Guest: Tara Weaver

Dawn and Jennifer are excited to welcome Tara Austen Weaver to the show today. Tara writes about things that interest her: food, travel, culture, the environment, and adventure in its many guises. She has lived in five countries on three continents and is happiest either exploring the world with a notebook and camera, or spending the day in a kitchen learning how people feed themselves. Tara loves to write about farmers, environmentalists, artists, and other passion-driven individuals. Tara’s writing has won awards and been published in numerous anthologies. Her own food blog, Tea & Cookies, has been recommended by the Food Network and selected by the Times of London as one of the top 50 food blogs in the world. An essay written for the site won best post in the 2008 Food Blog Awards. Tara’s first book, The Butcher and the Vegetarian: One Woman’s Romp Through a World of Men, Meat, and Moral Crisis, was published by Rodale in February 2010. The book tells the story of Tara’s foray into the world of meat, after a vegetarian childhood filled with tofu and alfalfa sprouts, and her often humorous struggle to come to terms with the issues and figure out what she should be eating. At its heart, it is a story about the choices we make in life, though there’s a lot of cowboys, cute butchers, and bacon along the way. The book has been mentioned in Newsweek, on New York Magazine’s Grub Street, in Women’s Wear Daily, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, Redbook, Body & Soul, and McLean’s magazine. Tara has been in love with the written word for as long as she can remember. She has presented at various writing conferences and even judged a few writing competitions (though she’d really prefer not to). Tara holds an MFA in creative writing from Mills College and for many years served on the executive committee for Litquake, San Francisco’s literary festival, where she founded the wildly popular Lit Crawl. Website: www.taraweaver.com