New Books In Food

In Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Venus Bivar documents the development of agriculture in post-1944 France. Through the Second World War, France’s agriculture was comparatively backward next to those of its neighbors and geopolitical rivals. The French government undertook a major program of “modernization” to encourage the consolidation of landholdings, increases in the productivity of agricultural labor, and the application of capital-intensive technologies. In this it was successful—at least to the extent that France became one of the world’s leading exporters of agricultural goods. However, as Bivar documents, this transformation was not without considerable resistance: plenty of farmers were unable or unwilling to change, and the transformation of the French countryside generated intense debates about the nature of quality in food and agriculture, and its relationship to the people and land of France. Venus Bivar is A

In his first book Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press 2018), historian Benjamin Robert Siegel explores independent India’s attempts to feed itself between the 1940s and 1970s. Following the devastating Bengal famine of 1943, hunger and malnutrition remained key issues for India’s politicians, planners and citizens as a new nation sought to become self-sufficient in food production. Siegel’s book follows debates on land reform, technology and native diets to understand how the food question became an entry point into larger questions of citizenship, rights and welfare, debates that continue to loom large in the battle against agrarian distress and widespread food insecurity in present-day India. Madhuri Karak holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Insurgent Difference: An Ethnography of an Indian Resource Frontier” analyzed resource extraction and developm

The North American Free Trade Agreement—or NAFTA, as we Americans call it—is very much in the news of late, primarily because President Trump has decided to make good on what he famously called “the single worst trade deal” that the United States has ever approved. Trump’s assessment, like so many of his statements, isn’t quite the fact he’d like it to be. In study after study, economists have found that NAFTA’s impact on the U.S. economy ranges from relatively insignificant to mildly beneficial. So as the media follows the negotiations and the talking-heads talk, we once again find ourselves in the welter of not knowing what to believe. What we need—what it seems we always need of late—is someone we can trust to clarify the situation, someone who basis their analysis on facts, on research, on evidence, someone who cares not only about the truth of the matter, but who also has a moral compass we can admire. Today I interview Alyshia Gálvez, author of the new book Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the De

The café, long a European institution, was also a stimulant and a refuge for European Jewish culture. In cities across Europe, and later in Palestine, Israel, and the United States, Jewish journalists, poets, and thinkers gathered in cafés to socialize, argue, create, and simply to be in a space that welcomed them. In A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture (NYU Press, 2018), Shachar M. Pinsker, Professor of Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan, provides a rich and detailed portrait of café life in six major centers of Jewish life and thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. The book is a welcome addition to the study of European Jewish thought and culture, and to the understanding of the motive forces behind Jewish creativity during a period that included large-scale emancipation, immigration, and destruction in the Jewish world. David Gottlieb earned his PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago in 2018. He serves on the teaching faculty of Cla

The concept of “Southern hospitality” began to take form in the late eighteenth century and became especially associated with Virginia’s grand plantations. This state was home to many of our founding fathers. Their galas, balls, feasts, and entertainments became famous internationally as well as at home. On whose shoulders did this success rest? Not the mistress, whose role was mainly that of social director. The labor was slavery, the abundant and spectacular food was produced by enslaved cooks. Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine (University Press of Kentucky, 2017) is their story. Let’s start with where you can’t learn about them. Colonial Williamsburg and many plantation houses that are tourist destinations did their best in the early twentieth century to remove all traces of slavery. Field hand houses and kitchens alike were razed. Author Kelley Fanto Deetz is director of programming, education, and visitor engagement at Stratford Hall, the birthplace of Robert

Consumers today have a lot of choices. Whether in stores or online, people are inundated by an abundance of options for what to buy. At the same time, the products we consume seem to have more and more ingredients, additives, and chemicals in them that put our health at risk, and even their packaging could be harmful to us. How do consumers make sense of the choices they have to make to reduce their own and their family’s exposure to everyday toxics? In her engaging and insightful new book, Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics (University of California Press, 2018), sociologist Norah MacKendrick shows readers how today’s regulatory environment in the United States came about, how so much of what we consume remains unregulated, and how environmental health groups, food retail stores, and consumers have adjusted to these realities. In an age of deregulation, when individuals are forced to take on an increasing amount of risk with decreasing support from societal institution

Diet books are a multi-billion dollar industry and in Diet and the Disease of Civilization (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Adrienne Rose Bitar explores the narratives of those books. Bitar looks at the ways in which diet books not only present American’s with dieting advice, but also create cultural narratives about how we should live. Through the exploration of hundreds of diet books over the past century (and sometimes more), Bitar examines four popular diets, viewing them as narratives for American culture. She looks at the Paleo Diet, the Garden of Eden Diet, The Pacific Island Diet and the Detox Diet as larger myths about American culture and social movements. Bitar’s work explores how diet books call for a healthier society by urging readers to create what they believe to be a more perfect world. She argues that diet books criticize excess, addiction, alienation, and the disruption and disappearance of traditional lifeways showing readers how to return to conditions that create optimal health and a mo

Is life without coffee possible? Before you answer, first admit that you know almost nothing about the plant that you depend on to deliver you conscious into your day. You will learn from Jeff Koehler’s wide-ranging history Where the Wild Coffee Grows: The Untold Story of Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup (Bloomsbury, 2017) that the true origin of coffee is the cloud forest in the Kafa highlands of southwest Ethiopia, where it is a wild-growing, shade-loving tree. How Caffea arabica migrated first to the Arabian Peninsula (which accounts for its being incorrectly named arabica instead of ethiopica), then traveled further to Brazil, Indonesia, Kenya, and beyond, is a fascinating tale. This local plant becomes a global necessity; a tropical variety evolves into the cash crop of Central America, a monoculture of short plants crowded into straight rows. But on its home ground, coffee doesn’t play by these rules. Ethiopians consume 50 percent of their production domestically. “Coffee is our bre

Most everything Americans eat today comes out of cans. Some of it emerges from the iconic steel cylinders and much of the rest from the mammoth processed food empire the canning industry pioneered. Historian Anna Zeide, in Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry (University of California Press, 2018), carefully traces how canners convinced a nation of consumers who ate little but seasonal, fresh food to dare to crack open an opaque container of unknown origins and put its contents into their bodies. The feat required reshaping everything from federal regulatory practices and the makeup of academic faculties to the way food was advertised and the genetic composition of peas. When the canning industry has seen its hard-won reputation for providing a wholesome staple of American pantries come under attack from consumer groups and environmentalists starting in the 1960s and 70s, it has doubled down on its techniques of obfuscation, brand burnishing, and regulatory capture. F

Chef Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota and originally from Pine Ridge Reservation, has become one of the most important voices in the Indigenous foods revitalization movement. By researching in the archives, visiting elders, and experimenting with new uses for traditional ingredients and techniques, he has created a new vision for modern Native American cuisine. That vision is realized inThe Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Particularly making use of the traditional foods of Minnesotan tribal peoples, his company The Sioux Chef and the related non-profit North American Traditional Food Systems (NATIFS) have now released their first cookbook with the University of Minnesota Press, described as follows: “Sherman dispels outdated notions of Native American fare—no fry bread or Indian tacos here—and no European staples such as wheat flour, dairy products, sugar, and domestic pork and beef. The Sioux Chef’s healthful plates embrace venison and rabbit, r

Environmental historian Peter A. Kopp‘s book Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley (University of California Press, 2016) examines the fascinating history of a very special plant: the hop. From its prehistoric origins to its use in ancient and medieval beermaking, the hop was already an important crop in human agriculture when it first appeared on Colonial American shores, but when it made its way to Oregon’s lush Willamette Valley in the mid-19th century, it changed itself, the region, and the world forever. Savvy farmers, brewers and marketers soon turned the Willamette Valley into the “Hops Capital of the World,” and began to bend the entire world’s beer industry to their will. The hop somehow managed to survive and even flourish during Prohibition of the 1920s and 1930s, then almost fell victim to a disease that nearly destroyed the fields of aromatic plenty, but laboratory science and big business spelled a resurrection for the hardy h

I first really got to know Andrew Friedman after the death of our mutual friend, the great food writer Josh Ozersky. Andrew is a widely respected food writer who has collaborated on numerous landmark cookbooks and chef memoirs. Now his labor of love, Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New American Profession (Ecco Press, 2018), is making waves in the industry. Friedman charts a course starting in the mid 1960s and winding up in the early 1990s during which the profession of cheffing became what it is today: Respectable. But what a hot, heavy, up and down journey to get there! We conducted this interview on the front sun deck of a beautiful house in Silverlake, Los Angeles.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen (Rutgers University Press, 2015), Deborah Harris and Patti Giuffre trace the historical evolution of the profession, analyze more than two thousand examples of chef profiles and restaurant reviews, and conduct in-depth interviews with thirty-three women chefs. There are a number of recent books, magazines, and television programs that focused on the world of the professional chef. The media perpetually uses men as icons to market the hot and sexy field of being a chef in the professional kitchen. All the while, the work of women in the kitchen is discounted as a domestic role. This devaluation remains intact because of the exclusion of women in professional kitchens. This helps men maintain the legitimacy of the profession and perpetuates the appearance of home cooking as women’s domestic duty. Dr. Deborah A. Harris is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Texas State University. She focuses her teaching

In Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America (University of California Press, 2017), Mark Padoongpatt weaves together histories of food, empire, race, immigration, and Los Angeles in the second half of the twentieth century. Flavors of Empire explores how Thai food became hyper-visible in the United States, and yet Thai people have remained relatively invisible in American life. The story of Thai food in America begins with U.S. informal empire and culinary tourism in Thailand in the 1950s. Subsequent migration and settlement in LA spurred a Thai restaurant boom in the 1970s and 1980s. Padoongpatt investigates how these culinary contact zones helped shape Thai identity while remaining attentive to tensions over ethnicity, class, and gender in these spaces. The commercially driven, multicultural sensibility that made Thai cuisine popular among Angelenos had its limits, however, and Padoongpatt uses the clash over a weekend food festival at a Thai Buddhist temple to highlight conflicting modes of s

Beer has been a part of human civilization dating back to its beginnings. In summarizing the role it has played over the millennia, Johan Swinnen and Devin Briski’s book Beeronomics: How Beer Explains the World (Oxford University Press, 2017) reveals how the evolving roles the beverage has played exposes broader trends in the economy and society. As Briski explains in this podcast, while beer has been consumed since at least as early as Sumerian times, it wasn’t until the addition of hops as a preservative by brewers in Europe during the Middle Ages that beer became commercially viable. The development of the industry reflected more general trends, from the economies of scale that took place during the Industrial Revolution to the impact of television on small brewers in the United States in the mid-20th century. Today the industry is characterized both by a few multinational conglomerates and numerous craft brewers whose products provide a diverse counterpoint from the mass-produced lagers of the

On September 3, 1991, a fire erupted at the Imperial Foods factory in the small town of Hamlet, North Carolina. Twenty-five people died behind the factory’s locked doors that morning. Most of the victims were women, and about half of them were black. In The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives (The New Press, 2017), Temple University history professor Bryant Simon lays out the structural failures in the American and global economic systems which killed those workers. As economic growth slowed and inflation rose in the 1970s, many Americans grew disillusioned with the New Deal era promise of high wages and a robust regulatory state. Instead, Simon argues, Americans began to embrace a culture of cheap, ready-made, products and government policies which benefitted business owners, rather than employees. Food sat high atop the list of cheap items Americans craved, particularly chicken which, just before the Hamlet fire, surpassed beef as the meat most commonly consume

Andrew Smith‘s Terror and Terroir: The Winegrowers of the Languedoc and Modern France (Manchester University Press, 2016) is a political history of wine radicalism. Focused on the producers rather than the consumers of what Roland Barthes famously referred to as the nation’s “totem-drink,” Terror and Terroir examines wine politics and activisms in the Languedoc following the Second World War. In a first chapter, Smith looks closely at the memory and legacy of the “Grand Revolt of 1907,” a series of major protests that became a cornerstone of winegrower mythology in the post-45 period. Tracing the evolution of the winegrowers’ movement in the region from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s, the book looks at a variety of groups and organizations that sought to represent the interests of producers. After 1961, the Comite Regional d’Action Viticole (CRAV) dominated the scene. Over the course of the next two decades, the CRAV engaged in a variety of forms of direct acti

The psychology of eating disorders is poorly understood. Recent trends in research and treatment focus near-exclusively on behaviors around food and weight without sufficiently attending to their psychic undercurrents. Yet evidence shows that, when patients start putting words to the pain their eating disorders express, they start gaining freedom from these vexing patterns. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is well positioned to offer individuals such an opportunity, and the rationale for such an approach is well-described in Dr. Nina Savelle-Rocklin’s new book, Food for Thought: Perspectives on Eating Disorders (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). In her book, Dr. Nina–as she likes to be called–explains psychoanalysis’s unique perspective on eating problems: that they express relational needs and traumas when words cannot, and that treatment which focuses on “what’s eating at you” rather than “what you’re eating” offers deeper and longer-lasting healing. In o

Religion is big business nowadays. Within the global context of Muslim consumers Islamic commodities have become increasingly popular over the past few decades. Faegheh Shirazi, Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, explores the industrial and discursive production of halal products in Brand Islam: The Marketing and Commodification of Piety (University of Texas Press, 2016). In the wake of increased insecurity due to the rise of anti-Muslim sentiments and policy, Islamic-branded products have become an essential means for shaping and expressing social identities. The commodification of a religious orientation has produced a halal consumerism that pervades the branding and marketing logic of several industries. In our conversation we discuss the corporatization of the halal food industry, Islamic products and non-Muslim publics, the politics of slaughtering animals, Islamic branded toys, such as hijabi dolls, cosmetic and toiletry products, and the Muslim f

Food is a hot topic these days, and not just among the folks posting pictures of their dinner on Instagram. A growing number of scholars in many fields study food’s production, distribution, consumption, connection to geopolitics, environmental impact and history. Alice Weinreb‘s new book, Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany (Oxford University Press, 2017), is a most welcome contribution to this rapidly expanding and timely field of study. The global industrial food system grew out of late-nineteenth-century imperialism. In 1914, that system became a weapon of war. For combatant states, maintaining (and disrupting) food supply chains emerged as a major military-strategic objective. Today, all states are caught up in the global food system, but Germany in the twentieth-century provides a unique place to observe its fascinating and often distressing historical permutations, because the country’s history condenses so many modern forms of state (imperial, fascist, sociali