Talks At Vizcaya: Helen Zoe Veit On Food In The Gilded Age Kitchen

Join us for a new season of ‘Talks at Vizcaya’ where we explore topics relating to the Vizcaya estate and its history. This season, guest speakers will expand on themes around Vizcaya’s historic kitchen, including farming, food preparation and eating habits in the Gilded Age.

Food in the American Gilded Age

The Gilded Age was defined by extremes of wealth and want, and those extremes played out dramatically in the ways Americans ate. For the elite, daily meals were extravagant, and formal banquets became complicated rituals of luxury and intentional waste.

While a wealthy minority feasted, many other Americans struggled to feed themselves, and hunger and misery were widespread among the rural poor and those in city slums. This lecture will explore the fascinating world of food in the American Gilded Age through its banquet menus, cookbooks, etiquette guides, and a rare look into the eating habits of the poorest Americans.

Featured Speaker: Helen Zoe Veit

Helen Zoe Veit in an associate professor of history at Michigan State University who specializes in the history of food in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is now finishing a book called Small Appetites: How American Children Became the Pickiest Humans in History, which traces the emergence of mass childhood pickiness in the United States. Her first book, Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century was a finalist for a James Beard Award in Reference and Scholarship. Veit has also edited three books with the American Food in History book series, including Food in the American Gilded Age, released in 2017. Veit’s writing on food history has appeared in a variety of academic journals and in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and elsewhere. She directs 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.