Nancy Harmon Jenkins, a nationally recognized expert on olive oil and Mediterranean cuisines, divides her time between an olive farm in Tuscany and a home on the coast of Maine. She has lived, worked, traveled, cooked, and raised a family throughout the Mediterranean, living at various times in Spain, France, Lebanon, Cyprus, and Italy.
Jenkins is a well-known food writer with a long list of books to her credit. Her latest is Virgin Territory: Exploring the World of Olive Oil, published this year by Houghton Mifflin, but she has been writing about food since 1975 when she was a Rome correspondent for the International Herald-Tribune in Paris. Her next book, The Four Seasons of Pasta written with her daughter Chef Sara Jenkins, will be published in October 2015.
Her first cookbook, The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, was published in 1993. Since then she has written six other cookbooks as well as a great number of magazine and newspaper articles. She has been a staff writer for the New York Times food section, publications director of the American Institute of Wine & Food, and a founding director of Oldways Preservation Trust. Nancy is also a regular contributor to ZesterDaily.com.
In addition to writing, she created and directs AmorOlio, a six-day seminar and program that takes place each year in different parts of the olive oil world (in autumn 2015, AmorOlio will be in Sicily); she has also worked with the media division at the Culinary Institute of America developing videos about culture and cuisine in many regions of the Mediterranean.
