Five More Smithies Shaping Food Media

Julia McWilliams Child ’34 started a revolution in food media when she taught America to cook French food through a TV screen. Not long after, Florence Gertner Fabricant ’58 joined The New York Times and with her “nose for news” helped push food writing into food journalism. Smith’s illustrious lineage of food media professionals is still going strong today. Here are a few other Smithies making an impact right now.

Nat Belkov ’16

Major: Art: architecture and urbanism
House: Jordan
Current role: Design director at Eater; creative director and editor at New York–based nonprofit Send Chinatown Love
Known for: Creating eye-popping digital and print graphic designs that bring stories to life and this year becoming a two-time James Beard Award nominee in the process. They were nominated in the Best Cookbook–U.S. Foodways category for Made Here: Recipes & Reflections From New York City’s Asian Communities and the Innovative Visual Storytelling category for “The Eater College Dining Plan.”

Rebecca Firkser ’15

Major: Theatre
House: Friedman Complex
Current role: Freelance recipe developer, tester, food stylist, culinary producer, and food writer for publications including NYT Cooking, TASTE, The Strategist, Eater, Kitchn, Epicurious, and Bon Appetit. Her first cookbook, Galette, comes out in spring 2025. She also created the popular budget recipe column Nickel & Dine while working as an assigning editor at Food52 and has since turned it into a Substack newsletter.
Known for: Her ability to wear all the hats when it comes to food media.

Esther Mobley ’11

Major: English language and literature
House: Duckett
Current role: Senior wine critic for the San Francisco Chronicle
Known for: Bringing an extraordinary depth of reporting to the Chronicle’s wine coverage, earning the Feature Writer of the Year in 2019’s Louis Roederer International Wine Writers Awards. In 2018, she took first place in the California News Publishers Association Awards Print Contest for feature writing and first place for agricultural reporting.

Helen Rosner ’04

Major: Philosophy
House: Wesley
Current role: Staff writer at The New Yorker
Known for: Going viral on X for things like blow-drying chickens before roasting and creating a soup so delicious it’s on a first-name basis with half the country. (Hi, Roberto!) She has won two James Beard Awards so far—the Personal Essay award in 2016 and, this year, the Craig Claiborne Distinguished Criticism Award—and was nominated for the Beard Foundation’s M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award in 2018.

Amy Traverso ’93

Major: Psychology
House: Parsons
Current role: Senior food editor at Yankee magazine; co-host of Weekends With Yankee on PBS; food and dining contributor to WGBH Radio’s Under the Radar With Callie Crossley
Known for: Being the queen of apples, thanks to The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which won her the 2012 Best American Cookbook Award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP); it was also a finalist for IACP’s Julia Child First Book Award. It’s over 10 years old and still in print.