Psyche Wililams-Forson is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park and an affiliate faculty member of the Women's Studies and African American Studies departments and the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity. She authored the award-winning book (American Folklore Society), Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (2006). Her new research explores the role of the value market as a immediate site of food acquisition and a project on class, consumption, and citizenship among African Americans by examining domestic interiors from the late nineteenth-century to the early twentieth-century.

Carole Counihan is Professor of Anthropology at Millersville University and editor-in-chief of Food and Foodways journal. She is author of The Anthropology of Food and Body (1999), Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence (2004), and A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado (2009). She is editor of Food in the USA (2002) and, with Penny Van Esterik, of Food and Culture (1997, 2008). She has been a visiting professor at Boston University, the University of Cagliari, the University of Gastronomic Sciences (Italy), and the University of Malta. Her new research focuses on food activism in Italy.