Detectives Chet Gecko and his partner Natalie Attired try to solve the mystery of why Emerson Hicky Elementary school students have suddenly started acting strangely.

Eighty-two years after Moses Dibobis escaped from the Lithuanian hamlet of Birzai with nothing but a packed lunch, his grandson David Smiedt journeys back to the former Soviet enclave looking for a link to his grandfather that extends beyond a receding hairline and shared sense of humour. What he finds there is that premium vodka is cheaper than water, spa treatments are more than a little invasive and that Stalin theme parks and eccentric museums are just the beginning of the charms of this beguiling nation. By the end of his journey, David finally has an answer to his mother-in-law’s question: ‘Who are your people?’ In From Russia With Lunch, David Smiedt takes all that is irreverent about Molvania and combines it with a love of history and the bizarre to reveal a land unknown by many. Better still, he eats pigs’ ears so you don’t have to.

Describes food customs and preparation in Russia, along with regional dishes and cooking techniques. Includes recipes for a variety of Russian meals.

A James Beard Award-winning writer captures life under the Red socialist banner in this wildly inventive, tragicomic memoir of feasts, famines, and three generations “Delicious . . . A banquet of anecdote that brings history to life with intimacy, candor, and glorious color.”—NPR’s All Things Considered Born in 1963, in an era of bread shortages, Anya grew up in a communal Moscow apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen. She sang odes to Lenin, black-marketeered Juicy Fruit gum at school, watched her father brew moonshine, and, like most Soviet citizens, longed for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, naively joyous, and melancholy—and ultimately intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother, Larisa. When Anya was ten, she and Larisa fled the political repression of Brezhnev-era Russia, arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and no right of return. Now Anya occupies two parallel food universes: one where she writes about four-star restaurants, the other where a taste of humble kolbasa transports her back to her scarlet-blazed socialist past. To bring that past to life, Anya and her mother decide to eat and cook their way through every decade of the Soviet experience. Through these meals, and through the tales of three generations of her family, Anya tells the intimate yet epic story of life in the USSR. Wildly inventive and slyly witty, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is that rare book that stirs our souls and our senses. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Christian Science Monitor, Publishers Weekly

Discusses what students eat for lunch around the world, including information on food culture and global issues surrounding food and nutrition.

This Collection of Original Essays gives surprising insights into what foodways reveal about Russia's history and culture from Kievan times to the present. A wide array of sources - including chronicles, diaries, letters, police records, poems, novels, folklore, paintings, and cookbooks - help to interpret the moral and spiritual role of food in Russian culture. Stovelore in Russian folklife, fasting in Russian peasant culture, food as power in Dostoevsky's fiction, Tolstoy and vegetarianism, restaurants in early Soviet Russia, Soviet cookery and cookbooks, and food as art in Soviet paintings are among the topics discussed in this appealing volume.

Chet Gecko’s investigations often show him the seamy underbelly of school life, but this case throws him for a loop. A deadly stink bomb is unleashed, a school building falls to rubble, money goes missing from the principal’s office, and that’s just a start. Chet’s endurance for trouble is tested, but so is his loyalty: Someone is trying to get his mongoose janitor pal Maureen DeBree fired. A true-blue P.I. doesn’t take that kind of monkey business lying down. Standing up, maybe. And stand up he will—to some very shifty school bullies. Chet keeps digging for the truth like a mole after an earthworm sandwich. Oh, foolish detective.