American
Magazine of American University
August 2011
Tenleytown, July 2011
Washing the truck is a daily summer ritual at the District of Columbia Fire
Department station on Wisconsin Avenue, which serves AU. Food also plays
a big role in the life beat of the recently renovated firehouse. Every day the
firefighters cook up hearty breakfasts and dinners for the guys. (See page 3.)
“Washington is home.
Photo by Jeff Watts
tions here that are
I support the instituimportant to me
and, as an alumna,
wanted to be sure
American University
is among them.”
Donors Make a
Difference
Acclaimed
opera critic and author Karyl Charna Lynn,
SOC/MA ’80, is a proud supporter of American University. After completing
undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Lynn pursued graduate work in
communications and media at American University to
enhance her career as a correspondent for ZDFGerman Television. At AU she studied film and broadcast journalism in the School of Communication. She
credits the university’s curriculum with forming the
basis for her success as a journalist and writer.
For Lynn, American University’s location in the
nation’s capital provided the perfect avenue for
enhancing a career in media, particularly during
a time of great national investment in the
arts. While a student, Lynn was able to
take advantage of Washington’s many
cultural offerings, expanding the classKaryl Charna
room beyond campus to the city itself.
Lynn SOC/MA
’80; with Placido
She then leveraged her associations to
Domingo
build a reputation as a leader in the field
of operatic journalism. Lynn’s passion for
the opera is evident in her six published books
on opera houses, companies, and architecture and the innumerable articles, features,
reviews, and profiles she has written for Opera Now, where she is the U.S. correspondent
and editor at large.
Lynn recognizes the value of an American University education. In an effort to make
opportunities available for the next generation of scholars and to support American
University’s strategic priority to increase access to higher education, Lynn has chosen to
support AU by naming it among the beneficiaries of her charitable estate plan. Lynn’s
generous commitment will establish an endowed fund intended to further the understanding and appreciation of opera through the support of faculty, guest lecturers, and
programming at the University. For Lynn, “Washington is home. I support the institutions here that are important to me and, as an alumna, wanted to be sure American
University is among them.”
American University is grateful to Karyl Charna Lynn’s foresight and salutes the
example she sets for the entire AU community.
For information on the benefits you, loved ones, and American University can receive
through charitable estate planning, contact Seth Speyer, director of Planned Giving, at
202-885-5914, speyer@american.edu, or visit www.american.edu/planned giving.
American
Magazine of American University
9
14
17
18
20
22
27
28
Volume 62 No. 2
Fat Cats, Bodybuilders, and
Corsets
Nearly two centuries ago—American men were
the first on the scales.
Say Cheese
Cheeseheads know Bob Wills, SIS ’76, makes one
mean cheddar.
‘Yankee Cooking At Its Best ’
Grab a seat at Brian Zecchinelli’s, Kogod ’85, Wayside
Restaurant—a Vermont institution since 1918.
Stirring a Political Stew
Food libertarian Baylen Linnekin, CAS ’97,
WCL ’09, wants food freed from regulations.
How to Fix Everything
Heather McDonald, CAS ’07, finds solace and healing
in the humble lasagna.
Greening the Food Desert
Anastasia Snelling, CAS, takes on food access and
nutrition in northeast Washington.
Fruit Guy with a Conscience
The Fruit Guys serve up fresh local fruit any way
their clients want it.
Banking on Food
The Capital Area Food Bank is grocery central for
500,000 D.C.-area residents.
• • •
departments
3
On the Quad
33 Alumni News
34 Class Notables
48 Nate Beeler’s World of Wonks
www.american.edu/magazine
American
American, the official magazine of American
University, is written and designed by the University Publications office within University
Communications and Marketing. Personal
views on subjects of public interest expressed
in the magazine do not necessarily reflect
official policies of the university.
Executive Director, Communications
and Marketing
Teresa Flannery
Senior Director, University Publications
Kevin Grasty
Executive Editor
Linda McHugh
Managing Editor
Catherine Bahl
On the Quad Editor
Adrienne Frank
Staff Writers
Adrienne Frank, Charles Spencer, Sarah Stankorb,
Mike Unger
Art Director/Designer
Wendy Beckerman
Contributing Designers
Rena Hoffman, Maria Jackson, Evangeline
Montoya-A. Reed, Natalie Taylor
Photographer
Jeff Watts
Class Notes
Traci Crockett, editor; Katie Mattern ’11,
editorial assistant
UP12-001
American is published three times a year by American
University. With a circulation of about 106,000,
American is sent to alumni and other constituents of
the university community. Copyright © 2011.
American University is an equal opportunity and affirmative action university and employer. American University
does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion,
national origin, sex, age, marital status, personal appearance,
sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, family
responsibilities, political affiliation, disability, source of
income, place of residence or business, or certain veteran status in its programs and activities. For information, contact
the Dean of Students (DOS@american.edu), Director of
Policy & Regulatory Affairs (employeerelations@american.
edu) or Dean of Academic Affairs, (academicaffairs@american.
edu), or at American University, 4400 Massachusetts Ave.,
N.W., Washington, D.C. 20016, 202-885-1000.
From the editor
On the Quad NEIGHBORHOOD
Delicious Discipline
Three-Alarm—Make that Three-Star—Pork Chops
My goddaughter Emma is a foodie, always has been.
Emma and her soccer-champ sister Sarah are fraternal twins. Sarah always scooted
and ran, chasing balls, and never cared much for food. Emma showed her stripes, when
from her high chair, she strung together her first sentence, and with a look of sheer
delight asked, “Can you eat it?” at the sight of anything small, bright, and appealing
dangled in front of her. It became her chant as she learned what she could and must not
put in her mouth. Her family was smitten. Both Emma and Sarah were taught not only what you “can eat,” (it’s not a plastic
toy, and it’s not a flower), but what it’s good to eat a lot of and what you shouldn’t turn
into a meal (at least not often!). Today, at nine, Emma loves restaurant dinners and serving guests at her family’s
parties. She loves her snacks too, but she knows what a healthy meal is. Sarah, who’s still
a picky eater, also knows a bowl of Goldfish is not dinner.
So we all begin. We love food or we don’t. But no matter where we sit on that
spectrum, we all need food to live.
Our issue is a celebration of food and how members of our American University
community embrace it. For some it’s the joy of producing food that became their livelihood, for others it’s the comfort of food after a day’s work or during a crisis.
For yet other faculty and alumni in our issue, it’s about making healthy food available
to our sisters and brothers who don’t have the resources to buy enough food for their
families. That—as the AU cofounders, trustees, and directors of the Capital Area Food
Bank—remind us is not a small business, but a multimillion dollar endeavor.
And for one health and nutrition professor, Stacey Snelling, and her faculty partners,
it’s about creating effective ways to show those families, who never learned about healthy
food choice in the charming way that Emma invited that knowledge, the joy of delicious
discipline. Read on, eat well, and please jump into the effort.
The alarm at Washington’s
Engine 20 firehouse on
Wisconsin Avenue sounded,
Linda McHugh
Executive Editor
www.american.edu/magazine
Send address changes to:
Alumni Programs
American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave NW
Washington, D.C.
20016-8002
or
e-mail: alumupdate@american.edu
Dear editor:
I admire Liz Leer’s ability to balance the “incredibly demanding” schedule required of
a student-athlete (“168 Hours: Booked Solid”).
While reading this article, however, I couldn’t help thinking that as I juggled my
full-time course load, my duties as a section editor for the Eagle, and working 20 hours
each week between two jobs, I would have relished having time to read Cosmopolitan and
watch Glee.
I’m sure many AU graduates who needed to work to afford college would express the
same sentiment.
Rebecca VanderMeulen
SOC/BA ’04
and a red light lit up the room. Quickly
firefighters began to assemble, anxious
for what was next.
A voice came over the P.A. system.
“Dinner’s ready. Let’s eat.”
At fire stations around the country,
food is a family affair. Every day the
firefighters gather for home-cooked
breakfasts and dinners made with
every bit the passion—and often the
skill—found in professional kitchens.
Those lucky enough to work on
Danny Faison’s shift at Engine 20, the
company that serves the American
University campus, eat like kings.
“I love to cook,” says Faison, a 21year veteran. “My grandfather taught
me. He cooked Sunday dinners for
years. Two meats, two starches and one
vegetable. He told me, ‘make sure you
can always provide for yourself.’”
Faison has taken that advice to a
new level. During his shift—firefighters
work 24 hours on, 72 off—he prepares
elaborate meals such as stuffed rockfish,
lamb chops, and Hawaiian chicken
with fried cabbage for 14 to 16 of his
coworkers. Each firefighter kicks in $10
per day for a hot and hearty breakfast
and dinner.
A Washington native and secondgeneration firefighter, Faison also runs
a catering company. On one of his days
off from the station he shops at Costco
or Sam’s Club, then spends much of
his free time during his shift preparing
the meals.
“It’s delicious. We’ve had quite
a few incidents where other
people tried to cook. We ruined
spaghetti; we made some
scrambled eggs that tasted like
plastic. If you want the food to be
any good, you want Danny to do
your cooking.”
 american
— Firefighter Patrick Swenson
BY MIKE UNGER
On this 98-degree June
day Faison labors near the gas
grill behind the station, flipping
honey-glazed pork chops that
have been marinating overnight.
His attention to detail is acute—he
constantly plucks chops from the
grill, reapplies sauce, and lays them
back on the rack.
His grandfather, Joseph, taught him to “cook
with your eyes,” so he works without recipes.
At 5:35 the chops, homemade cornbread,
potatoes au gratin, rice, and his “mean green”
beans are ready. Then the inevitable happens.
Not two seconds after the final dish is placed
on the kitchen counter, the alarm sounds. Dinner
often is interrupted by work, so when firefighters
have to leap into action, a coworker covers their
plates with foil.
Faison and his mates from Truck 12 return a few
minutes later—false alarm.
The meal is served buffet style, and after loading up their
plates the men settle into cushioned desk chairs surrounding two
conference tables in the lounge. There’s little conversation while
they eat; most eyes are focused on the Nationals baseball game
on the flat screen. It’s most men’s dream dinner scenario.
The skin of the pork is flavorful and crisp, the meat light pink
and tender. The cornbread is moist, the beans spicy.
august 2011 
On the Quad CHEFS
Cooking Light
Alumna Ann Kerwin
and AU’s top chef Mary
Soto dish on the recipe
for summer: eat local,
eat fresh, eat simple.
American magazine
challenged Bon Appetit
executive chef Soto and fellow
foodie Kerwin, CAS/BA ’71,
to prepare a trio of light, fresh,
and—most importantly—
mouthwatering offerings from
the Penn Quarter farmers’
market. The pair set out for
the market, nestled between
the National Archives and the
National Portrait Gallery in
northwest Washington, on a
June afternoon. On the menu:
gazpacho, asparagus with
sorrel butter, and strawberry
and arugula salad.
“Nothing beats fresh,
organic produce,” says Soto,
a self-taught culinary wonk,
as she chops tomatoes in the
bright, airy kitchen of the
AU president’s residence.
“My philosophy is to keep it
simple and let the fruits and
vegetables shine.”
Kerwin, too, likes to keep
it simple in the kitchen. She
has a collection of crowdpleasers—including curried
pumpkin soup, chicken
parmesan, and lasagna—but
she’s always looking for new
dishes to spice up family
dinners with husband, AU
president Neil Kerwin; son
Alex and fiancée Darcy; son
Michael, daughter-in-law Kara,
and granddaughter Violet.
Enjoy this taste of summer,
from Bon Appetit and the
Kerwins’ kitchen to yours. 
 american
american
AU’s catering company since 2000,
Bon Appetit buys at least 20 percent of
its food from farms within 150 miles of
its 400 cafes. Soto, pictured at the Penn
Quarter market with Kerwin, handpicks
AU’s fruits and veggies from seven farms
in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
BY ADRIENNE FRANK
Gazpacho
A cold, tomato-based Spanish soup that’s perfect
for hot summer nights.
Serve with tortilla chips and sangria.
Yields 5 1-1/2 cup servings
{ Seed
and finely chop 1-cup
cucumbers.
making the most of
your farmers’ market
• Shop seasonally: Plan
meals around what’s
currently being harvested
in your area.
• Skip the middle: Shop the
market early for the best
selection and late for the
best discounts.
{
Chop two dozen tomatoes.
{
Finely chop one medium red
onion (about ½ cup) and two bunches of
cilantro.
• Buy in bulk: Enjoy the
best prices—and the best
flavors—at the peak of the
harvest. Freeze, can, or
dry what you can’t use.
{
Combine ¾ of chopped tomatoes; two garlic
cloves, peeled; 2 tbsp. lemon juice; 1 tbsp.
olive oil; ½ tsp. coarse salt; and ¼ tsp.
pepper in blender. Blend on high speed for
30 seconds.
• Plan to be spontaneous:
Buy peaches and plums
that are in season now,
but also take a chance
on those gorgeous
gooseberries.
{
Pour into medium bowl; stir in cucumbers,
cilantro, onion, 2 tbsp. diced hot cherry
peppers, 1 tbsp. balsamic vinegar, and
remaining tomatoes.
• Ask the pros: New to
nettles? Perplexed by
pommelos? Ask farmers
their favorite ways to
prepare produce.
{
Cover and refrigerate for at least one hour.
Serve chilled with sprigs of cilantro.
• Bring green, go green:
Don’t forget to bring plenty
of small bills and a grocery
tote. Buying meat or dairy
products? Spring for an
insulated bag or cooler.
Asparagus with sorrel butter
Bring 1-inch of water to a boil in a large saucepan.
Put 2 bunches of asparagus, tough ends trimmed,
in a steamer basket, cover and steam until crisptender, about 4 minutes. Drop asparagus into ice
water to blanch. Drizzle with 1 tbsp. melted sweet
cream butter and 4 tsp. chopped, fresh sorrel; salt and
pepper to taste.
Strawberry and arugula salad
To fix this sweet and tangy mix of toasted pecans,
baby arugula, berries, and Parmesan cheese, visit
www.american.edu/americanmagazine.
• Browse before you buy:
Comparison shop.
Sometimes larger farms
get the prime real estate
on the edge of the market
and will charge a little
more.
• Know when to negotiate:
Haggling for a bunch of
basil is poor form. Asking
for a modest discount for
a large box or a bushel is
OK.
• Don’t just focus on fruit:
Fruit is the pricier produce.
If you’re on a budget,
focus on vegetables,
which are generally less
expensive.
• Wait to wash: Unless
there’s obvious dirt, wash
fruits and vegetables just
before cooking or eating.
On the Quad CALORIES COUNT
graham cracker
soaked in skim milk
On the Quad RESEARCH
overripe banana
Answering the Dinner (and Lunch, and Breakfast, and Snack) Bell
Basketball players Troy Brewer and Geleisa George have
a task this summer most of us schlubs sitting at our desks
fighting that three o’clock urge to get peanut M&Ms from
the vending machine envy. They need to gain weight.
Brewer, a 6-foot-5-inch senior guard, and George, a 5-foot9 sophomore, each want to add eight to 10 pounds of muscle
to their wiry frames. Doing so requires a combination of lifting
weights, limited cardio training, and consuming calories. Lots
of them. Here's what they are eating to bulk up. —MU
Eeeww . . .
For whatever reason, the thought of eating some
foods makes us cringe. It’s been scientifically
proven that certain animal parts—kidneys,
livers—are unappealing to many palates. But
what about overripe bananas, cottage cheese,
raw tomatoes? Do people find those icky too?
That’s the question clinical psychology PhD
candidate Laura Kushner set out to answer in
her dissertation, “Food for Thought: The Role
of Texture and the Disgust Response.”
“I have always been a foodie,” Kushner
says. So, “I wanted to do something for my
dissertation that revolved around food. The
previous literature said we’re only grossed out
by animal stuff. It reminds us of our animal
origins. I thought that might be true, but I also
thought it might be textures.”
Her takeaway: nonanimal foods can elicit
disgust, a finding not seen in prior research.
—MU
raw
tomato
rice pudding
okra
chunky peanut butter
Mr. Potato Head
Troy Brewer
Geleisa George
Current weight: 183
pounds
pounds
target calories: 3,000
Current weight: 132
pounds
pounds
target calories: 2,500
target weight: 190
target weight: 140
approximate Calories
Two eggs and toast, with
orange juice or fruit smoothie
450
450
Three eggs and toast
Snack
Banana and/or peanuts
200
600
Protein shake
Lunch
Chipotle burrito
970
970
Chipotle burrito
Snack
Fifteen to 20 crackers with
peanut butter
700
500
Peanut butter and jelly sandwich,
fresh fruit
Dinner
Grilled chicken (2 servings)
240
300
Grilled chicken with vegetables or
turkey and ham sub
Chocolate or muscle milk
210
430
Ice cream bar or protein shake
2,770
3,250
Breakfast
Dessert
Approximate total
Kushner
surveyed 100 people
to identify some of the most
objectionable foods, then fed
50 subjects (primarily AU students)
eight samples. She put each food
on a cracker, then removed the food
and recorded the eater's reactions. Ten
percent of the tasters wouldn’t even eat
a portion of the cracker untouched by
a brown banana, 30 percent rejected
the part of the cracker with the
banana’s “wet spot,” and the
rest chowed down.
mayonnaise
Baked or fried, mashed or grilled, scalloped or diced. Any way
you slice it, potatoes are palate-pleasingly popular the world
over.
“Who doesn’t like potatoes?” asks Larry Engel, a School of
Communication professor and filmmaker who clearly does. His
short documentary, Potato Heads: Keepers of the Crop, examines
the history and importance of the world’s most famous tuber.
“By taking a look at the lowly potato you come away
learning how important it is to developing countries now and
in the future,” he says. “Potatoes are the third most important
produce in the world behind wheat and rice.”
Engel’s film centers on two communities: Barnesville,
Minnesota, home to the annual Potato Days festival featuring
mashed potato wrestling, and an Andean community deep
in the mountains of Peru.
“They both cherish the potato,” says Engel, who made the
film with a grant from the Wallace Genetic Foundation. “The
potato carries such cultural weight because it’s really a critical
agricultural staple.”
In the movie Engel visits the International Potato Center in
Lima, Peru, which preserves more than 500 varieties of potato
seeds, and explores a host of serious issues pertaining to the
nature of the international food production system.
cottage
cheese
“The overall food production system is under greater and
greater threat as we create more monoculture agriculture,” he
says. “The current industrialization of our food and agriculture,
plants and animals is not sustainable. Ultimately, we will need
to make changes in how we treat the land, the water, and
farming.”
Potato Heads will be shown September 18 at the Corto
e Fieno Film Festival, in Ameno, Italy. No word yet as to
whether the festival will serve fries rather than popcorn at the
screening. —MU
Larry Engel films mashed potato wrestling at the Potato Days
Festival in Barnesville, Minnesota.
Calories calculated on www.sparkpeople.com
 american
august 2011 
American
Magazine of American University
August 
Farm to Food
Blazer’s Story
F
or most meat eaters, dinner is purchased from fluorescent-lit
groceries, where it is sold in plastic-wrapped foam trays. Rarely,
are we on a first name basis with our meat. Elizabeth McDermott,
a philosophy master’s student in the College of Arts and Sciences, is an animal lover.
She is also a meat eater and student of ethics. These traits, it seemed to her, were not in
moral conflict. This, despite claims by vegetarians who suggested she couldn’t in good conscience eat an animal, unless she was also able, emotionally and physically, to kill it.
So began a 10-week relationship with the bird who would become her dinner.
Philosophical Activism
Since Plato learned the trade, philosophy students have been subject to the Socratic method. But in Professor
Evan Berry’s Food Ethics course last spring, students did the usual reading, debating, and writing of papers, then
were further challenged to run a community activism project of their own design. It was ethics as experiment, the
world as laboratory. That challenge brought McDermott to a local farm with a cockerel problem—an abundance of
roosters was exhausting the hen population through harassment and over breeding. The largest, named Blazer, was the
worst of the batch. “I didn’t plan to name him,” McDermott clarifies. But on the farm where free range is the rule, a softhearted farmer habitually christens her hatch.
McDermott stepped onto the farm with her question in mind: As a meat eater, am I under ethical obligation to kill my own food?
Know Your Food
On day one, the farmer scooped up Blazer and placed him in McDermott’s arms. “He’s beautiful,” she said. “I really love animals.
I was raised to have a strong appreciation for nature.” Her father hunts. She fished as a kid. “They’ve always been in the world with
me, not for me to study and examine.” Over the next 10 weeks, McDermott got to know her rooster. When the day came, McDermott packed friends into her car for support. She was uneasy. “What was making me nervous was that this had been really built
up. The act of killing Blazer took on so much.” The farmer’s sons taught McDermott to wield an ax. Petite with a pixyish mien, she
spent hours perfecting her swing. Soon, it was time. She held Blazer before the farmer’s sons prepared him for the ax and remembers
feeling sad, watching him be tied. McDermott trembled as she readied herself. The ax fell. Blazer died. She shook for hours after. But
the job wasn’t over. With a friend’s help, she dressed and cleaned the bird. The hardest part for McDermott was cutting the bird’s
skin. That part made her nauseous. “We don’t think about who does these jobs.” Her mind strays to factory farms, where these activities are done by rote. This was different, “I got to continue caring
for Blazer after I killed him.”
Philosopher’s Soup
BY SARAH STANKORB
 american
When McDermott took the chicken home to her kitchen, she had to bone and shred the
meat. It was a more familiar experience, something she’d done hundreds of times with
store-bought birds. It cooked for four hours, stewed with spices to soften the cockerel’s
notoriously chewy flesh. McDermott shared the resulting mélange with friends, a
communion of sorts. They toasted Blazer. In the end,
McDermott’s moral queries were answered with a
call for greater mindfulness. “I would not say
everyone should have to kill their own food
to eat it. We don’t live in a world where
it’s possible. But people should know
what goes into meat consumption
and vegetable production.”
McDermott’s process was in itself
a meditation. Knowing Blazer
taught her many things,
among them, that her
moral obligation is to
think through her food
choices, and to do
so, “you have to come from a
different starting place.”
FOOD IN AMERICA
Fat Cats,
Bodybuilders,
and Corsets:
A History of Dieting in America
B
By Sarah Stankorb
efore Men’s Health and Glamour tempted
readers with punchy offerings of “Russian
Fat Loss Secrets” or “101 Ways to Look
Hotter Now,” stoutness was manly and real
women had curves—whether those curves
were nature- or corset-made.
Dieting—that willful and dreaded process of reshaping the
body through self-denial—had an early history in America.
In a recent paper published in the Journal of Social History, Katharina
Vester, professor and director of American studies in the College of Arts
and Sciences, uncovered inch-pinching and miracle diets in early
nineteenth-century America; trends predating the previously accepted
timeline of dieting in the United States.
Vester’s paper, "Regime Change," was recently awarded the Belasco Prize
for Scholarly Excellence from the Association for the Study of Food and Society.
august 2011 
D
ieting is conventionally understood
as a female fixation. Third-wave
feminist Naomi Wolf is more than tepid
on the issue, calling dieting “the most potent political sedative in women’s history”
and “something seriously being done to
us to safeguard political power.” The impression is that dieting was introduced to
keep the gals busy counting calories and
comparing measurements, so there would
be no time left for civil participation or
disobedience.
With evidence in hand from early
men’s periodicals, though, Vester offers a
counterpoint. Dieting was first a masculine activity.
When dieting was popularized in
eighteenth-century England, fat-trimming
measures promised men “that their influence, political power, and social privileges
would grow as their waistlines slimmed.”
weight. It is filled with jokes about men
who managed their weight down to
the pound, and casts a wary eye
toward men who opt for “short
allowances” at supper or “take
sweats” to shed water weight.
Spirit of the Times, though,
found that nobler classes,
reared on rich diets and a daily
schedule of polo and cricket,
were better built for excess
without the threat of obesity. The
nouveau riche, on the other hand,
whose wealth was often a product of the
industrial revolution, didn’t have the
breeding to know how to be rich.
As class lines blurred, the self-made
man had something to prove. The newest
member of the wealthy class, Vester notes,
“was thought to be striving, ambitious,
but insecure about his social standing,
and needed to demonstrate self-control.”
Prior to that time, stoutness
had been viewed as a sign of
masculine success. But in the
early 1700s in Great Britain,
medical concerns about
obesity accompanied cultural
charges that “excessive fatness”
equaled conspicuous consumption and a moral debate
about self-indulgence.
It took nearly a century for
concerns about obesity to cross
the Atlantic, but in the 1830s articles
began to appear in medical journals, prescribing dieting as a cure for congestion,
indigestion, and other common ailments.
By 1842, British dieting articles
reprinted in American magazines showed
that the fad had struck a chord with
readers on both continents. American Turf
Register and Sporting Magazine reprinted
an article that poked fun at English
gentlemen, increasingly vain about their
1870: Voluptuous Lydia Thompson
was one of the British Blondes,
burlesque singer-dancers who took
Broadway by storm.

1854: Drawing on

early sports magazines for
upper-class men, Katharina
Vester’s research places the
start of American dieting in
mid-century.
Muscles Make the Man
W
hen mid-Victorian culture began
to model the male ideal on ancient,
muscular, Greek perfection, men’s fitness
became an obsession. Fears abounded
that due to men’s increasingly sedentary
professions the male body had become
too round, too soft, too feminine. Not
coincidentally, this was the time when
middle-class women began demanding
education and political participation.
Vester explains, “the need for more
gender-specific embodiments emerged.”
In his 1863 publication, A Letter on
Corpulence, British undertaker William
Banting wrote about his “miraculous”
recovery from obesity through an early
Atkins-like diet: low-carbohydrate, highprotein, with meat four times a day and
plenty of liquor. It was a men’s-only diet.
In his Letter (which before Vester’s research
was held to be the first real popularly
adopted weight-loss diet), Banting detailed
the ridicule he suffered, as industrialization
led to more standardized furniture, uniform seat sizes on public transportation,
and ready-to-wear clothing. Nothing fit.
Banting and other corpulent men were
pushed into the world’s new mold. There
was a new normal.
By the close of the nineteenth century,
the lines were set, and men, mostly,
attempted to trim their bodies to fit
between those lines. A new word, “slob,”
slipped into the American language, used
to denigrate overweight men. Around
the turn of the century, the model for
male perfection shifted again, from Greek
artifacts to the hulking frame of early
bodybuilders like Bernarr Macfadden,
who quite literally co-opted the statues by
placing himself on a pedestal. A sculpted
specimen of broad-shouldered proportions, Macfadden fasted to trim fat and
layered on muscle through training programs he endorsed in his body-building
magazine. Throughout the twentieth
century, the male ideal fluctuated little

It’s a Man’s World
from Macfadden’s broad-chested and
muscular ideal, though it was punctuated
by the emergence of a new it bodybuilder
every few decades.
The image of the ideal female form,
however, would be hotly debated.
Good Girls Don’t Diet
W
hile men experimented with fad
diets and push-ups and weighttrained their way to fitness, nineteenthcentury popular culture urged women
to be plump to be healthy and beautiful.
Women were meant to be soft, passive,
their bodies full of round, maternal
lines, most often cinched at the waist
by corsets. As Vester explains, corsets
softly rounded the lower belly and were
“used to show fertility, for the hour-glass
figure,” not thinness.
Medical experts commonly stated
that plumpness was necessary for healthy
pregnancy and childbirth. According to
1880: Lillian Russell, songstress and model of
beauty through the turn of the century.
1871: Notions of conspicuous consumption
had become so entrenched in American culture that
political cartoons frequently depicted greed as fat.
1890s: The dress reform

movement exploded from the margins
and into middle-class sensibilities.
A fine figure became more a
matter of will-power than shaping
undergarments.

1860
1870
1880
1890
 american
1864: William Banting’s popular
diet discouraged men from eating
carbohydrates and endorsed eating meat
four times a day—accompanied by plenty
of alcohol.
1878: Illustration of Charles Bennett, the
California Hercules, appeared in How to Acquire
Strength and Muscle, a book illustrating strength
training techniques.


1850s: Tight lacing, a practice
made famous by Gone with the Wind’s
Scarlett O’Hara, was actually a rare
practice that emerged during the
1840–1850s. It was scorned from the
pulpit and the medical establishment.
To be fertile, women were encouraged
to be stout.


1850
1893: German strongman Professor Attila
opens a gym in New York, where he famously trained
heavyweight champion “Gentleman” Jim Corbett.
august 2011 
Vester, trim women were attacked in newspapers and magazines as bad mothers, a
danger to their unborn children, irresponsible, and unpatriotic.
Nevertheless, women’s magazines were
beset by readers with a steadily increasing
interest in dieting. Editors responded with
scolding. The 1878 diet advice and beauty
guide, How to be Plump, taught women
how to pack on the pounds, while their
husbands, fathers, and sons struggled to
do the opposite. In the 1880s, Scientific
American explained “body fat is feminine”
and Harper’s Weekly counseled “leanness
in the fairer sex is a dreadful evil.” While
male bodybuilders bared pecs and biceps
for students of physical culture, sex goddess Lillian Russell topped 200 pounds at
the height of her career. Big was beautiful.
But heftiness didn’t exhibit power the way
that dieting did for men. Vester gives a
nod to why women diet today, “Women
diet because they gain something by
doing so.”
Suffragettes, Bloomers,
and Diets
I
n the late nineteenth century, while
popular culture endorsed female body
fat, feminists took up the mantle of diet.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton endorsed uncorsetted women who trained with early
women’s physical trainer Diocletian Lewis.
Stanton herself famously went
on a diet in the 1880s. Many
middle-class women took up
dress reform as a fashionable
cause, rejecting the corset and
depending on exercise to shape
their bodies.
By 1886, the Boston Daily
Globe reported dieting had
become THE craze among
women. In 1891, Harper’s Bazaar panned
the efforts of women to emancipate
themselves through slenderness. Yet The
Well Dressed Woman, in 1892, offered
a fashion profile, endorsing a woman’s
shape sans corset. Trimness began to be
idealized. Women’s universities, which
decades-earlier had adopted physical
activity to counteract the damage of
“brain-work” by women, were in the
1890s offering physical education for
general health. Finally, the Ladies’ Home
Journal, which fought the turn toward
dieting for decades, relented, writing in
1897 “a woman can be as stout or
as slender as she desires.”
At the same time that suffragettes were gaining political
momentum, Charles Dana Gibson’s
Gibson Girl came to embody iconic
American beauty. Throughout the
1890s and decades into the new
century, the tall, slender, broadshouldered Gibson Girl was often
depicted taking part in a fashionable athletic activity, like golf, tennis,
or boating. By 1900, real-life women
suffragettes donned bloomers that made
bicycling and other activities far more
manageable. Corsets were replaced by
girdles—the predecessor of today’s Spanx.
Underneath the form-smoothing
(rather than shape-forming) garment,
women aimed for trim waists. With
ready-made clothes increasingly available, standard sizing made it clear when
women deviated from average dimensions
that were ever shrinking.
Dorothy Cocks, beauty editor at the
Ladies’ Home Journal in 1927 wrote that
the slender female body signified a position of power—real resistance to Victorian beauty ideals that had turned women,
according to Cocks, into “idiots.” She
asserted that the modern, slender woman
could “win championships, follow careers,
run industries.”
As women’s dieting went increasingly
mainstream, female slenderness was also
allied to conservative messages. Good
wives stayed thin by homemaking, and
in boorish disjunctive reasoning, being
overweight meant a woman was lazy and
a “bad” homemaker. The Fun of Getting
Thin, an early diet advice book, con-
cluded, “A fat man is a joke; and a fat
woman is two jokes—one on herself and
the other on her husband.”
This disturbing rationale did not
replace suffragettes’ messages of empowerment through dieting, just complicated
the goal. A thin woman should bring
home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and
burn a few calories while doing so.
Diets Not Stays
T
rends in bust, waist, and hip size fluctuated over subsequent decades, reflecting
women’s perceived roles in society. For instance, when the nuclear family of the 1950s
was the norm, and women were pushed
to be mothers, Marilyn Monroe had the
figure to emulate. Through the sixties, with
rising feminism and the sexual revolution,
there was Twiggy and Jane Fonda, Weight
Watchers, and Diet Pepsi.
Yet the impulse to diet and model
one’s body after cover girls—from Gibson
Girls to Gisele—wasn’t strategically
foisted upon women to consume their
energy and diminish their power as many
modern feminists assert.
“Its liberating potential,” writes Vester,
“was limited by the familiar process in
which cultural revolts become co-opted.”
Dieting, once a revolutionary act, became
just one more way for women to model
trends. And, as Vester concludes, “The
disciplinary regimen of social control
from without—through fashion, restricted
mobility, and corsets—morphed into
a dietary regimen of self-control from
within.” In dieting, women internalized
the corset and took hold of the strings.
Culture simply sold them on the proper
measurements. n
For more on how twentieth-century dieting
trends reflected women’s political and
social power, read American’s online
exclusive interview with Katharina Vester at
www.american.edu/americanmagazine.

1899: A lack of doctors willing and able to treat
obesity was quickly filled by quacks and unproven
fat-busting remedies.
1907: According to
Vogue, women’s sports had
become fashionable—and
still required the stylized
accoutrement of fulllength skirts and hats.
1910: “The Cure Consumer,” New
York Times Magazine, January 16, 1910,
mocked those who jumped from fad
to fad—fat-reducing abdominal belts,
muscle stretching, breathing exercises.
The cult of the body had become a
male obsession.


Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
1920
1910

1900

 american
1901: Newspapers and men’s magazines were
packed with ads touting scientific means to burn fat
and build muscle.

Bernarr Macfadden founds Physical
Culture, featuring himself on the cover. He publicized
his weight training program with naked photos of
himself—resulting in repeated obscenity charges.

1902:
1910:
With fewer middle-class
families able to afford live-in servants,
homemaking was increasingly seen as an
avenue for women’s fulfillment—and, with
the exercise it entailed, slenderness.

1921: Dubbed by
Bernarr Macfadden the
“The World’s Most Perfectly
Developed Clown,” circus
clown Otto Griebling advertised
his weight training lesson
booklets in comic books and
boys’ magazines.
1921: A year after ratification of the
19th Amendment and women’s voting rights, a
September 1, 1921, article in the Chicago Tribune,
“Throw Corsets Away to Keep Doctors Away,”
claimed women had become more interested
in work and sports than in their “hearts and
appearance.”
august 2011 
Say
Cheese

By Mike Unger
American
Magazine of American University
August 
FOOD IN AMERICA
 american
“When you taste a good cheese
development issues, which led him to
worked as a janitor during a summer,
there’s usually layer after layer after
Washington, D.C., and the School of
and I liked it because I saw what I’d
layer of different things happening in
International Service.
done at the end of the day. In some
your mouth,” Wills, SIS/BA ’76, says.
“I think my experience at AU, having
ways manufacturing has the same kind
“Because it’s a living food it’s constantly
access to Congress, doing internships
of feel to it.”
developing. It’s a comfort food. It’s an
while I was there, has had a huge impact
Like Swiss cheese, Wills’s knowledge of
ancient food. It’s a complex food.”
on everything I’ve done since,” he
the business had many, many holes. But
Nestled about an
he served a sort-of
hour northwest of
apprenticeship under
Madison in the idyllic
his father-in-law
hills and pastures of
and slowly began to
Plain, Wisconsin, Cedar
reshape the company.
Grove factory has been
Green initiatives
churning out cheese
were among his early
since 1878. More than
priorities.
a century later Wills
Traditionally,
and his wife, Beth,
cheese making
took a leap of faith,
involves the use of
purchasing the factory
animal enzymes, but
from her father. In the
Cedar Grove became
ensuing years Wills
the first company
has transformed the
in the nation to
business into one of the
label its cheese free
most environmentally
of synthetic growth
friendly, palate-pleasing
hormones. They don’t
cheese manufacturers in
use any genetically
the country.
modified products,
Bob Wills's factory sits across the street from the house where he raised his family.
“Bob Wills has two
relying instead on
of the best qualities
vegetarian enzymes.
a cheese maker can possess: skill and
says. “But somewhere along the way I
“Everybody said you can’t do that and
creativity,” says Jeanne Carpenter, a selfconcluded that I didn’t understand my
make good cheese, but we keep winning
described “cheese geek” who writes the
own country well enough to mess around awards with it,” Wills says.
blog Cheese Underground. “He isn’t afraid with somebody else’s.”
In 2000 he shelled out nearly
to take risks. The first time I spotted
After attending graduate school at the
a quarter-million dollars for the
his smoked salmon and dill cheddar, I
University of Chicago, Wills decided he
installation of a state-of-the-art
thought he was nuts. Then I tried it.
didn’t like the way the faculty thought
wastewater treatment system. Dirty
That cheese has gone on to win awards
about economics, so he finished his PhD water from the factory is piped into a
and be used in recipes by famous chefs
at the University of Wisconsin, where he nearby greenhouse where plants naturally
across the country, all because Bob asked also earned a law degree.
filter 7,000 gallons each day. At the end
himself, ‘What if?’”
When his wife’s parents decided to sell the
of the complex process clean water is
Self-examination has been a staple of
cheese-making business they’d owned since
returned to a nearby creek.
Wills’s personality throughout his 57
1946, Wills questioned himself once again.
“When I was at AU I worked for
years. Growing up outside Milwaukee
“I thought about it and I said, ‘What [former Senator] Gaylord Nelson, the
he became interested in international
was the job I liked best?’” he recalls. “I’d founder of Earth Day,” Wills says.
august 2011 
“It got ingrained in me to think
about the ways water is used.
Also, I live across the street from
the marsh, so when it’s clean
I’m happy.”
The use of fresh, natural
ingredients is vital to making
tasty cheese. Every day 160,000
to 180,000 pounds of fresh
milk from the 30 Wisconsin
farms Wills works with arrive at
Cedar Grove.
“It starts with the
grass,” he says. “The
health of the animals is
important. We make a
lot of cheeses from cows
that are only on pastures.
We’re operating on a
small enough scale that
we have a lot of control
and flexibility.”
After going through
the pasteurizer, a cocktail
of bacteria is added to the
cheese to give it flavor.
Enzymes are added to
make the milk thicken.
When it’s the consistency
of pudding or Jell-O,
it’s cut into cubes then
heated to separate the
whey from the curd.
Roughly a pound of
cheese is produced from every
10 pounds of milk.
Cedar Grove sells 30,000
pounds of curds a week in the
summer. A Wisconsin delicacy,
curds are small, round, un-aged
cheese nuggets with an almost
rubbery texture. They can
squeak when chewed.
The curds that aren’t sold are
pressed, shaped, and packaged
for aging (at 36 to 38 degrees).
The entire process takes about
seven or eight hours, meaning
Cedar Grove can produce 3.5
million pounds of cheese a year.
It’s shipped to virtually every
state and also used in products
like snack foods, frozen pizzas,
and even baby food.
In May Wills broke ground
on Clock Shadow Creamery, a
smaller factory in Milwaukee
that will produce 700 to
800 pounds per day of fresh
cheeses, like ricotta, and host an
apprenticeship program.
“The first time
I spotted
his smoked
salmon and dill
cheddar, I
thought he was
nuts. Then
I tried it.”
“Bob Wills is the incubator
of new cheeses and a champion
for new cheese makers in
Wisconsin,” Carpenter says.
“He is one of a handful of
cheese plant owners who rents
out space to other cheese
makers and who partners with
dairy farmers to make custom
cheese from their milk. Wills
made the decision to open his
plant 11 years ago to share
knowledge with up-andcoming cheese makers, despite
the risks of competition and
confidentiality issues. Because of
this willingness to help grow the
industry, Wills has helped
at least a dozen beginning cheese
makers and dairy farmers launch
their own cheese brands,
including arguably the most
famous cheese to ever come
from Wisconsin: Pleasant Ridge
Reserve of Uplands Cheese, a
triple best of show winner at
the American Cheese Society.”
Wills credits camaraderie
and friendly competition
for the dramatic
upswing in the quality
of Wisconsin cheese.
He calls the last decade
“the most exciting
time I can remember
in terms of creativity
and technological
advancement. “Consumers have gotten
so curious about what
we’re doing, we can be
aggressively experimental,”
he says. “It’s innovate
or die.”
At Cedar Grove that
spirit has led to the
creation of artisanal
18-month aged cheddar,
goat and sheep’s milk
cheeses, and water buffalo
mozzarella that is sweet, clean,
and rich. It’s also motivated
Wills to continue asking himself,
what’s next?
“I probably would have made
more as an economist, and I
definitely would have made
more as a lawyer,” he says.
“But I train people, I give
farmers an opportunity to get
value for their milk, I make
customers really happy when
they have a bite to eat. It’s a
pretty nice life.” n
Cedar Grove Cheese
www.cedargrovecheese.com
 american
‘Yankee Cooking
At Its Best’
By Mike Unger
It’s a pilgrimage New
Englanders have made
for generations. As a
boy Brian Zecchinelli’s
parents would load him
into the Dodge Aspen for
a monthly trip to one
of the family’s favorite
restaurants: the Wayside.
American
Magazine of American University
August 
FOOD IN AMERICA
Just five miles separated the
Zecchinelli home in Barre,
Vermont, from Berlin, where the
iconic eatery opened in 1918.
On the way young Brian’s
mouth would water as he
anticipated the first bite of a juicy
hamburger, made then as is it
now from fresh locally ground
beef. His mom usually ordered
the tripe.
“We batter it and deep fry
it, and we still serve it to this
day,” says Zecchinelli, 52, who
switched sides of the counter in
1998. “Some people have been
coming here their whole lives,
but this place is about so much
more than food.”
Ever since Effie Ballou opened
the Wayside on a dirt road near a
trolley route, it’s been a gathering
place for politicians, working
folks, and everyone else who
appreciates delicious down
home cooking.
“When my husband and I first
got married in ’58 we used to
go there for breakfast,” says Pat
Mercier, a seven-visits-a-week
regular. “We’d have breakfast so
we could sleep a little later before
mass. The waitresses get so they
know you. The moment you
come in they’ll bring you your
coffee, and they’ll tell me
right off if they don’t have
blueberry muffins, because
I love blueberry muffins.”
In 1966 Eugene and Harriet
Galfetti bought the Wayside
from its second owners, the
Fish family. Their daughter,
Karen, started working there
in 1974, and for years one of
her customers was Zecchinelli,
Kogod/MS ’85. But the two
didn’t formally meet until 1992,
when both served on a local
chamber of commerce board.
They married four years later,
and when Karen’s brother Peter
followed love to Boston, the
couple bought the business
from her parents.
“People do think of it as a
diner, because there is a 12seat counter,” Zecchinelli says.
“But it’s evolved into a pretty
comprehensive restaurant with
everything from eggs and bacon
to beautiful salmon specials,
oysters, and clams.”
The Wayside officially opens at
6:30 a.m., but those at the door
by a quarter past six are seated
and treated to complimentary
buttermilk doughnut holes. One
of the most popular breakfast
specials is the Cackleberry—two
farm fresh eggs and toast made
daily in the Wayside’s bakery. It’ll
set you back 99 cents.
“It’s very reasonable for a
family and especially retired
people like us,” Mercier says. “I
don’t know where you can get
dinner for two people for under
$20. I can’t even cook at home
for that. And they have the best
scallops around—I don’t care.
Even your fancy restaurants’ aren’t
as good.”
Specials are a staple. Each day
there are at least four, including
the Vermont (a country cooking
classic like casserole) and the
Traveler’s (seafood, steak, or
pork chops). “Yankee cooking at its best,”
declared the New York Times,
which especially enjoyed the
universally beloved salt pork
and milk gravy, “an old-timer’s
dream and a nutritionist’s
nightmare.”
No matter what you order,
chances are it comes from a
farm nearby.
“We deal with a dozen
[farmers] on a very large scale,
and another dozen folks just
come through the back door and
have something special they think
our customers would enjoy,”
Zecchinelli says. “The back
door’s always open to farmers,
growers, and gatherers.”
At its core the Wayside is an
extension of your own kitchen
table: a place to enjoy honest
food surrounded by the people
you love.
“We’re blessed to be carrying
the ball forward,” Zecchinelli
says. “We aren’t going to let any
of our predecessors down.” n
august 2011 
Linnekin on Food Choices
from “Dr. Claw Versus Johnny Law,”
www.mademan.com
P litica Stew
B
aylen Linnekin thinks you
should be able to buy, sell,
or consume
pretty much
any kind of food you want.
That’s why the soft-spoken Washington
College of Law ’09 graduate founded the
new advocacy group Keep Food Legal.
“We’re dedicated to the proposition
that people have a right to grow, raise, buy,
sell, cook, and eat the foods of their own
choosing,” Linnekin, CAS/BA ’97, says
of his nonpartisan organization. “There
are plenty of people telling people what to
eat or what not to eat. That’s not our gig.
We’re about defending everyone’s right to
make those choices on their own.”
When it comes to equal-opportunity
eating, Linnekin lives the brand: over the
course of a weekend at a spring conference in Chicago he ate sweetmeats and
oysters and generally indulged
in high-end dining. On the
trip home he feasted on a
quarter-pounder with cheese
(and yes, he had fries with
that). That night’s dinner: a
Twinkie.
Good thing he runs and
FOOD IN AMERICA
works out three days a week at
the AU fitness center. His typical lunch,
though, is half a sandwich with some
seltzer water.
By Charles Spencer
For Linnekin, memories of his formative years in Beverly, Massachusetts, are
mixed with food—baking cookies and
bread with his mom, reading comic
books over toast and eggs at a pharmacy
lunch counter.
“When I was starting law school I
was trying to figure out how can I devote
myself to something I care about deeply
and the more I thought about it I figured,
‘Wow, I really love to cook and eat, and I
care about this issue deeply. And it turns
out that there are a lot of people coming
from all sides who are trying to squelch
what chefs can cook with, what people can
purchase in the store, what farmers can
raise, and how they can raise it. And there
really isn’t a grassroots membership organization that’s dealing with this.’ So the
more I thought about it, I thought,
‘Bingo, there’s my calling.’”
The cook, food writer, and food
libertarian who sees the creative
art of cooking stifled by regulations he thinks are killing both
tradition and innovation asks,
“Who’s fighting back? We are. Keep Food
Legal is.”
In constitutional law classes—in addition to his degree from WCL he earned
American
Magazine of American University
 american
August 
a master of laws in agricultural and food
law at the University of Arkansas School of
Law—“I saw that . . . one needn’t look too
closely to see that a large part of modern
jurisprudence—much of it based on
Supreme Court decisions that I not-sohumbly argue were decided incorrectly—
comes from cases that deal with things like
growing wheat, selling a milk substitute,
and regulations impacting bakeries . . .
Seeing food’s key role in shaping the Court’s
thinking was an eye opener.”
It was while studying law in Arkansas
that Linnekin discovered another eye
opener. There he encountered the quaint
practice of cow-sharing. Buying raw
milk is generally illegal in Arkansas, but
consumers get around that inconvenience
by buying a share in a cow, which entitles
them to free raw milk.
Attending a spring Capitol Hill rally
to protest an FDA raid of an Amish farmer
who sold unpasteurized milk, Linnekin
got to relive his Clinton country days and
sip some of the forbidden beverage.
“And I’m not a milk drinker,” he
admits. “I don’t drink pasteurized milk or
raw milk for the most part. I just never
grew accustomed to it.” n
Keep Food Legal
www.keepfoodlegal.org
“Both by my estimation and his own, Dr. Claw, a selfdescribed ‘lobstah pushah,’ does things that are interesting,
not wrong. Sometimes, though, the interesting things
he does happen to be illegal. That includes boiling and
preparing lobster rolls in a small nautical-themed apartment kitchen and selling them on the streets of Brooklyn
without the proper city inspections and paperwork.”
Baylen Linnekin, executive director of Keep Food Legal, is coproducing a
documentary with School of Communication professor Leena Jayaswal on
food trucks and the underground restaurant scene.
from presenta
tion given as pa
rt of the
Southern Food
and Beverage M
useum
Talks Series, Was
hington, D.C.,
January 2011
“[W]e all know food
scolds go berserk ov
er fast-food
restaurants, and ten
d to believe that do
ing totally weird
things to them will
put a dent in obesity
rates. What
weird things? Thin
gs like exorcising cr
ap
py
toys from
Happy Meals—toys
that kids lose or br
eak in five
minutes—will mak
e the kids skinny.”
mob,”
the raw-milk
p
u
g
in
p
p
o
from “M
Times
, Washington
May 13, 2011
helps kill harm
at pasteurization
th
es
ut
sp
a
e
di
e
se
“No on
A claims to
ut where the FD
rly 25 years
ful pathogens. B
a molehill. Nea
e
se
es
at
st
t
os
mountain, m
, just 11 states
y was instituted
lic
po
A
FD
e
th
after
borders.”
ithin their own
ban raw milk w
Suggested Reading
• Mindless Eating, by Brian Wansink. The Cornell University
professor is also a member of the Keep Food Legal board.
How making small changes in your eating and diet can help
you take off weight.
• Rum Punch & Revolution: Taverngoing & Public Life in
Eighteenth Century Philadelphia, by Peter Thompson. The
central place of taverns as a marketplace of ideas.
• Eating in America, by Waverly Root. Highly recommended by
Linnekin. He has an original copy.
• Books by Anthony Bourdain, whom Linnekin interviewed for
his first real article in the area of food. Premise of the article:
Bourdain seemed to have libertarian leanings on different
issues. Was he a libertarian? Answer: no.
august 2011 
American
Magazine of American University
August 
FOOD IN AMERICA
How to Fix
e v e r y t h i n g
In her prize-winning essay, Heather McDonald, MFA ’07, shows how food and life
are inextricably bound in our memories. The former Food & Wine intern, who was four
years old when she tasted her first casserole—comfort food family friends provided after
the death of her grandfather—won $1,000 as Creative Nonfiction’s first prize for best
essay about food. Not bad for her first published work.
McDonald is a writing instructor in AU’s College of Arts and Sciences’ literature
department. What follows is a condensed version of her essay, published in Creative
Nonfiction’s June issue.
W
hen I met John, we both worked at nonprofit organizations. We
were underpaid, we found cheap happy hours and restaurants, and
we did what we could with inexpensive groceries. He always saw
it as a challenge: “What can I do with half a chicken, mustard,
spinach, and Rice-a-Roni?”
We scrimped our paltry salaries for the occasional fancy dinner, having
researched the best restaurants in D.C.—the ones where people whispered about
the chef ’s magic.
We quit our jobs and began grad school. He moved to Baltimore and I stayed in
D.C. The fancy dinners stopped, but we still cooked. That year, however, John noticed
his neck tightening, his left arm going numb, his shoulders off-center. Seven years
earlier, he had been treated for a benign tumor in his chest called a desmoid. He began
to worry.
Another tumor was now growing at the place where the arm joins to the shoulder
and connects nerves, muscles, ligaments, tendons and blood vessels. The surgeon said
removing the tumor would be better than chemotherapy or radiation.
Days later, he had to go back into surgery because “something was wrong.”
For the next few months, John was admitted and released over and over.
John was wasting away and no one could do anything.
 american
Nurses would bring John a menu on
a half-sheet and a golf pencil so he could
circle the options he wanted, though
some were crossed out depending on the
ward and your illness. John was on the
thoracic ward. Most of the patients were
frail old men with lung cancer. John was
in his late twenties.
No exceptions were made when an
item was crossed out for that ward.
“Can’t I get the eggs and bacon?
Please?” John begged the nurses.
“Nope.”
“But I’m only on this ward because my
surgeon is a thoracic surgeon! I have an
infection!”
“Sorry.”
What would arrive was usually white
or gray, served on tan melamine plates,
placed on a beige elementary-school
cafeteria tray. Styrofoam-flavored dinner
rolls. A dry, ropey chicken drumstick. We
tried not to complain.
We found other options after
wandering the hospital corridors, at least
when John could move around. We often
ate Subway sandwiches. The sweet, yeasttinged-with-preservatives smell that hits
you a few yards from any Subway began
to nauseate me. The store was actually in
the hospital, so it was easy—and better
than nothing. Occasionally, John and I
would order Chinese. I doubt the hospital
dietician would approve of the salt and
sugar levels, so I snuck it in
and hoped no one noticed the smell
of broccoli with garlic sauce. One
time I was caught, and said, “Oh, but
it’s for me.”
There was a Popeye’s and a KFC
nearby; even though the fast-food chains
were within walking distance of the
hospital, navigating East Baltimore at
1 a.m. seemed like a death wish. I snuck
in some fried chicken one day, with
biscuits and gravy and mashed potatoes.
That was a good day, but the questions
lingered. How is this healthy? How is this
what we have resorted to, after our days of
cooking and eating well? We brushed it
away: it was better than nothing.
And that became our refrain. I guess
this is better than nothing.
Back home, I shut down. After I had
not returned several messages, my friend
Lauren surprised me by stopping by
my apartment.
“I need to be alone,” I sputtered.
She shut the door behind her anyway.
“That’s fine,” Lauren said, pushing me
out of the way. “But you need to eat,”
she said. “I brought some lasagna.” She
popped it in the microwave. I stood,
staring at her, numb.
“You. Sit. Eat,” she said. She looked
over her wire-rimmed glasses until I did
as I was told. She sat with me, in total
silence, as I ate half of the lasagna. It had
been so long since I had eaten anything
satisfying. The mozzarella, the peppers,
the meat, the noodles: real food.
“How about I bring some quiche
tomorrow and you can take it to
Baltimore? I bet John needs to put some
weight on after all that hospital food,” she
said. I was relieved that someone knew
what to do.
When I arrived in Baltimore a few
days later, John was at home. He smiled
a little when he saw I had brought food.
His eyes focused, opening wide.
“Food!”
“Yes!” I said. He pre-heated his
rickety oven. We set the table. The
bacon, spinach and cheese quiche
bubbled in the oven. I made a small
salad. Despite appetites diminished
from months of not eating, we devoured
the meal.
The joy was short-lived. Back in the
hospital, John was no longer a “good
patient.” The hospital food did not
help; if anything, it was a cruel joke.
His steady diet of painkillers destroyed
his appetite, but he knew his body
needed food.
John was young, and I was young,
and pale food, pale people, and the
smell of disinfectant surrounded us. We
were supposed to be out with friends,
drinking and eating our way through
the glow of our late twenties. Now John
was sick, weak, in pain, and trapped
in a hospital where experts admitted
they could not diagnose the infection
consuming him. I was watching the
whole scene unfold, at arms’ length,
stupidly impotent.
I decided to cook.
The real relief was my belief that my
lasagna was a cancer-fighting superhero.
The lasagna—and I—would win. When
researching cancer-fighting foods, one
Web site told me that garlic “appear[s]
to increase the activity of immune cells
that fight cancer and indirectly help
break down cancer-causing substances.
These substances may also help block
carcinogens from entering cells and
slow tumor development.” Garlic can
fight tumors. I cheered. Then, I learned
that mushrooms have a protein that
can attack cancerous cells and possibly
prevent them from multiplying. This
lasagna has one pound of mushrooms. This
will stop the growth, too. I read elsewhere
that tomatoes have high levels of
antioxidants, which may fight free
radicals and cell damage. And cooking
tomatoes strengthens these powers. This
lasagna will fix everything.
I missed the qualifiers in that
research. Magical thinking told me I
could save John.
On the days I cooked, the smell of
softened onions and garlic mellowed
in warmed olive oil filled the rooms.
The sauce always overflowed the cast-iron
skillet, but I believed the extra iron the
sauce absorbed would strengthen John.
Tomato sauce spattered the walls. My
fingertips stung from garlic and tomato
soaking into the knife nicks and my raw,
gnawed-on cuticles burned.
But I could feel that pain and that,
too, quieted the panic. The apartment
smelled like it was a place where people
were healthy and comforted.
Sometimes I still like to believe the
lasagna is what saved him. In fact, it
was the infectious diseases team that
diagnosed him with the bone infection
and found the right intravenous
antibiotics. Within a week of treatment,
John began to laugh again. He spent
that summer in our garden, weeding
and pruning. We had the best tomatoes,
green beans and zucchini we have
ever had.
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august 2011 
“One student told me, ‘they’re trying to poison us,’” says
Anastasia Snelling, a professor in AU’s Department of Health and
Fitness, who’s been working at Kelly Miller since 2009 as part
of Community Voices for Health. “Here’s this delicious, healthy
food, and kids won’t even touch it.”
The “nutrition lady,” as Snelling’s affectionately known
at Kelly Miller, had her work cut out for her.
Navigating Nutritional
Wastelands
As students descended on the cafeteria at Kelly Miller Middle School in
Washington, D.C.’s Ward 7 last year, they were met with a shocking sight.
Gone were the burgers and pizza, replaced by whole grain pasta and farmfresh fruits and vegetables. The lighter, healthier menu—prepared from
scratch at the D.C. Central Kitchen—was the result of the Healthy Schools
Act of 2010, legislation that aims to fight hunger, obesity, and disease among
Washington’s youth. The intention was good—but the reviews were not.
American
Magazine of American University
FOOD IN AMERICA
 american
August 
Located in Lincoln Heights, just east of the Anacostia
in northeast Washington, Kelly Miller is just blocks shy of
what social scientists, policy makers, and health advocates
have dubbed a “food desert.”
According to the United States Department of Agriculture
(USDA), a food desert is a low-income census tract where at least
33 percent of residents live more than a mile from the nearest
supermarket. Case in point: Ward 7, the second poorest ward in
Washington, has just two Safeway stores. Located on either end
of the ward, neither is within walking distance for many of the
70,000 people who live in the neighborhood.
What they lack in big box retail, however, communities
like Ward 7 make up for with corner stores: mom and pop
operations that offer high-calorie snack food, cigarettes, alcohol,
canned goods, and a limited selection of fresh produce. (A 2008
report by the Food Research and Action Center found that, of
21 corner stores in Wards 7 and 8, only one offered apples.) And
while fresh food is scarce, fast food is abundant: Ward 7 has one
farmers’ market and 13 fast food outlets.
According to the USDA, 10 percent of the 65,000 census
tracts in the United States are food deserts. Of the 13.5 million
people in these areas, the majority—82 percent—live in urban
areas like northeast Washington. (Locally, the problem is even
more pronounced in Maryland’s Prince George’s County.)
Typically, food insecurity—the lack of or inability to
purchase nutritious food—is just one on a long list of social
ills that mar poor neighborhoods. Unemployment is high and
median household income is low, as is educational achievement.
At Kelly Miller, only 19 percent of students read at grade level
and 18 percent pass math proficiency.
Obesity, paradoxically linked with hunger, is also on the
rise in these communities, as are diabetes, hypertension, and
other chronic diseases. According to a 2010 report by the D.C.
Department of Health, 40 percent of adults in Ward 7 are obese,
compared to 22 percent, citywide. Nearly 42 percent of adults
in Ward 7 suffer from high blood pressure and almost 14
percent are diabetic.
The link between diet, exercise, and health is well
documented. And there’s no question that in food deserts
like Ward 7—which ranks last in fruit and vegetable
consumption in Washington—access to fresh produce,
whole grains, low-fat dairy products, and other staples
of a well-balanced diet is limited.
But, as Kelly Miller students’ preference for grease over
greens indicates, access, alone, doesn’t guarantee people will
make healthful choices.
“Researchers study, in very sophisticated terms, a single
variable: access. But the solution here is multifaceted,” says
4
5
9
WARD 3
WARD 7
august 2011 
Percentage of
Percentage of
Percentage of
$71,875
Snelling, who teaches in AU’s School of
Education, Teaching and Health. “Just
because we build a supermarket doesn’t
mean we’ve addressed how people in
lower socioeconomic areas view the
importance of nutrition.
“We have to increase access to healthy
foods in places like Ward 7. But, more
importantly, we have to educate and
empower people to make the healthy
choices, the right choices,” she continues.
“The best solutions bubble up—they
don’t parachute down.”
An Appetite for
Learning
The District has been creative in
tackling the food desert dilemma.
Although only two of the city’s 26
farmers’ markets are located east of the
Anacostia, 15 now accept food stamps.
And this summer, Washington’s first
mobile market—a school bus powered by
a blend of diesel and vegetable oil—will
hit the streets, offering fresh, locallygrown produce from the Arcadia Center
for Sustainable Food and Agriculture.
 american
Urban farms and community gardens
are also sprouting up across the city.
But, when the mobile market rolls
through Lincoln Heights, peddling
peaches and peppers, will residents bite?
Snelling’s scholarship around food
deserts—what she calls “communitybased participatory research”—is unusual,
in that it looks beyond access, asking: can
carrots and corn compete with Cheetos?
“It comes down to behavior
modification,” she explains. “We
have to work within the family,
the school, and the community to
change the culture of food.”
Now in her third year at Kelly Miller,
where she pioneered the Community
Voices for Health project, Snelling is
doing just that.
“Education and health care are the
two big social issues of our time and
we’ve done little to work on them,
simultaneously,” she says. “Healthier
students are better learners so, for us, the
school was the obvious place to start.”
Community Voices in Health began
with the five-week Kids Take Action
project, during which sixth graders
learned about public policy, nutrition,
and fitness. Students wrote letters to
President Obama and other legislators,
sharing their ideas for improving access to
healthy foods and safe play spaces in their
neighborhoods. They also created songs,
skits, poems, and posters promoting
exercise and healthy eating and designed
a community garden for the school,
planting strawberries, beans, and basil in
six raised beds.
“It’s an empowerment tool,” says
Snelling of the green space. “I can show
the kids the food pyramid or we can
go down to their garden and grow
some strawberries.”
Next, Snelling and her team of grad
students turned their attention to Kelly
Miller’s 40 teachers and staff, helping
them integrate health and nutrition
lessons into the learning standards for
math, language arts, science, and social
studies. In math class, for instance,
kids calculate the volume of a box of
Cheerios; in social studies, they learn
about the gardens maintained by slaves
on southern plantations.
Snelling also encouraged the
teachers—some of whom, like the
students, expressed a preference for
cafeteria pizza—to act as healthy
role models. “We told them the
same thing we told the kids:
‘just try it,’” says Snelling of the
healthier lunchroom offerings.
Now, armed with a $95,000 grant
from Kaiser Permanente, Snelling is
focusing on the Kelly Miller parents:
a critically important but difficult-tocapture group.
Teachers and staff can monitor what
kids eat at school, but when the afternoon
bell rings, all bets are off. Snelling says
parents need to model healthy behavior
for their children, in order to change
the culture of food in neighborhoods
where SpaghettiOs are more plentiful
than spinach.
Although the real work will get
underway when school starts in the fall,
parents—about one-quarter of whom
met with Snelling during parent-teacher
conferences in May—have expressed
an interest in cooking and stress
management classes, a walking club, and
a job fair. Thanks to the money from
Kaiser, Snelling will also offer a variety of
health screenings.
“We have to look at the whole
person,” she says. “What do they want
and need to live a healthier life?”
Harnessing the
Supermarket’s Power
Consumers base their food
choices on four criteria: taste, cost,
convenience, and nutrition. When a
working mom goes to the McDonald’s
drive-thru for dinner, she’s put
convenience at the top of the list;
when a shopper opts for conventional
strawberries over the organic version,
he’s likely based his decision on cost.
Not surprisingly, nutrition is often
an afterthought.
And while it’s easier to put nutrition
atop the list when cost is less of a
concern—call it the Whole Foods
effect—Snelling is adamant that it’s
possible to eat healthy on a budget. “It’s
not easy. You have to learn the skill of
cooking and the skill of shopping, but
it’s possible,” she says.
Navigating the grocery store, with
shelves stocked with products promising
low-fat, high fiber, and gluten-free, might
be the trickier skill to master. That’s
why Snelling, along with AU marketing
professor Anusree Mitra and public
administration and policy professor
Taryn Morrissey, is undertaking a study
of front-of-the-package marketing at
Safeway in Ward 7.
The research, funded by an AU grant,
is significant for two reasons. First, most
studies of food packaging have been
conducted in high-income areas; second,
research on food deserts focuses almost
exclusively on corner stores—likely
because independent grocers are more
autonomous and more prevalent than
large chains.
august 2011 25
“A
whole milk, the register will spit out
a coupon for a free gallon of skim.
Snelling also plans to organize
cooking demonstrations at Safeway,
preparing a healthy dinner using six
sale items. “If I have 30 minutes, I’d
rather teach people to cook on a budget,
engaging them in skill building around
food preparation, than drill them down
about their blood pressure,” she says.
Nudging Kids Toward
the Salad Bar
“But the fact is, I can reach
more people at Safeway than at the
corner store,” says Snelling. “Large
supermarkets should be the leaders
in educating consumers about
point-of-purchase food choices.”
Last month, Snelling and her team
began surveying consumers about their
shopping habits, food preferences, and
the ways in which marketing claims
influence their purchases. They’ll use the
data to craft “interventions” aimed at
helping shoppers make healthier choices.
If, for example, someone buys a gallon of
 american
26
Word of Snelling’s work is spreading.
In June, she was approached by the
USDA’s Economic Research Service
to use behavioral economics-based
strategies—a new trend in nutrition
and health promotion—to coax
students at Kelly Miller to make better
food choices. The $20,000 to $30,000
grant, currently pending approval by
the Office of Management and
Budget, will allow Snelling to tweak
the cafeteria layout, experimenting
with things like plate size and food
placement. The goal: to nudge kids to
make smarter selections by changing
the way their options are presented.
Previous research conducted by the
Center for Behavioral Economics in
Child Nutrition Programs at Cornell
University revealed that, giving foods
more descriptive names—“creamy
corn,” for example—increased sales by
27 percent. Also, when researchers put
apples and oranges in a fruit bowl rather
than a stainless steel pan, fruit sales more
than doubled.
Although USDA has funded similar
research at 15 colleges and universities,
Snelling’s grant is the first in Washington.
“It’s exciting that USDA wants to
roll up its sleeves in its own backyard,
and I’m glad AU can be a part of that,”
says Snelling, who will collect pilot data
at Kelly Miller and other D.C. schools
in the fall, and hopes to implement
similar strategies in lunchrooms across
Washington next year.
“Access is one thing, but when you
get kids engaged, that’s when change
happens,” she continues. “This is where
the rubber meets the road.” n
lot of the health disparities
that people have now are
because of lack of access to
healthy fruits and vegetables,” says Chris
Mittelstaedt, Kogod/BSBA ’91. He’s
trying to change that.
Mittelstaedt is founder, CEO, and
chief banana of the San Francisco–based
vending machine alternative, The Fruit
Guys. The business, which Mittelstaedt
launched during the heydays of the
dot-com bubble, was first geared toward
coders and techies whose waistlines
expanded as they pumped caffeine to get
through long shifts. Mittelstaedt found
his niche replacing chocolate-covered
espresso beans and Jolt with kumquats
and avocados.
Now operating from four hubs
nationally, the Fruit Guys offers
subscriptions of locally-grown produce to
clientele including high-end businesses,
local plumbers, public schools, and
commuters who trek home with their
weeks’ fruit, veggies, and recipes in
cardboard, produce-hauling briefcases.
Good health is central, but the Fruit
Guys’ mission is broader. Mittelstaedt
thinks back to his entrepreneurship class
with Kogod professor Richard Linowes
and repeats a grounding life and business
tenet Linowes planted in his mind: “He
asked, ‘What are you doing that makes
you a vital contributor?’” Mittelstaedt
adds, “I’ve thought about that throughout
the rest of my career. A lot.”
Over time, Mittelstaedt and the Fruit
Guys brand became deeply linked to the
causes of small agriculture and nutrition.
The terms advocacy and stewardship flow
as freely from Mittelstaedt as discussions
of the bottom line.
The Fruit Guys searches for suppliers
among farmers living on less than 100
acres, believing those who make their
homes there will “tend to take better
care of the land and be willing to be
good stewards.” The company runs a
farm stewardship program, installing
beehives as pollination aids and bat boxes
to control moth and mice populations
naturally. They were part of a successful
statewide petition of the California
Department of Food and Agriculture
to opt for sustainable methods in
eradicating invasive moths. The Fruit
Guys runs multiple community projects,
including donations to Philadelphia’s
Philabundance, San Francisco’s St.
Anthony’s Foundation, and the Chicago
Food Depository. They are even working
with Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution
and donated a year’s worth of produce
to three low-income families living in Los
Angeles’ food deserts to highlight
the issue of food access.
At a time when many similarly
mission-driven nonprofits are now
operating businesses for new funding
streams, Mittelstaedt explains, “We’ve
done it the other way around.” n
The Fruit Guys
www.fruitguys.com
august 2011 27
Barry Scher, SPA ’65, vice chair of the Capital Area Food Bank,
at the organization’s warehouse in Washington, D.C.
The need is staggering. The Capital Area Food Bank, which
serves more than 700 D.C.-area hunger-relief organizations
like food pantries, kitchens, and shelters, helps feed 478,000
area residents—a 25 percent increase since 2006.
“Over my 40 years” in the field
“I’ve never seen a time quite as
troubling as now,” said Lynn Brantley,
president and CEO of the CAFB,
which will distribute about 30
million pounds of food this year.
Half of that food will be fresh
produce, part of a push by the
food bank to provide nutritious
meals to those in need.
But less than a year before it moves
to a new facility that will more than
double its storage capacity and greatly
expand the services it can provide, CAFB
finds itself in the unprecedented position
of launching an emergency $1 million
campaign to help pay for that produce.
Otherwise, for the first time in the
food bank’s history, it will have to
charge its member agencies a 10-centper-pound fresh produce fee, a move
Brantley acknowledges will severely
American
Magazine of American University
FOOD IN AMERICA
28 american
August 
strain the local organizations that
depend on it for food. Many of those
organizations are reporting a 30 to
100 percent increase in demand for
food during the past couple years.
Brantley describes the emergency
situation as a “perfect storm” of rising
demand and skyrocketing costs, with
the food bank’s transportation and food
costs jumping 30 percent in the past
three months.
The Face of Hunger
Who are the people who depend
on the food the CAFB and its member
agencies provide? Increasingly, they are
members of the middle class squeezed
by unemployment, high housing costs,
and a stalled economy, Brantley said.
But in the main they are poor. In the
Washington, D.C., area, where one in
six residents is at risk of experiencing
Brantley describes
the emergency
situation as a
“perfect storm”
of rising demand and
skyrocketing costs
hunger, 78 percent of all households
served by the CAFB have incomes
of less than $35,000 per year.
Need is growing, Brantley notes,
precisely at the time when Congress
is proposing $800 million in cuts to
nutrition programs.
Food for Kids
Nationally, 26.5 million children under
age 18 are at risk of suffering from hunger.
One in five children in the
metropolitan area is at risk of
experiencing hunger—a figure that jumps
to one out of two children under
age 18 in the District of Columbia,
according to U.S. Census figures.
30
 american
That need is addressed by one
of CAFB’s most important initiatives,
the Food for Kids program, which
serves all of D.C., Northern Virginia,
and Prince George’s and Montgomery
Counties in Maryland.
Kendra Rowe Salas, SIS/MA ’04,
director of Food for Kids, manages a
12-person team. Through the Kids
Café, her program serves about 60
community sites, or about 1,800
children per day. The Weekend Bag
Program, which provides children with
food for the weekend, serves 1,500
children through 35 community sites.
The Kids Café Program has three
coordinators for each region, one of
whom is Marie Morse, SPA/MPA ’11.
The former Peace Corps volunteer,
who had also worked part time at
the food bank, is the Food for Kids
program associate and volunteer
coordinator for Northern Virginia,
working mostly with 30 Kids Café
sites in Northern Virginia.
For Sarah Lieberman, Kogod ’05,
a senior account executive at LM&O
Advertising in Arlington, Virginia,
helping raise funds for such programs
is one of the most satisfying parts of
her job. Lieberman is now putting
together a brochure to help get the word
out about the food bank’s variety of
services. And her firm has also provided
pro bono help to develop the brand
identity for the food bank’s annual
Blue Jean Ball, a major fund raiser.
A Firm Foundation
Running a food bank is labor
intensive. Donations often come
from the back of the pantry, and so
volunteers—the food bank depends in
part on the work of 14,000 of them—
must inspect every box, can, and jar for
expiration dates and swollen seams.
Once that’s done, everything must
be sorted and shelved so that agencies
can find what they need.
That kind of front-line commitment
is as essential as having a highly qualified
professional staff. But just as important
to a food bank’s success is a committed
board of directors.
Deborah Flateman, CEO of the
Maryland Food Bank, which covers the
Maryland counties not served by the
CAFB, agrees with the critical role an
engaged, professional board of directors
plays in making a food bank successful.
“This is a $38 million business,”
Flateman said of the Maryland Food
Bank. “That’s not like collecting food in
a garage.” The Maryland organization
distributed 18.6 million pounds of food
to 800 soup kitchens, shelters, and other
sites in fiscal 2010.
Also critical to success, Flateman
said, is the relationship between the
organization’s CEO and board chair.
At the Maryland Food Bank, that’s
Philip Andrews, WCL ’77. “There needs
to be a strong relationship, with good
communication,” she said. Andrews,
who is finishing his first year as chair, is
“totally committed to elevating our board
to the highest level. He’s got his eye on
the horizon.”
“There’s actually a life to your board
participation,” noted Shari Freedman,
SIS ’82, the San Francisco Food Bank’s
vice chairperson of the board. Freedman,
who is also chief financial officer for
Worldwise, praised the engagement
and innovations of her food bank’s
board while noting that it’s important
to understand that a board member’s
enthusiasm can undergo a life cycle. “You
can bring a lot of enthusiasm, but you
can get stale, too . . . I think it’s good
for boards to get new blood and look at
things differently.”
Certainly that’s been true at the
CAFB, said longtime Giant VP and
food bank board chair and member
Barry Scher, SPA ’65. Ramping up the
involvement of the board he counts as
among the food bank’s most important
achievements in recent years.
It also helps to have powerful friends,
especially when you’re trying to raise
millions of dollars for a new facility.
And Scher, who is now a principal at
Policy Solutions in D.C., has what the
Washington Post once called the best
Rolodex in Washington.
“I went out and got Abe Pollin,
Bill Marriott, Don Graham—because I
know them like that—to be cochairs of
the capital campaign,” Scher said of the
late philanthropist and Washington sports
magnate, Marriott Corporation leader,
and Washington Post Company chair.
“They brought in millions of dollars.”
Funding for the $37 million building,
which is paid for, came from a variety
of sources. In addition to donations
from the cochairs, William Conway
Jr. of the Carlyle Group and his wife,
Joanne, donated $5 million. The District
of Columbia’s Department of Housing
and Community Development gave
$15.8 million, the federal government
$3.1 million, the state of Maryland $1.8
million, and the Kresge Foundation $1
million.
New Building, New Phase
The 125,000-square-foot distribution
center at Puerto Rico Avenue is just down
the road from the current building, an
aging 48,000-square-foot warehouse,
located in northeast D.C. The food
bank also has a 12,000-square-foot
distribution center in Lorton, Virginia.
When the office and warehouse
operation is moved in May 2012, not
only will warehouse capacity be expanded
and bays added to make shipping
and receiving food more efficient,
but a commercial kitchen will allow
preparation of food for Kids Café sites
that lack kitchens.
“We want to try to be a hub for other
food banks,” Brantley said. “We’ll take
anything Feeding America [the national
food bank umbrella group] has to offer,
and bring that into the warehouse and
then we’ll ship it out to other food banks.
And then maybe we can get chicken from
Virginia or Eastern Shore, Maryland,
or maybe we can trade with somebody
in Florida for fresh vegetables in the
wintertime. It’ll give us a bargaining chip
to work with other food banks so that we
can pull in even more food.” n
“This is a $38
million business,”
Flateman said
of the Maryland
Food Bank.
august 2011 
T
he Capital Area Food Bank was
founded on January 15, 1980,
Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.
But a vital point in its origin can
be traced a few years earlier to a future
AU professor’s Yom Kippur fast.
During his third year at the
University of Missouri–Kansas City law
school, Richard Stack, now a professor
in AU’s School of Communication, was
trying to figure out what to do with the
rest of his life.
“The turning point for me towards
the end of law school was a Yom Kippur
fast, in which I was trying hard to
pay attention to the rabbi but I was so
hungry it was hard to do that,” Stack
recalled. “Here I am studying the law
of the land in the bread basket of the
country, but it began to occur to me to
ask why do some of us eat so well on the
planet and others don’t. So I used my
law school thesis to focus on that, to take
a look at the legal, political, economic
ramifications of food distribution. And
that really propelled my journey.”
Stack ended up in Washington
working for the World Hunger
Education Service. Unfortunately,
funding for his position dried up and he
found himself unemployed.
About then two D.C.-area groups,
the United Planning Commission
and the Interfaith Conference of
Metropolitan Washington, were
considering starting a food bank. By
then Stack had begun associating with
the interfaith group and had become
an active member of the discussion.
“I became the point person
for the group. Everybody else had jobs—
I didn’t. I did the research, I did the
legwork, I studied the other models,
came back and reported to the group,
and basically I was the natural person
 american
to take the lead role when the grant
proposals that I was writing started
to be funded . . . So after a year of
basically working in a voluntary
capacity, I graduated to being the
executive director.”
And so the Capital Area Food Bank
was founded in what Stack called a “very
funky” warehouse on Bladensburg Road
in D.C.
“We started in a leaky warehouse,
no pallet jacks, no forklifts, unloading
trucks by hand. It was by the grit of
our teeth that we began,” recalled Lynn
Brantley, president and CEO of the
CAFB, who was then on Stack’s staff.
In the beginning the food bank
distributed a million pounds of food
in one year to 90 agencies.
These days, it distributes 30 million
pounds to 700 agencies.
The move into CAFB’s current
building on Taylor Street, Northeast,
Stack considers the crowning achievement
of his tenure as executive director. And
it was while at the food bank that he
taught his first class at AU—a class
called the Politics of Hunger. After
leaving CAFB, Stack became the first
chair of the DC Central Kitchen,
which uses leftovers to feed thousands
of folks while providing programs such
as culinary training for the needy.
Guardian Angels
Just as vital to the food bank’s
founding was Barry Scher, SPA ’65.
The longtime Giant Food VP, now a
principal with Policy Solutions in D.C.,
joined the food bank in 1980 as a board
member. He became vice chair three
years ago, and before that was chair
of the board for 10 straight years.
“Barry’s the undergirding, the
heart of this place,” Brantley said.
“He’s always willing to jump in, always
willing to help. And because of who
he is he has such credibility. He started
the Good Neighbor Campaign with
Don Graham at the Washington
Post; he opened the door for that.”
That campaign, which invited
grocery customers to contribute food
to the food bank, along with a donation
coupon, raised about 300,000 pounds
of food the first year. And the coupons
allowed the food bank to build a directmail campaign. “We put the names into
our database and now we’ve raised over
$3 million just through our direct-mail
campaigns. Barry Scher and Donald
Graham are responsible for that.”
“He and Giant were the guardian
angels of the program,” said Stack.
“Safeway was very generous also, but
Giant provided probably more food,
more transportation support, people
power, financing, funding, and Barry’s
expertise in the local food industry.
Sometimes people wouldn’t return my
call as the director of the food bank, but
they always returned Barry’s call.”
Other grocers have supported the
food bank too, and Safeway’s Larry
Johnson was one of the important
supporters of the food bank during its
founding. Indeed, the current chair,
Greg TenEyck, is director of public
affairs and government relations at
Safeway. Dan Marett, a VP at Harris
Teeter, is also a current board member.
As the food bank prepares to enter a
new era, the institution remains a
legacy of the vision of people like Scher
and Stack and Brantley—and the staff
and thousands of volunteers who have
made the CAFB a vital source of food
for people who would otherwise go
hungry. n
34
Class Notables
36
News from Development and Alumni Relations
37
Class Notes
45
Alumni Foodies
www.american.edu/magazine
Alumni news
The class of 2011 enjoyed great fare and fellowship at this year’s Toast to Graduates, sponsored by AU's Alumni Association. More than 1,100
people attended the popular event held in the Katzen Arts Center. More photos can be seen on the Alumni Association’s Facebook and Flickr
pages. Visit us at www.facebook.com/americanualum and www.flickr.com/americanualum.
august 2011 
Class notables
Allison Sosna ’07
SO YOU CAN CATCH UP WITH PEOPLE YOU KNEW AT AU
Gelburd and three-month-old Millie
Diane Gelburd, CAS/PhD ’88
rowing up in the urban jungle surrounded by concrete
and cabs, Diane Gelburd dreamt of a life filled with
horses and hay.
“I thought people who lived on farms were the luckiest people
in the world,” laughs the Bronx native.
Years later, the city girl is living her country dream.
A senior executive in the United States Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, Gelburd and
her fiancé own 500 acres in northern Louisiana, where they raise
equine, cattle, and timber. Gelburd, who commutes to the farm
once a month from Washington, enjoys training and halterbreaking her beloved mules, including three-month-old Millie.
“I love working with the mules because they’re like overgrown
puppy dogs,” she says of the animals, which are notoriously intelligent, curious, and even-tempered. “They get very attached to
their trainers.”
And while farm life has its challenges—including a recent infestation of army worms and extreme weather that’s brought floods to
some parts of Louisiana and drought to others—Gelburd relishes
her time in the country.
“When I hear the cows mooing and the donkeys braying as
I walk through the pastures, I think how fortunate I am to have
the peace and serenity of the farm,” she says of her brood, which
includes 350 cows, 25 equine, and a rescued emu. “I miss it when
I’m back in D.C.”
Even when she’s in the city, though, agriculture is always on
her mind.
As special assistant to the chief for Strategic Natural Resources
Initiatives, Gelburd works on agricultural and environmental
policy issues such as food safety, biomass crop production, water
quality, and conservation. Recently, she led the Greater Sage-
G
 american
Grouse Initiative, which protects the declining species’ habitat
while ensuring the sustainability of ranches and farms in the western United States. She’s now turning her attention to the Farm
Bill, which is up for reauthorization in 2012.
In her 31 years with USDA, Gelburd’s worked in 11 states
and on three continents. She says the work’s been as varied as the
locale.
“I’ve had opportunities from working with farmers and ranchers on the ground to leading thousands of employees and billions
of dollars worth of conservation programs,” she says.
“Public service is incredibly rewarding. The work is hard
and the hours can be long, but it’s so satisfying to know that I’m
working to improve the well-being of our country.”
—adrienne frank­
Allison Sosna, SOC/BA ’07
s executive chef of contract foods with Fresh Start
Catering and D.C. Central Kitchen (DCCK)—located
in the country’s largest homeless shelter—Allison
Sosna’s duties go beyond dicing and slicing.
When she’s not in the kitchen, Sosna is teaching her sous
chef to use a computer so that he can further his career, meeting
local farmers as they deliver the day’s produce, and helping kids
discover new, healthy foods.
“The idea is helping people through food,” she says. “It’s
extremely fulfilling.”
The social enterprise arm of DCCK, which serves 4,500 meals
daily, Fresh Start Catering is staffed by graduates of its culinary
job training program. Fresh Start, which partners with dozens of
farms in the area, caters everything from business breakfasts to
plated dinners. Its clients include nine area schools.
“When I started with the schools, we made brussels sprouts,”
Sosna recalls. “No one thought they would eat them, but I said,
‘We’re going to sell them as mini cabbages’ and sure enough, one
of the kids said, ‘I love brussels sprouts.’ This sixth grader was
sold. Just by making food accessible and cooking it correctly,
you’re able to win kids over.”
A
Diane Gelburd ’88
Sosna, who’s been at DCCK for nearly three years, has seen
the staff swell from seven to almost 50. Most of her responsibilities
revolve around oversight of school food programs. Her goal: to
“create a school food model that we can replicate and feed all the
kids in D.C.”
It was while studying abroad in Italy that Sosna chose her life’s
work. “Italy shook me to the core, made me realize what I wanted
to do. I had to figure out this food itch,” she says.
Upon her return to D.C., Sosna volunteered—yes, volunteered—at Chef Geoff ’s restaurant near AU. “I started going there
one day a week, peeling carrots and hanging out,” she says. After
graduation, she attended culinary school and spent several years
working in fine dining.
Through her work at popular Washington eateries, Sosna
made lots of contacts, including Barton Seaver, a National
Geographic fellow and D.C. chef who encouraged her to apply
for the DCCK job.
“The full circle of food that we get to see every day is what
makes me tingle,” she says.
—traci crockett
august 2011 
news from development and alumni relations
U pdate
Reprinted with permission from the Washington Post
by Thomas J. Minar, Vice President of
Development and Alumni Relations
John M. Couric, former journalist, P.R. executive, father of
broadcaster Katie Couric
M
 american
Class notes
By Adam Bernstein
June 22, 2011
J
Family Photo
any wonderful achievements marked the end of our
fiscal year on April 30, 2011.
Foremost, we completed
the AnewAU campaign on
December 31, 2010, with
more than $214.1 million
raised. As if that were not
enough . . .
In a year when most institutions lost
alumni donors, our alumni rose generously
to meet the 50/50 Challenge, ending the
year with an increase of more than 500 donors year-to-date, and a 12 percent increase
in cash contributions to our Annual Funds,
totaling nearly $1.9 million. Alumni, along
with parents, faculty, staff, and friends,
made a substantial difference this year.
As a continued sign of American’s
commitment to our alumni, we increased
the number of outreach, social, networking, educational, and service events by
37.3 percent, holding 173 events around
the globe that attracted more than 5,400
strong. We will engage even more of you
in the life of the university in Washington, and bring American to you at home,
in print, and online. Please visit alumni.
american.edu to stay up to date.
All in all, American raised $18.6
million in cash and generated new gifts
and pledges of $20.8 million. Our work
to provide financial support for the strategic plan is in full force. We are focused on
raising funds for the School of Communication Building Campaign, scholarships,
faculty positions, annual funds, and soon,
the Washington College of Law.
Please stay in touch. As we begin fiscal
year 2012, remember that American
University is your university home. We
will be here for you every year, as we
welcome new members into our alumni
community, and remember those we
have lost. Thank you for including us
among your priorities. Without you, we
could not celebrate the milestones of this
past year and realize those of the next.
ohn M. Couric, a wire service editor who said he gave up the “high priesthood of journalism”
for a public relations career, in part to support a growing family that included the future television journalist Katie Couric, died June 22 at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington. He was 90.
His death, of complications from Parkinson’s disease, was confirmed by his daughter Katie,
the former anchor of the “CBS Evening News” and co-host of NBC’s “Today Show” who is
scheduled to start a daytime talk show for the ABC network.
“I encouraged her to go into broadcasting because I thought it was more promising than
print, having been in print myself,” John Couric, an Arlington resident, told The Washington
Post in 1991.
He covered Georgia politics and the state capitol for the Atlanta Constitution before
joining the United Press wire service in the late 1940s. He reported from throughout the
South for UP, chronicling the rise of then-Gov. Herman
Talmadge of Georgia and a hurricane that in 1949
devastated the east coast of Florida.
He joined the news service’s Washington bureau in
1951 and subsequently wrote about then-Senate Majority
Leader Lyndon Johnson’s heart attack, among other stories of
national interest.
He was an editor with UP before leaving in 1957 to
begin his public relations work with a series of trade associations, including the National Association of Broadcasters
and the American Health Care Association.
He retired in 1985 after six years with the Food and
Drug Administration, where he wrote articles and speeches.
John Martin Couric Jr. was born Aug. 28, 1920, in
Brunswick, Ga., and grew up in Dublin, Ga. He graduated
in 1941 with a journalism degree from Mercer University in
Macon, Ga., and was a newspaper reporter in Macon before serving in the Navy during World
War II.
Stationed in the Mediterranean and then the Pacific, Mr. Couric participated in the
invasion of Sicily before serving in the campaigns for Tarawa, Peleliu, the Philippines and
Okinawa. He retired from the Navy Reserve in 1965 at the rank of lieutenant commander.
Besides his daughter Katie, of New York, survivors include his wife of 67 years, Elinor
Hene Couric of Arlington; two other children, Clara Batchelor of Brookline, Mass., and John
M. Couric Jr. of Arlington; nine grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Their oldest
child, Virginia State Sen. Emily Couric (D-Charlottesville), died in 2001.
Mr. Couric received a master’s degree in communications from American University in
1968 and was an adjunct professor of journalism and public relations in AU’s graduate program and the University of Maryland for the next 27 years.
He was a longtime Arlington resident and member of the National Presbyterian Church in
Washington. He was involved in volunteer work for the American Heart Association and, in
the early 1960s, the President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped. He served
on the executive committee of both groups. n
For more information or to make a gift, please visit www.giving.american.edu or call the Office
of Development and Alumni Relations at 202-885-5900.
Thanks for sending your news. E-mail your
latest accomplishments to classnotes@american.edu.
—Traci Crockett, Class Notes Editor
1950
Stanley Grogan, SOC/BS, SOC/
MA ’55, was featured in two books,
Voices from the Korean War and The Forgotten.
Grogan flew two combat tours in Korea after
being called to active duty while attending AU.
1957
Alan Clem, SPA/MA, SPA/PhD
’60, is still enjoying life, is retired,
plays golf several months of the year and watches
classic movies. He has five children and five
grandchildren.
Americans, Rutgers University Press, based on
twenty-first century oral histories. She also
founded Don’t Tear It Down, now the D.C.
Preservation League, which celebrated its 40th
anniversary in April. www.alisonowings.com.
Libby York, SPA/BA, a jazz vocalist with
three award-winning CDs, will appear at An Die
Musik in Baltimore, the Kitano New York City,
and a venue in Washington, D.C. in the fall.
www.libbyyork.com.
1967
Wynn Lawry, CAS/BA, married
Nelson Lawry on May 1, 2010. She
divides her time between New Hampshire and
Arizona.
Joan Plaisted, SIS/BA, SIS/MA ’69,
was the senior advisor for Asia for
the United States at the 65th General Assembly
session of the United Nations in New York.
Octavio Portu, Kogod/BSBA, was elected
president of the Breck School Board of Trustees.
He is a founding partner of Portu-Sunberg
Marketing and Seasonal Specialities, both located
in Minneapolis.
1965
1969
1962
Valentine Fetisoff, CAS/BA, is
an inventor, mentioned in Who’s
Who of American Inventors, and the author of
Moonlight, an audio book of romantic poetry
published by Liberty Publishing House. He also
is a singer and has produced three CDs and three
cassette recordings. russmusicbooks@aol.com,
www.russianmusicandmore.com
1966
Warren Miller, SPA/BA, chairman of the U.S. Commission for
the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad,
was the keynote speaker at the Italian embassy’s
International Holocaust Remembrance Day on
Jan. 27, 2011, where he was knighted Commendatore of the Order of Merit of the Italian
Republic by the president
of the Republic of Italy.
He was recognized for his
accomplishments in negotiating 18 bilateral agreements
with Europe and Eurasia on
behalf of the U.S. government and for memorializing
Holocaust sites in Europe.
Alison Owings, SOC/
BA, published Indian
Voices/Listening to Native
Alison Owings ’66
Sherrill Cannon, CAS/BA, published her third rhymed children’s
book, The Magic Word, and has had three children’s plays published by Lazy Bee Scripts this
year. She appreciates the continued support she
has received since graduation from her AU mentor, William Stahr. www.sherrillcannon.com
Mike Durso, CAS/MEd, was elected to
a four-year term on the Montgomery County,
Md., Board of Education. Mike retired in June
2009 after 44 years in public education in
Washington, D.C.; Arlington County, Va.; and
Montgomery County, Md. He has been a high
school principal for the last 27 years.
Elinore Liebersohn Koenigsfeld, CAS/BA, had an exhibit, “REFLECTIONS,” which includes
Please join us
online!
“Like” the
American University
Alumni Association.
Follow us at
@AmericanUAlum.
Join the American
University Alumni
group on LinkedIn
to connect with
more than 8,000
fellow Eagles.
New! See photos
from alumni events.
Elinore Liebersohn Koenigsfeld ’69
key to the schools
College of Arts and Sciences: CAS
Kogod School of Business: Kogod, KSB
sculptures and digital prints based on sculptures,
paintings, and photographs, at the Jerusalem
Theatre, Jerusalem. She has been living in Israel
for 40 years where she has taught art, designed
educational computer software programs, written
a series of children’s books, and had many permanent museum exhibits. She and her husband,
Uri, have two children and five grandchildren.
www.elinoreart.com
School of Communication: SOC
School of International Service: SIS
Visit www.american.edu/
alumni/connected for links.
School of Public Affairs: SPA
Washington College of Law: WCL
august 2011 
ALL-AMERICAN
WEEKEND 2011
A celebration for alumni and families
October 21–23
Hosted by the Office of Alumni Relations and New Student Programs, AU’s All-American Weekend
is a celebration of AU with more than 50 events planned for alumni, families, students, community
members, and friends. This weekend celebrates the memories, the fun, and the future of AU.
www.american.edu/alumni/allamericanweekend
WEEKEND HIGHLIGHTS
Class notes
Executive foodies serve up success and philanthropy
Ari Kushimoto Norris
Elliot Schnier
Ronald Vogel
Sandra Escobar
CAS/BA ’99
Kogod/BA ’71
CAS/BS ’72
SPA/MPP ’99
R
S
A
ri Kushimoto Norris is
director of marketing and
design for KUSHI Izakaya
& Sushi, the D.C. hotspot
that was recently named a top
Japanese pub by Bon Appetit
magazine. Kushimoto Norris,
who served as lead designer for
the 4,000 square foot restaurant, fused traditional Japanese
design with modern accents.
www.eatkushi.tumblr.com/
Class Reunions
Can’t remember what your classmates look like? It’s time to return
to D.C. for your milestone reunion. Click “Reunions” on our Web
site to learn more.
All-Alumni Party
Call your friends, tweet your classmates, and let all your friends on
Facebook know that the place to be on Friday night is Ireland’s
Four Fields in Cleveland Park. The party will start at 8 p.m. and end
when Frank kicks us out.
All-American Picnic
Pack up the kids and head to campus for the finest in picnic fare!
Hang out with Clawed Z. Eagle, enjoy live music by Matt Boerum,
CAS/BS ’05, and catch up with old friends and new.
Annual Alumni
Awards Ceremony
Meet the Alumni Association’s
2011 Alumni Award winners at
a special ceremony detailing their
accomplishments and honoring
their achievements.
“Having arrived from Japan
only one year prior to enrolling
in college, AU was a place where
the social and educational atmosphere provided the groundwork
for me to become an entrepreneur. By developing valuable
friendships that have lasted, I
was able to partner with AU
alum Thom Flynn [manager
at KUSHI], CAS/BA ’00,
to create our successful
restaurant.”
— ari kushimoto norris
Join the celebration!
 american
Alumni: Call 800-270-ALUM (2586) or e-mail reunion@american.edu.
Parents: Call 202-885-3303 for more information about parent registration.
on Vogel is co-owner of
Booeymonger Restaurants,
a unique, local delicatessen
since 1974. Booeymonger
Restaurants has been a loyal
sponsor of AU athletics for
almost two decades. Ron began
E
lliot Schnier is copresident
and co-chief executive
officer of Porky Products, one
of the nation’s largest independent meat and seafood distributors. Schnier also serves in a
volunteer capacity as a member
of the Kogod School of Business Advisory Council. His
philanthropy has helped realize
the vision of the Katzen Arts
Center and renovations
for Kogod.
www.porky.com
“My experience at AU helped
me in many ways to become
successful in a very, very competitive industry. I have always
been grateful for my years at
AU, which provided me with
a wonderful education in and
out of the classroom. Believing
firmly that the responsibility
of success is also to give back,
it has been my pleasure as well
as privilege to be a part of AU’s
present and future planning.”
— elliot schnier
andra Escobar, who learned
the art of grinding cacao
beans from her grandmother, is
executive chef and owner of the
Cacao Tree, a socially responsible
producer of artisan chocolates,
other confections, and Mexican
haute cuisine in Washington,
D.C. Escobar sources her chocolate from fair trade producers in
Mexico and Central and South
America for delectable desserts
that capture her family’s heritage
and delight all . . . including
President Obama.
www.thecacaotree.com/
his career in the food service
industry at AU, managing the
97 Carryout, a student-run
sandwich and pizza eatery.
Ron and his family are longtime supporters and members
of the Eagles Club and help
provide pre-game hospitality at
home basketball games.
www.booeymonger.com
“I always enjoy being on
campus, as the university is
still a home to me. For this,
I feel a sense of loyalty and
responsibility to give back
what AU has given to me.”
—ron vogel
“As a graduate student at
American I learned to
value education not as a
means to achieve a greater
material ambition, but as a
means to mature as a confident and well-rounded
individual. My experience
helped reaffirm my belief that
education should help you
learn who you really are.”
— sandra escobar
august 2011 
Nate Beeler's World of
wonks
All We Are Saying Is Give Peace a Chance
If anyone could bring these two protagonists together, it would be an AU peace wonk.
We don’t know how many graduates of the School of International Service’s International Peace and Conflict Resolution
Program are working inside the Pearly Gates, but the 200 students currently pursuing master’s degrees could follow in the
earth-bound footsteps of earlier grads.
IPCR alums can be found at work in national and international organizations that focus on resolving and avoiding conflict,
as well as promoting international interchange and understanding. Here’s a sampling of organizations where you might run
into an AU peace wonk:
• United States Institute of Peace
• Woodrow Wilson International Center
• World Bank
• Nonviolence International
• Carter Center
• Refugees International
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia
• Doctors Without Borders
• Save the Children
• USAID
Peace is in the forefront of many people’s minds at AU. As Washington Examiner cartoonist Nate Beeler, SOC/BA ’02,
knows, no situation is without hope. n
—MU
 american
Non-Profit Org.
U.S. Postage PAID
Permit No. 109
Hanover, NH
Washington, DC 20016-8002
Address Service Requested
Chubby Hubby. Chunky Monkey.
Cherry Serendipi-Tea?
H
ere’s the scoop: Ben & Jerry’s, the Vermont
ice cream maker behind such iconic
concoctions as Cherry Garcia and Phish
Food, challenged 23 AU undergrads to pitch the next
great flavor, made with fair trade ingredients.
Flavor engineers—students in Kogod professor
Mike Carberry’s advertising and marketing communications class—didn’t disappoint, dishing up a sundae’s
worth of sweet ideas, including Mangorita, Fair Banana
Flare, and Black Swirl, inspired by the Pirates of the
Caribbean franchise.
<< Mock-up art looks like the real thing.