Fussell, Betty

Historian Betty Fussell (1927–) was one of the first American writers to consider food a legitimate subject of cultural, culinary, and anthropological inquiry. When she came to widespread attention with The Story of Corn (1992), her groundbreaking history of the New World’s preeminent crop, she had already succeeded as a scholar, teacher, writer, and cookbook author. Yet Corn was notable for several reasons: It focused on a single food, popularizing a genre soon embraced by many writers. It employed a narrative technique that included scenes from her own reporting, demystifying the subject and making it accessible to the wider world. And it embraced another of Fussell’s passionate intellectual pursuits: what it means to be American.