What's Eating America

As a painter, Gina Gigli has spent a celebrated career observing the world around her and distilling it into works of art ranging from pictures, collages and prints to wine labels, mythological masks and wispy, ephemeral scarves and ribbons.

As a writer, she has spent decades describing her acute observations and research in print.

And as the wife of a chef and restaurateur, she’s passionate about the primary ingredients of successful hospitality—people and food.

So it’s natural that when Gina and Ruggero went on a 10,000-mile cross-country highway odyssey in their trusty Jeep a few months after the horrors of September 11, 2001 but before the 9-11 atrocities led the United States into a war in Iraq, she would pack a notebook and a sketchpad.

Gina’s mission was to find out what Americans eat when they’re downhearted or discombobulated.

What she ended up with was a keen sense of What’s Eating America…what in the world bothers folk in the states she and Ruggero visited, and what they eat to make them feel better about life in general and threats to our national safety in particular.