Helen Zoe Veit

Helen Zoe Veit specializes in the history of American food in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She’s now finishing a book called Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Easters in History and Why It Matters, which traces seismic cultural shifts from the 19th century to the present to explain how picky eating came to define “children’s food” and to reshape American diets at large.

Her first book, Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century (UNC Press, 2013) explores food and nutrition in the Progressive Era. Modern Food, Moral Food was a finalist for the 2014 James Beard Award in Reference and Scholarship.

Veit’s writing on food history has appeared in a variety of academic journals and in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and elsewhere.

She directs the What America Ate project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, a digital archive and interactive website on food in the Great Depression. She also directs the new America in the Kitchen project, a three-year project also funded by the NEH, which will create a beautiful new website providing full digital access to 200 of the most important cookbooks in American history published between the 1790s and 1960. From 2018 to 2022 she was one one of the editors of Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies.

Veit has edited three books with the American Food in History book series with Michigan State University Press. Food in the Civil War Era: The North (2014) won Gourmand International’s award for best cookbook in a series published in the United States and was a finalist for the award in food history from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Food in the Civil War Era: The South was released in 2015 and Food in the American Gilded Age was released in 2017.

Veit teaches a variety of classes at Michigan State on American history, food, and culture. She was named the 2018 College of Social Science Outstanding Teacher.

To learn more, visit her webpage at helenveit.com