Click “ALL PROJECTS” in the menu above the photo for travel writing clips and food education.

For a schedule of programs and classes, click “UPCOMING APPEARANCES.”

For preservation recipes, click here for an index on my former food blog.

Jennifer Burns Bright is a food educator and travel writer based in Astoria, Oregon.  She specializes in Pacific Northwest travel and sustainable seafood, and contributes regularly to AAA’s outlets in the West, which collectively reach almost five million households each issue. She teaches culinary classes at several venues, and shares her knowledge of the seafood, agriculture, and wild foods of the Pacific Northwest at coastal resorts, libraries, restaurants, and (as of this spring) on small-boat cruise ships on the Columbia/Snake Rivers and Puget Sound. Starting April 2019, she will produce and host an occasional radio program, “A Fine Kettle of Fish,” focusing on local seafood, on KMUN, Coast Community Radio in Astoria.

Since 2016, Bright has led Conversation Project community discussions throughout Oregon through Oregon Humanities, a Portland-based, NEH-funded, non-profit organization. She moderates two CPs, one on local seafood called “Fish Tales: Traditions and Challenges of Seafood in Oregon,” and another on DIY movements called “Why DIY? Self-Sufficiency and American Life.” When she’s not out gathering seaweed or smoking black cod, she might be found volunteering for community food projects, organizing or hosting local food panels, judging culinary masterpieces, or interviewing young farmers and mad scientists.

Bright taught literature and food studies at the University of Oregon in Eugene for seven years, led a faculty research group in the emerging discipline of food studies, and won a national pedagogy award for a team-taught, interdisciplinary class on bread. She holds a PhD from the University of California at Irvine and a Master Food Preserver certification. She’s most proud of her collaborative projects, including co-hosting the local food radio program Food for Thought on Eugene’s NPR affiliate, co-organizing and managing FOH at a community dinner event showcasing local squash, and co-curating “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.

Her writing — on subjects as varied as Olympia oysters, chowders in the West, steelhead recipes, canning albacore, seed science, Dutch herring, Taiwanese fruit, and the history of restaurants — appears in Gastronomica, SeriousEats.com, Oregon Quarterly, NPR’s The Salt, AAA’s Via and Journey magazines, and Eugene Magazine, among many others.