Andrea Strong

Location: Brooklyn, New York

Education: Lehigh University, Brooklyn Law School

Expertise: Food Policy, Food Justice, Social Impact, Food and Culture

Andrea is a freelance journalist covering the intersection of food, business, policy, and the law.
In addition to Serious Eats, her work appears in The New York Times, Food & Wine, New York Magazine, Heated, Eater, and more.
Her work has twice appeared in the Best Food Writing anthology.

Experience

Over the course of her career, Andrea Strong has been a lawyer, a restaurant manager, a waitress, a farm hand, a humanitarian activist, and for the two decades, a journalist. Known for her pioneering food blog, The Strong Buzz, Andrea now covers the intersection of food, business, policy, and the law. Her work appears in The New York Times, Food & Wine, New York Magazine, Heated, Eater, and more.

Andrea’s writing has twice been selected for the Best Food Writing anthology; in 2003 for her The New York Times story on sloppy Joes and again in 2016 for her Serious Eats story on mothers. Her most recent cookbook is Good for You: Bold Flavors with Benefits, written with chef Akhtar Nawab.

With two young children in public school in Brooklyn, Andrea began to focus on improving school food in 2015. She founded the Wellness Council at PS 261 in 2016, and in October of 2018, she founded the NYC Healthy School Food Alliance, an advocacy group pushing for holistic school food reform across New York City: nourishing, home-cooked meals in all public schools, nutrition and culinary education in every grade beginning in pre-K, vegetable gardens in every school, and increased time for children to eat their lunches.

Andrea lives with her husband and two kids in Brooklyn, where she spends a significant amount of time loading and unloading the dishwasher and wondering where she left her phone.

What's your desert island food?

"Cheese. No refrigeration needed and tastes great melted in the desert island sun. Would probably go well with the wine I will ferment from local island grapes and dough I will make from local island wheat. Now the question is, what will be my desert island book? That's even harder. Hmmm ... thoughts?"

What's your favorite condiment?

"Zhug. Spicy, green, fresh, and so good it could make cardboard appealing if applied generously."

About Serious Eats

Serious Eats, a Dotdash brand, is an award-winning food and drink website visited by over 7 million hungry readers every month. Our audience comes to us for rigorously tested recipes, science-driven cooking techniques, robust equipment reviews, and stories that offer cultural and historical context to the foods we love to eat.

Dotdash is among the largest and fastest growing publishers online, and has won over 50 awards in the last year alone, including Digiday's 2020 Publisher of the Year. Dotdash brands include Verywell, Investopedia, The Balance, The Spruce, Simply Recipes, Serious Eats, Byrdie, Brides, MyDomaine, Lifewire, TripSavvy, Liquor.com, and TreeHugger.