Marian Burros, a journalist and cookbook author whose reporting for The New York Times and other newspapers gave new urgency to safety and health issues regarding food, died early Saturday in Bethesda, Md. She was 92.
Her son, Michael Burros, said she died in a hospital a few days after having a heart attack.
As the food editor of The Washington Star and The Washington Post in the 1970s, Ms. Burros made consumer protection and food safety topics a focus, expanding the boundaries of traditional women’s-page food writing to include not just recipes but also reporting on nutrition, truth in advertising and government policy.
“Marian was hugely ahead of her time in writing about the importance of food choices that not only improve health but also are sustainable and protect the environment,” Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, wrote in an email. “She was writing about the politics of food long before anyone dreamed that a food movement might exist.”
Her two-pronged approach — recipe writing combined with investigative reporting — carried over to Ms. Burros’s work for The Times, which hired her away from The Post in 1981. She might offer a recipe for, say, Martha Washington’s Great Cake, usually in the weekly De Gustibus column, which she took over in 1983, while reporting on a sodium labeling bill being debated in Congress or regulatory battles over the wording of federal dietary guidelines.
From her home base in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, she became a close observer of the White House kitchen, reporting on a succession of presidential chefs, inaugural meals and the dining styles of new administrations. She took a particular interest in the White House vegetable garden planted by Michelle Obama.
On the pleasure side of the equation, her plum torte was one of the most popular recipes in the history of The Times, reprinted every September from 1983 to 1989.
“It is beyond understanding why fans of the recipe do not just save it from year to year, instead of depending on its appearance in this column,” Ms. Burros wrote when the torte ended its run. “Yet one of this year’s requests read, ‘Isn’t it about time for the plum torte recipe?’”
Marian Burros was born Marian Jewel Fox on June 12, 1933, in Waterbury, Conn. Her father, Myron, a doctor, died when she was 5. Her mother, Dorothy (Derby) Fox, worked as a comptroller for several companies before, as a widow, marrying Charles Greenblatt, the owner of a grocery store chain, when Marian was 14.
Trips to France and Italy while she was in her teens exposed her to the pleasures of good food and the importance of good ingredients. “One taste of things such as duck with olives and beurre blanc turned me on,” she told The Times in 1981.
After she graduated from Wellesley College with an English degree in 1954, she and Lois Levine, a childhood friend, printed a collection of their home recipes on a mimeograph machine and sold it by hand to local bookstores and through Wellesley’s clubs in cities around the country. The collection was published by Collier Books in 1961 as “Elegant but Easy: A Cookbook for Hostesses” and eventually sold half a million copies. A revised and updated version, “The New Elegant but Easy Cookbook,” was published in 1998.
She collaborated with Ms. Levine on two more cookbooks, “Second Helpings” (1963) and “Freeze With Ease” (1965), before striking out on her own. Her many cookbooks included “The Summertime Cookbook: Elegant but Easy Dining Indoors and Out” (1972), “Pure and Simple: Delicious Recipes for Additive-Free Cooking” (1978), “Eating Well Is the Best Revenge” (1995) and “Cooking for Comfort” (2003).
In 1959 she married Donald Burros, an executive with White Conveyors, and moved to Bethesda, Md. He died in 1991. In addition to her son, from an earlier marriage that ended in divorce, she is survived by a daughter, Ann Burros-Silverstein, and two granddaughters.
In 1962, Ms. Burros began writing a food column for Maryland News, a suburban weekly. She went on to become food editor at The Washington Daily News and The Washington Star before The Washington Post hired her as its food editor in 1974. At about the same time, she began appearing as the host of a consumer affairs program on WRC, the local NBC television station.
After joining The Times, she served briefly as the restaurant critic after Mimi Sheraton left in 1983. Ms. Burros retired in 2008 but continued writing freelance articles.
Her reporting made her a leading voice in the rising consumer movement. She was known as a ruthless interrogator of food industry claims and a highly skeptical reader of ingredient labels.
“I saw so many things over a period of time that made me think that all was not right in the world of food,” she told Wellesley magazine in 2016. “There was a lot of fraud, a lot of cover-ups, and I wanted people to have all the facts so that they could make informed decisions.”
Ms. Burros alerted readers of The Post to the potential dangers of food dyes derived from coal tar, notably Red Dye No. 2, which the Food and Drug Administration banned in 1976. And, in a widely reprinted article, she revealed that Fresh Horizons Bread, marketed as a low-calorie alternative to regular bread, contained large amounts of powdered cellulose.
For The Times in 2005, she sent supposedly wild salmon from high-end local fish markets to a lab for testing, which showed that in nearly every case the fish was farmed.
This was her kind of story. “I’ve always been the kind of person who hates to be had,” she told The Times.
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