Rachel Laudan is an expert on how food and culture have evolved in tandem and author of Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (2013), a comprehensive history of food and culture from the first states to today.

The New York Review of Books praised the book as “an exposition as lucid as it is authoritative [which] gives deserved prominence to a long-neglected theme in world history . . . a triumph, pointing the way to a wholly new kind of historiography.” Japanese, Chinese (both mainland and Taiwan), and Korean translations have already appeared and a Spanish one is forthcoming.

As a historian, Laudan has concluded that never have such a large proportion of humans enjoyed such healthful and tasty food, a case she made in “A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We Should Love Fast, New, Processed Food” first published in 2001 and widely reprinted in the past twenty years in publications across the political spectrum.

In 2018, Laudan received the Paradigm Award of the Breakthrough Institute “in recognition of the progressive story I tell about food and farming.” The Award is given annually for “accomplishment and leadership in the effort to make the future secure, free, prosperous, and fulfilling for all the world’s inhabitants on an ecologically vibrant planet.”

Laudan has lived for extended periods of time on five different continents, giving her the chance to experience many of the world’s cuisines in their places of origin. A childhood on a working farm in southern England where her family grew wheat and barley and had a large dairy provided her with a down-to-earth sense of what it takes to produce the raw materials of food.