Helen Zoe Veit

Helen Zoe Veit is a historian of American food in the 19th and 20th centuries. An associate professor of history at Michigan State University, she is the author of Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History (St. Martin’s Press, 2026) and Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century (UNC, 2013), which was a finalist for a James Beard Award. She directs two major digital projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities: the What America Ate project, launched in 2017, an interactive website on food in the Great Depression, and the America in the Kitchen project, a new website to launch in 2027 featuring 200 of the most significant cookbooks in American history. 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, and elsewhere.