New Books In Food

In Devoured: How What We Eat Defines Who We Are (William Morrow Books, 2017), food writer and Culinary Institute of America program director Sophie Egan takes readers on an eye-opening journey through the American food psyche, examining the connections between the values that define our national character—work, freedom, and progress—and our eating habits, the good and the bad. Egan explores why these values make for such an unstable, and often unhealthy, food culture and, paradoxically, why they also make Americas cuisine so great. Egan raises a host of intriguing questions: Why does McDonalds have 107 items on its menu? Why are breakfast sandwiches, protein bars, and gluten-free anything so popular? Will bland, soulless meal replacements like Soylent revolutionize our definition of a meal? The search for answers takes her across the culinary landscape, from the prioritization of convenience over health to the unintended consequences of perks like free meals for employees; from the American obses

The “ownership” of Southern food is a divisive cultural issue, reflective of the ongoing struggle for racial justice in America. Michael Twitty shares with us that struggle in The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South (Harper Collins: Amistad 2017). He brings to life the unsung heroes of American food history, the black cooks in slavery and freedom who created an innovative and syncretic cuisine. Like them, he builds upon the South’s diverse botanical ecosystems, a continent of indigenous nations, and the long roots of memory, extending back across the middle passage to West Africa. For Twitty, this is also a tale of family. He shares his ancestors experiences through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents. He travels from abandoned cotton plantations to black-owned organic farms, from synagogues in Georgia to vodun rituals in New Orleans. As Twitty takes us on this journey, he shows how food and memory together can heal. He rem

Diana Kennedy, Nothing Fancy: Recipes and Recollections of Soul-Satisfying Food (University of Texas Press, 2016). Don’t be misled by this title. Its author, Diana Kennedy, has written nine cookbooks and spent forty years researching, preserving, and protecting the cuisines of Mexico. She teaches its regional cooking techniques in her kitchen at the Diana Kennedy Center, Quinta Diana, in Michoacan, Mexico, as well internationally through cooking tours as an ambassador of authentic Mexican cuisine. Her expertise grew through decades of driving the length and width of Mexico in her truck, learning cooking techniques and ingredients from local cooks in towns and villages. Along the way, she kept notes on the locales, growing seasons, and uses of all the herbs. She even learned how to deal with the occasional scorpion (there’s a spray). The word redoubtable certainly applies. Kennedy is English; she spent the war years in the English Forestry Corps in Wales and Wiltshire, to which she attributes the a

Napoleon famously stated that an army marches on its stomach. Of no less importance is the food that keeps exploration moving, whether polar, desert, or on pilgrimage. Demet Guzey‘s Food on Foot: A History of Eating on Trails and in the Wild (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) is a history of staying alive on the edible, barely edible, and inedible. It is also a history of progress made on several fronts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: nutrition, medical discoveries, early feminism. In the dawning days of exploration, the notion of the exploration-friendly foods was nonexistent. However, some groups had already devised travel-worthy food. Exploration owes a huge debt to the North American Cree Indians for their food, pemmican. This mixture of fat and dried meat was indestructible. Every polar expedition carried it. In the standard explorer kit (ship biscuits, chocolate, sugar, tea, powdered milk, pemmican) it was the most durable. It was not delicious. In fact, it was detested, but it w

A heritage food in France, and a high-priced obscurity in the United States. But in both countries, foie gras, the specially fattened liver of a duck or goose, has the power to stir a remarkable array of emotions and produce heated debates. Comparing the French and American producers and consumers of this controversial food item, Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food (Princeton University Press, 2016) offers readers a broad mix of these perspectives under a clear, rich analysis. Assistant Professor Michaela DeSoucey takes readers to the farms in southwest France, where ducks are force-fed with tubes placed down their throats, and into the high-end restaurants in Chicago, where foie gras was temporarily banned in the 2000s and made an object of fascination. Her aim is to show how we could use what she calls gastropolitics, or the conflicts over food and culinary practices that get branded as social problems and lie at the intersection of social movements, cultural markets, and government regulat

In The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World Jordan D. Rosenblum explores how cultures critique and defend their religious food practices. In particular he focuses on how ancient Jews defended the kosher laws, or kashrut, and how ancient Greek, Romans, and early Christians critiqued these practices. As the kosher laws are first encountered in the Hebrew Bible, this study is rooted in ancient biblical interpretation. Rosenblum explores how commentators in antiquity understood, applied, altered, innovated upon, and contemporized biblical dietary regulations. He shows that these differing interpretations do not exist in a vacuum; rather, they are informed by a variety of motives, including theological, moral, political, social, and financial considerations. In analyzing these ancient conversations about culture and cuisine, he dissects three rhetorical strategies deployed when justifying various interpretations of ancient Jewish dietary regulations: reason, revelation, and allegory. Finally, Rosenblum reflect

Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England (Duquesne University Press, 2016) is a collection of essays that offers new dimensions for reading and understanding Shakespeare’s plays. Responding to a rich scholarship on Shakespeare, the authors shift the centers and margins of literary discourse to illuminate aspects that were previously dismissed as insignificant. In Culinary Shakespeare, food is theorized as a territory where multiple dimensions intersect and overlap: aesthetic, social, national, political, etc. As the authors of the introduction section state, “This culinary Shakespearean moment, by crystalizing question about knowledge, power, ethics, colonialism, labor, and desire, introduces us to the grave importance of food in the early modern period and to the dangers of ignoring eating as an ontological and epistemological phenomenon” (1). A part of everyday life, food reflects the individuals engagements with the world and others, revealing intricacies of co

Food was central to the lives of people in England during the Middle Ages in ways different than it is today. As Christopher Woolgar reveals in his book The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500 (Yale University Press, 2016), it had a cultural significance that permeated nearly aspect of their society. Using a vast range of legal, archaeological, and literary sources, he explains what the English ate during the late Middle Ages, how they ate it, and what their food meant to them. The choices of food available to people typically varied based on wealth and locale, helping to define the class and status of their consumers within English society. Yet Woolgar shows that food often served as a form of connection as well, with the experience of eating within the context of elaborate settings such as celebratory feasts was an important experience of bonding within and between various groups. Together these various choices and settings gave foods and their consumption a particular social and cultural significance tha

My grandmother, who’s now ninety-eight, lived most of her life in a little town in Southwestern Ohio called Waynesville. The town has reinvented itself in the last few years as a destination for antiquers wiling to pay top-dollar for what she might call junk, but when she was there the town was the small center of a lot of small family farms, including her own. In her years there, she helped run the farm, started a dry-cleaning business, drove the school bus, served as an EMT and worked in the sheriff’s office. She was one of the folks everyone knew. On Sundays, she cooked biscuits for the prisoners in the local penitentiary. For me, growing up, she was just grandma. I didn’t realize the richness of her character until years later, with age and distance, maybe even a little wisdom. In her latest poetry collection, Amy Wright takes this kind of realization and transforms it into powerful, moving, and often times hilarious art. She was raised in the Appalachian region of Southwest Virginia, an

Here in the U.S. we’ve just celebrated the Fourth of July, with its parades, fireworks, and, of course, cook-outs. If you’re like me, the smell of a grilling burger can make you salivate from across the yard. I feel like Pavlov’s dog whenever it happens, and that includes the seven or so years I was a vegetarian. I’d like to say I react this way only on these idyllic occasions summer holidays, family barbecues, campfire weenie roasts under a star-filled sky. But the truth is I can be walking to my car in July across a 95-degree asphalt parking and smell the exhaust fan from a Burger King a block away: suddenly I need one of those flame-broiled burgers. Every time this happens I ask myself, “Why? Why is this smell such a trigger?” That’s exactly the question that drives Marta Zaraska‘s new book, Meathooked: The History and Science of our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat (Basic Books, 2016). As a science writer whose work has been featured in The Washington Po

The California farmlands have long served as a popular symbol of America’s natural abundance and endless opportunity. Yet, from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart to Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, many novels, plays, movies, and songs have dramatized the brutality and hardships of working in the California fields. Little scholarship has focused on what these cultural productions tell us about who belongs in America, and in what ways they are allowed to belong. In The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl (University of Washington Press, 2016), Sarah Wald analyzes this legacy and its consequences by examining the paradoxical representations of California farmers and farmworkers from the Dust Bowl migration to present-day movements for food justice and immigrant rights. Analyzing fiction, nonfiction, news coverage, activist literature, memoirs, and more, Wald gives us a new way of thinki

Resistance to the industrial food system has, over the past decades, led to the rise of alternative food movements. Debate about genetically modified food, sugar consumption, fast food and the obesity crisis (to name a few) is pervasive. Most often, this focuses on individual consumer choice. Garrett M.Broad argues, however, for the importance of community level initiative. He maintains that the vote with your fork movement obscures the structural foundation of the corporate food system. The alternative food movements, as a whole, fail to recognize that the inequities in the food system are connected to histories of racial and economic discrimination. Broad’s book More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change (University of California Press, 2016) examines the work of community-based food justice groups operating in South Los Angeles, like Community Services Unlimited (CSU). Founded as an arm of the South California Black Panther Party, CSU organizes at a grassroots level to provide community a

In Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food (Columbia University Press, 2016), Roger Horowitz, director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library, looks at points of intersection between Jewish law and modern industrial foodways during the 20th century. In revealing the hidden kosher histories of products such as Coke, Jell-O and kosher meat, Horowitz highlights controversies over rabbinic authority and consumption in American Jewish history.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Darjeeling tea, like other members of its artisanal tribe serrano peppers, Champagne, and grana padano,exists through a combination of intimate understanding of natural forces, intensive labor, and lifelong dedication. The result is a small output of unparalleled quality. The town where Darjeeling tea grows, in West Bengal, India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, is a setting of immense beauty, complicated history, and environmental fragility. Even transporting this precious tea to Kolkata, where it is traded 400 miles away down on the Indian plains, is subject to the whims of climate: monsoons and narrow mountain roads, often washed out by mudslides. Does a tea warrant such efforts? In Darjeeling (Bloomsbury, 2015), Jeff Koehler explains why the answer is “yes.” There is nothing simple about Darjeeling, this single estate agricultural product. He weaves a web of stories: how this non-native plant came to India, how a tea garden functions, what the role of tea taster is (there’s lots of sp

In her new book, Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production (University of California Press, 2015), Sarah Bowen presents the challenges and politics associated with the establishment of Denominations of Origin (DOs) for tequila and mezcal. On one hand, establishing these DOs protects a crucial part of Mexico’s national identity as well as the quality of these fermented beverages. On the other hand, small farmers, jimadores, and other agricultural field workers who have been producing tequila and mezcal for generations now find themselves struggling because they are either outside the currently defined terroir physical boundaries, or their products do not fall within the currently defined production standards. Without the ability to market their goods using the terms “tequila” or “mezcal”, these small business owners and workers are losing opportunities to the largest companies who have industrialized the market. Bowen takes the reader through the history of

New York City’s growth, from colonial outpost to the center of the gastronomic world is artfully crafted by Cindy R. Lobel, Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center, in her tome Urban Appetites: Food & Culture in Nineteenth Century New York (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Lobel examines the evolution of the metropolis as gastronomic capital through the lens of public markets, grocers, restaurants, dining rooms and kitchens as they rose and fell in popularity through the nineteenth century. Lobel’s attention to poignant historical moments, such as the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of middle/leisure class culturalism demonstrate the importance New York City has, and continues to play on gastronomic evolution. Not short on the politicizing of the market industry in the early to mid-nineteenth century, we are taken on the journey through the gritty dairy and meatpacking mills of the city, leading us into the bright light of reform, and healthier

I love this book, am using its recipes, and was thrilled to interview Dr. Koufman, an iconoclast who appears poised to torpedo a terribly wasteful and dangerous arm of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex. As the advertising copy for Dr. Koufman’s Acid Reflux Diet (Katalitix, 2015) notes: “Combining 35 years of work in the field of acid reflux, including scientific research and the treatment of thousands of patients at the Voice Institute of New York, Dr. Jamie Koufman has identified the causes and the cures for this much-misunderstood health crisis.” The opening section of the book explains the science of why this diet works, and the contains recipes. Our talk covered science along with the doctor’s personal biography.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James A. Benn‘s new book is a history of tea as a religious and cultural commodity in China before it became a global commodity in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the Tang and Song dynasties (with brief extensions earlier and later), Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) demonstrates that a “shift to drinking tea” in China “brought with it a total reorientation of Chinese culture.” Benn pays careful attention to the challenges and opportunities offered by the sources of China’s tea history, and each chapter offers a critical introduction to and analysis of some of those sources while also narrating a key moment and theme in the history of tea. (Because of this wonderful focus on the sources of tea historiography – including some great partial and whole translations of key documents of all sorts – the book makes not only a great read, but also a very useful pedagogical resource!) The coverage of Tea in China ranges

In the late nineteenth century, Jewish immigrants inspired by Zionism began to settle in Palestine. Their goal was not only to establish a politically sovereign state, but also to create a new, modern, Hebrew nation. With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the Zionist movement realized its political goal. It then sought to acculturate the multitude of Jewish immigrant groups in the new state into a unified national culture. Yael Raviv highlights the role of food and cuisine in the construction of the Israeli nation. Raviv’s book, Falafel Nation: Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel (University of Nebraska Press, 2015) examines how national ideology impacted cuisine, and vice versa, during different periods of Jewish settlement in Palestine and Israel. Early settlers, inspired by socialist ideology and dedicated to agricultural work, viewed food as a necessity and treated culinary pleasure as a feature of bourgeois culture to be shunned. Working the land, and later buying

The new edited volume by Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, Edda Fields-Black and Dagmar Schafer is a wonderfully interdisciplinary global history of rice, rooted in specific local cases, that spans 15 chapters written by specialists in the histories of Africa, the Americas, and several regions of Asia. Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (Cambridge University Press, 2015) creates a conversation among regional and disciplinary modes of studying and narrating rice histories that have often been conducted in isolation. Specifically, the project brings together two large-scale debates that emerge from very different rice historiographies: the “Black Rice” and “agricultural involution” debates frame the inquiry here, and as you listen to my conversation with Francesca and Dagmar (the two co-editors with whom I spoke for the podcast) you’ll hear them offer an overview of the nature and stakes of both of those areas of inquiry. In the course of the conversation we also had a chance to