Rachel laudan biography

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Picking up Mesolithic flints or clambering over Iron Age hilltop “forts” were daily occurrences. Then were moved again to the Bluegrass Region in central Kentucky. I attended private schools in the long nearly-800-year old shadow of Salisbury Cathedral spire. She is a popular speaker with food professionals as well as academic and general audiences.

Hawaii set me on a new track. Uncovering the ways in which the past shapes the present has been her driving interest from her childhood on an English farm dating back to the Neolithic, through her training as a geologist and academic career as a historian of science and technology, and to her current research into food history.

Caring for my husband before his death in August 2022 came to claim all my time.

By age eighteen I was ready to escape all this history. She has seized the opportunity the academic life gave her to cook in England, France, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, as well as the United States. Her award-winning book, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (University of California Press, 2013), examines the links between food preparation and cultural and economic development.

This historical background underpinned Laudan’s much-reprinted article “A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We Should Love Fast, Modern, Processed Food.” She is happy to plunge into debates on food politics on social media and at meetings across the balkanized food world at SXSW, the James Beard Foundation, the Southern Foodways Alliance, the Institute of Food Technologists, food and agriculture organizations, universities, and the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium.

Laudan’s career has given her the rare opportunity to live on five continents.

She specialized in the history of science and technology, holding appointments at American research universities and receiving grants from Fulbright, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I embarked on a global food history resulting in Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (2013). The other is a cultural history of the farmer.

Everything I had learned teaching history of science and technology I applied to one of humankind’s greatest technological products, food.

After fifteen years in Mexico, we moved north again, first to Austin, Texas where Larry taught in the Law School. One, tentatively titled Woman, Stone, Food, is a study of grain processing before mechanization.

The many different ethnic groups in the Islands were in the process of creating a new cuisine, Local Food. She specialized in the history of science and technology, holding appointments at American research universities and receiving grants from Fulbright, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Rachel grew up on dairy and wheat farm in England.

She and her philosopher husband have now come to roost in Austin, Texas, where she is happily exploring a fascinating state, walking her dog, making use of the great university library, and blogging on food at www.rachellaudan.com.