “Two Lipsticks and a Lover” – also published in the US as “All You Need to be Impossibly French.” In it, she tries to identify what it is that makes French women so chic compared to the rest of us. Her other books include “Ciao Bella: in Search of My Italian Father” and most recently, “The Viva Mayr Diet: 14 Days to a Flatter Stomach and a Younger You.” She formerly wrote the ‘French Mistress’ column in the Sunday Times about living in France, and now lives in Abu Dhabi where she is a staff reporter at The National Magazine.
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Jojo Tulloh is food editor of The Week, and author of "Freshly Picked: Kitchen Garden Cooking in the City", published this month by Chatto & Windus. "Freshly Picked" brings together stories and recipes inspired by Jojo's eight-year tenure of an allotment in Leyton, East London. She talks to the Browser about her favourite recipe books, and their writers.
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Claire Ptak takes cakes seriously. Rumoured to have baked the inaugural dessert for Barack Obama, she started out at Chez Panisse and is now running her own business in London: Violet.
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