Contributor Bio

I had to write a bio this morning. Why is it always so hard to write about me?! Here's what I came up with...

Camilla M. Mann, Contributing Writer

Food writing wasn’t a path on which Camilla M. Mann thought she would find herself, but when the opportunity presented itself, she thought: why not? Sharing culinary adventures with her pen and her lens seemed the perfect marriage of her passions: food, adventures, photography, and writing.

With the ink on her diploma for history and philosophy from The University of California at Berkeley still damp, Mann took a job as an au pair in Italy – because she’d always wanted to live there and because she wanted to let her LSAT scores expire without telling her parents that she had changed her mind about law school. She lived in Rome for a year and ended up cooking for the family six days a week. That meant that she shopped at local markets daily, talked to the growers, and gathered recipes from whoever would talk to her. She grew into a fearless cook, but one who insists on the freshest, highest-quality foods around.

 When she came back to California, she had a parade of jobs, including running a stock photography agency for a local wildlife photographer, editing test assessments, working as a divemaster for SCUBA certification classes, teaching stroller fitness classes when her boys were small enough to sit in a stroller, and heading up the alumni relations and annual fund at her high school alma mater. But through all of that, photography and writing were constants. She penned articles about marine conservation and dive travel; she wrote columns about exercise; she drafted applications for grants; and she recorded recipes she’d created on a kitchen blog.

Mann lives with her husband and two sons in Monterey. They frequent local farmers’ markets, picking up unusual fruits and vegetables for a culinary challenge; they belong to a CSA to support a local farm and eat seasonally; and they are currently cooking their way through all of the countries around the world on a cooking-around-the-world adventure.

Writing for Edible Monterey Bay has afforded Mann the opportunity to delve behind the scenes of their local foodshed, to dine on the creations of some local culinary geniuses, and to meet like-minded foodies at fabulous pop-up events around the Monterey Bay. Best. Job. Ever.