We’re excited to host another favorite local author of ours, Nina Mukerjee Furstenau as she celebrates the launch of her wonderful new book, Green Chili and Other Imposters. The event takes place on Wednesday October 27 at 6:30 p.m. It is free, and everyone is welcome - of course, as always we do require all visitors to the shop to wear masks. Be ready to be dazzled by Nina’s always entertaining and informative words but don’t blame us if your stomach starts rumbling half-way through!

Follow a food trail and you’ll find yourself crisscrossing oceans. Join M. F. K. Fisher Grand Prize for Excellence in Culinary Writing award-winning author Nina Mukerjee Furstenau as she picks through lost tastes with recipes as codes to everything from political resistance to comfort food and much more. Pinpoint the entry of the Portuguese in India by following green chili trails; find the origins of limes; trace tomatoes and potatoes in India to the Malabar Coast; consider what makes a food, or even a person, foreign and marvel how and when they cease to be.

Food history is a world heritage story that has all the drama of a tense thriller or maybe a mystery. Whose food is it? Who gets to tell its tale? Respect for food history might tame the accusations of appropriation, but what is at stake as food traditions and biodiversity ebb away is the great, and not always good, story of us.

Nina Mukerjee Furstenau is author of Biting through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America’s Heartland, winner of the 2014 M. F. K. Fisher Grand Prize for Excellence in Culinary Writing. She lives in Columbia, Missouri.