UNC professor inspires students with passion for food studies

Kelly Alexander is a self-identified food studies evangelist. She’s an award-winning writer and educator who started her career at food magazines in New York City before moving to North Carolina to first teach at Duke, then UNC, where she is currently a professor of American Studies. 

Growing up in Atlanta, Alexander wanted nothing more than to escape the South. She always saw New York City as the mecca of journalism and good food. In college, she interned at Food & Wine magazine in New York City where she reported on restaurant openings and did fact-checking for American chef and TV personality Julia Child’s column. 

In her senior year at Northwestern University, she became editor-in-chief for an independent student magazine called n magazine — a lowercase “n” to highlight the magazine’s alternative style. It was tradition for the editor-in-chief to create a special interest issue, so n magazine’s first-ever food issue was born.

Working at Food & Wine opened her eyes to the possibilities of food writing as a career. She later worked for Saveur magazine in New York City as a writer and senior editor.

“I know Kelly not as an educator or an academic, I know her as a food writer [and a] friend for years,” Colman Andrews, former editor-in-chief of Saveur magazine, said. “I’d say she's one of those people that can move easily if she wants to between [food writing and academia] and maybe, in some ways, bring them together.”

She wrote for food magazines for 10 years before moving to North Carolina and turning to academia when she was asked to mentor students at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. There, she taught a course called "Our Culinary Cultures," which focused on food documentary and writing, with elements of cultural anthropology and cooking. 

“Duke has an award for recognition about instructors who receive top 5 percent teaching evaluation designation in a semester, and I think [Alexander] got that at least seven times,” Chris Sims, director of the Center for Documentary Studies, said. 

Despite some hesitancy about her skills as a teacher, Alexander discovered a passion for food education. 

She encourages everybody to take a food studies class before they graduate college. At UNC, she teaches several food-related courses, including American Studies 275: Food and American Culture. She also works with Amy Cooke on the food studies minor. 

In a world where food is so accessible that people don’t have to think twice about where their food comes from, Alexander wants people to stop and think about their relationship to food and their food’s relationship to the world. 

While teaching at Duke, Alexander began a Ph.D. in anthropology with the intention of studying truffles. She did fieldwork in Brussels in a truffle restaurant, tediously sifting through spinach for perfect leaves. She was upset by the amount of perfectly edible food that she had to throw away because of small imperfections. She switched her research from looking at truffles to following the food waste policy in the European Union. 

“So many people could have dined so well off of the garbage can of this one restaurant,” Alexander said. 

The inspiration to study food waste also came from her grandmother. While living in New York, Alexander attended culinary school, but her grandmother gave her her first experiences in the kitchen. Her grandmother was a Hungarian Jewish woman from the Bronx and, despite her lack of formal training, owned a restaurant there. She moved to Atlanta after World War II. Living through the Great Depression and being a Jewish Southerner informed the way she cooked. 

“She literally never threw away anything, like a can of grease under the sink, no vegetable peel was too small to save, and so because of that, I was really interested in food waste,” Alexander said. 

Alexander returned to her Georgia roots in 2013 when she wrote "Peaches," a cookbook in the Savor the South series from UNC Press. The book includes 45 recipes, but she opens the book with the idea that there is no perfect peach recipe.

“If you have a really perfect ripe peach, you should eat it,” she said. “You should lean over your sink and eat it.”

@dthlifestyle | lifestyle@dailytarheel.com