Melissa L. Caldwell is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the founder of the UCSC Design Anthropology Fab Lab, and past editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies. A fieldworking ethnographer, her research examines how and why people help one another and how ordinary acts of compassion turn into forms of social activism that respond to pressing social and political issues. She has been conducting ethnographic research in Russia and postsocialist Europe since the early 1990s, and has recently begun research in Hong Kong and the United States. She has researched and written on such topics as food poverty and charity; the role of faith-based social welfare and humanitarian programs in responding to poverty, racial discrimination and violence, and gender inequalities; the moralities of food cultures and food relief programs; and the social justice dimensions of hacking and disruptive creative technologies, especially among food hacker