Ruth Ellen (Lovrien) Church (November 9, 1909 — August 20, 1991) was an American food and wine journalist and book author.
[4] Church began her nearly 40-year career at the Chicago Tribune writing food columns under the byline Mary Meade.
An article in the June 4, 1948, Tribune headed “Thousands Ask Mary Meade’s Aid in Cooking,” notes: “A London woman who only gets 1 ounce of fat a week for cooking, boils the fat out of marrow bones so she can bake a coffee cake from a Mary Meade recipe….
[…] These are only a sample of the 6,753 mail and telephone requests for aid that poured into Mary Meade’s office in Tribune Tower in the first four months of this year.
[1] Church regularly reported from the wine-exporting regions of Europe and followed the beginnings of the fine wine industries in the Finger Lakes District of New York and in California, noting in 1963 that “wine growers from many European countries are coming to our shores in increasing numbers to see our vineyards and talk with our leading technologists.
[8] According to Kimberly Wilmot Voss, author of The Food Section: Newspaper Women and the Culinary Community (2014) and a journalism professor at the University of Central Florida, food pages have been a part of newspapers for more than a hundred years, but were often considered to “nothing more than a collection of casserole recipes and plugs for local grocery stores and other advertisers [….]
In addition, I write a daily and Sunday column, and supervise the publication of a number of supplements each year, notably the Thanksgiving and Christmas special sections.”[11] One important sign of development in food journalism was nationwide meetings of the editors and writers, especially the Newspaper Food Editors Conference, held annually beginning in 1944 and sponsored by the Newspaper Advertising Sales Association.
Church, in an industry magazine article titled What Richard Karp Said She Said and What She Actually Said wrote that she had interviewed each of the food editors Karp identified in his article and put it plainly: “The comments attributed to these ladies are unbelievable and in fact, untrue.”[15] Church died in the early morning of August 20, 1991 at the hands of a burglar and assailant.