Food & Nutrition Scholar
This summer I had the wonderful opportunity to visit my old home, New York, where among other things, I worked with photographer Mariana Pelaez, to document the experiences of restaurants engaged through the Latin American Restaurants in Action Project. I am thrilled to share the final products in this short blog! First, we visited Que … Continue reading LARiA Project Updates: Sharing stories from New York
The month of October 2021 marks the birthday of my first book, “Caribeños at the Table: How Migration, Health, and Race Intersect in New York City,” with the University of North Carolina Press. It has been thrilling to see the book out in the world and I am thankful to many of you that have … Continue reading Celebrating Caribeños at the Table: November events!
A few years back, I briefly got into collecting cookbooks – a side effect of my first food studies article, Writing Cuisine in the Spanish Caribbean: A Comparative Analysis of Iconic Puerto Rican and Cuban cookbooks (Food, Culture, and Society, 2015). I do not have too many of them, but I’ve been revising these as … Continue reading Healthy Latin Cooking: Book Review and Testing
I am thrilled to share that my book, Caribeños at the Table: How Migration, Health, and Race Intersect in New York City, is scheduled to come out this October 2021 via University of North Carolina Press. The book has been the result of a long and transformative process, beginning back in 2013, when I moved … Continue reading Book announcement: Caribeños at the Table
Post dedicated to pitorro – an important component of Christmas celebrations in Puerto Rico, missed from my table this year.
My take, in support of the Goya Foods boycott.
Last month, my team completed the assessment of close to 90 Hispanic Caribbean restaurants, as an initial step for my new restaurant study. We worked together last spring to adapt the Nutrition Environments Measurement Survey for Restaurants (NEMS-R) to the Cuban, Dominican and Puerto Rican cuisines, including additional factors in relation to the promotion of … Continue reading Restaurant research update: An initial look at menus
Sharing and celebrating my new (and first!) NIH-funded research to collaborate with restaurants in the developing of an intervention to improve food environments in NYC’s Puerto Rican and Dominican communities.
Afro-descendant women have been key in the keeping and sustaining of food traditions in societies with a history of colonialism and slavery. Examples I have encountered in my work are Francisca Falú, the woman who taught iconic Puerto Rican cookbook, Carmen Aboy Valldejuli, how to cook, and Margot Bacallao, the assistant to Nitza Villapol, the … Continue reading Preserving cuisines: Quick thoughts at the intersection of gender, race and Diaspora
It was a hot and humid August morning. Adela sat in the back of her restaurant, peeling potatoes, with only a small fan to appease the heat. The TV was tuned to Telemundo, with Elvis Crespo singing for Monica Puig, the Puerto Rican tennis player who days before had just won the first gold medal … Continue reading Adela
Melissa Fuster, PhD 