In August, many food industry observers were surprised by the announcement that the 2020 and 2021 James Beard Awards had been effectively cancelled due to the pandemic. John Birdsall—a food writer, cookbook author, and former professional chef—fills the void with The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard (Norton, Oct. 6), a biography of the legendary “Dean of American Cookery.” In a starred review, our critic notes Birdsall’s impressive range: “The author’s well-written and knowledgeable text doesn’t scant Beard’s cooking and eating—indeed, luscious descriptions of memorable meals make this an appetite-arousing read—but its major secondary theme is the nature of gay life in midcentury America, where discretion was essential and discovery meant professional ruin and very likely jail.” I spoke with the author via Zoom; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about the genesis of the book.

In 2013, I wrote an essay called “America, Your Food Is So Gay,” which was kind of about my own experiences growing up with “gay uncles” in a California suburb. I also talked about the unacknowledged history of late-20^th-century American food being influenced by a trio of gay men who were in the closet [except] to a group of close friends and people in the industry: Beard, Craig Claiborne, and Richard Olney. I was fascinated by the fact that Beard was a household name, starting in the early 1950s and even beyond his death in 1985, and he really was larger than life: 300 pounds, 6-foot-3 or 6-foot-4 frame. He embodied the new American food movement that started after World War II.

Beard was an evangelist for specific varieties of food rather than a bland monoculture.

Yes, he railed against an American food system that for decades was owned by a few large food manufacturers. A lot of the cookbooks and recipes that were printed in newspapers were hidden behind a kind of fake, cheery female persona, somebody like Betty Crocker, who served as the symbol of the ultimate homemaker. But really, they were corporate recipes that were developed in test kitchens by crews of anonymous cooks. Beard’s early books were elegies for lost food, or food that Americans no longer had access to or were ignorant about—for example, all the varieties of fish available. He was really influenced by the early work of Rachel Carson, who wrote about New England fisheries a decade or more before Silent Spring. Beard wanted to interest Americans in the food that came from where they lived. He laid the groundwork for the system of farmers markets we see today as well as what we refer to as “farm-to-table” eating.

Do you think he was one of the primary forerunners to the sustainability movement that is so popular today?

He was. He was politically progressive. As a child traveling with his mother in California, he would see how fertile farmland was being paved over to create urban sprawl, and he was horrified by it; he felt the loss of farming could have taken place there. He was very aware of trying to champion a food system that was about small producers working in a particular region to grow amazing food.

Though he didn’t create the eponymous awards, how do you think he would have viewed them?

Well, he certainly had a robust ego, and even though he was not actively involved in the formation of the foundation or the awards, he would have been delighted that he came to be attached to the Oscars of the food world. Julia Child and some other prominent chefs, who wanted to memorialize James after he died, were the impetus for creating this foundation. I think he certainly would have loved to celebrate talent, especially younger chefs developing a voice and expressing themselves through food. However, he would have been against the idea of strict gatekeepers in the industry or food being associated with opulence and public displays of wealth. He wanted everybody to be able to access regional food and would have balked at any kind of suggestion of elitism in the food world.

Favorite meal, either at home or in a restaurant?

One of the great meals of my life was a salad, in 1984. I had no interest in food at the time, and a friend took me to a restaurant in San Francisco called Greens, which still exists. They had their own farm not far from the city. It may sound like a cliché, but I really had an epiphany; the salad was incredible. Just a bunch of small lettuces that had been picked that morning and rushed across the Golden Gate Bridge for lunch. I had never seen food like that. It was the first time that I really felt the connection between what I was eating and the place where it was grown, with the food as a kind of indivisible part of the landscape.

Eric Liebetrau is the nonfiction and managing editor.