CRUMPACKER, Bunny

PERSONAL:

Married Chick Crumpacker (a music producer).

ADDRESSES:

Home—NY.

CAREER:

Author. Has worked as a journalist, editor, public relations officer, and caterer.

WRITINGS:

(With husband, Chick Crumpacker) Jazz Legends, G. Smith (Layton, UT), 1995.

The Old-Time Brand-Name Cookbook: Recipes, Illustrations, and Advice from the Early Kitchens of America's Most Trusted Food Makers, Smithmark (New York, NY), 1998.

Old-Time Brand-Name Desserts, Smithmark (New York, NY), 2000.

Alexander's Pretending Day (fiction; for children), illustrated by Dan Andreasen, Dutton Children's Books (New York, NY), 2005.

The Sex Life of Food: When Body and Soul Meet to Eat, Thomas Dunne Books (New York, NY), 2006.

Former newspaper columnist.

SIDELIGHTS:

Bunny Crumpacker has held a variety of jobs over the years, including newspaper columnist, public relations officer, and caterer. It is from the last of these that she has drawn from experience to produce several books about cooking and food. The first two of these, The Old-Time Brand-Name Cookbook: Recipes, Illustrations, and Advice from the Early Kitchens of America's Most Trusted Food Makers and Old-Time Brand-Name Desserts, draw on old recipes prepared in American homes from the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. More recently, her Sex Life of Food: When Body and Soul Meet to Eat takes a very different look at what eating means to people. Although, as the title implies, Crumpacker discusses the psychological link between sexuality and food, she also writes about the use of food as a salve to comfort the soul in times of stress, food phobias, table manners and their history, restaurant design, cultural differences, and other eccentricities about food, including some odd facts about the eating habits of American presidents and even Adolf Hitler. "Though seasoned haphazardly with purple prose," according to one Publishers Weekly critic, "Crumpacker's clever insights and lyrical aphorisms blend into an indulgent read." A more enthusiastic Lisa A. Ennis attested in Library Journal that the author "paints a vivid … fascinating portrait of the role that food plays in people's secret and not-so-secret lives."

Adventurously moving into fresh territory for her, Crumpacker decided to write a children's book in 2005 titled Alexander's Pretending Day. Intended for pre-schoolers and kindergartners, it is a simple story about a little boy who asks his mother what she would do if he turned into various creatures and even objects, including a mouse, a dinosaur, a train, and a book. To each query, his mother replies in comforting ways that reassure Alexander he will always be loved and cared for. Several critics compared the story to The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, but even though the tale is admittedly not the most original concept in children's literature, Booklist reviewer Gillian Engberg felt that "preschoolers will most likely enjoy the familiar territory."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 15, 2005, Gillian Engberg, review of Alexander's Pretending Day, p. 1084; December 15, 2005, Mark Knoblauch, review of The Sex Life of Food: When Body and Soul Meet to Eat, p. 7.

Entertainment Weekly, February 3, 2006, Tina Jordan, review of The Sex Life of Food, p. 74.

Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2005, review of The Sex Life of Food, p. 1262.

Library Journal, February 1, 2006, Lisa A. Ennis, review of The Sex Life of Food, p. 102.

Publishers Weekly, February 7, 2005, review of Alexander's Pretending Day, p. 58; October 24, 2005, review of The Sex Life of Food, p. 49.*