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American Gothic House pie maker, author Beth M. Howard, releases debut film ‘PIEOWA: A Piece of America’
Iowans demonstrate the power of pie in new documentary by the ‘Pie Lady’
Aug. 20, 2025 6:00 am, Updated: Aug. 21, 2025 3:58 pm
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A standard pie serves eight slices, but the power of pie is infinite.
Author, pie maker and now filmmaker Beth M. Howard knows that better than anyone.
“I think pie is a metaphor for so many things — kindness, sharing, generosity. It’s comforting, it cheers people up, it’s a good way to say thank you,” the Donnellson resident said.
Since the early 2000s, Howard has seen pie’s impact on the world, from California cafes and a Connecticut community to far-flung destinations. Now, the native Iowan’s debut documentary film is sampling a slice of life from residents of all flavors across the Hawkeye State.
“PIEOWA: A Piece of America,” winner of the Best Food Film award at the San Antonio Film Festival, is now playing at theaters across Iowa and other cities.
Get a slice:
“PIEOWA: A Piece of America” is now playing in theaters across Iowa.
The documentary film is scheduled to appear at FilmScene at the Ped Mall in Iowa City on Aug. 23 and 24 at 1:30 p.m. Additional show times may be added.
For a full, updated list of screening locations, visit theworldneedsmorepie.com/pieowa.
Making the crust
Her entry into baking was easy as pie.
Burned out by a job with an outdoor adventure website in the booming years of the dot-com bubble, Howard quit in the early 2000s and returned to Los Angeles, a former home of hers.
She visited a Malibu cafe known for its pies in 2001, where she learned they were in need of a pie baker. So, she offered to help fill in.
They asked what her qualifications were.
“I’m from Iowa,” she replied.
Soon, Howard realized it was a calling that hit the spot as she made countless pies by hand for a star-studded clientele — lemon meringue for Barbra Streisand, strawberry rhubarb for Dick Van Dyke and coconut cream for Steven Spielberg.
“It really restored me. I loved peeling apples for hours, chitchatting with people in the kitchen,” she said. “I wanted to do something with my hands and engage the senses.”
The job at Malibu Kitchen lasted only a year before she returned to writing. But by 2007, pie was becoming a recurring life theme. Her blog, “The World Needs More Pie,” started hosting her anecdotal essays about the dessert.
Two years later, her husband died unexpectedly of a ruptured aorta at age 43.
“After the grieving, the crying and the grief counseling, I turned back to the thing that restored my spirit once before. And that was pie,” she said in a 2014 TED Talk.
The craft resumed with a friend’s request for Thanksgiving desserts. As soon as she felt the dough between her fingers, she was hooked again.
Five months after her husband died, she ran into a TV producer friend who suggested they make a pie documentary. As part of the documentary, they decided to make 50 pies to hand out 400 free slices on the streets of Venice Beach, California.
Naturally, patrons had questions. Who was paying for the pie? Who was sponsoring the giveaway?
“Nobody,” Howard replied. “We’re just doing this to make the world a better place.”
That made them want to pay kindness forward.
“Here I was at the lowest point in my life, and I still had something left to give,” she said.
Pitchfork Pie Stand
The year following her husband’s death, she returned to Iowa.
From 2010 to 2014, Howard lived in the iconic American Gothic House in Eldon, where she spent summers making and selling pies to hungry tourists at the Pitchfork Pie Stand while teaching pie-making classes.
After a storied career in journalism and public relations, she turned her writing skills into several books.
“Making Piece: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Pie” debuted as her first book in 2012, followed by the cookbook “Ms. American Pie” in 2014, and “World Piece: A Pie Baker’s Global Quest for Peace, Love and Understanding” in 2022.
In between it all, she was taking on headline-worthy projects — all led by pie.
After the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, she organized 60 volunteers to bake 250 pies for the residents of Newtown, Connecticut. In 2015, she embarked on a round-the-world journey to teach pie classes and promote world peace in nine countries.
The next logical step
Howard said “PIEOWA,” her foray into film making, was the next logical progression after several books. Exhausted after a six-month tour to promote “World Piece,” she said “no more books.”
The author thrust herself into the two-year production, started in June 2023, with self-taught training on shooting and editing, and some help from more experienced editors and camera operators.
The film started with the idea of covering pie competitions at the Iowa State Fair and pies of RAGBRAI before it evolved into a statewide focus after Howard saw the word “Pieowa” on a RAYGUN postcard.
She had been pitching the idea for years, but producers were only interested in trending baking competitions or shows with celebrity hosts.
“I’m not going to let gatekeeping stop me from telling the stories of these people,” Howard said.
After telling pie stories through her lens, she wanted to tell it through the lens of others — a Vietnamese woman with an egg roll business, an Australian couple selling meat pies, a Black sweet potato pie bakery owner, high school girls learning how to run a pie shop, and Latino high school students sharing kindness on Thanksgiving.
Pie healed her after her burnout and her husband’s death. Now, distraught by the state of affairs in America, she looks to see if it can heal her again.
In addition to professing its curative powers, the nonpartisan pie in this film becomes a Trojan horse for discourse on delicate divisions that have left the country reeling.
“I hope people realize it’s important and it’s not that hard to give back. Maybe it’s not pie, maybe it’s something else you’re good at,” she said. “It’s in the giving that we find our happiness and where we can make the world a better place.”
“That’s where happiness lies.”
The power of pie
Howard first realized the meaning of pie even before she worked at that Malibu restaurant.
At business meetings in tech company boardrooms, the mere mention of pie would derail agendas as everyone lit up.
“Even if my pie wasn’t perfect, if I brought someone a homemade pie, they’d get really excited, and that was telling,” she said. “It strikes an emotional chord, I was always aware of that.”
And later, as pie became a full-time vocation at the Pitchfork Pie Stand, visitors would linger, stick around to peel apples and make friends.
“I think we’re longing for community, and people have been for a long time,” she said. “It’s working with your hands and building community. You’re creating something, you’re part of something.”
Both the making and sharing of pie is what she calls “medicinal.”
Her favorite pie is apple, “because it’s the only one I never get tired of.”
Iowa ties
Pie isn’t unique to Iowa or even America. But it is uniquely woven into the fabric of Iowa’s culture.
Howard said the tradition goes back to Iowa settlers, where farm wives delivered the treat to husbands working in the fields and church ladies made them for socials that were the backbone of rural communities.
“Iowa Boy” columnist Chuck Offenburger, featured in the film, speaks to the history of how these Iowans used pie to “make do,” no matter what they had in their cupboards.
“The show is bound to become a smash hit with Iowans,” he said.
His successor, former Des Moines Register columnist Kyle Munson, also had high praise for the film.
“It’s a film to remind us that what unites us is stronger than what divides us,” he said in his Main Street column.
Comments: Features reporter Elijah Decious can be reached at (319) 398-8340 or elijah.decious@thegazette.com.
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