Back in the 1960s and ’70s, most of what we ate came from gigantic industrial farms churning out tasteless produce and chickens laced with antibiotics. Thanks to the counterculture, plus a great many visionary environmentalists, plus a whole lot of home cooks watching “The French Chef,” a movement sprang up and inspired Americans to start thinking differently about what could be on our plates. Most recently, we’ve seen a flock of ambitious new celebrity chefs on TV demonstrating their own version of a food revolution - for better or worse.
In this Benzonia Academy Lecture (August 2023), Laura puts women at the center because women have always done the heavy lifting - often literally - in the history of American cooking.
Laura Shapiro was a columnist at The Real Paper (Boston) before beginning a 16-year run at Newsweek, where she covered food, women’s issues and the arts and won several journalism awards. Her essays, reviews and features have also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and many other publications. Her first book was Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (1986), which the University of California Press reissued in 2009 with a new Afterword. She is also the author of Something from the Oven: Revinventing Dinner in 1950s America (Viking, 2004), named in the Wall Street Journal as one of the five best books on American food; and Julia Child (Penguin Lives, 2007), which won the award for Literary Food Writing from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Her latest book is What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories, which Susan Stamberg of NPR called, “seriously and hilariously researched culinary history.”
Laura can be seen in a number of TV documentaries on culinary history, including “Julia” (PBS), Michael Pollan “Cooked” (Netflix) and “The Food That Built America” (History Channel).
She and her husband, Jack Hawley, live in New York, where Jack teaches religion at Barnard and Columbia. Their daughter, Nell, teaches Sanskrit at Harvard. The three of them spend all winter looking forward to August at Crystal Lake (Michigan), where generations of Hawleys have been active in the Congregational Summer Assembly since its founding.