Our Story

Meal Maps has been a project in the making for several years now, hinted at and talked about over plenty of curries, soups, stained cookbooks, and bottles of wine.
The Meal Maps crew includes Liz, Aimee, and Bria—friends who met ten years ago at a tiny liberal arts college in the frozen fields of the sadly slipping rustbelt of Southern Wisconsin. As ladies who love to move around, explore, and tell stories, we realized we were marking time by the recipes we were cooking. We remember places by what we ate there. Beloit, Wisconsin’s fried cheese curds. Chicago’s soul food. Tucson’s Sonoran-style hot dogs. When we went somewhere new, we used recipes to grab at the stories, memories, politics, and opinions of the places we were in and the places we’d come from.
For the better part of the last five years, we haven’t lived in the same location. Most recently, Aimee spent two years eating and drinking her way through Spain and is now back in Southern California. Bria mastered banana pudding and jalapeno cheese grits in Durham, North Carolina, and now lives in Tucson, Arizona. And Liz just took off on a one-way ticket from Chicago to Guanojuato, Mexico. Through our travels and time spent apart, we wrote letters about the things we would see in markets and cook in our own kitchens. We collected recipes, sometimes attached to their own strange and interesting rituals and stories, and ate some very colorful and delicious meals!
We hope Meal Maps will give us an anchored space to talk about the memories that we bind to the food that we’re eating, as we each travel through very different terrain. Follow our recipes and wander with us.