Patricia M. Malesh, PhD, is an award-winning author who has written about food cultures and identity for over fifteen years. She has long subscribed to plant-based diets and fancies herself a creative culinary artist whose nutritional motto is "eat the rainbow." She is deeply invested in the stories we tell and believes sharing our stories is a powerful force for social change. As part of her research for her dissertation entitled "Rhetorics of Consumption: Identity, Confrontation, and Corporatization in the American Vegetarian Movement," she read over two hundred plant-based cookbooks and still uses many of the recipes she discovered in them.