Helen Zoe Veit, Ph.D.

Helen Zoe Veit, Ph.D., is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University, specializing in American food culture across the 19th and 20th centuries. Her latest book, Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History, traces the rise of mass childhood pickiness over the last two hundred years. Her first book, Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century, was a James Beard Award finalist for Reference and Scholarship.

Veit directs two major digital humanities projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities: What America Ate, a digital archive exploring American eating during the Great Depression, and America in the Kitchen: The Historic American Cookbook Project, which provides full digital access to 200 of the most significant cookbooks in American history published from the 1790s to 1960.

Her writing on food history has appeared in academic journals and in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and elsewhere. She served on the editorial collective of Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies from 2018-2022 and edited three volumes of the American Food in History book series from Michigan State University Press, including Food in the Civil War Era: The North, which won Gourmand International’s award for Best Series Cookbook published in the United States in 2014.