Brenda Biddle

A Second Chance to Shine - The Before and After Lives of Mount Holyoke's Older Learners
Vista, Summer 1997, by Emily Harrison Weir

Food for Thought

Always eager to work with her hands, Brenda Biddle supported herself as a chef for ten years before discovering deeper meanings of food and hunger through intellectual study.

Brenda Biddle quit Hampshire College in the 1970s and worked on an archaeological dig in England, picked grapes in France, studied in Italy, lived in a teepee while running a health food store, got married and divorced, and supported herself doing everything from wiring computer chips to quilting. Most recently, Biddle trained herself as a gourmet cook and ran Vermont's Brick House Supper Club, offering diners five-course meals featuring dishes like roasted duck breast with fig-and-ginger chutney.

Although she still cooks professionally, Biddle discovered at MHC a deeper way to make food a part of her life. Now forty-five, she is studying "food as a force in history, as a metaphor in literature, and from an anthropological perspective" and finds the study "has created a new sense of possibilities and horizons." Biddle plans to do graduate work and envisions a future of traveling, writing, and studying the cultural meanings of food. "Before MHC, I was deciding what to cook my three kids for dinner," she says. "Now I look at what people ate in the Middle Ages, what it was like to be in a famine, and examine deeper food-related issues instead of the day-to-day drudgery of satisfying my family's hunger."