Ramin Ganeshram

In addition to contributing to a variety of food publications including Saveur, Gourmet, Bon Appetit and epicurious.com, Ganeshram has written food/culture/travel articles for Islands (as contributing editor); National Geographic Traveler; Forbes Traveler; Forbes Four Seasons and many others. She was as a reporter and writer on Molly O’Neill’s magnum One Big Table (Simon & Schuster 2010). Her own cookbooks include Sweet Hands: Island Cooking from Trinidad & Tobago (Hippocrene 2006;2nd Ed 2010) and The America I Am: Pass It Down Cookbook (Smiley Books, 2011) with Jeff Henderson

Ganeshram responded to the controversy in an article in the Guardian: "Hercules’s story is complex, but that is exactly why to my mind it deserves to be told in books for children and adults. Banning A Birthday Cake for George Washington felt, to me, like an erasure...It goes without saying that an irrevocable injustice was done them...We owe them a debt of respect and gratitude. And by speaking out rather than remaining cowed and silent we must do them the justice of telling their individual truths particular to their experiences."

In 2018, Ganeshram published The General's Cook, (Skyhorse, NY) the novel she had been working on previous to the publication of Birthday Cake. In the novel's acknowledgment's the author reprised public statements regarding her objections to and attempts to persuade the publisher to alter what she called the "offensive nature" of the picture book's illustrations.

In January 2016, her children's book A Birthday Cake for George Washington, about U.S. President George Washington's slaves who look for ingredients to bake a birthday cake for their owner, was published by Scholastic. It was criticized for "white-washing" and "sugar-coating" the brutality of life in slavery and was withdrawn by the publisher 12 days after its release.

Ganeshram has received seven journalism awards for her writing and an International Association of Culinary Professionals Bert Greene culinary journalism nomination. Her cookbook "FutureChefs: Recipes from Tomorrow's Cooks Across America and the World" won a 2015 International Association of Culinary Professionals Cookbook of the Year Award in the Children, Youth & Family category.

She is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of World Foods (Greenwood Press 2010) and a peer reviewer for the Journal of Food, Culture and Society. Her work also appears in the second edition of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food & Drink in America, which was nominated for an IACP Cookbook award in 2014 and in Savoring Gotham also forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

In January 2010, she founded the charity Food 4 Haiti, to raise money for the UN World Food Programme’s effort in the earthquake ravaged Haiti. She was formerly on the board of the Meriden, Connecticut-based non-profit, My City Kitchen, which teaches kids about food and cooking as a way to instill healthy lifestyle habits while raising self-esteem. Currently, she is the co-chairperson of the Food Access Coalition an Fairfield County, CT based nonprofit that works to promote food justice in the local area.

Ramin Ganeshram (born June 21, 1968) is an American journalist, chef and cookbook author who writes about American and Caribbean foodways and culinary culture. She is known for her specialized knowledge of Trinidad & Tobago cuisine and for her work in food history and polycultural American food experiences.

As reported by Craig LaBan of the Philadelphia Inquirer in March 2019, Ganeshram and her Westport Historical Society colleague Sara Krasne uncovered compelling evidence suggesting Hercules, who had never been seen again after 1801, in fact lived in New York City where he died on May 15, 1812. The discovery offers never-before seen scholarship on Hercules.