Download Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray AudioBook Free
For more than 30 years, Perseverance Gray, writer of the famous cookbook Honey from a Weed, resided in a distant part of Puglia in southernmost Italy. She resided without electricity, modern plumbing, or a cell phone, grew much of her own food, and compiled and ate wild crops alongside her friends and neighbors in this financially impoverished region. She was keen on stating that she had written only for herself and her friends, yet her growing reputation brought a steady blast of international visitors to her door. This simple and isolated life she decided for herself may help explain her relative obscurity when compared to the other great food freelance writers of her time: M. F. K. Fisher, Elizabeth David, and Julia Child. So it is not surprising that when Grey passed away in 2005, the BBC explained her as an "almost forgotten culinary legend." Yet her effect, especially among chefs and other food freelance writers, has already established a enduring and profound effect on just how we view and commemorate good food and regional cuisines. Gray's prescience was unrivaled: She had written in what today we'd call the Slow Food motion, from foraging to eating locally, a long time before it became part of the cultural mainstream. Imagine if Michael Pollan or Barbara Kingsolver acquired spent several years living among Italian, Greek, and Catalan peasants, saving their formulas and the significance of food and food gathering with their life-style. In Fasting and Feasting, biographer Adam Federman instructs the remarkable, and until now untold, life story of Patience Grey: from her privileged and intellectual upbringing in Britain, to her trials as a single mom during World Conflict II, to her profession working as a artist, editor, translator, and author, and explaining her travels and culinary journeys in old age. A fascinating and spirited woman, Patience Grey was very much a part of her times but very clearly before them.
