Join the Arnold Arboretum on February 1 at noon for a talk by popular Mushroom Hunt instructor Maria Pinto on her new book, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival. Maria weaves together memoir, mycology, and cultural history to illuminate the deep and surprising ways fungi connect with human life. With vivid storytelling and a fiercely original voice, she explores fungi not just as biological wonders but as tools of survival, subversion, and spiritual sustenance – especially for thos living at the margins. The program takes place in Hunnewell Hall. For more information visit https://arboretum.harvard.edu/events-2/program-catalog/
Join chef Diane Kochilas for a conversation and cooking demo spotlighting the fresh flavors of her new Athens-inspired cookbook on January 26 at 6:30 pm..
Curated Cuisine is a monthly series examining all things edible, from the chefs cooking the food to the writers reviewing the recipes. Meet the people shaping the food industry, both local and national and enjoy a post-show bite inspired by the conversation.
Greek food has come a long way since the days of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The modern metropolis is flush with global influences and ingredients dancing alongside traditional Greek staples. Greek chef and television personality Diane Kochilas, an Athenian for over three decades, has written a new cookbook that dives deep into the savory twists and turns of cuisine in the Greek capital. In Athens: Food, Stories, Love, she offers a cipher to the changing Mediterranean mecca and also fresh takes on Greek classics. Join us for a conversation and live cooking demonstration with Kochilas moderated by WBUR senior correspondent and host Deborah Becker.
Copies of the cookbook will be available to purchase from our bookstore partner Brookline Booksmith. Kochilas will sign and guests will enjoy a bite from the book following the conversation.
This event is co-produced by Boston University Metropolitan College Programs in Food & Wine. Tickets (from $12.51) available through Eventbrite HERE.
Join friends at The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on November 20 in Calderwood Hall for a special evening with James Prosek—award-winning artist, writer, and naturalist—in celebration of Gardner’s Eden, one of the Museum’s newest publications and the culmination of Prosek’s 2018 residency at the Gardner. In conversation with Pieranna Cavalchini, Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art at the Gardner Museum, Prosek will trace the roots of inspiration for the book and provide insights into his artistic practice. An audience Q&A and book signing will conclude the event. Copies of Gardner’s Eden will be available for purchase from Gift at the Gardner.
During his artist residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, James Prosek was drawn to Gardner’s collection, her love of plants, and the relationships she nurtured. Over the course of several visits, he created a series of 54 exquisite drawings capturing everything from rarely seen personal mementos and carefully arranged gallery objects to the ever-changing flora and fauna of the Museum’s iconic Courtyard.
Each drawing is paired with carefully selected quotations from letters, poems, and journals by Gardner, her friends, and contemporaries. These selections highlight the breadth of Isabella’s eclectic interests and reveal Prosek’s own keen, observant eye. Thoughtfully paired with an essay by the artist, they invite readers to reflect on the enduring dialogue between art, nature, and personal history.
For the final event of the Fall 2025 Pépin Lecture Series on October 23 at 6 pm, author and historian Lori A. Flores joins us to discuss her latest book, Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to Covid-19. Copies of Awaiting Their Feast will be available for purchase.
Though Latinx foodways are eagerly embraced and consumed by people across the United States, the nation exhibits a much more fraught relationship with Latinx people, including the largely underpaid and migrant workers who harvest, process, cook, and sell this desirable food. Lori A. Flores traces how our dual appetite for Latinx food and Latinx food labor has evolved from the World War II era to the COVID-19 pandemic, using the US Northeast as an unexpected microcosm of this national history.
Spanning the experiences of food workers with roots in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Central America, Flores’s narrative travels from New Jersey to Maine and examines different links in the food chain, from farming to restaurants to seafood processing to the deliverista rights movement. What unites this eclectic material is Flores’s contention that as our appetite for Latinx food has grown exponentially, the visibility of Latinx food workers has demonstrably decreased. This precariat is anything but passive, however, and has historically fought—and is still fighting—against low wages and exploitation, medical neglect, criminalization, and deeply ironic food insecurity.
Lori Flores’ research and writing focus on Latino life, labor, immigration, and food history, particularly when it comes to the US Northeast. She is an expert on the Bracero Program and Mexican guestworkers, the US farmworker rights movement, food laborers’ conditions, and relationships between citizen and immigrant Latinos. She is also the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement. She also directs Stony Brook’s Latin/x American and Caribbean Studies Center and Program.
The second talk of Boston University’s Food Studies Programs’ Pépin Lecture Series for Fall, 2025 will take place Thursday, October 23 at 6 pm at 808 Commonwealth Avenue, in Fuller 124.
Though Latinx foodways are eagerly embraced and consumed by people across the United States, the nation exhibits a much more fraught relationship with Latinx people, including the largely underpaid and migrant workers who harvest, process, cook, and sell this desirable food. Lori A. Flores traces how our dual appetite for Latinx food and Latinx food labor has evolved from the World War II era to the COVID-19 pandemic, using the US Northeast as an unexpected microcosm of this national history.
Spanning the experiences of food workers with roots in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Central America, Flores’s narrative travels from New Jersey to Maine and examines different links in the food chain, from farming to restaurants to seafood processing to the deliverista rights movement. What unites this eclectic material is Flores’s contention that as our appetite for Latinx food has grown exponentially, the visibility of Latinx food workers has demonstrably decreased. This precariat is anything but passive, however, and has historically fought—and is still fighting—against low wages and exploitation, medical neglect, criminalization, and deeply ironic food insecurity.
Lori Flores’ research and writing focus on Latino life, labor, immigration, and food history, particularly when it comes to the US Northeast. She is an expert on the Bracero Program and Mexican guestworkers, the US farmworker rights movement, food laborers’ conditions, and relationships between citizen and immigrant Latinos. She directs Stony Brook’s Latin/x American and Caribbean Studies Center and Program.
The program is free but registration is open at Eventbrite HERE.
The Boston University Food Studies Program has announced its Fall 2025 Pépin Lecture Series. On Thursday, October 9 at 6:00 pm Hi’ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart will present a talk based on her new book Cooling the Tropics. Beginning in the mid-1800s, Americans hauled frozen pond water, then glacial ice, and then ice machines to Hawaiʻi—all in an effort to reshape the islands in the service of Western pleasure and profit. Marketed as “essential” for white occupants of the nineteenth-century Pacific, ice quickly permeated the foodscape through advancements in freezing and refrigeration technologies. In Cooling the Tropics Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart charts the social history of ice in Hawaiʻi to show how the interlinked concepts of freshness and refreshment mark colonial relationships to the tropics.
From chilled drinks and sweets to machinery, she shows how ice and refrigeration underpinned settler colonial ideas about race, environment, and the senses. By outlining how ice shaped Hawaiʻi’s food system in accordance with racial and environmental imaginaries, Hobart demonstrates that thermal technologies can—and must—be attended to in struggles for food sovereignty and political self-determination in Hawaiʻi and beyond.
Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kanaka Maoli) is Assistant Professor of Native and Indigenous Studies at Yale University. An interdisciplinary scholar, she researches and teaches on issues of settler colonialism, environment, and Indigenous sovereignty. This first book, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Duke University Press, 2022) is a recipient of the press’s Scholars of Color First Book Award. It will be available for purchase on October 9.
Her articles have appeared in refereed journals such as NAIS, Media+Environment, Food, Culture, and Society, and The Journal of Transnational American Studies, among others. She is the co-editor of the special issue “Radical Care,” for Social Text (2020), and the editor of Foodways of Hawaiʻi (Routledge, 2018). She is currently working on a project about cultural memory, commemoration, and hauntings in Hawaii State Parks. Professor Hobart holds a PhD in Food Studies from New York University, an MA in Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture from the Bard Graduate Center, and an MLS in Rare Books Librarianship and Archives Management from the Pratt Institute.
The event will take place at 808 Commonwealth Avenue, in Fuller 124, and is free, but registration is recommended through Eventbrite HERE.
Join The Acton Conservation Trust on September 25 for a Book Talk with Lynda Mapes, author of The Trees Are Speaking: Dispatches from the Salmon Forests. More information and registration on our website: www.ActonConservationTrust.org
Lynda V. Mapes, award-winning environmental journalist for the Seattle Times, was inspired to write The Trees Are Speaking after exploring the richness of old growth forests in the Northwest U.S. and Canada. But she also came face to face with the widespread destruction of these forests. Mapes writes, “The book therefore became a witness not only to the incredible ecological and cultural values of these forests but to the connected history of their loss, beginning on the East Coast in Maine and repeated across the United States and continuing over the border into Canada, even today.”
Mapes also outlines the resilience of nature, the insights and perseverance of First Nations people who have raised their voices to protect and renew ecosystems, understandings of our inter-relatedness uncovered by scientists, and even new approaches to commercial forestry.
The winter garden is truly a low-maintenance affair — no weeding, no watering and no dead-heading. The winter landscape may be quiescent, but the garden need not be bleak. Plants with brightly colored berries, twigs, stems, foliage, and even winter-blooming flowers shrug off the snow and cold. They bring cheer, even as the sun enters Capricorn.
Landscape horticulturist Warren Leach, and author of the new book from Timber Press Plants for the Winter Garden, will showcase gardens he has designed that celebrate the winter season as well as planting design ideas for your own garden on Saturday, September 20, from 10 a.m. to noon, at Berkshire Botanical Garden (Book signing to follow the talk)
For more than 35 years, Warren Leach has been creating beautiful landscapes throughout New England as well as making captivating and educational display gardens as co-owner of Tranquil Lake Nursery in Rehoboth, R.I., a specialty nursery that is a prominent grower of daylilies, iris and distinctive perennials and woody plants.
Kevin West, author of The Cook’s Garden: A Gardener’s Guide to Selecting, Growing, and Savoring the Tastiest Vegetables of Each Season, will lead a talk on growing your own garden and incorporating homegrown produce into everyday cooking on Saturday, September 6, at the Berkshire Botanical Garden from 2 to 3:30 p.m. The event includes a kitchen demonstration.
Kevin West comes from East Tennessee farmers and Smoky Mountain settlers, country people with generations of commitment to growing delicious food. He is the author of Saving the Season: A Cook’s Guide to Home Canning, Pickling, and Preserving (Knopf). He also coauthored The Grand Central Market Cookbook (Clarkson Potter) and contributed to Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original (The University of North Carolina Press). He gardens and cooks in the Berkshires. $25 for BBG members, $40 for nonmembers. Register at https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/events/cooks-garden-kevin-west
Marcus Bridgewater is an author, speaker, and creator. He is widely known as Garden Marcus for connecting his observations in his garden to personal growth & well-being, and he is the author of several books including How to Grow: Nurture Your Garden, Nurture Yourself (HarperOne, 2022). Marcus has been featured in a variety of press & media including the New York Times, Vogue, and The Drew Barrymore Show. He lives in Texas with his wife, son, and ever-growing garden. Drawing from his own experiences cultivating both plants and mindfulness, Marcus will share how the natural world offers timeless wisdom for resilience, patience, and well-being in this engaging presentation. Whether you are an avid gardener or simply seeking inspiration for personal growth, this talk will provide valuable lessons on how to cultivate a thriving life—both in the garden and beyond.
Hear Marcus at the Polly Hill Arboretum, 795 State Road, West Tisbury, on August 16 at 10:30 am. $10 for PHA members, $15 for nonmembers. Registration required as space is limited. Please pre-register, Sign Up Here
