New Books In Food

My guest today is Anders M. Greene-Crow. Anders teaches at the Woods College of Advancing Studies and is a former Professor of English at Boston College. More recently, Anders has been preparing for the New York state bar exam, while also co-hosting the podcast “Say Podcast and Die!,” about R.L. Stine’s book series, Goosebumps. Today, we are discussing Anders’s first book, Austerity Measures: The Poetics of Food Insecurity in Early Modern English Literature (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). Austerity Measures is a brilliant intervention in how we read early modern poetry. Crow looks at a range of lyric poets and writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Thomas Tusser, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Anne Bradstreet, and Thomas Tryon. Austerity Measures argues that early modern poets used literary form to model solutions addressed to pressing concerns about food insecurity and food ethics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium

We all have the power to change the world through the products we buy. This simple premise has driven the growth of the conscious consumer movement for decades. Indeed, what started with a handful of niche sustainability brands has exploded into the mainstream with labels like Organic, Non-GMO, and Fair Trade Certified now adorning products in major retailers across the country. Yet the true promise of ethical sourcing and conscious consumerism has not been fully realized. Paul Rice has dedicated his career to helping consumers and businesses embrace the power they have to protect the environment and improve the lives of farmers and workers on the far side of our global supply chains.In Every Purchase Matters, Mr. Rice reveals the untold story of the Fair Trade movement and its significance for us all. Calling on the close relationships he cultivated over the last forty years with the pioneers of ethical sourcing—CEOs, activists, grassroots farmer leaders, and consumer advocates—Mr. Rice gives voice to the vi

In the Philippines, rice serves as a fundamental component of the diet, typically accompanying most meals as either white or brown rice. It is also a key ingredient in various snacks and desserts. Consequently, the Philippines ranks among the top countries globally in rice per capita consumption, alongside nations like China and India. However, the majority of rice produced are modern varieties, which are intended for mass consumption, and differs from traditional varieties. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Julie Yu-Wen Chen, a Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki, engages in a discussion with Floper Gershwin Manuel about traditional rice in the Philippines and the initiatives aimed at its preservation. Floper Gershwin Manuel is currently a PhD student at Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand taking up PhD in Sociology and Anthropology. His research interests include heritage and museum studies, rural and agricultural communities, cultural mapping, and gender and youth in

Gardens are often spaces of hope, expected to solve many problems in a city including food insecurity and climate resilience. In fact, there has been a historical trend of urban gardening gaining popularity during times of crisis. Gardens of Hope is the story of urban gardening in New Orleans in the decade after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. Yuki Kato highlights the impact urban gardens have on communities after disasters and the efforts of well-intended individuals envisioning alternative futures in the form of urban farming. Drawing on repeated interviews with residents who began cultivation projects in New Orleans between 2005 and 2015, Kato explains how good intentions and grit were not enough to implement or sustain urban gardeners’ visions for the post-disaster city’s future. Coining the term “prefigurative urbanism,” Kato illustrates how individuals tried to realize alternative ways of living and working in the city through pragmatism and innovation. Gardens of Hope asks key questions about wh

The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, a conflict that solidified SPAM’s place in global food culture. Created by Hormel Foods in 1937 to utilize surplus pork shoulder during the Great Depression, SPAM became an essential resource during the Second World War, and helped shape perceptions of American culture. SPAM: A Global History (Reaktion, 2025) by Dr. Kelly Spring explores SPAM’s complex history, from its inception to its resurgence during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting its enduring legacy in places like Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Okinawa and South Korea. It demonstrates how SPAM, a long-lasting and valuable protein, played a crucial role during wartime and continues to influence dietary practices worldwide. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Yo

Ghana’s twentieth century was one of dramatic political, economic, and environmental change. Sparked initially by the impositions of colonial rule, these transformations had significant, if rarely uniform, repercussions for the determinants of good and bad nutrition. All across this new and uneven polity, food production, domestic reproduction, gender relations, and food cultures underwent radical and rapid change. This volatile national history was matched only by the scientific instability of nutritional medicine during these same years. Moving between the dry Northern savannah, the mineral-rich and food-secure Southern rainforest, and the youthful, ever-expanding cities, John Nott's Between Feast and Famine: Food, Health, and the History of Ghana’s Long Twentieth-Century (UCL Press, 2025) is a comparative history of nutrition in Ghana since the end of the nineteenth century. At the heart of this story is an analysis of how an uneven capitalist transformation variously affected the lives of women and child

Michael Grunwald is a well renown journalist, who over the last thirty years has focused on public policy and national politics, with the last fifteen years having him zeroing in or climate-related issues. His current book, which he wrote this after six years of research. It was a passionate journey to understand, not to advocate for any position. Because of his reporting for such publications as the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and Politico magazine, Michael won the George Polk Award for national reporting and the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative reporting, as well as being honored with many other journalism honors. This is Michael’s third book, and like the previous two, his journalistic research and writing states the major challenges to the feeding the world’s population, but also provides a visionary path forward. This book not only delves into agriculture practices and consumers’ choices about food, but the focus is on the immense climate impact from poor land land-use decisions. Learn more

Michelle Phillipov's Digital Food TV: The Cultural Place of Food in a Digital Era (Routledge, 2023) explores the new theoretical and political questions raised by food TV’s digital transformation. Bringing together analyses of food media texts and platform infrastructures—from streaming and catch-up TV to YouTube and Facebook food videos—it shows how new textual conventions, algorithmic practices, and market logics have redrawn the boundaries of food TV and altered the cultural place of food, and food media, in a digital era. With case studies of new and rerun television and emerging online genres, Digital Food TV considers what food television means at the current moment—a time when on-screen digital content is rapidly proliferating and televisual platforms and technologies are undergoing significant change. This book will appeal to students and scholars of food studies, television studies, and digital media studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becomin

The nineteenth-century spread of democracy in Britain and its colonies coincided with an increase in alcohol consumption and in celebratory public dinners with rounds of toasts. British colonists raised their glasses to salute the Crown in rituals that asserted fraternal equality and political authority. Yet these ceremonies were reserved for gentlemen, leaving others – notably women and Indigenous people – on the political margins. Drink and Democracy: Alcohol and the Political Imaginary in Colonial Australia (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025) by Dr. Matthew Allen traces the development of democratic ideas in New South Wales through the history of public drinking and temperance. As the colony transformed from a convict autocracy to a liberal democracy, Dr. Allen argues, public drinking practices shaped the character of the emerging political order. The ritual of toasting was a symbolic display of restraint – drunkenness without loss of self-control – that embodied the claim to citizenship of white male

The Proof Is in the Dough: Rural Southern Women, Extension, and Making Money (University of Georgia Press, 2025) examines how rural white and African American women in Alabama and Florida used the Cooperative Extension Service's home demonstration programming between 1914 and 1929 as a means to earn extra income. Kathryn L. Beasley explores an area of rural women's history that has not been closely examined--that is, how rural American women involved with home demonstration used the skills they learned as a way to better themselves economically. Furthermore, Beasley traces how this extra income allowed these women to shape their own producing and consuming habits. While most home demonstration programming during the Progressive Era and 1920s focused on ways to save money--among other objectives--rural women in Alabama and Florida used different strategies to earn more money and gain some economic independence. Beasley's research shows how Alabama and Florida's rural women exercised their own determination an

Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2025) by Dr. L. Sasha Gora explores the complex relationships between wild plants and introduced animals, Indigenous foodways, and Canadian regulations. Blending food studies with environmental history, the book examines how cuisines reflect social and political issues related to cultural representation, restaurants, and food sovereignty. Dr. Gora chronicles the rise of Indigenous restaurants and their influence on Canadian food culture, engaging with questions about how shifts in appetite reflect broader shifts in imaginations of local environments and identities. Drawing on a diverse range of sources – from recipes and menus to artworks and television shows – the book discusses both historical and contemporary representations of Indigenous foodways and how they are changing amid the relocalization of food systems. Culinary Claims tells a new story of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance, emphasizing the critic

Barry Enderwick has been making, eating, and sharing historical sandwiches for years on social media @sandwichesofhistory and recently in live shows.  In Sandwiches of History: The Cookbook: All the Best (and Most Surprising) Things People Have Put Between Slices of Bread (Harvard Common Press, 2024) he painstakingly recreates dozens of recipes, staying faithful to the original sandwiches while also providing guidance on how to make each more amenable to a contemporary palate.  The recipes provide a window into the kinds of sandwiches that were common in prior eras and also highlight some of the ways that ingredients and techniques have changed. Ingredients like nasturtium leaves, watercress, and sardines may be surprising now but were common in the past. Other combinations speak to the new found prosperity and international interests of the post World War II years.   Above all, Barry's good humor and respect for both the sandwiches and the sandwich eaters make this book a compelling exploration of changin

Laura Lee Flanagan's Hardcore Vegetarian (Feral House, 2025) is a celebration of food and love for everyone! Hardcore Vegetarian is a journey into vegetarianism led by someone who fell into it inadvertently and is happily still learning as she goes. As a passionate home cook, Flanagan became what she describes as a "lazy vegetarian" while figuring out how to cook for herself and her vegetarian husband, musician Harley Flanagan. It is a narrative guide for the vegetarian-curious, for home cooks who want to explore vegetarianism and introduce plant-based recipes into their households. It explores the meaning of food in our lives, how we interact with it, and how our relationship to it evolves as over time. Included are short personal accounts, as Flanagan engages readers as she gently and humorously shares her own learning curve, along with road-tested, beloved, and delicious recipes. Hardcore Vegetarian brings readers along for the successes and sometimes failures as Flanagan overhauls her kitchen and recipes

Following a group of US Midwest farmers who purchased tracts of land in the tropical savanna of eastern Brazil, Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado (Cornell University Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Ofstehage investigates industrial farming in the modern developing world. Seeking adventure and profit, the transplanted farmers created what Dr. Ofstehage calls "flexible farms" that have severed connections with the basic units of agriculture: land, plants, and labor. But while the transnational farmers have destroyed these relationships, they cannot simply do as they please. Regardless of their nationality, race, and capital, they must contend with pests, workers, the Brazilian state, and the land itself. Welcome to Soylandia explores the frictions that define the new relationships of flexible farming—a paradigm that Dr. Ofstehage shows is ready to be reproduced elsewhere in Brazil and exported to the rest of the globe, including the United States. Through this compelling ethnograp

The cookbook genre is highly conventional with an orientation toward celebration and success. From glossy photographs to heartwarming stories and adjective-rich ingredient lists, the cookbook tradition primes readers for pleasure. Yet the overarching narrative of the region is often one of pain, loss, privation, exploitation, poverty, and suffering of various kinds. While some cookbook writers go to great lengths to avoid reminding readers of this painful past, others invoke that pain as a marker of southern authenticity. Still others use stories of southern suffering as an opportunity to make space for reconciliation, reparation, or apology for past wrongs. In Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks (UP of Mississippi, 2025), author Carrie Helms Tippen attempts to understand the unique rhetorical situation of the southern cookbook as it negotiates a tension between the expectations of the genre and the prevailing metanarratives of the southern experience, one focused on pleasure and

Plants, Politics and Empire in Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Annalisa Marzano investigates the cultural and political dimension of Roman arboriculture and the associated movement of plants from one corner of the empire to the other. It uses the convergent perspectives offered by textual and archaeological sources to sketch a picture of large-scale arboriculture as a phenomenon primarily driven by elite activity and imperialism. Arboriculture had a clear cultural role in the Roman world: it was used to construct the public persona of many elite Romans, with the introduction of new plants from far away regions or the development of new cultivars contributing to the elite competitive display. Exotic plants from conquered regions were also displayed as trophies in military triumphs, making plants an element of the language of imperialism. Dr. Marzano argues that the Augustan era was a key moment for the development of arboriculture and identifies colonists and soldiers as important agents

In barely three generations the Spanish diet has changed beyond recognition. The traditional concerns around nutritional health and scarcity have been mostly left behind, but they have given way to new problems linked to excess. In Milk in Spain and the History of Diet Change: The Political Economy of Dairy Consumption since 1950 (Bloomsbury, 2024) Dr. Fernando Collantes shows how the dairy industry has been central to this societal shift. From widespread calcium deficiency in the 1950s to the more recent, and controversial, turn to highly processed foods, it provides a recent history of diet change in Spain. Probing the reasons behind why this shift has occurred, and how, it shows that when it comes to food society, politics, economics and the law are intrinsically linked.Taking the reader beyond the world of food, Milk in Spain and the History of Diet Change combines qualitative and quantitative methods to position diet change within the broader debate on consumer society and 'the good life'. Contrasting tw

As the birthplace of maize and a celebrated culinary destination, Mexico stands at the crossroads of gastronomic richness and stark social disparities. In México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality (University of Arizona Press, 2025), Dr. Enrique C. Ochoa unveils the historical and contemporary forces behind Mexico’s polarized food systems. México Between Feast and Famine provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of Mexico’s food systems and how they reflect the contradictions and inequalities at the heart of Mexico. Ochoa examines the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of neoliberal policies that have reshaped food production, distribution, and consumption in Mexico. Dr. Ochoa analyzes the histories of Mexico’s mega food companies, including GRUMA, Bimbo, Oxxo, Aurrera/Walmex, and reveals how corporations have captured the food system at the same time that diet-related diseases have soared. The author not only examines the economic and political dimensions of

Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of farm machinery, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides are sold to farmers around the world. Although agricultural inputs are a huge sector of the global economy, the lion's share of that market is controlled by a relatively small number of very large transnational corporations. The high degree of concentration among these agribusiness titans is striking, considering that just a few hundred years ago agricultural inputs were not even marketed goods. In Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters (MIT Press, 2025), Dr. Jennifer Clapp explains how we got from there to here, outlining the forces that enabled this extreme concentration of power and the entrenchment of industrial agriculture. Clapp reveals that the firms that rose to the top of these sectors benefited from distinct market, technology, and policy advantages dating back a century or more that enabled them to expand their businesse

On the podcast today I am joined by Christof Lammer, a social anthropologist based at the University of Klagenfurt and inherit fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin. Christof is joining me to talk about his new book, Performing State Boundaries: Food Networks, Democratic Bureaucracy and China published in Open Access by Berghahn Books in 2024. The book delves into intricate political processes in an eco-village in Sichuan, revealing the multiple ways in which the boundary between state and non-state is performed. It shows how, in these performances, competing images of the Chinese state’s authoritarian, socialist and cultural otherness are mobilized to shape social policy and the transition to ecological agriculture in unexpected ways. Scholars working on China or the anthropology of the state more generally will find the book eye-opening, with its rich theoretical discussions and deep analytical insights, all based on fine-grained ethnography.  Performing State Boundaries: Food Networks, Democratic Bureauc