When John got started in the cocktail world, Jim Meehan was his first boss at the acclaimed neo-speakeasy, PDT (Please Don’t Tell). Jim also wrote the foreword to John’s first book, Drink What You Want. The finale of this miniseries, this is a touching interview between two longtime friends and colleague, and ultimately ends up being as much of an interview of John as it is of Jim.

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Editors are the unseen heroes of the publishing world, offering critical behind-the-scenes feedback that can take an author’s work from good to spectacular. Amanda has not only been John’s editor for both Saved by the Bellini and Drink What You Want, she’s also a dear friend. Here they chat about Amanda’s start in publishing, her editing process, and why she chose to focus on cookbooks. 

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Cathy dials up Meera Sodha, bestselling author (and The Guardian’s vegan columnist) to chat about her latest cookbook. We talk about how her book thoughtfully incorporates the cuisines of many Asian countries, and how Meera collaborated with the home cooks and chefs she met on her culinary journeys. We'll also hear about some of Meera's favorites from the book's 120 vegan and vegetarian recipes, which include the likes of Mushroom Bao, Pumpkin Malai Kari, Brussels Sprout Nasi Goreng and Salted Miso Brownies. 

Image Courtesy of Flatiron Books

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On this week's episode of Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined in the studio by Sohui Kim and Rachel Wharton, who have teamed up to write The Good Fork Cookbook.

Sohui Kim is the chef and co-owner of The Good Fork. She trained at ICE, cooked under Dan Barber and Anita Lo, and defeated Bobby Flay in a dumpling contest on the Food Network. Rachel Wharton is a James Beard Foundation award-winning journalist and the co-author of The Di Palo’s Guide to the Essential Foods of Italy.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined in the studio by Chitra Agrawal, the author of Vibrant India: Fresh Vegetarian Recipes from Bangalore to Brooklyn, and the founder of Brooklyn Delhi, an award-winning Indian condiments line. Chitra writes the popular recipe blog The ABCDs of Cooking, teaches vegetarian Indian cooking classes at Brooklyn Kitchen, Brooklyn Brainery, and Whole Foods, and hosts pop-up dinners throughout New York City with creative Indian-inspired menus.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by chef, author, and food writer Gill Meller. In his first book, Gather, Meller showcases 120 recipes inspired by British seasonal cooking, and the landscapes in which he lives and works.

On this week's episode of Eat Your Words, Troy Ball joins Cathy to talk about her book Pure Heart:
A Spirited Tale of Grace, Grit, and Whiskey. Troy is the founder and principal owner of Asheville Distilling Company in Asheville, North Carolina, makers of Troy & Sons Platinum Whiskey, Troy & Sons Oak Reserve and Blonde Whiskey, which have won national and international medals in world whiskey competitions.

On the 300th episode of Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined in the studio by Melissa Clark, a food writer, cookbook author and staff reporter for the New York Times Food section, where she writes the popular column “A Good Appetite” and appears in a weekly cooking video series. Melissa has written thirty-eight cookbooks, including her latest, Dinner: Changing the Game, to be published by Clarkson Potter in March 2017. Her work has been honored with awards by the James Beard Foundation and IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals), and has been selected for the Best Food Writing series.

On the 299th episode of Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Jennifer Steinhauer, a congressional reporter for The New York Times. Prior to moving to Washington with the Times in Feb. 2010 she was the Los Angeles bureau chief for the paper. She is also the co-author of the book A Meatloaf in Every Oven: Two Chatty Cooks, One Iconic Dish and Dozens of Recipes - from Mom's to Mario Batali's.

On this Valentine's Day edition of Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Simran Sethi, a journalist and educator focused on food, sustainability and social change. She is also the host, writer and creator of The Slow Melt, a podcast that uses chocolate as the thick, delicious lens through which to explore the world—from flavor and physiology to chemistry and conservation, from global markets and gender to climate change, social justice and beyond—highlighting the people, places and processes behind this $100 billion industry.

On the latest episode of Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Jeremy Sewall and Marion Lear Swaybill, co-authors of the book Oysters: A Celebration in the Raw. The book is a primer on all things oyster, where they grow and why they taste the way they do, how to differentiate one oyster from another, and how to buy them, shuck them, serve them, and enjoy them at home.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by author McKay Jenkins. McKay is professor of English, journalism, and environmental humanities at the University of Delaware. Cathy and McKay talk about a very hot topic around the world: GMOs, or genetically modified organisms. Advocates hail GMOs as a harmless extension of natural selection, and even further as the key to ending global hunger and malnutrition. Critics, on the other hand, dismiss GMOs as the playthings of greedy corporations who are eager to squeeze every last dollar out of the land they work on while inadvertently poisoning their consumers.

Cathy dials up the authors of The Chilean Kitchen, Pilar Hernandez and Eileen Smith. They discuss the classics of Chilean cuisine and the rich history of influences that has molded it over the centuries. 

Image courtesy of Skyhorse Publishing.

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On the season premiere of Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Trine Hahnemann, owner and CEO of Hahnemann’s Kitchen and enthusiastic advocate for sustainable solutions, organic sourcing and food made with love. Hahnemann has also written eleven cookbooks in her native language Danish and also five in English, including The Scandinavian Cookbook and Scandinavian Baking. She is an enthusiastic advocate for sustainable solutions, organic sourcing and food made with love, and is a passionate opponent of food waste.

On the season finale of Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Michaela DeSoucey, author of Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food. Bringing together fieldwork, interviews, and materials from archives and the media on both sides of the Atlantic, DeSoucey offers a compelling look at the moral arguments and provocative actions of both pro- and anti-foie gras forces.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Shane Mitchell, a Saveur contributing editor and author of Far Afield: Rare Food Encounters from Around the World, a culinary travel book featuring profiles of people who are keeping some of the world's oldest food traditions alive, such as taro farmers in Hawaii who have never left the islands, Maasai warriors in Kenya, and Icelandic shepherds who still use the techniques of their Viking ancestors.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Natalie Eve Garrett, an artist, writer, and the editor of The Artists' and Writers' Cookbook: A Collection of Stories with Recipes from powerHouse Books. Inspired by a book from 1961, The (original) Artists' & Writers' Cookbook included recipes from the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Marianne Moore, and Harper Lee. This new version includes stories and recipes from Joyce Carol Oates, Neil Gaiman, T.C. Boyle, Marina Abramović, and many others.

Today on Eat Your Words, Molly Yeh calls in to tell us all about her transition from New York City to the country life in Minnesota. Molly's recent book, Molly On The Range, catalogs her time working a farm and creating recipes (both old – previously published on her blog – and new!).

On this week's Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Cal Peternell of Chez Panisse, and author of A Recipe for Cooking, which The New York Times Book Review called "the best beginner’s cookbook of the year, if not the decade."

Cal Peternell grew up on a small farm in New Jersey and earned a BFA in painting from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Living in Italy with his wife, artist Kathleen Henderson, Cal was inspired to pursue a cooking career. After working at various acclaimed restaurants in San Francisco and Boston, including BIX, Loretta Keller’s Bizou, Lydia Shire’s BIBA, and Chris Schlesinger’s the Blue Room, he landed at Chez Panisse. Cal and his wife have three sons and live in the Bay Area.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined in the studio by Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe, food historians and co-authors of A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression.

A Square Meal examines the impact of economic contraction and environmental disaster on how Americans ate then—and the lessons and insights those experiences may hold for us today.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Ronni Lundy, author of the book Victuals: An Appalachian Journey, with Recipes.

Born in Corbin, Kentucky, Ronni Lundy has long chronicled the people of the hillbilly diaspora as a journalist and cookbook author. She is the former restaurant reviewer and music critic for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, former editor of Louisville Magazine, and has contributed to many national magazines. Her book Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes and Honest Fried Chicken was recognized by Gourmet magazine as one of six essential books on Southern cooking. In 2009, Lundy received the Southern Foodways Alliance Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway speaks with Sandor Katz, author of "the book that started the fermentation revolution," Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods.

Since its publication in 2003, and aided by Katz’s engaging and fervent workshop presentations, Wild Fermentation has inspired people to turn their kitchens into food labs: fermenting vegetables into sauerkraut, milk into cheese or yogurt, grains into sourdough bread, and much more. Katz’s work earned him the Craig Clairborne lifetime achievement award from the Southern Foodways Alliance, and has been called “one of the unlikely rock stars of the American food scene” by The New York Times.

The updated and revised edition, now with full color photos throughout, is sure to introduce a whole new generation to the flavors and health benefits of fermented foods.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Karen Stabiner, a journalist and author of narrative non-fiction. She is the author of Generation Chef, the story of Jonah Miller, who at age twenty-four attempts to fulfill a lifelong dream by opening the Basque restaurant Huertas in New York City. The book takes us inside Huertas’s roller-coaster first year, but also provides insight into the challenging world a young chef faces today—the intense financial pressures, the overcrowded field of aspiring cooks, and the impact of reviews and social media, which can dictate who survives.

Cathy welcomes Darin and Greg Bresnitz, the hosts of the podcast Snacky Tunes on HRN, and authors of a new cookbook on food and music also called Snacky Tunes: Music is the Main Ingredient. The authors share the fun behind-the-scenes of working on the book, which includes recipes from acclaimed chefs around the globe including May Chow, Pooja Dhingra, Alex Atala, and more.

Photo Courtesy of Phaidon.

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This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Louise Miller, writer, baker, banjo player, and author of The City Baker's Guide to Country Living, a full-hearted novel about a big-city baker who discovers the true meaning of home—and that sometimes the best things are found when you didn’t even know you were looking.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined in the studio by Diana Henry, an award-winning food writer, journalist and broadcaster. She is the author of ten books, including A Bird in the Hand, which was a bestseller and won a James Beard Award in March 2016. Her latest, Simple, takes the kind of ingredients we are most likely to find in our cupboard and fridge – or be able to pick up on the way home from work – and provides recipes that will become your friends for life.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined in the studio by Hillary Davis, author, food journalist, cooking instructor, and writer and creator of the popular food blog Marché Dimanche. Davis is the author of Les Desserts, Le French Oven, French Comfort Food, Cuisine Niçoise, and A Million A Minute. She is presently at work on her fifth cookbook and a novel.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Miriam Horn, the author of the newly published Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman: Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland.

Horn tells us about food practitioners she's profiled in her book, all of whom live along the Mississippi River and represent an underreported movement to address environmental challenges in the US.

On the season premiere of Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Larry Olmsted, an award-winning journalist and author who has written several thousand articles for major newspapers and magazines worldwide over the past 20-plus years. He currently writes one of the most popular columns for Forbes online, is USAToday.com’s weekly Great American Bites restaurant columnist, is the Contributing Travel Editor for Cigar Aficionado magazine, and has held numerous other editorial or columnist positions for a variety of publications. His latest book, Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don't Know What You're Eating & What You Can Do About It, is available now.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Pascal Baudar, a wild food researcher and a self-styled “culinary alchemist” based in Los Angeles.He has served as a wild food consultant for several TV shows including MasterChef and Top Chef Duels, and has been featured in numerous other TV shows and publications. His new book is titled The New Wildcrafted Cuisine: Exploring the Exotic Gastronomy of Local Terroir.

On this week's episode of Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Los Angeles Magazine food critic Patric Kuh, author of the James Beard award-winning Last Days of Haute Cuisine, a history of the American restaurant business. The magazine’s chief restaurant critic since 2000, he was the recipient of the 2006 James Beard Foundation award for best magazine restaurant critic in America.

Kuh's latest book is titled Finding the Flavors We Lost: From Bread to Bourbon, How Artisans Reclaimed American Food, and profiles major figures in the so-called “artisanal” food movement.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway speaks with Jessica Fechtor, author of the bestselling memoir Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals that Brought Me Home.

Jessica Fechtor’s debut memoir chronicles her recovery from a ruptured aneurysm at age 28, and how she reclaimed her life through food and cooking. A national bestseller and winner of the 2015 Living Now Book Award, Stir has been praised by Oprah.com as "a page-turning pleasure," and by The Wall Street Journal as "a recipe for living a life of meaning.” Fechtor lives in San Francisco with her husband and daughters. She doesn’t believe in secret recipes.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Joel Salatin, a farmer, lecturer, and author who raises livestock using holistic management methods of animal husbandry, free of harmful chemicals, on his Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. Meat from the farm is sold by direct-marketing to consumers and restaurants.

Salatin's latest book is THE MARVELOUS PIGNESS OF PIGS: Nurturing and Caring for All God's Creation, which tackles the tension between environmental and faith-based communities.

This week on i, host Cathy Erway is joined by Sherri Brooks Vinton, author of the new book Eat It Up!: 150 Recipes to Use Every Bit and Enjoy Every Bite of the Food You Buy.

Sherri is the author of the Put 'Em Up! series. Sherri's books, lectures, and workshops have taught countless eaters how to have a more delicious life. Her first book, The Real Food Revival: Aisle by Aisle, Morsel by Morsel, teaches readers how and why to enjoy sustainably raised foods. Sherri's current series of Put 'Em Up! books provide a modern take on home food preservation. She has been featured on numerous radio and TV programs, including Martha Stewart Radio and the Leonard Lopate Show. Sherri is a former Governor of Slow Food USA and is a member of Women Chefs and Restaurateurs, the Northeast Organic Farmers Association, International Association of Culinary Professionals, and Chefs Collaborative.

To kick off the fall season, Cathy welcomes to the show Tom Philpott, a veteran food and environmental reporter currently with Mother Jones. Tom's new book, Perilous Bounty, is an urgent wake-up call to the plight of the American farming system that just might remind you of classics like Silent Spring and The Jungle.

Photo Courtesy of Bloomsbury Press.

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This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined in the studio by Tyler Kord, chef-owner of the lauded No. 7 restaurant and four No. 7 Sub shops in New York. He is also a terrifically neurotic man who directs his energy into writing fall-down-funny stories and rants about sandwich philosophy, love, self-loathing, and the life of a chef.

A Super Upsetting Cookbook About Sandwiches welcomes you inside Tyler Kord’s wonderfully off-kilter mind: a place where bread, condiments, vegetables, and meats mingle in delicious, unexpected recipes—and where his raves, rants, jokes, and stories run free. Most of these stories also happen to be truly excellent recipes in this convention-breaking cookbook. Come for the laughs, stay for the roast beef sub with fried shallots and smoked French dressing.

On this week's episode of Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway talks to Derek Dellinger, the author of the homebrew and craft beer blog Bear Flavored, a contributing writer to the Upstate Brew York magazine and a homebrew advisor to Beacon Homebrew. Listen in as they discuss Derek's career, his year long fermented-foods diet, his thoughts on soda and much more.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Elana Karp, author of the Plated cookbook.

After graduating from Le Cordon Bleu Paris, Elana Karp chose a unique path. Instead of going to work for a high-profile chef in the $600 billion restaurant industry, she helped launch a startup with a bold social mission: to change the way America eats. As the VP of Culinary at Plated, Elana oversees the entire menu creation process, crafting new seasonal recipes each week. Working with local farmers and fishermen to address the broken food system, Elana is helping to bring healthy, high-quality meals into dining rooms across the country.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway welcomes author J. Ryan Stradal, whose first novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, was published by on July 28th, 2015, and reached the New York Times Hardcover Best Seller list at #19 on its third week of release. In April 2016, the American Booksellers Association named Kitchens the Indies Choice Book of the Year Award – Adult Debut Winner.

Whenever today's guest, author Catherine Price, told people she was working on a book about vitamins (Vitamania, out now), they would immediately think of bottled pills.

It's easy to see why. While there are only 13 essential vitamins, thousands of supplements claim to boost our health. But should we be going back to basics, getting our vitamins from the foods we eat rather than the products of a powerful industry? Listen in to find out.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Diana Abu-Jaber, author of the new culinary memoir, Life Without A Recipe.

Diana was born in Syracuse, New York to an American mother and a Jordanian father. Her family moved to Jordan a few times throughout her childhood, and elements of both her American and Jordanian experiences, as well as cross-cultural issues, especially culinary reflections, appear in her work.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined in the studio by Kate Daloz, author of the new book We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America, a nonfiction account of Vermont's Myrtle Hill commune in the 1970s. It follows the dreams and ideals of a small group of back-to-the-landers to tell the story of a nationwide movement and moment, and shows how the faltering, hopeful, but impractical impulses of that first generation sowed the seeds for the organic farming movement and the transformation of American agriculture and food tastes.

Kate Daloz grew up in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, in the geodesic dome her parents built after returning from a stint in the Peace Corps. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she also taught undergraduate writing. Her work has appeared in the American Scholar among other publications. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.

This week on Eat Your Words, Cathy is joined in the studio by fellow HRN host Mike Edison, who just kicked off the tour for his new tragic-comic memoir, You Are a Complete Disappointment: A Triumphant Memoir of Failed Expectations. Tune in for this tale about being the person who you want to be, not the person you're told you should be.

Tune in for a special bonus episode of Eat Your Words, with an exclusive panel discussion from the recent Food Book Fair.

How does one write a convincing, veiled-enough, but-believable-enough work of fiction inspired by a real place, people, and time when the subject is something as personal as food and the dining experience? And why are readers — whether they have worked in restaurants or not — so interested in the behind-the-scenes goings on at restaurants?

featuring:

Stephanie Danler, author of "Sweetbitter"

Jessica Tom, author of "Food Whore"

Helen Ellis, author of "American Housewife"

Cathy Erway, moderator, host of Heritage Radio Network's "Eat Your Words" and author of "The Food of Taiwan" and "The Art of Eating In"

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined via phone by Karen Leona Anderson.

Anderson grew up in Connecticut. She received an M.F.A from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, an M.A. from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and her Ph.D. from Cornell University, where she wrote a dissertation on poetry and science. Her work has appeared in ecopoetics, jubilat, Verse, Indiana Review, Fence, Volt, and other journals. She is an associate professor of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland.

Cathy chats with Chase Purdy, a reporter for Quartz and POLITICO who has covered the business and technology of food. His new book, Billion Dollar Burger,  

explores the bright promise of cell-cultured meat and the political regulations it’s up against by following the Silicon Valley startup closest to bringing this advanced idea to reality.

In March, HRN began producing all of our 35 weekly shows from our homes all around the country. It was hard work stepping away from our little recording studio, but we know that you rely on HRN to share resources and important stories from the world of food each week. It’s been a tough year for all of us, but right now HRN is asking for your help. Every dollar that listeners give to HRN provides essential support to keep our mics on. We've got some fresh new thank you gifts available, like our limited edition bandanas.

Keep Eat Your Words on the air: become an HRN Member today! Go to heritageradionetwork.org/donate. 

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In this episode of Eat Your Words, Cathy talks to Lucky Peach editors Chris Ying and Rachel Khong about their new cookbook, The Wurst of Lucky Peach: A Treasury of Encased Meat. Chris and Rachel talk about their "sausage quest" around the world to North America, South America, Europe, Australia, Africa and Asia to find sausages they wanted to celebrate in their cookbook. Listen to find out about Rachel's love for the danger dog and what continent has the fewest endemic sausages.

This week on Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway sits down with the ladies of the Food Book Fair, Kimberly Chou and Amanda Dell. Dubbed the "Coachella of writing about eating," Food Book Fair includes panel discussions, a pop-up bookstore, #Foodieodicals, cooking demos, conceptual literary dinners, film screenings and much more. This year's fifth anniversary of the festival takes place on May 1st and 2nd at the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg.

On this week's episode of Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway speaks with Karissa Chen – a writer who is currently a Fulbright Fellow in Taiwan – on the importance of being responsible when writing about another culture's food. Specifically, they tackle food writer Calvin Trillin's controversial poem "Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?" which was recently published in The New Yorker. While major news outlets have interviewed various food writers who are critical of this situation, very few have bothered to ask Asian American writers what they think.