Helen Zoe Veit is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University, specializing in American food in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is now finishing a book called Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History and Why It Matters (St. Martin's, 2026),  which explains the rise of mass childhood pickiness over 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 and was a finalist for a James Beard Award for Reference and Scholarship.

She 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. She also directs America in the Kitchen: The Historic American Cookbook Project, a three-year project also funded by the NEH that will create a beautiful new website providing full digital access to 200 of the most significant cookbooks in American history published from the 1790s to 1960.

Veit is one of the former editors of Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies. She also edited three volumes of the American Food in History book series from Michigan State University Press. The first volume, Food in the Civil War Era: The North, won Gourmand International's award for Best Series Cookbook published in the United States in 2014. Food in the Civil War Era: The South came out in  2015 and Food in the American Gilded Age came out in  2017.