Tasting Grace: How Food Invites Us into Deeper Connection with God, One Another, and Ourselves
By Melissa D’Arabian (WaterBrook)
Winner of the 2009 Food Network Star competition, Melissa D’Arabian hosted her own television show, Ten Dollar Dinners, for three seasons before hitting the book market with the 2012 best-seller of the same title. A year later, Supermarket Healthy added more recipes, along with food shopping strategies developed by the family-friendly, budget-conscious Christian wife and mother. Tasting Grace is D’Arabian’s first non-cookbook foray into publishing.
Liberally sprinkled with Scripture references, biblical examples and personal experiences, the author asks and answers the question, “How is God reaching us through food?” Each of 16 chapters focuses on an invitation from God that involves the plants and animals he created for eating. These include concepts that range from compassion and how Jesus used food in bringing people together, to family connections made around the table and hospitality as service.
In a kind of food biography, Melissa speaks honestly about her personal struggles growing up in a food-insecure single-parent home with a mom who worked and attended medical school. She tells how her mother stretched the budget and shares how an empathetic elementary school principal gave her a cafeteria job where she found enough to eat and more. The Food Network Star weaves in stories of plenty after her mother became a successful physician, time working for Disney in France after her mother’s suicide when Melissa was in college, marriage to Philippe, experiences cooking with her French mother-in-law, challenges feeding four daughters on one income and much more.
Tasting Grace is a book to be savored like a meal with family and friends as Melissa D’Arabian narrates the journey into How Food Invites Us into Deeper Connection with God, One Another, and Ourselves.
Kathy Robinson Hillman, former president
Baptist General Convention of Texas
Waco
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