Helen Zoe Veit is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University. She specializes in American history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the history of food and nutrition. She is now writing a book entitled Picky: How American Children Became the Pickiest Humans in History, which explains the rise of mass childhood pickiness 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 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) explores the origins of modern eating. Modern Food, Moral Food was a finalist for the 2014 James Beard Award for Reference and Scholarship.
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She is a member of the editorial collective of Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies. She also directs the What America Ate project, a digital archive and interactive website focusing on American eating during the Great Depression, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Veit has edited three volumes of the American Food in History book series from Michigan State University Press. The first volume in the series, Food in the Civil War Era: The North, won Gourmand International's award for Best Series Cookbook published in the United States in 2014 and was a finalist for the 2015 award in food history from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. The second volume, Food in the Civil War Era: The South, came out in Spring 2015, and the third volume, Food in the American Gilded Age, came out in Spring 2017.