Karen Coates is an author, journalist and food blogger at Rambling Spoon. She spent several years living in Asia and working as a correspondent for Gourmet. She and her husband, visual journalist Jerry Redfern, now make their home base in New Mexico’s Rio Grande Valley on a little plot of land filled with gardens, grapes and fruit trees. Karen periodically teaches Southeast Asian cooking classes and demonstrations in the United States. Her journalistic work focuses on food, environment, health and human rights in the developing world. She is a senior fellow at Brandeis University’s Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, and author of four books. Her latest, with Jerry, is Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos.