Becky Selengut is an author, instructor, podcaster, and chef based in Seattle. Her books include: Misunderstood Vegetables, How to Taste, Shroom, Good Fish, and Not One Shrine. Selengut is the co-host of the local foods podcast Field to Fork. When Selengut is not the chef aboard the M/V Thea Foss, she forages, makes a mean Manhattan, and shares her life with her wife April Pogue, their lovably loony pointer mix Izzy and their semi-feral gray floof Jinx.

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Selengut thought she wanted to be a doctor but changed course while taking pre-med classes to embark on a field in the culinary arts. She still gets to wear white, hold knives and cut things up (and was spared the huge student loans). After graduating at the top of her class from the Seattle Culinary Academy, she put in many years at some of the Seattle area's most well-known restaurants. Her longest stint was three years at the internationally acclaimed Herbfarm Restaurant working under her mentor, Chef Jerry Traunfeld. Since 2004, her career has moved beyond the traditional restaurant into everything but the restaurant, taking on such diverse jobs as cheffing on a yacht tour of the Inside Passage to teaching cooking to immigrants and refugees and finding them work in the food industry. In 2004, she started her private chef and culinary education business and in January 2006 she founded the educational website Seasonal Cornucopia. She is a former adjunct professor in the culinary/nutrition department at Bastyr University and a former instructor for PCC Natural Markets (2004-2017) and The Pantry (2011-2021).

Selengut co-hosted a NSFW comedy podcast with Matthew Amster-Burton called Look Inside This Book Club where they read, reviewed and riffed on only the free "look inside" preview of best-selling (but not necessarily good) romance novels.

Selengut co-authored The Washington Local and Seasonal Cookbook in 2008, and wrote Good Fish (a sustainable seafood cookbook) in 2011. Good Fish was an IACP book award finalist, one of Seattle Magazine's best cookbooks of 2011 and an NPR-notable read (Good Fish was rereleased, updated and expanded in 2018). Shroom: Mind-Bendingly Good Recipes for Cultivated and Wild Mushrooms (Andrews McMeel Press 2014) was her third book and was named one of the top 10 cookbooks of the year by NPR. She is the co-author of the humor and travel memoir Not One Shrine: Two Food Writers Devour Tokyo . How to Taste: The Curious Cooks Handbook to Seasoning and Balance, From Umami to Acid and Beyond (Sasquatch Press, 2018) is her fifth book. Misunderstood Vegetables (Countryman Press, 2024) was favorably reviewed by Florence Fabricant in the New York Times and has received widespread coverage in national publications. Selengut also writes freelance articles and develops recipes for local and national publications and websites (Serious Eats, Eating Well, Marx Foods, etc...) and has given numerous talks and keynotes on sustainability, cooking, foraging and taste/flavor theory.

Becky Selengut is a cookbook author, culinary instructor, and private chef based in Seattle.

Represented by Sharon Bowers
Folio Literary Management