About the Author

Amy Bentley is a professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies in the Steinhardt School at New York University. A historian with interests in the social, historical, and cultural contexts of food, she is the author of the Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health and the Industrialization of the American Diet (University of California Press, 2014), which was nominated for a James Beard Award, and also winner of the ASFS Best Book Award. In 2024 she co-edited (with Fabio Parasecoli and Krishnendu Ray) the collection Practicing Food Studies (NYU).

Other books include Food for Thought: Nourishment, Culture, Meaning (co-editor) (Springer 2021), Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (University of Illinois, 1998), and A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Era (editor) (Bloomsbury, 2011). Book chapters and journal articles feature a variety of topics mainly focusing on food in the recent past (see Selected Publications below). Current research projects include a history of food in US hospitals, the cultural and historical contexts of meat and dairy substitutes, the cultural contexts of food waste, the role of flavor in human and planetary health, and an assessment of how historians write about food.

In addition to her work as a food historian, she is involved in a wide range of food-related academic and applied projects, including the Food and COVID-19 NYU digital archive, and as co-founder of the NYU Urban Farm Lab and the Experimental Cuisine Collective (2007-2016). Her work with a multi-disciplinary team on the project, Co-Creating an Implementation Strategy for Climate-Smart Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture to Improve Dietary Health and Reduce Non-Communicable Disease Risk in Tamale, Ghana, for which she received an NYU Climate Change Seed Grant, takes her research in new directions.

The former Editor-in-Chief of Food, Culture, and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research (2013-2019), Bentley is co-editor with Peter Scholliers of the book series Food in Modern History: Traditions and Innovations (Bloomsbury). She serves as a board member for the Bloomsbury Food Library, the Cornell University HEARTH Collection, the book series Food and Society: New Directions (Bristol University Press) and the journals Food and Foodways, the Graduate Journal of Food Studies and Gastronomy. In 2025 she was appointed to the Advisory Board of the NYU Center for the Humanities.