Amy Bentley is Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. 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 (University of California Press, 2014), (James Beard Award finalist, and ASFS Best Book Award). For more information see inventingbabyfood.com.
Other books include the recently published co-edited volume with Simona Stano Food for Thought: Nourishment, Culture, Meaning (Springer 2021), as well as 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 chapter and journal articles feature such topics as ketchup in Reagan's America, the politics of southwestern cuisine, and a historiography of food riots (see Selected Publications below). Her current research projects include a history of food in US hospitals, and the meanings and uses of food production in religious communities.
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, and the journals Food and Foodways and Graduate Journal of Food Studies.
