Larry Olmsted is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author specializing in food and travel. His book Real Food, Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating & What You Can Do About It was a New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal Bestseller, as well as a Bestseller in Canada. The book includes an in-depth look at the glorious culinary traditions of the Emilia-Romagna region, which he uses as a model for the ideal way gourmet foodstuffs should be produced around the world.
Olmsted is the Great American Bites restaurant columnist for USA Today, the Great Life food, travel and lifestyle columnist for Forbes.com, and the Contributing Travel Editor for Cigar Aficionado magazine. He has written several thousand articles for major newspapers, magazines and their websites worldwide, including the Financial Times, Town & Country, Bon Appetit, Wall Street Journal, Outside, Men’s Health, Inc Magazine, Worth, the New York Daily News, Boston Globe, Denver Post, Playboy, Popular Science, Robb Report, Investor’s Business Daily, USAToday, Whisky Advocate, SeriousEats.com, Grub Street, the James Beard House Magazine, and dozens of others. He also writes frequently for in-flight magazines including American Airlines’ American Way and Celebrated Living and United’s Rhapsody and Hemispheres.
He was named one of the “10 Most Extreme U.S. Journalists,” by the Society of Professional Journalists and Travel Writer of the Year by the State of Mississippi. His Forbes.com column was named one of the World’s Top 100 Travel Sites, and his work has repeatedly been nominated for awards from both the Society of American Travel Writers and the North American Travel Journalists Association.
He is also a passionate cyclist and has written frequently on cycling tours, including his personal favorite, the combination of cycling and gastronomy. He has done several bike trips in Italy, including Tuscany, the Ligurian Coast, Piedmont and the Veneto. He has visited Parma, Bologna and Emilia-Romagna serval times, touring cheese dairies, ham producers, and taking cooking lessons.
Olmsted appears frequently on both television and radio as a travel and food expert, and he has been a guest judge on Gordon Ramsay’s Master Chef, spoken on culinary topics at South By Southwest, and has appeared repeatedly on the Dr. Oz Show, as well as CBS This Morning, ABC National News, Fox News, The Doctors, Inside Edition, CNBC, Wall Street Journal Live, and others. He lives in Vermont and teaches Creative Writing to graduate students as a visiting professor at Dartmouth College.
