I'm a humanities ph.d. student at the University of Michigan. My research is on food, but I do a lot of cooking and thinking about food that doesn't fit into my dissertation. Some of that will show up here in the form of recipes, thoughts on food news, and occasionally some casual research.

I'm not a photographer, nutritionist, or food industry professional. The former will be obvious. In regards to the latter, I'll try not to make claims that are beyond my ken. That said, just like everyone else who has to eat, I have to make decisions about how to eat based on the best information I have about how that might affect my health and well-being, the environment, the economy, labor conditions, etc. Rather than pontificating about or trying to prescribe "best" practices, I hope to challenge and investigate mass media reporting, popular wisdom, and my own beliefs about how I "should" eat and what it means to eat "better." I'll do my best to cite the sources of the recipes and information I use and link to them when possible.

As I explained in one of the early entries, the title of the blog isn't meant to perpetuate the myth of four tastes but to invoke the tastes most often used metaphorically. This blog will often be about the literal and practical acts of cooking and eating, but I also hope to at least gesture towards the broader social, cultural, and political significance of eating, to sort of loop and swirl around the question of why it should make any sense at all to describe life itself as bitter or sweet, or of course, both at the same time.