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. Now I make myself at home 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-eight years, and earning money in food-related ways for more than ten.
These days I cook for money at a little hippie café called Morning Glory and look forward to starting the M.A. program in Food Studies at NYU’s Steinhardt School. I got excited about the idea of academic food studies in an anthropology class on food and culture at the University of Oregon in the fall of 2006; since then I’ve taken an environmental studies class about sustainable agriculture, volunteered with the Willamette Farm and Food Coalition, participated in the UO’s Urban Farm program, and reluctantly withdrawn from Prof. Moreno’s Gender Issues in Nutritional Anthropology. I love cooking, but it would be super-fantastic to use all my reading, writing, and thinking about food in a professional way as well. So that’s my dream.
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.
