Hi, I’m Caroline. I move through the world a little slack-jawed by the whole enterprise, the connectedness of it all.
My favorite stories weave together ecology, labor, politics, and eating. In Madeira, after a chestnut-themed lunch, I could not help but wonder what the character of modern Appalachia might have been without chestnut blight, a disease that rendered the keystone species functionally extinct. So I cooked and visited with women in the tiny village of Curral das Freiras to find out. I reported from the flooded rice fields of South Carolina, ringed by sabal palms and occupied by roseate spoonbills and alligators. The crop has a dark history in the state, one rooted in slavery, but rice farmers keep traditional Gullah Geechee knowledge alive. And, damn, if they don’t produce fine pots of Carolina Gold rice.
Dear Lord, I love a rabbit hole—to unspool complex histories through a single subject, dig through archives, talk to scientists and home cooks and blue collar workers, to report my way to an answer, especially if it’s messy. My grandmother lives in South Florida, and after an iguana lodged itself into her toilet, I started researching the invasive species. I trailed biologists, zookeepers, reptile breeders, air-gun toting exterminators, and pet owners. I made iguana posole. Now, I’m now writing a book about green iguanas as a mirror for what I love and loathe about Florida—from its finest eccentrics and natural beauty to corruption and unchecked development.
I also write for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Bitter Southerner, Garden & Gun, Food & Wine, Robb Report, Town & Country, Conde Nast Traveler, and more. A piece about rosin baked potatoes (whose Southern origin story was total bullshit, BTW) was anthologized in Best American Food Writing 2023. I’ve been twice nominated for James Beard Journalism Awards. To report those stories, I camped out at the University of Florida Smathers Library to read 40 years of turpentine industry manuals. In the Outer Banks, I dug clams from the mud with my bare toes. As a contributing editor for Plate magazine, I won a Jesse H. Neal Award for a feature about restaurant workers using NARCAN to reverse opioid overdoses.
While I was in journalism school at the University of Georgia, I traveled to Paris to study cooking at Le Cordon Bleu, where I graduated first in my class. I have interviewed more than 1,000 chefs and eaten at just as many restaurants, and for more than a decade, I covered the intricacies of the hospitality industry. Restaurants, and the fine people who work in them, taught me about science, artistry, systems, economics, healthcare policy, sexism, intergenerational trauma. You name it. The hospitality industry is a microcosm of American culture.
I live in New York City with my husband William and French bulldog Reggie. But I was raised in Baxley, Georgia (population 4,943) and had an outdoor dog named Butch, who was run over twice by the same UPS man and survived. I am forever split between those places, between Prada loafers and running barefoot, art galleries and cypress swamps, frustration with the South’s politics and defending her fucking honor. This summer, I am learning how to throw a cast net on the Satilla River. I have been to clown school. Just wait for those stories.