Jennifer burns bright

Recent travel and food writing clips can be found here.

Preservation recipes on my former food blog can be found here.

Jennifer Burns Bright is a food educator, recipe developer and product consultant, and travel writer based in Astoria, Oregon.  She specializes in Pacific Northwest travel and food, including indigenous foods like wild mushrooms and sea vegetables. She has written about and taught many workshops on sustainable seafood, and develops recipes for industry clients as well as home cooks.

Since 2016, Bright has led over 70 Oregon Humanities Conversation Project community discussions (on local seafood traditions and the DIY movement) throughout Oregon. She contributes regularly to AAA’s print magazines in the West, which collectively reach almost five million households each issue, and many other media outlets. Her forthcoming book, 25 Culinary Adventures on Oregon’s North Coast, will appear in 2021. She also produces and hosts a quarterly radio program on Astoria’s KMUN, Coast Community Radio, called “A Fine Kettle of Fish,” which focuses on local seafood.

Bright taught literature and food studies at the University of Oregon in Eugene for seven years. She led a faculty research group in the emerging discipline of food studies, won a national pedagogy award for a team-taught, interdisciplinary class on bread, and co-curated “Recipe: The Kitchen and Laboratory in the West, 1400-2000,” an exhibition of rare books and ephemera in the UO Special Collections at Knight Library. She holds a PhD from the University of California at Irvine and a Master Food Preserver certification from OSU Extension.

Her writing — on subjects as varied as Olympia oysters, the secret to perfectly cooked albacore, chowders in the West, steelhead recipes, canning tuna, seed science, Dutch herring, Taiwanese fruit, and the history of restaurants — appears in Oregon Coast magazine, 1859 and 1889 lifestyle magazines in Oregon and Washington, Gastronomica, SeriousEats.com, Eater.com, Oregon Quarterly, NPR’s The Salt, AAA’s Via and Journey magazines, Acres USA, and Eugene Magazine, among many others.

In her free time, Bright enjoys hiking on the North Coast, shipwatching on the Columbia, gardening, beachcombing, hunting for mushrooms, harvesting shellfish, and creating jams with items she’s able to glean or forage. She serves on the board of Astoria’s North Coast Food Web.