A place's food is its most honest story.

This way of looking at the table isn’t something new. When I was 28, I spent eight months traveling alone through India, eating prasad with devotees of Krishna, thenthuk with Tibetans in Ladakh, and fish curry with Catholics in Tamil Nadu. At some point during that trip, I stopped seeing food as just food and began to see it as a unique and universal language, capable of bringing us all together around the same table.

That was the very moment I left my career as a biologist with a master’s degree in nutrition to devote myself 100% to life as a freelance food writer. Over the years, and after living in Barcelona (Catalonia), Oaxaca (Mexico), and Florence (Italy), I have come to realize that cuisine and ingredients are expressions of a region, builders of community, and preservers of tradition.

Thanks to this perspective, I was awarded the First Emilia Pardo Bazán Fellowship in Gastronomic Literature, published in *Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies* (UC Press, California), was invited to New York University in Florence to speak about gastronomic identity, directed the Gastropology Congress in Barcelona (2025), and was also selected as one of the best Spanish-language writers in the anthology *Escribir Gastronomía 2022*.

Today, I enjoy helping others embark on the path of gastronomic writing and discover new ways of looking at gastronomy—because, yes, in Italy, people eat much more than just pasta and pizza, and in Mexico, there are tacos as delicious and little-known as tacos de rajas poblanas.