Faculty Fellow
Professor of Nutrition and Food Studies
De-Colonizing Food History: Examining the State of the Field
Amy Bentley is Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University, a 2024-25 NYU Humanities Fellow, and recipient of a 2024 NYU Distinguished Teaching Award. A historian with interests in the social, historical, and cultural contexts of food, she is the author of Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet (California, 2014), (James Beard Award finalist, and ASFS Best Book Award). In 2024 she co-edited (with Fabio Parasecoli and Krishnendu Ray) the collection Practicing Food Studies(NYU).
Other books include Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (University of Illinois, 1998), A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Era (editor) (Bloomsbury, 2011), and the co-edited volume (with Simona Stano) Food for Thought: Nourishment, Culture, Meaning (Springer 2021). 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). 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, Graduate Journal of Food Studies and Gastronomy.