How Emotions Affect our Reading and Cooking

A live recording from the Mudgee Readers Festival with Germaine, Sophie and some special guests!

Our lunch at Logan wines as recorded for this podcast. All images by Amber Hooper  

This podcast has always been fascinated by the ‘shape’ books and meals leave on us and how this is dependent on when in our lives we read or eat them and how we are feeling at the time.

So, when Rhys Gard of the Mudgee Readers Festival approached us about collaborating on an event for this year’s program, we jumped at the opportunity to do so and share it with you via this podcast (click here to listen if you haven’t yet!).

Also below - all the links to books, recipes and things we mentioned in our chat.

We can’t read without being influenced by what we have read before or our experiences that have come before and our imaginings of what our future holds. We can’t eat without being influenced by our tastes, appetites, memories of meals past and imaginings of future meals.

And while reading and eating are both different experiences, as illustrated in this quote from writer Rebecca Solnit in her book The Faraway Nearby, they are both very much affected by our emotions.

“A pie may be eaten warm from the oven by the cook and her companions but a book is read many months or years after it’s written, out of sight of the writer, who never knows quite what she has done.”