Carole M. Counihan is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she earned a BA in history cum laude from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts. Counihan's research centers on food, culture, gender, and identity in the United States and Italy. She conducted fieldwork in Bosa (Sardinia) and Florence (Tuscany), Italy during the 1970s and 1980s, and published "Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence" in 2004. She explored gender and culture in her book "The Anthropology of Food and Body" (Routledge, 1999). She is editor of "Food in the USA: A Reader" (2002); with Penny Van Esterik of "Food and Culture: A Reader" (1997, 2008, 2013, 2018); with Psyche Williams-Forson of "Taking Food Public" (2012); with Valeria Siniscalchi of "Food Activism" (2014): and with Susanne Højlund of "Making Taste Public" (2018). She conducted fieldwork from 1996-2006 in a Hispanic community in Colorado, collecting food-centered life histories from nineteen women. Based on this research and supported by a 2005-2006 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, she authored "A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado" (2009). She is editor of the scholarly journal "Food and Foodways." Counihan conducted ethnographic research on food activism in Cagliari, Sardinia between 2011-2015 and published in 2019 "Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia" about diverse efforts to change the food system.
