Michael Batterberry; cofounded Food & Wine magazine

Mr. Batterberry, who in recent years had genteelly declined to disclose his age to the media — “Age entries should be reserved for wine lists,’’ he once told The New York Times — was 78.

A resident of Manhattan, he died from complications of cancer, said his wife, Ariane.

At his death, Mr. Batterberry was the editor in chief of Food Arts, an influential trade magazine for the restaurant and hotel industry. In May, he and his wife, the Food Arts publisher, were honored with the James Beard Foundation lifetime achievement award for their contributions.

The author of many books on food and other subjects, Mr. Batterberry was considered a chronicler and a shaper of late 20th-century food culture. He made clear that his interest lay not merely in food per se, but in food as a mirror of the collective national psyche.

For decades, Mr. Batterberry had a keen ear to the gastronomic tracks — and tracts — of the country. Food writers in search of the next new thing consulted him on topics as varied as sustainability, New York’s soup craze of the 1990s, and the recent renaissance of the Tiki restaurant.

“The pu pu platter has something very atavistic about it,’’ Mr. Batterberry told The Times in 2002. “Sitting around and grilling your food in the cave — there’s this sense of community.’’

Mr. Batterberry’s books include a highly regarded history of New York dining, “On the Town in New York, From 1776 to the Present,’’ written with his wife and originally published in 1973.

The book surveys Gotham gastronomy as social ritual, from the rich oyster stews of the 18th century to a memorable late 19th-century banquet in which diners sat on horseback and drank champagne from saddlebags (straws were provided) to the surge in Chinese takeout of the 1970s.

Michael Carver Batterberry was born in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England, to American parents. His father, a Procter & Gamble executive, was then establishing a branch in Britain.

Mr. Batterberry attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, but left before graduating to join his family in Venezuela, where his father was setting up Procter & Gamble’s Latin American operations.

As a young man, Mr. Batterberry was a painter; he also worked as a designer of interiors and much else, first in Venezuela and later in Rome, before returning to the United States in the mid-1950s.

Settling in New York, he worked as a freelance magazine journalist, writing often about food. In 1968, he married Ariane Ruskin, also a writer; after their marriage, the couple were contributing arts editors of Harper’s Bazaar.

In an America still largely uninterested in food, it took the Batterberrys seven years to secure start-up capital for Food & Wine. From its inception, the Batterberrys’ publication had two aims: first, to puncture what they saw as the truffled pomposity of Gourmet, the best-known food magazine of the period; and second, to appeal as much to men as to women, who had long been food magazines’ primary readership.

Adopting a livelier, less reverential tone than Gourmet, the new magazine, which soon began appearing monthly under its shorter, more familiar title, featured articles by prominent writers like George Plimpton and Wilfrid Sheed.

By 1980, The Times reported, Food & Wine had a monthly circulation of 250,000 readers, almost half of them men. That year, the Batterberrys sold the magazine to American Express Publishing. Last year, Food & Wine, which is still published by American Express, had a monthly circulation of more than 900,000.