Gourmet's Ruth Reichl Serves Food on a Bed of Humanism in Yale Lectures

Gourmet editor and celebrated writer Ruth Reichl will deliver the 2005 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center (WHC), 53 Wall Street, October 26–27.

Reichl is an award-winning prolific author whose writings on food continue the distinguished traditions of M.F.K. Fisher and A.J. Liebling. In addition to her many other accomplishments, she served as restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times and food editor for the New York Times before becoming editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine in 1999. She has been honored with four James Beard Awards for excellence in journalism and the culinary arts and has received numerous accolades for her moving and critically acclaimed memoirs, “Tender at the Bone,” “Comfort Me with Apples” and, most recently, “Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise.” The three volumes chronicle her life-story with disarming candor.

The theme of Reichl’s Tanner Lectures is “Why Food Matters.” The first lecture, “Cooking Lessons: A Short History of Eating,” will address the social and political implications of food in a historical context; the second, “Stories We Tell: The Subtext of the Table,” will touch on the autobiographical theme, showing how food has been crucial to her personal development throughout her life. Both lectures, which are free and open to the public, take place at 5 p.m. in the WHC auditorium.

The appointment as Tanner Lecturer is a recognition for outstanding achievement in the humanities. The Tanner Lectures were established by the American scholar, industrialist and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner for the purpose of contributing to the moral and intellectual life of mankind.

The most recent Tanner Lecturers are neurologist and author Oliver Sacks M.D., historian Garry Wills and novelist Salman Rushdie.

Two coordinated events, a film festival based on the theme of food (October 22–23) and a panel discussion on autobiography with several Yale masters of the genre (October 25), will be described in a separate press release.

For more information, please contact manana.sikic@yale.edu.