Welcome New Gastronomy and Food Studies Students part 5
We look forward to welcoming a wonderful new group of students in our fall 2021 classes, and hope you will enjoy getting to know a few of them here.
Ariella Amshalem has four children and a sense of humor.
She has lived back and forth between Boston and Israel since the age of 5, and as of this winter, now resides permanently (?) in a lovely, semi-rural town where local milk is delivered to her doorstep every Tuesday morning.
After a career as a dancer and dance teacher, Ariella decided to pursue her other, more practical interest, and enrolled in pastry school when her first baby was eight months old. She has worked in cafes, bakeries, restaurants, a winery, written content for the Breville brand’s recipe site, teaches at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, and has led food tours around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. She most recently taught dance and cooking at a girls’ school in a remote corner of the Negev Desert, where the students regularly ate and prepared couscous and bourekas, but had never baked a muffin.With her fourth baby in tow (or really, in arms) Ariella is hopeful that she will be able to take full advantage of this amazing opportunity to participate in the Gastronomy program and travel further along this wonderful and unpredictable journey.
Growing up, Becca Miller spent all of her time in the kitchen with her family. Influenced by her parents British roots and the incredible food farmed around them on the North Shore of Massachusetts, they would spend their weekend’s preparing roast beef and Yorkshire puddings and devouring grilled corn and tomato salads.
Throughout high school and college, Becca found herself drawn to creative nonfiction courses and relied on using food — recipes, stories about meals, and the connection subjects have with ingredients and dishes — to tell her stories. During her time at NYU Becca had the opportunity to study in London for two years, immersing herself in their diverse food community and spending every free day she had exploring the narrow aisles of Borough Market for the freshest fish and vegetables, always snacking on a Scotch egg as she wandered.
Becca graduated from NYU with a Liberal Arts degree and a minor in food studies and is currently working as the assistant editor in the Hearst Food Group where she writes for titles like Good Housekeeping and Women’s Health.
Becca is joining the BU Gastronomy program from New York City, where she is constantly attempting (and failing) to grow basil on her fire escape and is perpetually planning her next meal. She’s so excited to have the opportunity to be surrounded by a group of passionate food lovers and is looking forward to diving deep into classes on food writing and policy.
Having graduated mid-pandemic from Boston College with a degree in Communication, Lily Gribbel was forced to reconfigure her post-grad plans. Luckily, she isn’t a stranger to change. Having moved across the country from California’s Bay Area to Boston midway through high school, and then transferring halfway through college, Lily found comfort in the strange changes COVID brought about this spring. Spending weeks in isolation cooking food for her roommates and watching hours of food docuseries on Netflix, Lily rediscovered her interest for food-centric media content she studied frequently in undergrad. She is constantly trying to understand the strange and relatively new world of food media. Why have online food videos such as Youtube, bloggers, and docuseries become so pleasurable for people to view when they’re unable to taste the subject? Is taste able to permeate in some way through visual appeal/effects? Within the Gastronomy program, Lily hopes to further explore the way food can be used in visual media. Alongside her studies, she is about to begin her career working at a boutique PR firm in Boston to help local restaurants gain back business they lost during the pandemic. Although Lily lacks prior experience in the world of gastronomy, unless working at a Bruegger’s Bagels in high school counts :), she is excited to dive into a completely new and exciting field. Taking inspiration from both coasts she has lived on and the 17 countries she has visited, Lily hopes to gain a better understanding of her relationship to food. In her free time, you can find Lily dining at local restaurants with friends, lounging at the beach, exercising along the Charles, or bingeing the newest online food content. She’s excited to meet new and unique people, explore great food, and refine her studies in the program this Fall!
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, Nick Lucovich has a passion for food deeply rooted beyond the local fare of pierogies and Primanti Brothers sandwiches. Frequent visits to the mushroom farm, where 3 generations of his family worked, ignited his interest for agriculture & food. He spent his teenage summers maintaining the grounds and hand packaging mushrooms. After earning a bachelor’s degree in Food Science from Michigan State University, Nick started his career at Giant Eagle gaining experience in food service and retail with roles in sensory evaluation, quality, food safety, merchandising, and procurement. Nick joined Nestlé in 2013 and is currently a product developer within their Baking Division, responsible for leading innovation, renovation and optimization projects from idea to commercialization. He loves the science of prototyping and scaling recipes to large manufacturing proportions that ultimately lead to new or improved products in the market.
Nick enjoys traveling to explore regional markets and cuisines, running and fly-fishing. He is excited to join the Gastronomy program where he expects to fine-tune his discriminating abilities to evaluate and describe food, open up methods for developing new food products and elevate his personal culinary adventures. He is looking forward to the opportunity to research the origins, cultural importance, and environmental and social issues related to food.