Amy Bentley

Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, New York University

Amy Bentley is Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University, a 2024-25 NYU Humanities Fellow, and recipient of a 2024 NYU Distinguished Teaching Award. A historian with interests in the social, historical, and cultural contexts of food, she is the author of Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet (California, 2014), (James Beard Award finalist, and ASFS Best Book Award).

Current research projects include a history of food in US hospitals, the cultural and historical contexts of meat and dairy substitutes, the cultural contexts of food waste, the role of flavor in human and planetary health, and an assessment of how historians write about food. She has been featured as an expert on the science of the American diet, most recently in the New York Times Magazine article “Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back” (Nov. 19, 2024).