“We Americans read about food to remember how it feels to be hungry,” writes Molly O’Neill in her newest book, “American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes,” a Library of America publication that hits books shelves in May. While the collection may, indeed, leave you longing for dinner, it will also remind you that food is a central theme in American writing and history. From the early European visitors to 21st-century food industry watchdog Michael Pollan, O’Neill comprehensively collects essays and excerpts that tell the story of a New World and its edible bounties. Naturally, she includes M.F.K. Fisher, A.J. Liebling, Julia Child, Laurie Colwin, Calvin Trillin and Ruth Reichl. But who knew about food in the literature of Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, H.L. Mencken, Gertrude Stein, William Styron, LeRoi Jones, Ralph Ellison, May Sarton and David Sedaris? Maine readers will also appreciate Kenneth Roberts’ piece on Down East fare, an expose on Toll House cookies by Maine food writer John Thorne, and other pieces on New England specialties such as maple syrup and clam bakes. Fans of O’Neill’s work in The New York Times, her cookbooks and last year’s memoir “Mostly True” know that she loves more than food. She loves books, too. It was only a matter of time until she combined the passions for an anthology that reads as well in the kitchen as in the library. I caught up with her at an airport, where she was waiting for a flight to her next assignment.

As a reader and a cook, I loved “American Food Writing.” You are so big-hearted in this book. Did you feel that yourself during this book?

I did. I was so taken with the generosity of the other writers. There’s something so optimistic about food writing. There’s always a second change, always another meal, always a hope. After reading thousands and thousands of pages in a systematic fashion, that’s what one sees. And it affected the way I wrote about it.

When you read, is there a part of your brain that is always alert to the subject of food?

It’s definitely a signal to me. Food gestures toward class, it gestures toward mood, it gestures toward appetite. What is the character really hungry for?

What can we learn about food from American literature?

Look at the trajectory beginning with the earliest explorers writing about food. They are so full of wonder about the bounty and the majesty and the glorious unknown of the new continent. It’s intimately connected with food. The writers often began with a Eurocentric way of looking at the New World, and were quickly seduced by it. As time goes on, we can see ideas of status, the importance of home, tradition, race and ethnic identification, a tremendous longing. We learn a lot of what it means to be human and to be American.

Does food writing today still encapsulate those same ideas?

The best of it does, yes.

It strikes me that everybody is a food writer these days.

A lot of people want to be food writers. There’s a hilarious notion that everybody is a critic, and everybody is a food writer. The truth is that there’s a small percentage that are really great, who truly understand what food means to human beings and who have worked really, really hard to have a hands-on knowledge and encyclopedic knowledge.

Can you name one?

I’d rather not. Thanks.

What are you working on now?

Now I’m working on a contemporary view of telling that story of American food by allowing people to talk about their recipes and traveling around the country gathering those recipes. I was in Stonington in January doing just that.

What can you tell me about food in Maine and where it fits into the American scene?

Maine is traditionally dependent on the fishing industry. Today, there’s some very interesting work going on with sustainable agriculture and growing for the four seasons. This anthology tells a lot about the story of New England cooking, and you can feel parts of Maine in it. Current Maine is far less quaint and much closer to the cutting edge than historic Maine is. It’s really wonderful to see the tension between what was and what will be. You see that in Maine. I feel it there more sharply than other parts of the country. I hope to be there for a month this summer.

What will you do here?

I hope to have a potluck and gather people’s recipes and oral histories.