Connecting Food, Family, and Culture Lynne Christy Anderson
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“Tell me what you eat, I'll tell you who you are.” Brillat-Savarin Follow me on…
	I’m a writer, teacher, and cook who discovered a passion for food early on, in the kitchens of my mother and grandmother, where I relished such tasks as beating egg whites for a proper meringue or sautéing tomatoes and basil straight from the garden for that evening’s pasta. So, it just seemed logical to head to Paris after college. There, I cooked and ate my way through the markets and restaurants around the city until I returned to Boston and eventually found work cooking professionally for almost a decade. Despite the camaraderie in these restaurant kitchens and the amazing ingredients on hand, I eventually longed for something more. Just before the birth of my daughter, I began to pursue a degree in Applied Linguistics, wondering if my life in food was really over. It wasn’t. When I started my first job teaching English to newly arrived immigrant adults, I found my students and I shared a similar passion: we loved to talk about food. These mothers and fathers from places like Guatemala, Pakistan, and Haiti shared their memories of family and friends and the favorite meals they ate back home. Before I knew it, my students were bringing their tortillas, biriyani rice, and Cape Verdean couscous into school for me to try, sharing their recipes and telling me where to shop for ingredients This led to the inspiration for my book, Breaking Bread: Recipes and Stories from Immigrant Kitchens. Told through the voices of the immigrant cooks I interviewed, Breaking Bread highlights the way food sometimes eases the transition to a new culture, serving as a powerful link to the past and a bridge into the future. In addition to writing, I have designed and taught classes that explore culture through cooking with school-aged children in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In these, students have learned about the healthy foods and traditions of some of the many ethnic groups living in America today, often in their own diverse city neighborhoods. Currently, I teach writing and literature courses to immigrant and foreign students at Boston College and Bunker Hill Community College in Massachusetts. During the summers, when I’m not teaching, I find more time to write, and in 2008, was the Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholar in non-fiction. I live with my husband and two children in a very old house in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts where we spend most of our time cooking (in my grandmother’s pans) and eating (on my mother’s plates) in our kitchen that's a little too small.							MEDIA BOOK PROJECT KIDS’ MULTICULTURAL COOKING PROGRAM SUMMER COOKING CAMP BREAKING BREAD PRESS
Copyright: Lynne Christy Anderson 2010 Puddingstone Design