Research Guides: Food Studies: Special Collections & Archives

NYU Special Collections

NYU Special Collections offers different types of materials pertaining to food. The Marion Nestle Food Studies Collection documents the evolution of world cuisines and food practices with a particular focus on the United States and the food habits and activity in New York City. It includes one of the largest cookbook collections in North America, the papers of prominent chefs and food critics, ephemera and oral histories. More information about the variety of collections they have can be found on the link above, and a few highlights are included below.

You must plan your visit to the Special Collections and start by creating a Special Collections Research Account.

Fales Food Video Archive: Critical Topics in Food Series
For the past several years the Fales Library, NYU’s Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, and Public Health, along with Clark Wolf of Clark Wolf Company, Inc. have planned a series of public, scholarly panels and events highlighting current topics in food. Videos of the talks are available at the link above.
Voices from the Food Revolution: People Who Changed The Way Americans Eat
An oral history project of 43 interviews conducted by Judith Weinraub. The audio is at the bottom of each interviewee's page.
Early American Cookbooks
Early American Cookbooks is a carefully curated collection of 1450 cookbooks published in the United States between 1800 and 1920. All of the titles in the collection are in the public domain and are available in full-text on the HathiTrust Digital Library. It was created by Gioia Stevens, Special Collections Cataloger at NYU Division of Libraries.
Marion Nestle Papers
Marion Nestle is a nutritionist, consumer activist, and academic who is one of the pioneers of the food movement. Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, which she chaired from 1988-2003. Her research examines scientific and socioeconomic influences on food choice, obesity, and food safety, emphasizing the role of food marketing.
Mapping the NYU Libraries Cookbooks Collection
Mapping the NYU Libraries Cookbooks Collection is a metadata visualization project showing 27,187 cookbooks mapped by place of publication. This project focuses on place of publication because it offers new information to food studies researchers
Food Studies Ephemera Collection
The Food Studies Ephemera Collection consists of pamphlets, recipe booklets, and other food- and cookery-related ephemera.

Archived Blogs

Food Blogs are an important part of contemporary food culture; they are standard readership for any Food Studies scholar. Although much of their news is skewed toward media and restaurants, they sometimes offer critical and analytic content. To ensure perpetual access, NYU captures and archives a variety of food-related blogs. A sample of blogs include:

Food Politics (by Marion Nestle)
Curious Cook (with Harold McGee)

These blogs go back to December 2011.

See the list of archived Food Blogs.

Other Special Collections and Archives

Smithsonian Food History Project
The Smithsonian's Food History Project focuses on food, agriculture, and beverage history in the United States. Collections come in various formats, from objects, to archival materials, to oral histories and videos.
Cookbook and Home Economics Collection
The digitized Cookbook and Home Economics Collection includes books from the Young Research Library Department of Special Collections at UCLA, The Bancroft Library at The University of California, Berkeley, and the Prelinger Library. These fascinating books take us back to an America in the early decades of the 20th century covering topics on cookery, textiles, family and home, budgeting, domestic sciences, and many other delightful topics.
Community and Charity Cookbooks
The Charity and community organization cookbooks are digitized and made available by the University of Michigan via HathiTrust.
Feeding America
Feeding America is an online collection of some of the most important and influential American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century. The digital archive includes 76 cookbooks from the Michigan State University Libraries' collection.
Little Cookbooks
Michigan State University's Little Cookbooks contains thousands of food and cookery related publications produced primarily by companies in the United States from the late nineteenth century up to the present. The collection provides a rich resource to study the evolution and history of advertising, food products, individual companies, technology, food preparation, and food production.
Ad Access
An image database from Duke University of over 7,000 U.S. and Canadian advertisements covering Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, World War II propaganda, and food - dated between 1911 and 1955.
Organic Roots Collection
The USDA's National Agricultural Library Organic Roots Collection aims to harness the information from our agrarian roots to ensure the sustainability and longevity of today’s small farms. It is an electronic collection of historic USDA documents published before 1942 (before synthetic chemicals became widely used) that contain information and data that is still pertinent for today's agriculture. The documents in the collection were specifically chosen for their relevance to today’s sustainable and organic farmers. This collection is intended to be a resource for farmers, researchers, and anyone else who may be interested in sustainable agriculture.
Cornell's Food, Wine & Culinary History
Cornell's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections offers research materials on the history of wine, food, agriculture, cookery, gastronomy, and restaurants. These are not digitized collections.

Menus Collections

What's on the menu? (NYPL)
With approximately 45,000 menus dating from the 1840s to the present, The New York Public Library’s restaurant menu collection is one of the largest in the world, used by historians, chefs, novelists and everyday food enthusiasts. These have been digitized so that we can access specific information about dishes, prices, the organization of meals, and all the stories these things tell us about the history of food and culture.
Culinary Institute of America's Menu Collection
The CIA’s special collection of 30,000 historical menus illustrates the history of dining in America and abroad, with menus from all of the states and over 80 countries, as well as ships, railroads and airlines.
National Restaurant Association's Menu Collection (JWU)
This collection was donated to Johnson & Wales University Library by the National Restaurant Association. Many of the menus featured were part of their menu design contests in the 1980s and 1990s.
Transportation Library Menu Collection (NU)
Northwestern University's Transportation Library menu collection comprises over 400 menus from 54 national and international airline carriers, cruise ships, and railroad companies, dating from 1929 to the present, with a particular focus on mid-to-late 20th century air transportation. The menus preserve a glimpse of the golden age of air travel in which fine dining, fine wines, and thoughtful design created a passenger experience of mystique and allure.
Menus: The Art of Dining (UNLV)
The University of Nevada, Las Vegas has a digital collection of menus from Henry J. Bohn, editor and publisher of Hotel World magazine, an early hotel and restaurant trade publication. Bohn collected both American and Canadian menus from 1870-1930.
Menus Collection (UW)
The University of Washington's menu collection represents menus, placemats, and other graphic materials from many of the Puget Sound area's most famous restaurants and dining facilities in the years between 1889 and 2003.
Cornell University's Menu Collection
A collection of over 10,000 menus, providing evidence of the manners, mores, and food habits of earlier times. The core of the collection was assembled by Oscar Tschirky, a maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City, from 1893 to 1943.
Harley J. Spiller Collection
The University of Toronto's Harley J. Spiller collection comprises some 10,000 menus, business cards, restaurant matchbooks, and a variety of objects related to Chinese cookery. The majority of the menus document Chinese cuisine found in restaurants located predominantly in New York state. Menus can, however, be found from across the United States, Canada, and other international locations.