March 2026

Food is never just fuel. Weeknight dinners, holiday tables, and potlucks are where families gather, friendships form, and communities strengthen. Smells linger in memory, like a backyard barbecue or a familiar dish simmering on the stove, evoking a feeling you recognize before you can name it.

In Bite by Bite: Nourishments & Jamborees, award-winning poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil writes from that place of recognition. Born in the United States to a Filipina mother and a Malayali father, she turns to food to connect with her parents’ cultures and her own family history. She writes about birthday lumpia folded by her mother’s hands, jackfruit first tasted at her grandparents’ home in South India, and simple meals like gyros, enjoyed with her husband and sons while she was teaching in Greece. 

Through these moments, she shows how everyday meals and food traditions create personal rituals and meaning. Yet Nezhukumathil connects them to the larger histories of food itself, carried by tradition, migration, trade, and colonialism. The result is a quiet meditation on why we cook and eat together: not just to survive, but to belong.