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Producer Jane Snow:

The Eat, Pray, Love exploration was produced by Jane Snow, who has received numerous national and state awards for food reporting, including two James Beard Awards. She is also a seven-time winner of the Ohio Nutrition Council’s Media Excellence Award for nutrition reporting. She has been nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize, and her food section with the former Knight Ridder was named best in the country in its circulation category three times between 1999 and 2006. She is past president of the Association of Food Journalists.

Read Jane’s Blog:

Jane’s discover of Zen in high school:

   At the prim Presbyterian church my family attended, I was a social pariah by age 10 until I in essence excommunicated myself at age 14, with my parents’ blessing. I was the kid in the back of Sunday school class who asked sincere but rude questions such as how Jonah managed to breathe inside all that whale flesh, and whether the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls didn’t in fact prove the King James Bible wasn’t the immutable, transcendent word of God our minister claimed it was. As you can imagine, at Easter I sympathized way too much with Doubting Thomas.

   What a nightmare I must have been for my poor folks, who never missed a Sunday and participated enthusiastically (or as enthusiastically as Presbyterians can)   in church life; my late father was a deacon and Mom was director of the vacation bible school.

   It gets worse. To their horror, after I was released from my weekly obligation to attend church, I began to explore other religions and belief systems in an ardent search for the meaning of life. By the time Mom called in help, I had flirted with Catholicism, attended a Jewish synagogue, and was exploring Zen Buddhism.

   The Presbyterian minister ambushed me at home. We chatted in the living room about psalms and koans, the virgin birth and Gautama Buddha.

   “No need to worry,” he cheerily told my mother. “She has an inquisitive mind and is just searching. She’ll come around.”

   Over the years I continued to explore, but kept coming around not to Christianity but to meditation – whether through Buddhism, yoga or whatever. The centering and stilling of the mind connected me to a spirituality that Presbyterian Sunday school hadn’t.

   I still meditate. I don’t have a guru, like Gilbert, and I haven’t spent four months on an ashram trying to achieve nirvana. But my sporadic attempts to shrug off destructive desires through meditation have helped me through some rough spots.

   If only I could make it up to my Mom.