Betty Fussell

Best known for her book The Story of Corn, winner of the first Jane Grigson Award given by the IACP in 1993, Betty Fussell is the author of eleven books, ranging from biography to cookbooks, food history and memoir. A frequent speaker at IACP conferences, she was Scholar in Residence in 1999. Her essays on food, travel and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers over the past 50 years.

A winner of the James Beard Foundation’s Award in Journalism and Who’s Who in Food and Beverage, as well as Food Arts’ Silver Spoon Award, she has lectured throughout the country in venues as varied as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Iowa’s State Fair. She has presented courses and/or workshops in food writing, food history and food preparation at universities, colleges, culinary schools and cooking stores across the United States and in Mexico. Her memoir, My Kitchen Wars, was performed in Hollywood and New York as a one-woman show by actress Dorothy Lyman. Her most recent book on American food, Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beefsteak, was published in 2008. Her work in progress is How to Cook a Coyote: A Manual of Survival.