Ashley Rose Young went from bored biology student to one of the foremost experts on street-food history in New Orleans
In How I Got My Job, folks from across the food and restaurant industry answer Eater’s questions about, well, how they got their job. Today’s installment: Ashley Rose Young.
Ashley Rose Young faced some skepticism when she began her career as a food historian. Other historians — and even some acquaintances — questioned the seriousness of her chosen subject. But Young was undeterred. Having written a dissertation on the history of street food in New Orleans, she knew how much food can reveal about a society, from how people make and spend their money to the class and racial inequities they face.
Now, Young has trained her eyes on U.S. food culture as historian for the American Food History Project at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) in Washington, D.C. Beyond her duties as a researcher and curator at the museum, she hosts a live cooking demonstration series exploring food histories with guest chefs ranging from professionals like Sean Sherman and Edouardo Jordan to home cooks. In the following interview, Young shares what it takes to become a food historian and some of her coolest experiences — including hanging out in Julia Child’s kitchen.
Eater: What does your job involve?
Ashley Rose Young: I’m a trained historian who researches and teaches the history of the United States through the lens of food: its culture, economy, politics, environmental impact, and more. Many trained historians go on to be professors at colleges and universities, but I chose a different path. I am what people call a “public historian.” I share my research through articles, museum exhibitions, programs, and special events created to engage and educate a broad public.
At NMAH, my position has several components. I’m part of the curatorial team that recently refreshed and re-opened the exhibition, Food: Transforming the American Table, which explores the cultural and technological changes that have shaped how and what we eat since 1950. We conducted fieldwork and archival research, recorded oral history interviews, and collected objects to provide new perspectives on the story of food in modern America.
I am also the historian and host for our live cooking demonstration series, Cooking Up History. Each month, we invite a special guest chef to the museum to prepare several dishes on stage while discussing the history and traditions behind its ingredients, culinary techniques, and enjoyment. I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with home cooks and professional chefs, including Edouardo Jordan, Mollie Katzen, Priya Krishna, Martin Yan, Carla Hall, Aarόn Sánchez, Maneet Chauhan, Sean Sherman, and Sheldon Simeon.
Additionally, I work with my colleagues to organize the Smithsonian Food History Weekend. Each year, we bring together culinary professionals, activists, scholars, and community members to explore an annual theme such as “Innovation on Your Plate,” “Many Flavors, One Nation,” and “Power Through Food.” Through live cooking demonstrations, round table discussions, and hands-on activities, we bring museum visitors together to understand the profound impact that food has on our everyday lives.
What did you originally want to do when you started your studies?
My interest in becoming a public historian is deeply rooted in my college experiences at Yale. When I started my freshman year, I wanted to be an evolutionary biologist. At that time, my dream was to work with professor Richard Prum and examine the cellular structure of bird feathers and how birds of paradise use ultraviolet feathers to attract potential mates. A strange start for a food historian, right?
It was not long into my freshman year that I found my history course on the American Revolution, taught by noted Hamilton scholar Joanne Freeman, to be way more engaging than the prerequisite courses required for the biology major (chemistry, calculus, organic chemistry, etc.). It took some time, but eventually I switched to the history major. After earning my bachelor’s degree, I immediately went on to graduate school at Duke where I earned my master’s degree and PhD in history.
What was your first job? What did it involve?
I cut my teeth on food entrepreneurship in my family’s business, McGinnis Sisters Special Food Stores [in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania]. The business, open for more than 70 years, was owned and operated by my mother, Sharon, and my two aunts, Bonnie and Noreen. It closed in 2018.
The business grew out of my grandfather’s post-World War II employment as a produce vendor selling oranges from a roadside cart. Street food vending provided him an economic toehold in the postwar period and he eventually opened a small corner grocery store with an in-house butcher shop (my grandfather Elwood’s kielbasa were much beloved by Pittsburghers). From there, he established several other grocery stores.
In the early ‘80s, my mother and aunts took over the business, expanding it, refining it, and making a name for themselves as local business leaders and entrepreneurs. I grew up watching these amazing women (often clad in ‘80s power suits) transform a small family grocery business into an industry leader in gourmet retailing.
As soon as I could hold a spoon, I was put to work spreading tomato sauce on our hand-tossed pizza crusts. Eventually, I graduated to the bakery department, where during the holiday rush, I would help my mother bake cookies, pies, dinner rolls, and loaves of bread in the middle of the night. From placing product orders with our vendors, to peeling more shrimp than I could ever count, to ringing out customers at the cash register, I worked in every department of our stores, and that was all before I started high school.
How did you first get interested in pursuing food history?
My role in the family business had a profound impact on my interest in food cultures, business history, and entrepreneurship. My father is a retired public high school history teacher who instilled in me a passion and insatiable curiosity for history. The long-term influence of my parents’ professional lives came to bear on my own life in college; specifically, when I took a course with professor Maria Trumpler called Women, Work, and Food. Given my mother’s business and my own experiences in the food industry, you can guess why I was interested in the course.
In 2009, freshly inspired by the possibility of critically studying food, I interned with Liz Williams at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans where I found my passion project: to research and write a history of New Orleans through its food culture and economy. And I did just that. My senior history thesis at Yale was a critical study of historic Creole cookbooks, specifically examining racial, gender, and ethnic stereotypes of the women who were cooks in private homes, catering businesses, and restaurants throughout the city in the 19th and 20th centuries.
I continued to pursue my focus on New Orleans as a graduate student in the history department at Duke, eventually writing my dissertation, “Nourishing Networks: the Public Culture of Food in Nineteenth Century America,” which uses New Orleans as a case study to examine the culture around selling and eating foods in city streets, plazas, and parks. In other words, I wrote a street-food history of the Big Easy, taking seriously the entrepreneurial spirit and tenacity of women, recent migrants, people of color, and other marginalized communities. I am now developing that dissertation into my first academic book.
What was the biggest challenge you faced in starting your career?
Although scholars have been writing about history through the lens of food for generations, there were still historians and members of the public who were skeptical of the seriousness and rigor of food history just 10 years ago.
When I told people that I was a food historian, their first response was usually to laugh with surprise and ask the follow-up question, “What does that mean?” And then many of them would try to guess what I researched before I had a chance to answer their first question: “Does that mean you look at what George Washington ate?” I would reply that some scholars do, in fact, pursue that topic. Then, I clarified that my research interests were in the life and labor of everyday people: market people, street-food vendors, and cooks.
I would tell them how food history enabled me to begin piecing together the experiences of people who are often overlooked in history — the people who fed entire cities and whose ingenuity, perseverance, and business acumen are regularly ignored in traditional histories. And my goal was, and is, to help people understand the importance of the street food economy historically as the primary means through which cities fed themselves well into the 19th century. Further, street food labor was a means through which many people provided for their families when their access to other jobs was limited, because of structural barriers tied to race, ethnicity, and gender.
What was the turning point that led you to where you are now?
In 2014, I was in the midst of graduate school when I received an email from my now colleague, Steve Velasquez. He asked me for recommendations of senior scholars who wrote about New Orleans through the lens of food. He had learned about my work through my research fellow profile page on the Southern Food and Beverage Museum website. I replied back with several suggestions, but a few weeks later, Steve asked me if I would be interested in coming to the National Museum of American History to speak about my research during their Food in the Garden series.
A few months later, my parents and I traveled to D.C. where chef David Guas and I spoke about New Orleans’ rich culinary history. Leading up to and during the event, I developed a sense of kinship with the Smithsonian food history team. Their approach to public programming was so creative and engaging, all while being grounded in serious academic research. I fell in love with their work, and became a close follower of the American Food History Project. A few years later, I interned for the project, and shortly thereafter was hired as its historian.
What were the most important skills that got you there?
The Smithsonian is a scholarly institution, and so my professional research and writing skills in history played a key role in my ability to thrive at the museum.
Perhaps surprising to some, another key component is my love of performance, which stems from my childhood obsession with musical theater. I was never the star in the high school musical, more like the overenthusiastic chorus member, but I learned how powerful art can be in communicating a message. In graduate school I applied skills of oration, movement, and improvisation in the classroom.
Now, as the host of our monthly cooking demonstration series, Cooking Up History, I bring that same skill set to our demonstration stage, drawing the audience into history through storytelling, lively conversation with guest chefs, and, on occasion, a song or two (ones that are historically relevant, of course). One of my favorite cooking demo moments was when Carla Hall taught the entire crowd her “mirepoix” song (a way to remember key ingredients in classical French cooking).
What’s your favorite part of your job?
I enjoy connecting with museum visitors and discovering a shared sense of curiosity and wonder about history.
What’s one of the coolest things you’ve gotten to do as a food historian?
Julia Child’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, kitchen is on display in the Food: Transforming the American Table exhibition at the museum. As a member of the exhibition team, I have the chance to step inside the kitchen to check the condition of the objects — the tools, equipment, furniture, books, and decorative pieces — that are placed exactly as they were when Julia left Cambridge in 2001.
The first time I crossed the threshold, a shiver ran down my spine (my body’s reaction to what can only be described as a religious experience of the culinary kind). To stand in the kitchen of such a talented, dedicated culinary educator, surrounded by the tools of her trade was inspiring.
How are you making change in your industry?
The museum field is always evolving, but it feels as though we are in a particularly transformative time as institutional priorities shift to creating museums that are even more inclusive, relevant, and accessible. As a member of the Smithsonian food history team, I am working with my colleagues to create opportunities for community leaders, chefs, and home cooks from incredibly diverse backgrounds to come to the museum and share their personal and community history through food.
In the past several years, our research has focused on the relationship between migration and food, mapping out the kaleidoscopic presence of diverse food cultures in the U.S. This year alone, our lineup of guest chefs included those originally from Eritrea, Iran, Syria, Vietnam, El Salvador, Ethiopia, China, and Peru, along with second-generation guest chefs from the Philippines, Armenia, India, and Mexico. It was an honor and privilege to work with such knowledgeable cooks, and I look forward to expanding the content and reach of our food history programming at the museum.
What advice would you give someone who wants your job?
I would advise people to build professional and personal relationships with historians they admire. I firmly believe in the power of mentorship, and encourage young scholars to seek out the advice and support of both their peers and senior scholars.
Amy McKeever is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC.
Photo courtesy of Ashley Rose Young.
Illustrations from the Noun Project: camera by Dhika Hernandita; covered dish by Made by Made; wine by Made by Made; lightbulb by Maxim Kulikov; hand writing by Pongsakorn.
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