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 Age (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). 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, Graduate Journal of Food Studies and Gastronomy.
Selected Publications
- Bentley, Amy (2024). Food that Acts Like Other Food: A History. International Journal of Sociology of Food and Agriculture (IJSAF). 30:2, 67-79. DOI:10.48416/ijsaf.v30i2.595
- Bentley, Amy, Samantha Ruth Brown, Shayne Leslie Figueroa, Salma Serry, and Claudia Saffar (2023). "School Meals in Multicultural/Multireligious Settings." In Fraser-Pearce and Fraser, eds, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Schools and Religion (September).
- Bentley, Amy (2022). "Brother Herman Zaccarelli and the Influence of Vatican II on Catholic Institutional Food Service." Research in Hospitality Management, 12:3, 225-234. DOI: 10.1080/22243534.2023.2202487
- Kelly A. Spring, Scott A. Barton & Amy Bentley (2022). “Online Learning and Community-Engaged Pedagogy During a Global Health Crisis: Teaching Food Studies & COVID-19.” Food, Culture & Society DOI: 10.1080/15528014.2022.2148085
- Bentley, Amy (2021). "Ketchup as a Vegetable: Condiments and the Politics of School Lunch in Reagan's America." Gastronomica 21:1(February): 17-27.
- Simona Stano and Amy Bentley (2021). Food for Thought: Nourishment, Culture, Meaning (Springer).
- Bentley, Amy and Stephanie Borkowsky (2020). "The Food and COVID-19 NYC Archive: Mapping the Pandemic's Effect on Food in Real Time," Gastronomica, 20:4 (December): 8-11.
- Bentley, Amy (2019). "What Should Babies Eat and Whose Business is it? In Matthew Morse Booker and Charles C. Ludington, Eds. Food Fights: How the Past Matters in Contemporary Food Debates (University of North Carolina Press): 189-207.
- Bentley, Amy (2018). “How Ketchup Revolutionized How Food is Grown, Processed, and Regulated" June 4. Smithsonian.com.
- Albala, Ken, Warren Belasco, Amy Bentley, Lisa Heldke, and Alex McIntosh (2017). "FCS Editors' Roundtable: Reflections on the Twentieth Anniversary of the Journal." Food, Culture and Society 20:1(March): 1-14.
- Bentley, Amy (2016). "Growing Concerns." The Times Literary Supplement (March 25).
- Amy Bentley (2014), Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet (UC Press).
- Amy Bentley and Hi’ilei Hobart (2014). “The Industrialization of Food in Recent United States History.” In Paul Freedman et al, eds. Food in Time and Place: The American Historical Association Companion to Food History (University of California Press): 165-187.
- Amy Bentley (2012). "Sustenance, Abundance, and the Place of Food in United States Histories." In Kyri Claflin and Peter Scholliers, eds. Writing Food History: A Global Perspective (Bloomsbury): 72-86.
- Amy Bentley, Warren Belasco, Carolyn de la Pena, and Psyche Williams-Forson (2011). “The Frontiers of Food Studies.” Forum Section, Food, Culture and Society, Vol, 14, No. 3(September): 301-314.
- Daniel Bender with Rachel Ankeny, Warren Belasco, Amy Bentley, Elias Mandala, Jeffrey M. Pilcher, and Peter Scholliers (2011). “Eating in Class: Gastronomy, Taste, Nutrition, and Teaching Food History.” Radical History Review, 110 (Spring): 197-216.
- Leora Auslander, Amy Bentley, Leor Halevi, H. Otto Silbum, and Christopher Whitmore (2009). “AHR Conversation: Historians and the Study of Material Culture,” American Historical Review (December): 1355-1404.
- Amy Bentley (1998). Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).