- Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
- Advanced Certificate, Cordon Bleu Cookery School
- B.A., Sociology/Anthropology, Haverford College
- Food Systems Graduate program
- Food Systems Research Center (FSRC)
- Gund Institute for Environment
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Areas of expertise
Culinary history and anthropology, food supply chains, climate change and sustainability, taste of place.
BIO
Dr. Amy Trubek is Professor in the Nutrition and Food Sciences department at the University of Vermont and the Director of UVM's Climate Kitchen. She was the founding Faculty Director of the Food Systems graduate program.
She is the author of three scholarly monographs: Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession (2000), The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir (2008) and Making Modern Meals: How Americans Cook Today (2017) and numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She served as the co-editorial chair of Gastronomica: The Journal For Food Studies and the Vice-President of the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition.
She has been interviewed and quoted in various media outlets, including Burlington Free Press, Vermont Public, Atlantic Monthly, Boston Globe, BBC, CBC Radio and the New York Times.
Trubek’s research focuses on the practices needed to move from the raw to the cooked (in a broad sense): people working with food, making food for themselves and for others, taking the resources of the natural environment and transforming them into palatable and culturally acceptable dishes, meals and drinks. These questions also intersect with a robust line of social science and humanities inquiry into the cascading interest (especially in the United States) in foods from somewhere made by someone, most often identified as a cultural and political response to the industrialization and globalization of the modern food supply.
Trubek is also involved in transdisciplinary, collaborative research with scholars focusing on the ‘wicked problems’ of our time in relation to food systems and individual and planetary health. In 2021 she was awarded (along with Dr. Caitlin B. Morgan) a Robert Wood Johnson Pioneering Ideas grant to design and implement a serious game methodology to better understand the structural inequities preventing small scale farmers from selling their whole foods to their community members. In another collaborative project, the guiding question is: How do Americans learn how to cook while living in such a saturated food environment, when someone else (or something else) can always do that work instead? Along with colleagues in the Nutrition and Food Sciences department and in consultation with UVM Extension and the UVM Medical Center she has developed an on-line (soon to be open source) curriculum to with the goal of learning food agency to enable motivation when faced with the everyday necessity to provision, cook and eat. As Director of the Climate Kitchen, she works closely with faculty, students and staff to work in kitchen labs to engage with both adaptation and mitigation of environmental changes across the food system.
She teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses, including Basic Concepts of Food, Qualitative Research Methods, and Food Systems and Society. She regularly mentors undergraduate interns and graduate students in the Climate Kitchen.
Courses
- NFS 1053: Basic Concept of Foods
- FS 6400: Food Systems Society and Policy
Bio
Dr. Amy Trubek is Professor in the Nutrition and Food Sciences department at the University of Vermont and the Director of UVM's Climate Kitchen. She was the founding Faculty Director of the Food Systems graduate program.
She is the author of three scholarly monographs: Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession (2000), The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir (2008) and Making Modern Meals: How Americans Cook Today (2017) and numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She served as the co-editorial chair of Gastronomica: The Journal For Food Studies and the Vice-President of the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition.
She has been interviewed and quoted in various media outlets, including Burlington Free Press, Vermont Public, Atlantic Monthly, Boston Globe, BBC, CBC Radio and the New York Times.
Trubek’s research focuses on the practices needed to move from the raw to the cooked (in a broad sense): people working with food, making food for themselves and for others, taking the resources of the natural environment and transforming them into palatable and culturally acceptable dishes, meals and drinks. These questions also intersect with a robust line of social science and humanities inquiry into the cascading interest (especially in the United States) in foods from somewhere made by someone, most often identified as a cultural and political response to the industrialization and globalization of the modern food supply.
Trubek is also involved in transdisciplinary, collaborative research with scholars focusing on the ‘wicked problems’ of our time in relation to food systems and individual and planetary health. In 2021 she was awarded (along with Dr. Caitlin B. Morgan) a Robert Wood Johnson Pioneering Ideas grant to design and implement a serious game methodology to better understand the structural inequities preventing small scale farmers from selling their whole foods to their community members. In another collaborative project, the guiding question is: How do Americans learn how to cook while living in such a saturated food environment, when someone else (or something else) can always do that work instead? Along with colleagues in the Nutrition and Food Sciences department and in consultation with UVM Extension and the UVM Medical Center she has developed an on-line (soon to be open source) curriculum to with the goal of learning food agency to enable motivation when faced with the everyday necessity to provision, cook and eat. As Director of the Climate Kitchen, she works closely with faculty, students and staff to work in kitchen labs to engage with both adaptation and mitigation of environmental changes across the food system.
She teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses, including Basic Concepts of Food, Qualitative Research Methods, and Food Systems and Society. She regularly mentors undergraduate interns and graduate students in the Climate Kitchen.
Courses
- NFS 1053: Basic Concept of Foods
- FS 6400: Food Systems Society and Policy