‘What She Ate’ Reveals The Plates And Palates Of 6 Notable Women

Back in the late 1980s, when I was first starting out as a critic for The Village Voice, one of the books I was assigned was Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad, a social history of the home economics movement during the turn of the last century.

I can’t recall many of the other books I reviewed in those days, but Perfection Salad has remained indelibly with me. Shapiro helped break new ground by taking the history of women, housework and cooking seriously, even as her witty and vivid writing style was decidedly un-solemn. Now, some 30 years later, Shapiro has done it again, this time, breaking new ground in the art of biography by taking the adage, “you are what you eat,” literally.

Shapiro’s fascinating new book is called What She Ate, and it focuses on the lives of six women from different centuries and continents — all prominent to different degrees. Among them are Dorothy Wordsworth, the poet’s shy, worshipful sister; Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress and 11th-hour wife; and Helen Gurley Brown, the whippet-thin, legendary editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan.