America's 50 Most Powerful People In Food For 2011 Slideshow

We're confident that we've come up with a pretty good list. What do you think? Did we leave off anybody obvious, or give undue prominence to some food folk or not enough to others? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Using OpenTable, it is now possible to book tables online at more than 15,000 restaurants, all over America and in London; 175 million diners have taken advantage of the service since its inception in 1998. Some restaurateurs object to OpenTable's fees, but the site has had a real impact on the hospitality industry, not just changing the way people make restaurant reservations — no more long waits on hold, no more snooty reservationists — but also discouraging no-shows and enabling customization of the experience (want to arrive by limo? have flowers waiting at the table? invite friends?). More innovations are presumably to come.

Stewart, creator of a wildly successful food and entertaining brand, remains one of the most powerful women in the entertainment industry. Her first book, Entertaining, published in 1982, became the best-selling cookbook since Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In 1990, she launched her iconic Martha Stewart Living magazine. Twenty-two years later, her company, Martha Stewart Omnimedia, produces books, periodicals, TV shows, housewares, and more. She continues to be an arbiter of domestic fad and fashion, in and out of the kitchen.

From a Southern California convenience store, Trader Joe's has grown into a culinary-cultural phenomenon with offbeat semi-supermarkets in 31 states (and more to come), establishing standards of quality and purity for suppliers (they have a famous list of ingredients they won't accept in products they sell), inspiring other food retailers to be more creative, and in general — despite corporate secrecy policies that seem to have been borrowed from the NSA — injecting a dose of fun into market-going.

Viertel, who has been at the helm of Slow Food USA since 2008, was recently named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (he is 32) for his leadership of the American Slow Food movement. A grassroots initiative born in Italy, Slow Food aims to educate consumers, improve the way food products are produced and preserved, and celebrate the social and cultural experience of eating. Though Slow Food has only 19,000 members in America (and a mere 85,000 worldwide), it is highly visible and widely respected, and has stimulated culinary discourse nationwide.

Having virtually reinvented Japanese food for non-Japanese diners (his black cod with miso became one of the signal dishes of the 1990's in restaurants all over the country), Matsuhisa today oversees, with varying degrees of personal involvement, almost 30 restaurants in locations ranging from Aspen to Athens, Dallas to Dubai (with three each in New York, London, and the Los Angeles area) — and continues to help shape restaurant idioms around the world.

She no longer has her bully pulpits (The New York Times restaurant critic's slot or the editorship of the late Gourmet magazine), but Reichl remains a contender. She is among the most successful American authors of narrative food books and has recently become at editor-at-large for Random House (in which context she will presumably bring us good writing on food that is not her own). She has also inspired parody (cf. Ruth Bourdain and "The Tao of Ruth") — of which there is far too little in the food world — and, hey, she has more than 60,000 followers on Twitter.

Chef, restaurateur, cookbook author, media personality... As our most diversified and highly visible exponent of modern Italian — and/or Italian-American — cooking, Batali has built an empire of restaurants, with the help of business partners including Lidia and Joe Bastianich and Nancy Silverton, that have changed the way we think about everybody's favorite cuisine. Last year, his Del Posto in Manhattan won four stars from The New York Times, one of only seven restaurants — and the only Italian — to merit that distinction.

When she became president of this non-profit culinary institution in 2006, Ungaro's main job seemed to be damage control: After her predecessor was accused of embezzlement, the organization lost much of its credibility in the food world, despite the fact that it doles out what are the considered the highest honors in American food and wine, the James Beard Awards, sometimes called "the Academy Awards of food." Ungaro restored the foundation's reputation and has since worked on expanding the foundation's charitable works, like its scholarship program, as well as raising the profile of the Beard Awards — even moving the ceremony to New York City's Lincoln Center to give it added pizzazz.

Taste of Home has the largest circulation of any food magazine in the country — 3.2 million, nearly two-and-a-half times what its nearest competitors boast. In addition, its various cookbooks have sold over nine million copies, its website logs 2.3 million visitors a month, and its pop-up cooking schools attract more than 300,000 attendees annually. Sure these folks affect the way America cooks and eats.

A consummate trend-spotter, culinary popularizer, and developer of kitchen and dining room talent, Melman was the co-founder of, and for decades has been the animating spirit behind, the punningly named Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, based in Chicago but currently running more than 60 restaurants in seven states, from Arizona to Virginia. Along the way, Melman has raised the bar for "dinner houses" all over the U.S., and made theme restaurants into an art form.

As the Chairman and CEO of Kraft Foods, Irene Rosenfeld runs the company that produces such mainstream brands as Jell-O, Ritz Crackers, Philadelphia Cream Cheese, and Oscar Mayer hot dogs and bacon, not to mention cheese aplenty — products found in the pantries of nearly every home in America. Named #2 on Fortune's recent roster of "most powerful women" (just under Indra Nooyi), Rosenfeld most recently helped Kraft acquire Cadbury, making her company a $48-billion dollar leader in the packaged food business.

Since Sharples became head of Allrecipes.com, which sometimes ranks as the most popular recipe search site on the Web (thus far, we can't help adding), it has grown by at least 40 percent, and now boasts an average of six million unique users a month. With her new position as president of the Reader's Digest Association, which owns the site — she remains the head of Allrecipes.com, too — she'll presumably strive to ensure the continued success of the company's other food-related properties, including the Rachael Ray and Taste of Home empires.

We hope they won't mind being counted together as one, since their claim to fame — the Zagat guides — has been intensely collaborative. A couple of attorneys who met at Yale Law School, the Zagats had the inspiration, long before the Internet gave every casual diner a voice, to democratize restaurant criticism, collecting ratings based on consensus rather than basing them on individual critical opinion. Inclusion in the appropriate Zagat guide (and on its associated website) has become a badge of honor in the industry, and low ratings therein have deflated more than one food-biz ego and ultimately closed more than one restaurant door.   

Arturo Rodriguez first joined César Chavez's union in 1969 as a university student and has remained a dedicated employee ever since. Taking over as president when Chavez passed away, Rodriguez continues to carry out the UFW's mission of protecting immigrant workers from exploitation and improving their working conditions. Among his accomplishments have been gaining passage of a law requiring a neutral party to oversee the negotiation of farm workers' contracts, and the implementation of agreements guaranteeing farm workers' rights with the country's largest dairy producers and strawberry farms.

With a media empire worth $476 billion, Winfrey has made the careers of such celebrities as chefs Paula Deen and Art Smith and the health and diet gurus known as Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz. When she decided that an obscure tropical fruit call the açai berry was the next magic elixir, sales of açai-flavored products soared. When she warned viewers about the dangers of eating contaminated meat during the Mad Cow hysteria, she worried Texas cattlemen so much that they filed a multimillion-dollar defamation suit against her (they lost). Winfrey no longer has her famous daily talk show, but she will surely continue to help shape our food choices through her new Oprah Winfrey Network. 

Though only a small number of people every year have the privilege of dining at his flagship establishments, The French Laundry in Napa Valley and Per Se in New York City, each garlanded with three Michelin stars — and not all that many more can enjoy even his more modest establishments in California, New York, and Las Vegas — Keller has set the tone for fine dining all over the country. The precision with which he organizes and runs his kitchens has changed attitudes and raised standards; he is the serious American chef other chefs aspire to be.

Tyson is the world's second-largest meat processor and wholesaler and the second-largest food producing company in America; the second most generous corporate donor to hunger and disaster relief in the country (it gives both money and food); and the exclusive supplier of chicken to everyone from KFC, McDonald's, and Burger King to Leavenworth Penitentiary. Tyson is the king of chicken, in fact — the reason we eat it (some of us, at any rate) twice or even thrice a day. Just think what would happen if Tyson moved big-time into rabbit or maybe squirrel.

As the Founder and CEO of the national warehouse club Costco, Sinegal has made quality name-brand products accessible to a wide clientele through bulk purchasing — and selling. Its immense buying power — it is, among other things, the nation's number one retailer of wine — gives Costco the ability to influence supply and demand on a major scale.

Let's see... He invented upscale pizza and Asian fusion as we know it, introduced high-quality chef-branded items to the supermarket freezer case, rethought airport fast food, and reinvented the steakhouse. One of the first "celebrity chefs" (some argue that he was the first) in America, Puck has continually thought up new ways to feed us, and chances are he's not done yet.

A federal food safety veteran, Taylor seemed a wise choice in early 2009 to lead a government agency that has been under fire following scores of lethal food contamination cases and food recalls. The new two-part food safety legislation recently passed not only entrusts Taylor and his agency with carrying out new regulations, but also gives the FDA more authority to direct safety and recall policies and review the procedures of food-producing firms. The resulting prevention-based strategy is definitely a game-changer.

As Frank Bruni's successor at The New York Times, Sifton has stirred controversy galore with his often unexpected assessments of New York City eating places and his sometimes counterintuitive awarding of stars. However, his ability to stir the pot seems only to have increased his influence. An opinionated critic (should there be any other kind?) backed by the Gray Lady wields the power to make or break restaurants both new and established in the nation's largest city, which makes Sifton undeniably America's preeminent restaurant reviewer.

Think about how powerful food TV stars like Guy Fieri and Rachel Ray are; then consider the power of the person responsible for giving them their platforms. Johnson became president of the Food Network in 2004, and since 2010 has been in charge of all food content for FN owner Scripps Networks Interactive, including the recently-launched Cooking Channel and a family of websites. Having engineered the development of Iron Chef America, it's clear that Johnson understands the power of turning food into entertainment, and pretty likely that she'll keep finding new ways to do so.

Steve Jobs one of the most powerful people in food??? As far as we know, he can't cook. We don't know or care what he eats for breakfast or where he eats for dinner. In fact, Jobs has just gone on medical leave (he fought off pancreatic cancer in 2004) and is not currently in day-to-day charge of Apple. But with the introduction of the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the iPad, Jobs gave consumers a whole new way to learn about restaurants, recipes, and more. The devices lend public reviews on sites like Yelp! greater prominence than they've had, and apps like Urbanspoon, Epicurious, and Locavore are just the first course. The iPad is even being used as a menu or a wine list in some establishments. Jobs remains a contender, and we'd bet he hasn't finished changing the food game.

(Not that Hugh Grant, silly). As leader of this international biotechnology firm, which is the world's largest producer of genetically modified seeds — and the manufacturer of Roundup (the most commonly used agricultural pesticide around the world) and recombinant bovine growth hormone, among many other substances — Grant has a major influence on the food we eat, and will eat more of in the future, whether we like it or not.

The user. The reader. The consumer. The restaurant-goer. The home cook. The culinary professional. Websites and magazines report the trends; cookbooks sometimes ignite them or fan the flames. But you are ultimately the one who decides what to devour and what to leave aside. You're responsible, finally, for the quality and integrity of our raw materials, the style and accent of our restaurants, the success or failure of our food products and cuisines. You determine what we eat and how and sometimes why. And you're doing a great job. Keep it up.