Alane Salierno Mason is a book editor in New York City. She translated, as a labor of love, Elio Vittorini’s magnificent short novel Conversations in Sicily (New Directions). “The Exegesis of Eating” was selected for Best Spiritual Writing 2001, edited by Philip Zaleski, and will also appear in We Begin with Food, an anthology of Italian American women writing on food, forthcoming from the Feminist Press.