Biography as it's usually practiced rarely pauses at the kitchen table to examine the food. Yet ordinary meals give us an incomparable vantage point on anybody's life, whether it's a person who loves to eat or a person who couldn't care less. After all, food happens every day; it's associated with every appetite, and it's entangled with all the social and economic conditions that bear upon our days. Laura Shapiro's book What She Ate takes up the lives of six very different women—Dorothy Wordsworth, Rosa Lewis, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eva Braun, Barbara Pym, and Helen Gurley Brown—and tells their stories by putting the food right up front.

Laura Shapiro is the author of Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century and Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, and Julia Child. Her latest book is What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food that Tells Their Stories.

This event is in partnership with Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor.