Harold McGee

Harold McGee studied at California Institute of Technology and Yale University. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is food science. Employment is recorded with Yale University. Works named in the authority record are On Food and Cooking. Distinctions recorded are James T. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry.

• Name — Harold McGee • Birth Name — Harold James McGee • Born — 3 October 1951 • Fields — * Cooking • Chemistry • Food science • Kitchen science • Molecular gastronomy • Education — * California Institute of Technology (BS) • Yale University (PhD) • Thesis Title — Keats and the Progress of Taste • Thesis Url — https: search.library.yale.edu/catalog/9931833793408651 • Thesis Year — 1978 • Doctoral Advisor — Harold Bloom • Known for — On Food and Cooking • Children — 2

McGee was born on 3 October 1951 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Louise (Hanney) and Charles Gilbert McGee, and raised in Elmhurst, Illinois. He was educated at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), initially studying astronomy, but graduating with a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in Literature in 1973. He went on to complete a PhD on the romantic poetry of John Keats supervised by Harold Bloom at Yale University, graduating in 1978.

Before becoming a food science writer, McGee was a literature and writing instructor at Yale. He has also written for Nature, Health, The New York Times, the World Book Encyclopedia, The Art of Eating, Food & Wine, Fine Cooking, and Physics Today. He has lectured on kitchen chemistry at cooking schools, universities, the Oxford Symposia on Food and Cookery, the Denver Natural History Museum, and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. For a brief time he wrote a regular column for the New York Times, The Curious Cook, which examined, and often debunked, conventional kitchen wisdom. His book on smells was published in 2020. With Dave Arnold and Nils Norén, McGee teaches a three-day class, The Harold McGee Lecture Series, at the French Culinary Institute in New York City.

McGee married his college girlfriend Sharon Rugel Long on July 7, 1979; they divorced in 2004. They had two children, son John (born 1986) and daughter Florence (born 1988).