Spend too much time on the internet these days and you can walk away with a lingering sense of body shame, dietary uncertainty, and overall not-great-vibes. To me, this means it's all the more important to reflect on our relationships with food and re-assess how we think about them.

My guest today, Shana Spence, is one of the central people that I take a lot of inspiration from when it comes to healing relationships with food. Shana is a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her debut book came out this past August 2024, titled Live Nourished: Make Peace with Food, Banish Body Shame, and Reclaim Joy. She currently works in public health for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, doing community nutrition lessons, and also owns her own company, The Nutrition Tea ®. She describes herself as an "all foods fit" dietitian and creates a platform for open discussion on nutrition and wellness topics that are inclusive, non-diet, and weight-neutral, all with an intersectionality of social justice.

Today, Shana joins me to discuss some of the key themes and crafting of Live Nourished, touching on how diet culture persists in post-secondary educational spheres, the funny but persistent and weird ways that wellness permeates our eating choices, and how to break away from the idea of food as a moral choice, to think about nourishment in a more individual and cultural way.

Learn More From Shana:

• Buy Live Nourished book
• Instagram: @thenutritiontea
• Website: https://www.thenutritiontea.com/
• Newsletter: https://thenutritiontea.substack.com/
• TikTok: @thenutritiontea

Our relationship with food in North America is such a deeply fascinating, contrasting, nuanced and complicated one. There's so much to consider – both in the sheer population size and geographic scale of our food systems, but also in how we make sense of the foods we do and do not have access to. My guest this week, andrea bennett, tackles these big questions in latest new book, and is here to discuss some of the central ideas around it.

Andrea is a National Magazine Award-winning writer and senior editor at the Tyee, and has recently released a collection of essays called Hearty: On Cooking, Eating, and Growing Food for Pleasure and Subsistence through ECW Press. The essays in Hearty offer a snapshot of the North American cultural relationship to food and eating, deep diving into specific foods and tracing them through time, such as chutney, carrots, and ice cream, but also explores appetite and desire in food media, the art of substitution, seed saving and the triumphs and trials of being a home gardener, how the food system works (and doesn't), and complex societal narratives around health and pleasure.

In today's discussion, we look at the relationship between vegetables, imagination, and food media, trace the labour that goes into food through different North American geographies, and how poverty, scarcity, and restaurant work informed their art of substitutions in recipes that translated into a nourishing sense of local community through time.

Learn More From andrea:

• Buy Hearty

• Instagram: @andreakbennett

As we start up season 9 of the podcast, I wanted to share some life and technological updates, as well as what you can expect of this season. Food feels very different from when I started this show in 2018, the "foodie" culture isn't proliferating, which isn't a shock given the challenges of food and living costs in North America.

This season we're going in with a clear eye for analysis on some of the major factors informing our food systems: the treatment of immigrants working in food, how climate change and drought stress impacts food growing, talking back to diet culture in the era of Ozempic, and finding ways to connect back to nourishment that feel more joyful.

We've got a new look, a powerful line up of guests, and a really fruitful series of conversations for you!

Follow Sarah/AnthroDish:

• Substack: https://sarahduignan.substack.com/
• Instagram: @anthrodishpodcast
• TikTok: @anthrodish

We've heard stories about how chicken nuggets are riddled with questionable ingredients, but what gets missed when looking at industrial meat production is those who process a nation's worth of meat and poultry, the immigrants working at Tyson meatpacking companies throughout Arkansas.

My guest today is Alice Driver, who has written a haunting exposé on the toxic labour practices experienced at Tyson, the largest meatpacking company in America. Alice is a J. Anthony Lukas and James Beard Award-winning writer from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. She is here today to discuss some of the central themes in her new book, Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Industry, which is out officially as of today through Simon and Schuster. She is also the author of More or Less Dead, and the translator of Abecedario de Juárez.

In our conversation, Alice details the story of the immigrant workers who had the courage to fight back after decades of deadly chemical accidents, hyper-surveillance, and unsafe working conditions throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. She unveils how the landscape and politics of Arkansas are marked by the poultry industry, and the exploitation models that went into creating such difficult and hazardous working conditions for those who are often subjected to invisible labour. She recounts how workers fought back in a lawsuit against Tyson Foods despite the potential consequences, and what is needed to truly change meatpacking industry standards.

Learn More From Alice:

• Book: Life and Death of the American Worker
• Website: https://www.alicedriver.com/
• Instagram: @alice_driver

For our last episode this season, we're exploring what it means to cook from a third culture kitchen. There's been growing discussions online of what it means to be a third culture kid or a third culture individual. My guest today, Jon Kung, is one of the best people to speak to how third culture experiences can play out through food, cooking, and kitchen spaces.

Jon is a popular Chinese American chef, content creator, and podcast host of 1 For the Table with legendary drag queen Kim Chi. Jon has amassed a following of over 2 million people for their unique style of third culture cooking, which blends cultural traditions, flavours, and ingredients that hold personal meaning to them. After graduating from Eastern Michigan University with a bachelor's degree in theatre arts and creative writing, and then earning a law degree from University of Detroit Mercy, Jon changed career paths to focus on cooking. They worked in some of the top Detroit kitchens before launching their successful Kung Food Market Studio pop-up. As the pandemic forced the pop-up to shut down, Jon turned to social media to create instructional and entertaining cooking videos that explore the vast Chinese diaspora, and apply culinary techniques of traditional Chinese cooking onto global flavours and ingredients.

Jon is on the show today to discuss their debut cookbook, Kung Food: Chinese American Recipes from a Third Culture Kitchen. We explore what it means to cook through third culture lenses, the 2010s rebrand of American fusion cooking and its impact on the idea of authenticity and third culture expressions in food, TikTok food landscapes, how Jon translated their dishes and videos into a cookbook format, and Toronto's early 2000s obsession pizza obsession.

Learn More About Jon:

• Jon's Cookbook: Kung Food: Chinese American Recipes from a Third Culture Kitchen
• TikTok: @jonkung
• Instagram: @jonkung
• YouTube: @jonkung
• Threads: @jonkung
• Website: https://www.kungfood.kitchen/

Here in Ontario, we're just hitting the warmer spring weather after a grey and cloudy winter, and anyone living up north can attest to the amount of daydreaming we do about our future and past summer plans. During that daydreaming, memory and nostalgia can play a significant role in establishing an ideal summer, with tastes, scents and flavour playing powerful roles in thinking about what foods were prepared and shared. During the summer, the simple and mouth-watering foods tend to satisfy better than during a blustery snowstorm — but how can one capture the ritual and ceremony of joy and make it last throughout the year?

My guest today is Katie Laliberté, who is here to share the nostalgic and delicious experience that informed the forthcoming Heydays at the June Motel: Beach Town Classics, which is co-authored by Freddy Laliberte, Evan Baulch, and Emma Bulch. Katie helped to open Heydays Restaurant in Sauble Beach in 2020, after many years of supporting restaurants in Toronto. She is a writer and sometimes book-seller and is currently working on a restaurant romance novel as well.

Today, Katie explores the pandemic landscape origins of Heydays Restaurant through its ongoing partnership with The June Motel, how her Connecticut roots informed the unique coastal comfort food cuisine within the cookbook, and how the restaurant and book serve as an invitation to take the beach home with you, to create summer memories to last a lifetime.

Learn More about Katie!

• Buy the Heydays Cookbook

• Instagram: @heydaysrestaurant

• Website: https://heydays.thejunemotel.com/

News media at large is in a challenging position this year: we've seen mass layoffs across digital media, local news, TV, print, even podcasts and documentaries. There's shifts in audiences, loss of journalist jobs, and shaky foundations of social media platforms like Twitter and Substack that make even the strongest bylines at risk of being swallowed up. As a public, that means how we consume and analyze media changes too. Here on AnthroDish and across food media platforms, food is a jumping off tool that can offer alternative avenues to navigate complex sociocultural and political issues. My guest today is Hanna Raskin, founder of The Food Section, who is here to explore how her newsletter is creating a nuanced space for food media coverage across the American South.

One of the leading voices for high-quality local food journalism, Hanna has received widespread recognition for her writing and reporting. She previously worked as a food editor and chief critic for The Post and Courier newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina, which earned her the James Beard Foundation's inaugural Local Impact Journalism Award. Since then, she founded The Food Section in 2021 as a twice-weekly Substack newsletter, and subsequently moved it onto its own independent platform in 2024. The Food Section has been named one of the best newsletters in the country by several prestigious industry organizations.

Hanna sits down with me today to share her experiences building The Food Section after transitioning away from newspaper reporting, what the dimensions of local food journalism can offer that other beats cannot, and how to navigate the concept of rigour in a food media world that can otherwise easily swing from buzzy big media to surface level content creator coverage.

Learn More About Hannah:

• The Food Section Website
• Threads: @hanna_raskin
• Instagram: @hanna_raskin
• Facebook: The Food Section group

You may be familiar with the Greek island of Ikaria through the popularity of "Blue Zones" and the idea that these regions of the world can provide insights into living longer, healthier lives. Yet as with most trends around diet and health, there is so much unspoken about the nuances of what an Ikarian lifestyle and diet entails, and the cultural relationships that Ikarians have with their food and communities.

My guest today is Diane Kochilas, who is here to share her insights on these relationships with food through her new cookbook, The Ikaria Way. Diane has been at the forefront of bringing healthy, delicious Greek and Mediterranean cuisine to a wide international audience for over 25 years. She is the host and co-executive producer of the award-winning PBS show, My Greek Table, and she runs the Glorious Greek Cooking school on her native island Ikaria. She's released 18 cookbooks on Greek cuisine, and has consulted with American universties to bring healthy Greek foods to their dining programs.

Today, Diane unpacks what it means to live and eat in the spirit of the Ikarians, discusses the differences between food preparation and preservation in Greece compared to other Mediterranean cultures, and unpacks how the anxiety and disconnection between North Americans and their food has shaped how we think about cooking and eating, and how she navigates these perspectives through her recipes.

Learn More About Diane:

• Cookbook: The Ikaria Way
• Website: https://www.dianekochilas.com/
• Diane Kochilas on YouTube

Thinking about "typical" types of veganism can reveal a lot of fascinating Western stereotypes or biases around what it does and doesn't entail. And yet so many cultural cuisines from around the world are rooted in plant-based meals that have been passed down through generations to shape contemporary ethnic cuisines. So what happens when someone adopts a vegan diet and lifestyle, in terms of navigating heritage, identity, and family connection?

My guest this week is popular recipe developer and creator Remy Park from Veggiekins, who is here to explore these themes and discuss her beautiful debut cookbook, Sesame, Soy, Spice: 90 Asian-ish Vegan and Gluten-free Recipes to Reconnect, Root, and Restore. Originally from New York/New Jersey area with an international upbringing, she shares vibrant plant-based recipes that take inspiration from her three cultures: Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese, and all the countries she's lived in. Remy is also a certified yoga and meditation teacher as well as a holistic nutritionist. Her work has been featured in a variety of publications, including Shape Magazine, British Vogue, BuzzFeed, Elle Vietnam, CBS News, and ABC News.

Within the cookbook, Remy's personal wellness journey is woven throughout her accessible plant-based takes on international and Asian-ish dishes. In our conversation today, we explore the traditional flavours and diets of her Asian cultures, and how the book formed a love letter to Remy's family heritage, how she navigates food as communication across American and Asian understandings of snacks and salads, and the power of language in recipe development when healing from eating disorder experiences.

Learn More About Remy:

• Veggiekins Website: https://veggiekinsblog.com/
• Seasame, Soy, Spice Cookbook
• Instagram: @veggiekins
• YouTube
• TikTok: @veggiekins

One of the pitfalls in sustainability movements is this assumption that we're all working from an equal playing field, when the reality is that oftentimes we don't have the home space or the time to grow our own food. What we don't always ask is whether we can make the comproimses that allow us to meet those desires to grow our own food without the high demands often required of it conventionally.

My guest this week is Natalie Paterson, who has brought together her Indigenous cultural background and her scientific training to explore what we can do with microgreens. Growing up in New Zealand, Natalie was inspired by her Māori upbringing to explore the value of growing your own food. Natalie completed a BSci in nutritional biochemistry and an MS in food science at Chapman University in Orange County, California. Natalie pursued food science (the study of food from farm to fork), as she recognizes that food is intrinsic within every facet of life, thereby holding the power to promote health while preventing and curing disease.

Natalie speaks on her previous experience bringing scientific expertise to the market, identifying through her move to London, England, that there is often no connection between food, people, and nutrition. With the demand for at-home fresh vegetables persisting regardless of one's location, Natalie speaks today on the ways that indoor hydroponic smart gardens can help make people's cooking more simple, nutritious, and sustainable.

Learn more about Natalie:

• Instagram: @natalie.s.paterson