Donna R. Gabaccia is the Charles H. Stone Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the author of many books and articles about Italian migration around the world and about immigrant women and immigrant life in the United States (including From Sicily to Elizabeth Street, Militants and Migrants, and From the Other Side).

Gabaccia's long-standing interest in material culture and in the everyday lives of immigrant women first focused her attention on food as a field of inquiry in ethnic studies. Many histories of ethnicity emphasize how outsiders change in order to become part of the mainstream, ignoring that the cultural mainstream itself changes over time, while discussions of multi-culturalism instead emphasize the tenacity of cultural traits among America's many separate ethnic groups. Gabaccia had a hard time reconciling these scholarly interpretations of American life with the booming "fad" for ethnic foods in the 1980s, and by the degree to which her own eating habits diverged from those of her Italian, Swiss, and German grandparents.

In We Are What We Eat, Gabaccia examines how the marketplace became an important center of ethnic interaction, changing the eating habits of all who entered it. At least at the table, Americans replay their connections to their neighbors on a daily basis; our meals should remind us of a peaceful, and pleasurable dimension of ethnic life that we too often ignore when we think about "who we are" as a people and a nation.