Jamie Truppi ’00 Liberal Arts
2022
Nutritionist Jamie Truppi offers her marriage on a platter in this self-published food memoir. Her story, presented through different dishes, centers around her complicated relationship with and passion for food—from her early dating life through divorce.
Truppi’s fixation with ingredients challenges not only her way of thinking but her closest personal relationships. Her friends and family call her a “food snob.” She’s obsessed with what she eats. She’s also a wreck. These are things she freely and bravely admits, things for which she provides plenty of evidence. “Nutritionist moms with Type-A personalities (or maybe just me) have the potential to go off the deep end because, well, we analyze every single food decision. Every. Single. One,” she writes in Chapter 32: Recipe for Driving Everyone Nuts.
In her early twenties, she’s “a lonely rootless globetrotter from a severed middle-class family.” While her personal life is a mess, she focuses on what she can control: food. She learns “how complex it had become to keep simple meals ethical!” She calls natural food stores her “soul incarnate” and moves with her future husband to Portland, Oregon, where “food that met my standards was accessible all around me.” She becomes vegetarian, gives up dairy, goes vegan, eats at In-N-Out Burger, and bakes sourdough bread. Halfway through the book, she’s still asking, “What life path was I treading?”
The 41 chapters are recipes for feelings and moments: dreaming, decision-making, deliverance, desire, disagreements, dissolution. Each also ends with a culinary recipe: vegetarian Thai green curry and rice, vegan chocolate chip cookies, Swiss chard with cannellini beans and pancetta, triple chocolate brownies with peanut butter and sea salt.
Truppi’s voice is strong, self-deprecating, unapologetic, approachable, and sometimes irreverent. She’s an authentic, honest, and self-aware narrator as well as “the diet dictator. The food fanatic. The plate police.” She navigates the birth of her son, the death of her sister, the birth of her daughter, and the downward spiral of her marriage. Her journey is full of indignation and loss, as well as learning and personal growth.
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Journey to self through food: Q&A with author Jamie Truppi