What she ate : six remarkable women and the food that tells their stories

By focusing on the different diets of six famous women Laura Shapiro looks into their lives and minds. Helen Gurley Brown, editor of Cosmopolitan, spent her life dieting. Eleanor Roosevelt wasn’t interested in fine dining, but she did want to support Americans during the Depression, so she served some of the least appealing meals ever in the White House, because they were frugal. Food preparation has been women’s work for a long time. Laura Shapiro makes it an expression of women’s lives and choices too.