From Kitchen to Screen: Food, Society, and the Stories of the Gilded Age

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The Gilded Age was defined by extremes of wealth and want, and those extremes played out dramatically in the ways Americans ate. For elite Americans in the late 19th century, daily meals were extravagant, and formal banquets became complicated rituals of luxury and waste. But 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. Veit will draw on this history as she takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour of food in HBO’s The Gilded Age, for which she was a historical consultant.

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Helen Zoe Veit is an historian of American food. An associate professor at Michigan State University, she is the author of Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History (St. Martin’s Press, 2026) and Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century (UNC, 2013), which was a finalist for a James Beard Award. Veit’s writing has appeared in a variety of academic journals and in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She was a historical consultant on Seasons 1 and 2 of HBO’s The Gilded Age, and she directs two digital projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities: the What America Ate project, an interactive website about food in the Great Depression, and the America in the Kitchen project, a new website featuring 200 of the most significant cookbooks in American history.