James McWilliams

James McWilliams is a historian and writer based in Austin, Texas.  He is a prolific blogger on The Pitchfork, and the author of The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals; Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, and A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America. Links to his books can be found here.

His writing has also appeared in The Paris Review daily, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Washington Post, Slate, The American Scholar, Texas Monthly, The Atlantic, and The Texas Observer. He writes “The Things We Eat” column at Pacific Standard, and his literary non-fiction has appeared in The Millions, Quarterly Conversation, The New York Times Book Review, and The Hedgehog Review.

I reached out to James for an interview after reading his cover article "Loving Animals to Death" in The American Scholar, and in May 2015 he kindly offered to share an afternoon conversation in his work studio in Austin, Texas.

The Interview