Emelyn Rude was an undergraduate at Harvard studying social studies and working in the basements of some of New York City’s finest restaurants when she noticed an irritating gap: there was no middle ground between rigorous academic papers and dumbed-down listicles. You could write a serious thesis about Roman honey cakes or you could churn out clickbait, but there was nowhere for the kind of deep, beautiful, slightly obsessive food storytelling she wanted to read. So in 2017, after a successful Kickstarter campaign under the working title Repast, she launched EATEN — the world’s first magazine devoted entirely to food history. She had already published Tastes Like Chicken: A History of America’s Favorite Bird, a book that tracked the chicken from ancient Egypt to the modern McNugget, and the magazine extended that same impulse: serious research delivered with wit and visual flair.
Three times a year, each issue takes a single theme — Party, Processed, Spicy, Salty, Vegetable, Extravagance — and fills it with the kind of stories that feel like discovering a forgotten wing of a museum. Stalin’s reign of dinner-party terror sits alongside Frida Kahlo’s legendary celebrations. An essay on Tibetan butter sculpture shares pages with the history of Tabasco sauce and the saga of sea turtle soup across centuries. Rude designs and edits the magazine herself, illustrating it with archival images sourced from public domain treasures like Wikimedia Commons and the Wellcome Trust, giving each issue the feel of a beautifully curated exhibition catalogue from another era.
The International Association of Culinary Professionals — the organisation co-founded by Julia Child and Jacques Pépin — named EATEN its Publication of the Year just eighteen months after launch, recognition that validated Rude’s conviction that food history could sustain a standalone magazine. Now based between Washington, D.C. and Cambridge, England, where she has been pursuing a PhD on historical fish stock collapses as a Gates Cambridge Scholar and National Geographic Explorer, Rude keeps her academic work deliberately separate from the magazine: one lets her be serious and technical, the other lets her be creative and strange. That duality is precisely what makes EATEN so compelling — a publication that takes food history with absolute seriousness while having enormous fun with the telling.
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