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Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectators' Food and Drink podcast.

I'm Olivia Potts and today we are delighted to be joined by Darya Lavelle.

Darya is a writer.

Born in Kiev, she was raised in New York and has worked a fiction writer,

with her short stories being published in The Deadlands and Dread Machine.

Her first book, After Taste, explores food, grief, and the uncanny.

And will be published by Bloomsbury on the 22nd in May.

Dario, welcome to Table Talk.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

We're going to start where we always do at the very beginning and ask you, what are your earliest memories of food?

I love this question. I have so many early memories of food and eating and food rituals. Food was really an important touchstone, I think, in my house growing up. And I have all of these specific recollections of eating various things that small children did not

like to eat when I was a small child. So I have all sorts of memories of eating, and I still

eat them. Entire lemons whole, anything sour, anything pickled, not just pickled

cucumbers, but pickled tomatoes, pickled watermelon, pickled apples, all that sort of stuff

comes back from, I'm Ukrainian, so it comes back from sort of that Ukrainian cultural, Eastern

European tradition of eating. And then I also loved olives inexplicably. I was so grown up. So grown up. I called them

salty little plums and my parents talk all the time. During immigration, so when we left Ukraine, I was two.

And we came to the U.S. and you couldn't go directly here at the time. You had to stop in Austria and Italy in our case. When we were in Italy, I ate olives just by the fistful. I parents talk about it all

...