About

 

So what, exactly, is dissertating? And why did it need special food?

Food for Dissertating started when I actually was dissertating--that is to say, I was writing my dissertation. My Ph.D. is in a humanities field and really doesn't have much of anything to do with food, although as a historian I do sometimes go on historical food-related tangents. But after I was finished dissertating on my academic topic, I still wanted to talk about food, and dissertating itself is just the act of discussing a subject fully. If there was ever a thing I would like to fully discuss--aside from what I spent more than 25 years of my life in school to study--it would be food.

Back then, the blog was all about packed lunches, and it mostly stayed that way until the COVID-19 pandemic. Stuck at home, I still wanted to write about food, but I wasn't packing anything. So now Food for Dissertating is about lots of things, and it's been vegan since I transitioned to veganism in 2016.

After earning my Ph.D. in 2014, I went to work in a special collections library. I packed my lunch every day and this served as a kind of journal of that. In 2016, for a host of reasons, I chose to transition to a vegan diet. The blog went on a semi-hiatus in the the fall of 2016, while I made my transition and tried to figure out what to do with the site. Evidence of my transitioning can be seen in the fall of 2016, but largely without explanation. I returned in early 2017 to let my readers know that I would be posting exclusively vegan content. Posts before then show both my less-than-stellar photography skills and me eating things I gave up long ago, but I chose to leave them up to document what it was like to make a drastic change in my life like that. (It no longer feels that drastic, but it was rocky for me at times.)

So what will you find here now? Unlike a lot of food blogs, I don't primarily focus on recipes. This is still a journal of cooking and eating, mostly. I will link to the recipes I try and you may want to try them, too, after you see how they turn out. I do write recipes of my own sometimes, too. Ultimately, though, this blog is more to give you ideas.

I'm not a medical doctor. I can't give you that kind of advice. But I can show you how I have chosen to find joy in the midst of all sorts of things by feeding myself as well as I can, in the hopes that you might be inspired to find a bit of joy yourself. 

In that sense, I'm still dissertating, and I invite you to dissertate with me. Thanks for stopping by.