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Associate Professor of History, Michigan State University

Helen Zoe Veit specializes in American history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the history of food and nutrition. She received her Ph.D. in 2008 from Yale University. She is now writing a book called Small Appetites: A History of Children’s Food, which examines the history of children’s eating during 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 (UNC Press, 2013) explores food and nutrition in the Progressive Era. Modern Food, Moral Food was a finalist for the 2014 James Beard Award in Reference and Scholarship.

Veit is director of the What America Ate project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, a digital archive and interactive website on food in the Great Depression.

Veit has edited three books with the American Food in History book series with Michigan State University Press. The first, "Food in the Civil War Era: The North" (2014) won Gourmand International’s award for best cookbook in a series published in the United States and was a finalist for the award in food history from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. The second book in the series, "Food in the Civil War Era: The South," was released in 2015 and the third, "Food in the American Gilded Age," was released in Spring 2017.

Experience

  • –present
    Associate Professor of History, Michigan State University