Are you a foodie?

Whether you love to eat or to write about food and cooking, join Central Chapter’s virtual meeting on Saturday, December 12 at 10 a.m. with author Carolyn Niethammer. She’ll talk about her latest book, A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary History, and her 50-year career of writing about Southwest food.

Date: December 12, 2020
Time: 10 a.m.
Zoom: Members and interested guests will be sent the Zoom link prior to the meeting. If you do not receive the link, email your request to Barbara Lacy at lacyarts@gmail.com

Carolyn Niethammer Bio:

Carolyn Niethammer learned to love and understand the West growing up in small-town Northern Arizona. She has spent her life writing about the foods and people of the Southwest in award-winning ethnobotanies, cookbooks and biographies. She began her career out of college as a newspaper reporter, then in the late Sixties spent a year going “back to the land” in Northern California where she learned about edible wild plants. For her first book, she traveled throughout Arizona and New Mexico interviewing Native American women on their use of wild plants. Other books followed on edible wild plants, Southwestern food, and Native American women. Her one novel is based on the life of a well-known Western cook.

Why She Knew the Story of how Tucson Became the first US UNESCO City of Gastronomy was Hers to Tell

Her latest book, her eleventh, is A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary History. In it she tells the 8,000 year story of how the residents of the Santa Cruz Valley subsisted on wild foods, learned to grow corn and eventually became expert farmers, and how today’s residents still grow and eat some of the same foods that nourished the local people so long ago. Carolyn has been writing about Southwest food for more than 50 years, so she had a good base of knowledge to tell the story of why Tucson received the UNESCO City of Gastronomy designation. But the most fun, was learning all the things she didn’t know.