John McQuaid

Journalist & Author

John McQuaid is a journalist and author of Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat (Scribner, 2015), on the biology, history, and cultures of flavor. He has written on science and the environment for publications including Smithsonian and Scientific American, and won many national journalism awards, including sharing Pulitzer Prizes for a series on global fisheries collapses and for coverage of Hurricane Katrina while at the New Orleans Times-Picayune (after writing a series on hurricane risk that anticipated the disaster). He is the co-author of Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms (Little, Brown & Co., 2006). He was a Wilson Center Fellow reporting on artificial intelligence and surveillance in 2020-21, and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism, studying the intersection of AI and the news media.

Participant In:

A ≠ B → Taste & Discernment

March 23rd, 2024 at 2:30PM

Past Event

Where life begins to distinguish the edible, the nutritious, the appealing, from the insipid, the poisonous, and the disgusting; this is where taste and discernment come into being. From a bag of Cheetos to Michelin 3-star fare we cover a lot of ground, yet financial means alone fails to account fully for the popularity of… read more »