Karen Eng ’90

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Karen Eng ’90 produced the cover of the second issue of PekoPeko, her food zine, on a 1930s Hacker printing press, in her own words, “painstakingly, sweatily, one by one.”

But before you allow yourself to be impressed by that feat, you may be asking yourself, “What’s a zine? What’s a pekopeko?” So some definitions may be in order. Zines are self-produced, small-circulation publications, and they can usually be found in bookstores small enough to care about them. Zines fill in the cultural gaps left by mainstream magazines looking to fill ad space and make profits.

And pekopeko? It’s “a Japanese onomatopoeic word for the noise your stomach makes when it’s hungry. Karen Eng got hungry and made this zine,” according to the brief editorial explanation found on the first page of each issue.

Karen’s PekoPeko is something of an anomaly. It’s about food, but unlike most mainstream food magazines it’s not about gourmet dining. It’s technically an underground publication, but unlike many zines it’s warm and generous, almost loving in its tone. It’s handmade, carefully curated and a quirky delight to read. The first four issues feature stories on Las Vegas casino buffets, craft service tables on film sets, overviews of marijuana cookbooks, cartoons, recipes and an expose on U.S. Navy chow. PekoPeko is less aspirational then documentary, and that’s how Karen likes it: “You can tell a lot about people by their relationships with food. That’s really fascinating to me.”

The former English major never thought she’d end up creating a zine about eating. “I was going to be a poet,” she explains. “I took all the poetry classes at UCLA. It was weird. You couldn’t declare poetry as your track until you finished it. And the classes were small so everyone would fight to get into them. It was pretty sobering and humbling. The cutthroat world of poetry!”

After graduating, the Cypress, Calif., native, whose grandfather was a cook (“He made amazing prime rib with gravy. I don’t know what his secret was. Lots of salt and fat, I imagine.”) moved to Berkeley, where she lives with her husband Iain Mann, and set about to become a poet. “But I hung around the poetry scene for a while and I couldn’t handle the way people talked about their ‘craft,’” Karen laughs.

Later, a stint at PC Games magazine got her thinking about her foodie future. “My manager kept giving me those six-month reviews,” Karen explains. “The ones where they ask you trick questions like, ‘Where do you see yourself in five years?’ and you’re supposed to respond, ‘Right here doing the same thing I’m doing now!’ Being unable to lie well, I said, ‘I guess ideally I’d like to have my own magazine.’ Of course I hadn’t really thought this through at all. And he said, ‘Oh really? What would that magazine be about?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I guess food.’ I had been doing work for Wired, too, and that magazine has its own chef. He would make really interesting, inspiring things with food. He’d make these incredible squash tarts. There was something about the way he worked with food that impressed me and I started writing down notes about the things he made. I’m predisposed to thinking about food anyway, not like about caviar and stuff like that, but as a day-to-day life thing.”

Since early 2001, PekoPeko has been a home for writers to write freely about how food connects to day-to-day living – and the zine has received quite a bit of recognition. Nominated for a 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award, as well as a 2002 Utne Reader design award, the zine also won Giant Robot magazine’s Hottest Zine award in 2001. Add to that glowing reviews in publications nationwide and what you have is one surprised woman. “Make that extremely surprised,” says Karen. “I’m doing this by the seat of my pants.”

Karen is currently working on a piece for an anthology on women and food to be published by Seal Press, as well as doing freelance copyediting for International Data Group, which publishes MAC World. A self-described “typography dork,” she devotes her spare time to constructing PekoPeko, obsessing over details and when not employing that old printing press, “standing by and freaking out while the printer tells you everything’s wrong.”

She also makes time to travel back to Los Angeles to visit family and former UCLA classmates. “I have one friend who works for the University, so when I come down I’ll go visit her on campus. It’s nice to be there,” Karen says. “I transferred there from a little Catholic college. And I remember feeling at the time that if I stayed at that school then my life was going to be this James Joyce fan club forever. I loved the people but I knew I had to do something different, so I decided to throw myself into the big unknown of UCLA. I’m glad I did it.”