Sheila Himmel

Sheila Himmel has won a James Beard Award for food writing, an Associated Press News Executives Council award for feature writing, and awards from the Association of Food Journalists for restaurant criticism. She attended the Graduate School of Journalism at UC-Berkeley, and worked for 26 years at the San Jose Mercury News, from copy-editor to editor of the Sunday opinion section to managing editor of the Sunday magazine. Her last 10 years at the paper were as a food writer and restaurant critic. In 2000 she wrote an investigative story that came to be known as "Vealgate," uncovering a prominent San Jose restaurant's longtime fraud, substituting pork for veal. ("Vealgate" was featured on NPR's "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me." ) In 2003 she wrote a story with her 19-year-old daughter about Lisa's eating disorders. Their book, Hungry: A Mother and Daughter Battle Anorexia, was published by Penguin in August 2009. A freelance writer in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sheila is curator of San Francisco Eats, an exhibit and database at the San Francisco Public Library. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and USA Today.