[3] Her father had been a minor league pitcher before working for North American Aviation and later running an excavation business.
O'Neill earned a bachelor's degree from Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and then moved to Northampton, Massachusetts where she and eight other women opened a feminist cooperative restaurant.
In 1990, she moved to the New York Times, where she wrote a food column for their Sunday Magazine and Style section for a decade.
[2] During that time, she published a number of influential articles, including a widely read piece noting that salsa had displaced ketchup as the most popular condiment in the United States, and exploring the cultural implications of that fact.
[5] For many years, O'Neill lived in Rensselaerville, New York, where she hosted students for summer writing workshops[6] as part of a program she founded called CookNScribble.