So I have a story that I should have shared here a while ago because it’s kind of a little-big deal. One boring afternoon at work in my cubicle, my office phone rang. “Is this Jennifer Eastman? Hi, this is Peggy calling from the Boston Globe.” Seriously? Calling about what?
Peggy was doing a story about Gastropod, a new podcast looking at food through the lens of science and history, and saw a comment I left on the its Facebook page. I was practically gushing over a particular episode that featured Dan Barber and discussed his new book The Third Plate. (You see, I heard Dan Barber’s TedTalk about a Spanish farmer raising geese for foie gras without the use of a gavage in the dehesa, a savannah-like grasslands area in Southern Spain and Portugal that is renowned for its biodiversity and extensive pastoral system and also where the acorn-loving Iberian pigs freely roam and thus, are prized for their meat.) Peggy got some names of people to interview from the podcast’s creators, but happened upon my comment and tracked me down like good journalists do. She knew that I had my own blog too. We agreed that she’d call me later that evening when I got home from work.
I’d never been interviewed before in that capacity and wasn’t sure I could give Peggy anything worthy of being quoted for her article. It was also important to me that I didn’t come off as amateurish. We talked for about 20 minutes. She didn’t know when the article would go to press, but she’d email me once it did. She also said that she’d try to include the name of my blog and its link in the article, but she wasn’t sure if that would be something her editor would cut so she couldn’t make any promises.
(Ha! I didn’t want what I said to come across as amateurish and there was a possibility that Boston Globe readers could easily be routed to my outdated, poorly formatted blog. Totally amateurish! I cook and I garden, but photography is not my forte. Cooking is fluid for me and there’s no fluidity in trying to photograph food as it’s being prepared. Just saying.)
So on Christmas Eve morning, I got an email from Peggy with a link to the article. She was able to include my blog link after all. That was pretty cool, but so was hearing my husband tell me how impressed he was with the knowledge I demonstrated during the interview. Maybe I’m not as amateurish as I thought.
Either way, check out Gastropod and be enlightened on the science and history of food!
The Scrumptious Harvest 