In New Book, Author Profiles Six Notable Women Through Food They Ate

Author Laura Shapiro has taken an unusual approach to the form of biography in her new book, “What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories.”

In an interview with Lois Reitzes, Laura Shapiro said that the premise of “What She Ate” was to “look at the life of a woman who doesn’t necessarily even like to cook, or maybe she isn’t even interested in food, and use food as a window onto that life.”

So how did she settle upon her final six women? Shapiro admits that the process of elimination was simultaneously difficult and simple: the historical women would have to have left a paper trail, and therefore would have likely been famous in their own time.