About Dr. Trubek

Personal Introduction

My fascination with all things culinary began in childhood. I used to watch Julia Child on public television with my mother on a weekend morning. Afterwards we would often go to the kitchen and try to make a dish or even a meal from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, an amazing culinary tome that Child wrote with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle. In high school I started a small catering business with a friend and worked at a great local restaurant, making cookies and bars and spending time with the quirky characters (cooks and customers) that came in and out each day. From that time on, I knew exploring food and cooking were going to be major parts of my life.

Dr. Trubek's Background

After college, Amy Trubek was an apprentice to a chef in a French restaurant and eventually went to Cordon Bleu Cooking School. She then went on to pursue graduate studies in Food & Culture, eventually earning a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1995. She is now an assistant professor in the Nutrition and Food Science department at the University of Vermont. She teaches courses in the contemporary food system, food and culture, and food history. Her research interests include the history of the culinary profession, globalization of the food supply, the relationship between taste and place, and cooking as a cultural practice.

She is involved in on-going research into the importance of the taste of place as a means of promoting and supporting place based foods and regional food systems. Her recent book, The Taste of Place, A Cultural Journey into Terroir, looks at the importance of terroir as a cultural category and explores how terroir is being used in the United States today to change our food culture. She is also involved in an interdisciplinary research project looking at the terroir of Vermont maple syrup. More recently, Trubek has launched an in-depth ethnographic project on cooking in contemporary American culture linking cooking practices to the food environment and individual health. Prior to starting at University of Vermont in the fall of 2005, Amy was the executive director of the Vermont Fresh Network, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting direct partnerships between farmers and chefs. Amy was a 2002-2004 Food and Society Policy Fellow, and before that she taught at New England Culinary Institute for eight years.

Last modified May 12 2009 10:36 AM