Women food scientists

Elsie Widdowson CH CBE FRS (21 October 1906 – 14 June 2000), was a British dietitian and nutritionist. She and Dr Robert McCance, a pediatrician, physiologist, biochemist, and nutritionist, were responsible for overseeing the government-mandated addition of vitamins to food and wartime rationing in Britain during World War II.

Barbara McClintock (June 16, 1902 – September 2, 1992) was an American scientist and cytogeneticist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927. There she started her career as the leader in the development of maize cytogenetics, the focus of her research for the rest of her life. From the late 1920s, McClintock studied chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize. She developed the technique for visualizing maize chromosomes and used microscopic analysis to demonstrate many fundamental genetic ideas. One of those ideas was the notion of genetic recombination by crossing-over during meiosis—a mechanism by which chromosomes exchange information. She produced the first genetic map for maize, linking regions of the chromosome to physical traits. She demonstrated the role of the telomere and centromere, regions of the chromosome that are important in the conservation of genetic information. She was recognized as among the best in the field, awarded prestigious fellowships, and elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944.

Maureen Lee Storey, Ph.D., is the president and CEO of the Alliance for Potato Research and Education (APRE), founded in 2010. APRE is dedicated to expanding and translating research into science-based policy and education initiatives on the role of all forms of the potato in a well-balanced diet. Regarding potatoes, she has said, "This industry has recognized that we need the science in order to fight back on the goodness, the deliciousness, the nutritiousness of the potato regardless of the form that it is being prepared in."

Louise Slade was a food scientist known for her work on food polymer science. She was an elected fellow of the Institute of Food Technologists and of the American Association of Cereal Chemists.

Mary MacArthur, was a Canadian scientist who performed research on the principles of the successful dehydration and freezing of fresh foods. She performed this research while employed by the federal government of Canada's Department of Agriculture at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, Ontario. In 1952 she was the first woman to be named as Fellow of the Agricultural Institute of Canada (FAIC) for her contributions to Canadian agriculture.

Professor Ailsa A. Welch is a professor of nutritional epidemiology at Norwich Medical School (part of the University of East Anglia) in the UK. Her research focuses on the impact of human nutrition on health, disease and aging. She is listed as a notable scientist in Thomson Reuters' Highly Cited Researchers 2014, ranking her among the top 1% most cited scientists.

Jan Low (born 1955) is an American food scientist. She is known for her work helping develop the biofortified orange-fleshed sweet potato at the CGIAR International Potato Center, for which she was a co-recipient of the 2016 World Food Prize alongside Maria Andrade, Robert Mwanga, and Howarth Bouis.

Pamela Hardt-English is an American food scientist and computer scientist who created Resource One, a "people's computing center" in 1972 at Project One, a "technological commune" in San Francisco, California.

Ruth Khasaya Oniang’o (born November 9, 1946) is a Kenyan Professor of Nutrition and a former member of Parliament. She created Rural Outreach Africa to empower smallholders to address malnutrition, she oversees her country's nutrition policy and she is on the board of the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International.

Carey Dunlap Miller (1895–1985) was an American food scientist.