Eliza Barclay is the Science and Health Editor at Vox.com. Formerly, she was a reporter and editor of NPR's James Beard Award-winning food blog, The Salt. She has covered the environment, immigration, economic development, and international politics as a freelancer, and her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, FORTUNE, National Geographic News, The Lancet and several other publications. She holds a B.S. from the University of California-Berkeley and an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University.

Rachel Laudan is out to change how we think about food. All food is processed, all food is made by humans, and all the better for it. We are not limited by what nature provides. Instead we have seized the opportunity to tailor foods to our needs and desires.

She is author of the prize-winning and Empire: Cooking in World History (2013) and the much-reprinted long form essay "A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We Should Love New, Fast, Processed Food."

In a former career, Rachel was a recognized academic historian with a Ph.D from University College London. She specialized in the history of science and technology, holding appointments at American research universities and receiving grants from Fulbright, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The academic life gave her the opportunity to cook in England, France, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, as well as the United States, building on the practical knowledge of food she acquired in her childhood on a dairy and wheat farm in England. After fifteen years in Mexico, she and her husband now live in Austin, Texas.