Bite by Bite

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, a poet and essayist of Filipino and South Asian (Keralite Indian) descent, structures this memoir-in-essays around individual foods, spices, and ingredients. Each chapter takes a single item, from rambutan to leche flan, and braids together personal memory, natural history, cultural lore, and reflections on identity, family, and belonging. Writing from her home in Mississippi, where she lives with her husband, Dustin, their two teenage sons, Pascal and Jasper, and a small dog, Nezhukumatathil frames the book as an exploration of what nourishes her family, driven by questions about where food comes from and why certain flavors evoke specific people and emotions.

In the introduction, she confesses she does not actually like cake but loves the communal act of making and sharing it, connecting the Greek root of the word "poet," meaning "to make," to her approach to food. She states that she writes about her family to insist upon their presence in a world that has historically disregarded stories like hers, and she introduces the concept of a "honey-smile," a slow smile that starts inside before surfacing, as emblematic of the nourishment that comes from gathering together.

The early essays focus on Nezhukumatathil's adolescence in rural western New York, where her family lived on the grounds of the Gowanda Psychiatric Center, a mental institution where her Filipina mother worked as a psychiatrist. In "Rambutan," she discovers at 13 that her hair has turned curly overnight, and the Malay word for hair, rambut, gives the spiny tropical fruit its name. Her mother forbids hair products, and the author spends years wishing for blond or straight hair to fit in at her predominantly white school. During a visit to her grandmother in India, she sees the older woman's hair loose for the first time: identical dark ringlets. She admits she did not make peace with her hair in that moment, but decades later, after her grandmother's death, she embraced her curls and unplugged the flat iron.

"Mango" introduces the lifelong debate between her Indian father and Filipino mother over whose mangoes are sweetest. She declares the Indian Alphonso mango the winner but acknowledges her best memories belong to the Philippine Carabao variety. She recounts a formative experience in graduate school where white classmates spent an entire poetry workshop insisting the word "mango" needed a footnote so readers would know it was a fruit. She went home and cried but then doubled down, using the word in every subsequent poem. The essay traces the mango through colonial trade routes, family myth, and pregnancy, as her first son kicked inside her whenever she ate mango during a trip to the Philippines.

Food and shame recur in "Lumpia," about the Filipino deep-fried finger food her mother insisted on making for her 14th birthday sleepover, even though the author begged for pizza and chips only. When some friends refused to even try the lumpia her mother had lovingly prepared by hand, embarrassment transformed into pride. She identifies this as the last time she ever felt shame about her family's food. In "Rice," she recalls her mother teaching her the ring-finger method for measuring water in a rice cooker, a technique universal among Filipinos she knows, and her mother singing the children's song "Planting Rice Is Never Fun" while cooking after long shifts treating psychiatric patients.

Several essays explore Nezhukumatathil's maternal and paternal family lines through specific foods. "Tomato" connects three generations: her mother's first garden in suburban Chicago, captured on Super 8 film; her own pandemic garden in Mississippi; and her maternal grandmother, Lola Felipa, who died just a month after the author was born. "Jackfruit," her favorite fruit, returns her to age eight and her first visit to her grandparents in Kerala, India, where her grandfather sliced open the enormous fruit on newspapers at the dining table. Almost 40 years later, visiting her parents in Florida, her father serves freshly cut jackfruit, and she holds back from mentioning the memory of his own father doing the same, knowing her grandfather's absence still feels raw. She now keeps her grandfather's typewriter in a glass case and uses it to write letters to her own loved ones.

The book traces Nezhukumatathil's path from isolated adolescence to a rich adult community built through food and shared identity. "Lychee" describes her early friendships with Asian American writers in New York City, particularly Joseph Legaspi and Sarah Gambito, who were forming Kundiman, an Asian American writing organization. "Bing Cherry" recounts her first summer as a newly hired, newly single professor, picking cherries alone in a western New York orchard where the owner's son grew uncomfortably forward, following her deep into the trees and inviting her inside. Frightened and far from anyone who could hear her, she hurried to her car and channeled the fear into "The Woman Who Turned Down a Date with a Cherry Farmer," one of her most anthologized poems. "Concord Grape" describes attending the Silver Creek Grape Festival alone, too shy to stomp grapes competitively, until a kind woman serving grape pie drew her into conversation and introduced her to a web of neighbors and community.

Marriage and parenthood run through the book's later chapters. "Risotto" describes a rare trip to Switzerland without children, where she and Dustin, emotionally drained by a toxic and racist academic department, eat mushroom risotto at a small hotel in the Swiss Alps. The meal reminds them they are a team; they did not yet know they would soon move to Mississippi. "Pawpaw" uses the fruit, which has burgundy blooms and takes its Shawnee name from the September moon, to express her anticipation of her eldest son leaving for college. "Blackberry" describes planting a bush during the pandemic that produced fruit by July, introducing her sons' concept of "fruit time": measuring the year by which fruit is in season. "Watermelon" recounts a road trip with the writer Ross Gay to a festival in Cave City, Arkansas, where hundreds of people eat watermelon together in communal joy. On the drive home, they pull over to investigate rows of what they think is fruit but discover is cotton; as two brown people standing in a cotton field in the South, they both silently return to the car.

Gun violence shadows two essays. In "Apples," apple-picking memories with her toddler sons give way to grief over mass shootings in American schools. "Waffles" opens the morning after a shooting at an elementary school, which fell on the day before Dustin's birthday. They canceled their plans, stayed home with their sons, and began what became a monthly ritual called "Waffle Mornings," an intentional gathering with fruit, bacon, and confectioner's sugar sifted over waffles.

Cultural identity threads through essays set in Hawaii and beyond. "Shave Ice" explores what it feels like to be among people who look like her, as she teaches at a school in Honolulu and notices the large Filipino population. "Halo-Halo," about the Filipino shaved-ice dessert whose name means "mix-mix" in Tagalog, embodies her mixed heritage. "Coconut" addresses the slur of calling a brown person a coconut, meaning white on the inside, brown on the outside, and argues the insult assumes there is one correct way to be Asian. "Black Pepper," structured as a nocturne, traces the spice from Kerala, where her father's ancestors are from, through centuries of colonial exploitation, as explorers risked everything to control the spice routes.

The book closes with "Leche Flan," the Filipino crème caramel, as a coda. Nezhukumatathil wonders whether her sons will remember any of the elaborate treats she has made for them and concludes that the point is not perfection or memorability but warmth: "You heat up the waffle iron. You shave the ice. You rescue the egg yolks. You have to. You make something new with what you have" (198). The making, she insists, is itself the nourishment.