Happy 100th Birthday, Gram!

My paternal grandmother was named for her father, and my younger brother has their name as his middle name. (My middle name is my maternal grandmother's.) She was born on the same day, month, and year as the late Queen Elizabeth II. They led very different lives. Gram grew up poor in rural Texas. Her mother died when she was 11 of complications of an abortion, after her doctor told her not to get pregnant again but her husband didn't care. She wanted two things when she grew up: nice clothes and to travel. She got them both--visiting 27 countries on four continents!--as well as a long career as a night psych nurse. She joined WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), went on a blind date, and met the man of her dreams. They married and had four children, five grandchildren, and four great grandchildren. 

I was the first grandchild. Gram has been the longest reader of this blog, which I started to document my travels. Friends and family recently gathered from around the country to celebrate her 100th birthday.

Some of her favorite things 

- cheese and crackers and a glass of wine in the evening

- strawberries with Nutella

- tissues in her pockets and candy in her drawers

- researching family genealogy

-  reading

What does a physician's signature mean? Celebrating the launch of my book

One of the reasons I have been relatively quiet on the blog front is that much of my free time for the two years--especially on weekends, what used to be prime blogging time--has been devoted to turning my PhD dissertation into book. I finished the last detail in November 2025, and my advanced author copies arrived on February 1. (This is the unboxing video.) It was officially published on 17 March--12 years to the day since I defended the dissertation--and today we celebrated with a book launch. You can watch the video here.

I'm incredibly grateful to my Division for granting me a part-time contract so that I could devote part of my work week to this project and for throwing me this party. My Big Boss, Division Chief Jane Liebschutz, gave an introduction; I spoke for 15 minutes about the project and why this kind of medical history matters to clinicians; there was Q&A; and we ended with food, book signings, and photos.

I brought a box full of my favorite books on the history of food, Germany, and/or the World Wars.

The Politics of the Table: Nutrition and the Body in Modern Germany is a revised version of my PhD dissertation, "The Politics of the Table: nutrition and the telescopic body in Saxon Germany, 1890-1935." It relies on primary and secondary sources in German and English; I did my own translations with the help of online dictionaries and (very rarely, when checking for idioms) Google Translate. I used no AI to compose the text, which consists of 8 chapters, a full introduction and a conclusion, 20 illustrations, and 10 tables. The chapters range from 7,500 to 12,000 words each, for a total of 105,000 words. That is akin to single-authoring ~20 scientific articles (at 5,000 words each)!

Table of Contents

Preface. The Menu
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Bodies That Eat and Drink

Part I. “The Kitchen Is the Laboratory of the Housewife”: The Circulation of Nutritional Science, 1890–1930
Chapter 1. From Calories to Vitamins: Nutrition in the Laboratory
Chapter 2. Feeding the Sick: Nutrition and Authority in the Sick Room and the Clinic
Chapter 3. Under the Hygiene Eye: Nutrition at the German Hygiene Museum
Chapter 4. How to Cook Your Vegetables: From the Factory to the Kitchen

Part II. “The Cooking Spoon Is the Scepter of the People’s Health”: Nutrition & and World War I
Chapter 5. “More Than Bitter”: The Blockade and Rationing in Saxony and Bavaria
Chapter 6. “I Am Not a Taste Barbarian”: Food and the Senses During World War I
Chapter 7. Cooking Out but Eating In: The Politics of the Family Table During World War I
Chapter 8. From the Kitchen to the Bedside: Sick Rations in Germany During World War I
Conclusion: Nutritional Knowledge and Ignorance in the Third Reich

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Timeline

2004-2008 ~ developed the idea as a graduate student
2008-2010 ~ MS1 and MS2 medical student
2010 ~ won the 3 most prestigious dissertation research prizes in my area of interest (chose the DAAD and declined the rest)
2010-2011 ~ research trip to Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin, Munich, and Braunschweig
2011-2014 ~ wrote the dissertation (defense date 17 March 2014)
January-March 2023 ~ sent book proposal and draft manuscript to JHUP
October-December 2023 ~ manuscript accepted and contract signed
December 2024 ~ missed original submission date due to clinical load
March 2025 ~ submitted final manuscript
August 2024 ~ completed proofs
14 November 2026 ~ galleys and index due
17 March 2026 ~ publication date

What makes the book different than the dissertation

Introduction has been overhauled for readability
Chapter 6 on eating and the senses is completely new to the book
I re-researched and completely re-wrote Chapter 9 on wartime sick rations; this is the most original chapter in the book and contributes significant new details on how rations for special populations came about and were managed
All other chapters are shorter and tighter, with some material having been moved between chapters; even with the new chapter, the manuscript is 25,000 words shorter than the dissertation
New ending for the Conclusion
Updated the Bibliography
Changed some of the Illustrations and Tables

Repast: Studies in the History of Nutrition | Hopkins Press

The Repast series centers on the history of human nutrition broadly conceived. It draws from a variety of fields including history of science, medicine, and public health, food studies and food history, historical sociology, anthropology, and literary studies, as well as work on contemporary topics that engages meaningfully with historical context. There are now three books in the series, which my colleague Andrew Ruiz (University of Wisconsin--Madison) edits.

Here's the announcement about my first book, written and published in graduate school.

Day 5: Learning about the Donner Party and Antelope Island

The Donner-Reed Party and Antelope Island aren't themselves related, but we learned about both on our last full day of vacation. Although it took us out of our way, we did retrace our steps back to Emigration Canyon to eat lunch at Ruth's Diner, the (second?) oldest restaurant in the Salt Lake Valley. Ruth (1895-1989) sounds like quite the character, having been a burlesque performer in her late teens-20s, then running a hamburger joint downtown for two decades before moving an old trolley car out of the city to set up as a diner. She lived in the back part with her chihuahuas, Lucky Strikes, and a contempt for government regulation. Anyway, Dear Husband wanted to say that he had eaten at Donner Pass--but actually that's west of here, in the Sierra Nevada mountains. (More on that in a moment.) The hot biscuits they bring to your table are aMAZing, even the day after; the rest of the food was just okay.

Left: Most of the sportspeople we passed in our Jeep were on bicycles, and then there was this woman practicing for cross-country skiing with roller skis

While waiting/eating, we learned that the Donner-Reed party leaves Springfield, IL, on April 15, 1846. They used the Oregon Trail, but rather than go through Idaho on their way to California, they follow a guy's advice to cut off 250 miles by taking a "short cut" through Utah and Nevada. (Mind you, said dude had never actually traveled the short-cut that now bears his name, and he went on with another group.) The Donner-Reed party hacks their way through the brush and trees to get into what is now called Emigration Canyon. Fed up, they push their oxen to haul all 23 of their wagons up some ridiculous large hills/small mountains. (I think this is when Reed stabs another man to death and is exiled from the group on horseback.) The oxen are then too exhausted to slog through the salt flats, and lot die or run off. Chasing the cattle slows down their progress even more. Party leaders leaves an older single man behind because he can't walk  and weighs too much to put in a wagon. Eventually they straggle into Reno, rest for a couple of days, before heading over the Sierra Nevada mountains at the end of October. They don't make it because of an early snow storm. Some of the people who starve or freeze to death at Donner Pass are cannibalized by the living. In the middle of December, a group leaves on snowshoes to try to get help; many of them also die (and are eaten). Reed does make it to California and sends a rescue party that, however, doesn't reach the survivors until the middle of February 1847. Another rescue group shows up 1 March. The last straggler isn't rescued until April 1847, more than 1 year after they had set off. A few months later, in July 1847, Brigham Young's Mormon band is able to use the partially-cut path down Emigration Canyon. It only takes them four more hours of work to clear the rest. They are able to plant enough crops to survive the first winter, without starvation or cannibalism, and "the miracle of the gulls" helps them with the second harvest (see Day 1).

After lunch we had several quiet hours at home base before Clayton picked us up for our sunset tour of Antelope Island, the largest of several islands in the Great Salt Lake, which is the largest salt lake in the Western hemisphere (35 miles x 75 miles!) and 7-8x as salty as the ocean (~21%). The Dead Sea is smaller (9 miles x 30 miles) and saltier (34%).

Clayton told us about Freeman Island, which John Freeman originally called Disappointment Island for the lack of food or other resources, but that only lasted for the first round of maps in the 1840s. Brigham Young tried to use it as a sort of natural prison for a guy who had robbed over 300 graves...but the dude just swam off and walked away. (I don't think we know if/how long he survived after that.)

We saw shore birds, burrowing owls, prong horned antelope, a great horned owl on the Fielding Garr Ranch, and of course a lot of bison. The bison were brought in the 1890s to be hunted; they are now protected. The bachelor males keep to smaller groups, while the females and young make larger herds. We also saw people getting out of their car to take photos of the bison who had stopped in the crosswalk like a crossing guard and wondered whether they were testing the prediction that 50% of the time an agitated bison will charge, and 50% of the time they flee.

The longest settlement on the island was at Fielding Garr Ranch, where they raised cattle, then sheep, then cattle. Clayton showed us the spring house, which is 50 degrees year round, and how the original farmhouse was built with adobe bricks and then added onto over the years. The little museum there was closed, but there's a beautiful tree-shaded picnic area, and it looks like they offer horseback riding. 

The only other long-term settlement on the island was a couple in which the man was a sailor and the woman had tuberculosis; she died after 7 years and is the only person buried on the island. He went back to Salt Lake City. You can RV, tent, or cabin camp on Antelope Island now--we saw some Scouts while we were there--and the star-gazing is top notch.

 

We got plenty of good pictures, and the hike up to Buffalo Point was easy enough. We reminded ourselves about igneous vs sedimentary vs metamorphic rocks, and we smelled sage and wild parsley (above left), which smelled like celery to me. The soundtrack was the chirping song of yellow-breasted meadowlarks, which reminded me of Germany. Clayton says they don't have meadowlarks in Europe, but maybe I remember hearing blackbirds? 

Great views at sunset! The color got even better after we were heading off the island, as the last rays of the sun peaked under the layer of clouds that had obscured most of the setting sun.

Yesterday we practiced ice skating and eating on Day 4. Day 5 ends our Spring Break Trip to Salt Lake City and Park City.

Day 4: The Ice Skating and Eating Events

Thursday I had planned to be our "down day," without significant driving. The original plan was to have a quiet morning, then visit the Wheeler Historic Farm because it was a) free, b) close, and c) covered pioneer history. When I learned of an ice skating rink at Millcreek Common within walking distance and featuring Dear Husband's favorite--a pizza place--I decided we would do that instead.

It was a beautiful spring day, sunny and temps >60. We played a game of Memory while waiting for pizza, which I was so hungry to eat that I didn't snap a photo. Afterwards, we picked up our rental skates and hit the ice. Not literally--there was only one fall, and it was onto a padded surface. We skated a handful of times at the University of Illinois hockey rink but somehow have not managed to put on skates in the decade since we moved to Pittsburgh.

The experience reminded me of nothing so much as the time on our anniversary trip to Milwaukee that we rollerbladed on the shore of Lake Michigan, a trip so old that I wasn't blogging at the time. This time we shared the looping track with half a dozen other skaters of various ages and abilities. With the pop songs blaring and the sun shining, it was a great day to move our bodies, develop blisters on our ankles, and get sunburned on our faces (eep!). I packed sunscreen for tomorrow's wildlife adventure. Guess I should have applied some today.

After another couple of hours of down time "back at the ranch," we got dolled up for a fancy dinner at Monte, a restaurant that is rumored to be angling for a Michelin star. (However, the Utah chef who has been a James Beard finalist for three years running is Nick Zocco of Urban Hill.) The experience was sold to us as a chef's table*--it would have been our fourth--but in actuality it was a pre fixe menu. Online reviews are mixed, so we were a little concerned to be the only customers on a Thursday if it really were a simultaneous seating event (another couple came in 45 minutes later).

Drinks: rose lemonade (from a bottle, but the best lemonade DH says he's ever had) and a glass of brut to celebrate my book dropping in just five days.

Left: the best thing DH has ever eaten made out of beets (which he doesn't usually like) and a light green puree with trout roe that made me exclaim out loud. Right: so much bread (breadsticks, sourdough, brioche). We couldn't eat all of the bread, so we packaged it up for breakfast and lunch the next day. The brioche was realllly good, especially with some house-made butter.

Left: a sort of French onion soup I didn't finish because I didn't think the onions were caramelized enough; however, DH prefers his onions less cooked and liked it. Right: quail ravioli in a sauce that didn't have enough salt, but was balanced if eaten with the pasta.

Left: a two-bite squid ink beignet with rabbit in the center (you just eat the round ball with the leaf on it, not the rest of the charred wood!). Right: a really excellent 3 ounces of beef with two sauces. The last chef's table we did (for Valentine's Day) had portions that were too large. These were just right.

* Looking back at the website, it's described as "chef-driven" and "changing with the seasons," as if those were unique qualities that no other fining establishment had thought of. So while we never talked to chef Martin Babio, our server did tell us about each of the seven courses.

Left is the palate cleanser that was the best tasting "green" we've had (mint, lime, cucumber, and some other things). Between that the dessert--the silkiest chocolate tart imaginable--the dinner was worth it. Staff are attentive but let you enjoy the meal. The setting is industrial with a side of woodsman-naturalist. The music was loud but fun. My only real critique is that the restaurant is located in a distillery, so when we arrived via Google Maps, we thought we were at the wrong building, and I had to double-check the address. Otherwise, 5 stars, would do again for a fancy occasion.

After all that, we scrambled back in the car and headed up to Temple Square to catch the last hour of the Mormon Tabernacle choir rehearsal, which is free and open to the public. That was a lovely way to end the day.

Did you miss our mountain adventure on Day 3? Up next: how much do you know about the Donner Party?