Student Summer Symposium: Eric Lewis Donovan
From recipe testing, to ethnography, to archives, to even appetizers, our 2026 Student Summer Symposium showcases the many ways our students think, create, and write about food.
Mrs. Vazza’s Meatballs
By Eric Lewis Donovan
Mrs. Vazza’s Meatballs was created for my Food & Visual Culture course. Through a family meatball recipe, the zine explores how food carries memory, identity, migration, and place across generations. The project challenged me to look beyond ingredients and recipes and consider food as a form of storytelling, revealing how family traditions become living archives of culture and belonging. Creating this piece deepened my understanding of visual storytelling and reinforced the idea that some of our most meaningful histories are preserved not in books, but around the table.
The zine centers on Mrs. Vazza’s meatballs, a family recipe that has been carried across generations and adapted by the women who preserved it. What began as a recipe became a way to explore food as inheritance—how traditions, memories, identities, and stories are passed down through kitchens and around tables. As someone who wasn’t born into the Vazza family but was welcomed into their traditions, I became interested in how food can create belonging and connection, and how recipes often preserve much more than ingredients. Ultimately, the meatballs became a lens through which to examine family, place, memory, and the quiet ways culture survives through everyday acts of cooking and sharing a meal.
