Michael Parker writes about his mother’s reluctant, but exclamation-point-laden food column for her husband’s newspaper. Former vegetarian Cathy Cleary reveals what led her to sit down to a pork dinner, and Celia Rivenbark remembers her summer job at the only sit-down restaurant in her eastern Carolina hometown. Bridgette Lacy celebrates mid-summer “Mater Days” in newsrooms where she worked, and Tom Rankin writes about taking his goats to be slaughtered by a halal butcher from Afghanistan in Sanford.

Other contributors are Lee Smith, Marianne Gingher, Jill McCorkle, Jaki Shelton Green, Wayne Caldwell, Marcie Cohen Ferris, John McElwee, Michael McFee, Stephen Petrow and Zelda Lockhart, along with Bill Smith, a food writer and chef at the restaurant Crook’s Corner, and cookbook author Nancie McDermott.

The collection is edited by novelist, English professor and food writer Randall Kenan, who lives in Hillsborough. Softcover, 192 pages, $17.95.