Laurie Woolever — Care and Feeding with Daniela Galarza

In this moving, hilarious, and insightful memoir, Laurie Woolever traces her path from a small-town childhood to working at revered restaurants and food publications, alternately bolstered and overshadowed by two of the most powerful men in the business. But there's more to the story than the two bold-faced names on her resume: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain.Behind the scenes, Laurie's life is frequently chaotic, an often pleasurable buffet of bad decisions at which she frequently overstays her welcome. Acerbic and wryly self-deprecating, Laurie attempts to carve her own space as a woman in this world that is by turns toxic and intoxicating. Laurie seeks to try it all--from a seedy Atlantic City strip club to the Park Hyatt Tokyo, from a hippie vegetarian co-op to the legendary El Bulli--while balancing her consuming work with her sometimes ambivalent relationship to marriage and motherhood.As the food world careens toward an overdue reckoning and Laurie's mentors face their own high-profile descents, she is confronted with the questions of where she belongs and how to hold on to the parts of her life's work that she truly values: care and feeding.PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063327603?ic_referral=oaRsyZ61C06Icl54TYZ21kRl33qS6OEAwG8JD7XC-yIwMw1PaJ9BlqDz1hbnR9mXjOsdx6OGs_gN49lkhkOJqMBF4FrSHRsbw6Xe1ozKMX1qZyPCpCO_0qvYwhJVKT-LSsE3-wLaurie Woolever is a writer and editor. She spent nearly a decade assisting Anthony Bourdain, with whom she coauthored the cookbook Appetites and World Travel. She's written about food and travel for the New York Times, GQ, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach, Saveur, Dissent, Roads & Kingdoms, and others, and has worked as an editor at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator. She is also the New York Times bestselling author of Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography.Woolever is in conversation with Daniela Galarza. Galarza is a staff writer for the Food section at The Washington Post who also writes "Eat Voraciously," a newsletter offering easy dinner recipes, cooking tips and inspiration. A former restaurant pastry chef, Galarza has been writing about food and cooking for more than 10 years. Before joining The Post, she was a features editor at Serious Eats, senior editor at Eater.com and deputy food editor at Los Angeles magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine, Wall Street Journal and other publications. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a certificate in pastry arts from the International Culinary Center in New York. After studying pastry and bread making in Paris and central France, she worked as a pastry chef and in product development in New York and Los Angeles before entering journalism.*recorded 3/13/2025