Jane and Michael Stern

Jane Grossman Stern and Michael Stern (both born 1946) are American writers who specialize in books about travel, food, and popular culture. They are best known for their Roadfood books, website, and magazine columns, in which they find road food restaurants serving classic American regional specialties and review them. Starting their hunt for regional American food in the early 1970s they were the first food writers to recognize that this food was as worthy to report as was the haute cuisine of other nations.

Since the Sterns began documenting regional American food in the 1970s many other writers and television personalities have used their pioneering work as inspiration. In addition to their early work with regional American food the Stern's book Square Meals (Knopf 1985) put "comfort foods" like mac and cheese, meatloaf, and mashed potatoes on the culinary map. Square Meals did an audacious reverse spin on the tricked up and precious nouvelle cuisine that was beloved by food critics at that time.

Jane Grossman grew up in New York City, where she attended the Walden School and received a BFA in graphic design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Michael Stern grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1968. They met as graduate students in art at Yale University and their first date, at Pepe's Pizza in New Haven, had a food focus. The couple married in 1970. The following year, Jane earned an MFA in painting from Yale and Michael changed schools and earned an MFA from Columbia University in film. Neither found work in their fields of study.

After a short stint of producing documentaries for WNBC, a teaching job at Hunter College and another at Wesleyan University they began work on the book that eventually became the first Roadfood. The book was conceived as a book on "truck-stop dining," funded with an advance from a publisher. The Sterns set out in their car to travel through the United States and eat up to 12 meals daily at diners and local cafes. The resulting first edition of Roadfood was published in 1977; the most recent edition was released in 2017.

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