Archive - March 28, 2023

Back in the mid-sixties when I was an APCD in Ethiopia, a year after my tour as a PCV secondary school English teacher in Addis Ababa, I did a lot of flying on Ethiopia’s Airlines small fleet of single engine prop planes, piloted by young French guys all new to the Empire. It was difficult flying, even in the best of weather, over the vast terranes and high plateaus, and across the Semien and Bale Mountains, the Danakil Depression, where you would feel the fierce winds, and always had to land the small propeller plane on a narrow dirt runways in the middle of nowhere. Still, it was breathtaking to sail across endless kilometers and see tiny tukul houses dotting the hills as if they were nothing more than birthmarks on the African landscape. I was seeing Africa up-close and personal. It was my own special view of the vastness . . .

Award-Winning Author to be Next Ofstad Scholar at Truman State Universty Nina Mukerjee Furstenau (Tunisia 1984-86) is an award-winning author and journalist with special interests in food and identity. Her food memoir, Biting Through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America’s Heartland, won the 2014 M.F.K. Fisher Book Award and the International Grand Prize/Les Dames d’Escoffier for culinary literature, among other recognitions. Her most recent book, Green Chili and Other Impostors, focuses on heritage foods and colonial power. Her textbook Food & Culture will be released sometime in 2023.Among her other accomplishments, Furstenau has launched five business magazines and served as publisher of two of them for 15 years prior to going to the University of Missouri Science and Agricultural Journalism program where she was director of food systems communication from 2010-18. In the past, she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia (1984-86) and was a Fulbright Global . . .