The Las Vegas Valley’s food history starts over 10,000 years ago, when the area’s first inhabitants lived a life of transhumance—the practice of moving to wherever resources are abundant. Join Nevada Humanities for a special online talk by Sarah Lohman, author of Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods, on the history of food and food culture in Las Vegas.
At this online talk, we’ll begin our journey through time with the edible native plants that sustained early life and are still present in our landscape. We’ll talk about the surprisingly luxurious foods available in early Las Vegas before moving into our casino era—including buffets and shrimp cocktail—and we’ll discover why slot machines used images of fruit. Then, in modern Vegas, we’ll explore how the Strip became a destination for high-end dining, how migrant and immigrant groups have shaped our local food scene, and what’s next for our valley’s food.
This is a free online event. Please note that this is a live webinar on Zoom. Registration and a Zoom account is required to join the event. Register here.
Sarah Lohman is a culinary historian and the author of the bestselling books Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods and Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine. She focuses on the history of food as a way to access the stories of diverse Americans. Endangered Eating was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was named one of the Best Books of 2023 by Amazon’s Editors, Food & Wine, and Adam Gopnik on the Milk Street podcast. It was a finalist for the Nach Waxman Prize for Food & Drink Scholarship and winner of the Ohioana Library Book Prize for Nonfiction. Lohman’s work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and NPR. Lohman has lectured across the country, from the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, DC, to The Neon Museum in Las Vegas. Lohman is based in Henderson.
This program is produced by Nevada Humanities as part of Around the Table—a series of free, public humanities-based programming in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Throughout 2026, Nevada Humanities invites Nevadans to share and celebrate their diverse food traditions through a series of public events and creative reflections that explore Nevada foodways, food traditions, and expressive cultures across the Silver State.
Around the Table is part of the national initiative By the People: Conversations Beyond 250, which is a series of community-driven programs created by humanities councils in collaboration with local partners, and was developed by the Federation of State Humanities Councils and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.
Nevada Humanities’ Around the Table programming is supported in part by the Federation of State Humanities Councils and Nevada Humanities’ generous donors.
