Harold James McGee (born October 3, 1951) is an American author who writes about the chemistry and history of food science and cooking.

He went on to do a Ph.D. on the romantic poetry of John Keats supervised by Harold Bloom at Yale University, graduating in 1978.

He has also written for Nature,[10][11][12][13][14][15] Health, The New York Times, the World Book Encyclopedia, The Art of Eating, Food & Wine, Fine Cooking, and Physics Today.

[16] He has lectured on kitchen chemistry at cooking schools, universities, the Oxford Symposia on Food and Cookery, the Denver Natural History Museum, and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

McGee's scientific approach to cooking has been embraced and popularized by chefs and authors such as David Chang[23] and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.