About Tracy
On Monday, 28 January 2008, I took a picture of my breakfast table that says a lot about me:
Clicking on the picture will take you to an annotated version on Flickr, but I’d be very flattered if you read the rest of this page first.
I’m Tracy van Cort, a freelance geek of many flavors. I started growing up in Westfield, New Jersey, escaped to Claremont, California via Harvey Mudd College where I majored in mathematics and linguistics (the latter at Pitzer and Pomona colleges) the Pitzer/Pomona College), and lived in Laguna Beach for a year while finishing up one last undergraduate class. After that, I spent six years in Eugene, Oregon with a guy named Peter, two cats named Otis and Iggy Pop, and a vegetable garden with no name but plenty of love. I have been enjoying food for over twenty-nine years, and earning money in food-related ways for more than ten.
These days I still live with Peter and the cats, but our home is New York City, where I’m working on a master’s degree in food studies at NYU. I met and fell in love with academic food studies during an anthropology class on food and culture at the University of Oregon in the fall of 2006; on my way to NYU I followed that anthropology class with an environmental studies seminar about sustainable agriculture, volunteering with the Willamette Farm and Food Coalition, a far-too-short stint in the UO’s Urban Farm program, and finally a reluctant withdrawal from a class about gender issues in nutritional anthropology. Meanwhile, I held a variety of food jobs, and started this blog to document my professional and amateur food adventures, from kitchens to gardens and back again. I would love to use all my reading, writing, and thinking about food in a professional way, so that’s the dream I’ve chased to NYU.
My last cooking job was on the line at a little hippie café called Morning Glory, but I used to run the cheese department at Sundance Natural Foods, and before that I worked in the Sundance kitchen and deli. Sometimes I miss that kitchen, but that just motivates me to create home versions of the recipes I developed there. Publishing those recipes is one of the central goals of this blogsite, but I have many other delicious things to write about as well.
For the rest, I’m not sure what to say; I’d rather let TracyFood speak for itself, if it’s not too late. Here’s my resumé and Epistolography is one of my more successful writing projects. I don’t know if I want to grow up, let alone what I want to be (except myself), but I plan to keep writing pretty much no matter what.
