Slices of Life

From rambutan to waffles, the book’s bounty invites readers to a feast of food for thought.

In her latest essay collection, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees, Aimee Nezhukumatathil greets her readers, takes their coats, and pulls up a chair. She welcomes them to indulge in a smorgasbord of stories that start with food and that spill into every other facet of life that’s nourished by it. Naturally, she starts at home.

“For what is home if not the first place you learn what does and does not nourish you?” Nezhukumatathil asks in the introduction to Bite by Bite. “The first place you learn to sit still and slow down when someone offers you a bite to eat?”

From here, she guides her readers through a gastronomic examination of the unparalleled power of food and flavor to create associations, evoke memories, trace histories, and tell stories. Rambutan is unruly, much like the author’s curly tresses and her teenage rebellion. Mango is a family tree with roots that cross oceans. Through vignettes steeped in sentiment and finished with thoughtful reflection, Nezhukumatathil invites us to eat, taste, and remember with her.

“[Bite by Bite] uses food to talk about what it means to be human — to love, to learn, to laugh, to lose,” writes Clint Smith, author of the 2022–23 Go Big Read book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America. “Nezhukumatathil’s writing has changed the way I look at food and made me infinitely more grateful for those whom I share it with.”

Nezhukumatathil was the 2000–01 Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow in the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and is the author of the New York Times best-selling essay collection World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments. She is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Mississippi.

Published in the Winter 2024 issue