Name: Victoria Pope
Blog: The Atlas of Eating

Victoria Pope is the Managing Editor of National Geographic Magazine. Before she joined NGM, she worked as an editor and writer for U.S News and World Report. She spent more than a decade as a foreign correspondent in Germany, Austria, Poland, and Russia. While covering such seismic events as the imposition of martial law in Poland and the coup against Gorbachev in the former USSR, Pope found time to practice kitchen journalism. Reporting on the daily lives of ordinary citizens in Communist Poland and Russia, she witnessed the power of breaking bread to preserve family, friends, and frank conversation in societies bereft of public dialogue or individual freedom. National pride, she learned, can be kept alive with borscht and bigos (Polish hunter stew). Food is at the heart of rituals that outlast political regimes and even forceful ideologies. She has been thinking about food as an agent of both tradition and social change ever since.