Emily Contois

Emily Contois

Writer

Emily Contois is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at The University of Tulsa. She is the author of Diners, Dudes & Diets: How Gender & Power Collide in Food Media & Culture (2020) and co-editor of Food Instagram: Identity, Influence & Negotiation (2022). She completed her PhD in American Studies at Brown University and holds an MA in American Studies from Brown, an MPH focused in Public Health Nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MLA in Gastronomy from Boston University.

Culture

Microwave Cookbooks: Technology, Convenience & Dining Alone

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The microwave is celebrating its 50th birthday this year, but even that can’t redeem the innumerable copies of microwave cookbooks you’ll find discarded at thrift shops. Recently, while scanning the musty smelling shelves for vintage copies from Julia Child and James Beard, I finally gave into my curiosity and purchased a small corpus of five… Read more →

Health and Wellness

Real Men & Real Food: The Cultural Politics of Male Weight Loss

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When Weight Watchers first launched an online program “customized just for guys” in 2007, one of their advertisements proclaimed, “Real men don’t diet.” This counterintuitive declaration evoked the questions that animate my current research. I’m analyzing how the consumer culture constructs notions of “real men” through depictions of food and the body, particularly during moments… Read more →

Bites of History

Helen Atwater: The First Lady of American Nutrition You’ve Never Heard Of

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When I was researching the history of American food guides, I came across one of the earliest resources, “How to Select Foods,” published in 1917 by Hunt and Atwater. At first I assumed that this Atwater was Wilbur Olin Atwater, the man so often heralded as “The Father of American Nutrition.” I was wrong. It… Read more →