What is Food History News? foodhistorynews.com is the go-to place for anyone with any interest at all in the history of food in North America. News about upcoming food-historical events, culinary historian groups, resources real and virtual, plus useful and interesting information, and opinion! can be found right here. If you are new to the field, this is the best place to start.

What was Food History News? This website is the outgrowth of the printed newsletter published four times a year for twenty years beginning June 1989. About ten years ago publisher Sandy Oliver realized that there was a tremendous amount of activity and lots of participants in food history across the continent. She established this website to handle all the information that goes stale quickly in print and maintained the printed newsletter for more lasting results of research on a huge variety of topics over the twenty years of the newsletter's existence.

How do I subscribe to F.H.N.? You can't. The printed newsletter is finished, and this website is your new, and for now, free, resource. Enjoy.

And a Little of our History:

Who subscribed? F.H.N. circulation topped out at around 950 in 1996 and began a slow decline to 500 which it held to the very end. For a long time, an impressive roster of food writers, academicians, culinary historians and living history people of every stripe graced its mailing labels. Almost anyone and everyone who is writing, leading, and teaching, in the field today were subscribers to F.H.N.

How did it get started? In the winter and spring of 1989, three separate events prompted F.H.N.'s publication. First, living history cook and scholar Dr. Clarissa Dillon, proposed via the Association for Living History, Farm, and Agricultural Museums (ALHFAM) that some mechanism be created for sharing research information and Lee Heald, who was in the Education of Plimoth Plantation at the time, said to Sandy, "You could do that."

Second, the Culinary Historians of Boston and the American Folklore Society held a joint symposium in Cambridge, MA, which Sandy Oliver and her long-time friend and colleague Dr. Joanne Bowen, a zooarchaelogist now at Colonial Williamsbug and William and Mary, attended together. This was the first time Sandy had been in a room filled with other people also interested in food history. Will Weaver, Leslie Land, Kathy Neustadt, Barbara Wheaton, Joyce Toomre, and many others were there. It was evident that academicians did not talk to living history people, and vice versa. Sandy thought that these people ought to now what the others are doing and a newsletter might do that...

Third, Sandy asked Lynda Clancy, a young graphics designer based in nearby Belfast, ME, to design letterhead for her and Lynda inquired about Sandy's work. "You ought to do a newsletter," Lynda said. With an ALHFAM annual conference coming up, Sandy prepared copy, gave it to Lynda, who laid it out, creating a publication so professional looking that it had credibility long before it deserved it. Sandy had 100 printed; she gave them away free at the conference in June 1989, and by September she had 60 subscribers. Thus committed, it took twenty years to figure how to stop.