New Books in Food
430 episodes - English - Latest episode: 20 days ago - ★★★★★ - 9 ratingsInterviews with Food Writers about their New Books
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Episodes
Keja L. Valens, "Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
June 22, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourWomen across the Caribbean have been writing, reading, and exchanging cookbooks since at least the turn of the nineteenth century. These cookbooks are about much more than cooking. Through cookbooks, Caribbean women, and a few men, have shaped, embedded, and contested colonial and domestic orders, delineated the contours of independent national cultures, and transformed tastes for independence into flavours of domestic autonomy. Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for Natio...
John Soluri, "Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States" (U Texas Press, 2021)
June 16, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourBananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores—everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this second edition of Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and t...
Adam Zientek, "A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024)
May 24, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesAdam Zientek, Assistant Professor of History at UC Davis joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024). Beginning in the fall of 1914, every French soldier on the Western Front received a daily ration of wine from the army. At first it was a modest quarter litre, but by 1917 it had increased to the equivalent of a full bottle each day. The wine ration was intended to sust...
Cathy Stanton, "Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
May 23, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesAn anthropologist walks into a grocery store—no that’s not the start of a joke, that’s the true story of how Cathy Stanton came to be involved with Quabbin Harvest, a food co-op in the former mill town of Orange, Massachusetts. Part memoir and part history, Stanton’s new book Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024) traces the struggles of one small store in one small town and uncovers the long arc of the modern industrial food system coming int...
José Ciro Martínez, "States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan" (Stanford UP, 2022)
May 15, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesIn 1974 the government of Jordan established a new ministry to oversee a nationwide scheme to buy and distribute subsidized flour and regulate bakeries. The scheme sets terms for the politics that are the subject of a new book: States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan (Stanford University Press, 2022). Rest assured, this is no dull account of state welfare that posits and tests for a two-dimensional relationship between the delivery of a staple food and public acqui...
Kimberley Moore and Janis Thiessen, "Mmm... Manitoba: The Stories Behind the Foods We Eat" (U Manitoba Press, 2024)
May 12, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesIn 2018, Janis Thiessen, Kimberley Moore, and collaborator Kent Davies refashioned a used food truck into a mobile oral history lab. Together they embarked on a journey around Manitoba, gathering stories about the province’s food and the people who make, sell, and eat it. Along the way, they visited restaurant owners, beer brewers, grocers, farmers, scholars, and chefs in their kitchens and businesses, online, and on board the food truck. The team conducted nearly seventy interviews and indul...
Sara B. Franklin, "The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America" (Atria, 2024)
May 03, 2024 08:00 - 26 minutesThe woman behind some of the most important authors of the 20th century—including Julia Child, Anne Frank, Edna Lewis, John Updike, and Sylvia Plath—finally gets her due in this colorful biography of legendary editor Judith Jones. When Judith Jones began working at Doubleday’s Paris office in 1949, the twenty-five-year-old spent most of her time wading through manuscripts in the slush pile until one caught her eye. She read the book in one sitting, then begged her boss to consider publishing ...
Michael Gilson, "Behind the Privet Hedge: Richard Sudell, the Suburban Garden and the Beautification of Britain" (Reaktion Books, 2024)
May 03, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesBritain is a nation of gardeners; the suburban garden, with its roses and privet hedges, is widely admired and copied across the world. But it is little understood how millions across the nation developed an obsession with their colourful plots of land. Behind the Privet Hedge: Richard Sudell, the Suburban Garden and the Beautification of Britain (Reaktion, 2024) by Michael Gilson explores the history of this development and how, despite their stereotype as symbols of dull, middle-class confo...
Crystal Wilkinson, "Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks" (Clarkson Potter, 2023)
May 02, 2024 08:00 - 47 minutesYears ago, when O. Henry Prize-winning writer Crystal Wilkinson was baking a jam cake, she felt her late grandmother’s presence. She soon realized that she was not the only cook in her kitchen; there were her ancestors, too, stirring, measuring, and braising alongside her. These are her kitchen ghosts, five generations of Black women who settled in Appalachia and made a life, a legacy, and a cuisine. An expert cook, Wilkinson shares nearly forty family recipes rooted deep in the past, full of...
Tarana Husain Khan et al., Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia" (Pan Macmillan, 2023)
April 28, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourForgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia (Pan Macmillan India, 2023) is a collection of essays and recipes that highlights the complex and layered food history of Muslim communities across South Asia. The contributors to the volume include historians, literary scholars, plant scientists, writers, chefs, and more. And their range of essays take us from Ladakh in the north to Sri Lanka in the south, as we learn how food has not been fixed but rather has traveled, survived, a...
Ruth Reichl, "The Paris Novel" (Random House, 2024)
April 19, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesStella St. Vincent, a thirty-something copy editor in 1980s New York, has survived a relationship with her mother, Celia, so complicated that even the words “my daughter” give Stella pause. Celia lived life to the fullest, reinventing herself and discarding anything that no longer pleased her, including Stella’s father, whom Celia refused even to name. And when Stella rebelled by becoming the exact opposite of her mother—disciplined, buttoned-down, reliant on schedules to guarantee safety—Cel...
Richard Olsen-Harbich, "Sun, Sea, Soil, Wine: Winemaking on the North Fork of Long Island" (SUNY Press, 2024)
April 17, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesWith his new book Sun, Sea, Soil, Wine: Winemaking on the North Fork of Long Island (SUNY Press, 2024), Richard Olsen-Harbich, Long Island's longest-tenured winemaker, weighs in on what makes the North Fork so unique for fine wine production. He shares his journey through the intricate art of winemaking – a tale of dedication, passion, and the remarkable bond between the sun-soaked earth, the sea-kissed vines, and the creation of exceptional wines. He artfully delves into the rich history, di...
Victoria Flexner and Jay Reifel, "A History of the World in 10 Dinners: 2,000 Years, 100 Recipes" (Rizoli, 2023)
April 16, 2024 08:00 - 56 minutesFor every lover of food culture, A History of the World in 10 Dinners: 2,000 Years, 100 Recipes (Rizzoli, 2023) by Victoria Flexner and Jay Reifel presents scrupulously researched and accessible cookbook presents one-of-a-kind dinner parties inspired by seminal moments in culinary history. In ten chapters—each an important moment in food history, from Ancient Rome to Al-Andalus in Spain, from the Ethiopian Empire to nineteenth-century New York City—the authors pair menus with immersive retell...
Grazia Ting Deng, "Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy" (Princeton UP, 2024)
April 14, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesWhy and how local coffee bars in Italy--those distinctively Italian social and cultural spaces--have been increasingly managed by Chinese baristas since the Great Recession of 2008? Italians regard espresso as a quintessentially Italian cultural product--so much so that Italy has applied to add Italian espresso to UNESCO's official list of intangible heritages of humanity. The coffee bar is a cornerstone of Italian urban life, with city residents sipping espresso at more than 100,000 of these...
JJ Johnson and Danica Novgorodoff, "The Simple Art of Rice: Recipes from Around the World for the Heart of Your Table" (Flatiron Books, 2023)
April 13, 2024 08:00 - 32 minutesThe Simple Art of Rice: Recipes from Around the World for the Heart of Your Table (Flatiron Books, 2023) is a cookbook celebrating the versatility of this grain. Its recipes are rooted in many cultures from around the globe, including Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Award-winning author Chef JJ Johnson, along with Danica Novgorodoff, produces rice recipes for every meal and event. The Simple Art of Rice also provides valuable information on fool-proof methods and rice cooking that wil...
Tina Sikka, "Health Apps, Genetic Diets and Superfoods: When Biopolitics Meets Neoliberalism" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
April 05, 2024 08:00 - 18 minutesHealth Apps, Genetic Diets and Superfoods: When Biopolitics Meets Neoliberalism (Bloomsbury, 2023) critically examines contemporary health and wellness culture through the lens of personalization, genetification and functional foods. These developments have had a significant impact on the intersecting categories of gender, race, and class in light of the increasing adoption of digital health and surveillance technologies like MyFitnessPal, Lifesum, HealthyifyMe, and Fooducate. These three vec...
Paul Hansen, "Hokkaido Dairy Farm: Cosmopolitics of Otherness and Security on the Frontiers of Japan" (SUNY Press, 2024)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesAs an ethnography of a Japanese dairy farm while having theoretical values going beyond the specific context, Hokkaido Dairy Farm: Cosmopolitics of Otherness and Security on the Frontiers of Japan (SUNY Press, 2024) offers a historical and ethnographic examination of the rapid industrialization of the dairy industry in Tokachi, Hokkaido. The book begins with a history of dairy farming and consumption in Hokkaido from a macro perspective, mapping the transition from survival to subsistence and...
Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, "Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America" (UNC Press, 2023)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America (UNC Press, 2023), Elizabeth Engelhardt argues that modern American food, business, caretaking, politics, sex, travel, writing, and restaurants all owe a debt to boardinghouse women in the South. From the eighteenth century well into the twentieth, entrepreneurial women ran boardinghouses throughout the South; some also carried the institution to far-flung places like California, New York, ...
José Tenorio, "School Food Politics in Mexico: The Corporatization of Obesity and Healthy Eating Policies" (Routledge, 2023)
March 30, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourFor decades now, we’ve all heard the refrain – we are in a war against obesity, with perhaps the most important battle being fought over the health of our children. What better place could there be to defeat the enemy of obesity than our schools, where children are fed and educated and educated about being fed on a daily basis? But how did we come to see health promotion in schools as the key solution to solving the problem of obesity? And is obesity really at the root of our problems to begi...
David E. Sutton, "Bigger Fish to Fry: A Theory of Cooking as Risk, with Greek Examples" (Berghahn, 2021)
March 28, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesWhat defines cooking as cooking, and why does cooking matter to the understanding of society, cultural change and everyday life? Bigger Fish to Fry: A Theory of Cooking as Risk, with Greek Examples (Berghahn, 2021) by Dr. David E. Sutton explores these questions by proposing a new theory of the meaning of cooking as a willingness to put oneself and one’s meals at risk on a daily basis. Richly illustrated with examples from the author’s anthropology fieldwork in Greece, Bigger Fish to Fry prop...
Dinesh Wadiwel, "Animals and Capital" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
March 19, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn the 20th century, capitalist animal agriculture emerged with a twofold mission: to ruthlessly exploit animals for their labour time and enlarge human food supplies. The results of this process are clear. Animal-sourced foods have expanded exponentially. And simultaneously, hundreds of billions of animals confront humans and machines in brutal, antagonistic relations shaped by domination and resistance. Building on Karl Marx’s value theory, Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel argues that factory farms an...
Xaq Frohlich on the History of Food Labeling
March 18, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourPeoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks with Xaq Frolich, Associate Professor of History at Auburn University, about his new book, From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age (University of California Press, 2023). From Label to Table tells the fascinating history of the US Food and Drug Administration’s spreading authority of food regulation over the 20th century, which, after many twists and turns, culminated in the mandatory standardized food label featured on all...
Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm
March 14, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourToday’s book is: Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm (Red Hen Press, 2023), by David Mas Masumoto. In his new memoir, Mas discovers his “lost” aunt. She had been taken away in 1942 when all Japanese Americans were considered the enemy and imprisoned. Due to a disability, she became a “ward” of the state; and his family believed she had died. Then came a surprising phone call—she was alive and living a few miles from their family farm. As Mas disco...
Christy Spackman, "The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage" (U California Press, 2023)
March 08, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesHave you ever wondered why your tap water tastes the way it does? The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage (U California Press, 2023) explores the increasing erasure of tastes from drinking water over the twentieth century. It asks how dramatic changes in municipal water treatment have altered consumers’ awareness of the environment their water comes from. Through examining the development of sensory expertise in the United States and France, this un...
Alicia Kennedy, "No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating" (Beacon Press, 2023)
March 06, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourA culinary and cultural history of plant-based eating in the United States that delves into the subcultures and politics that have defined alternative food. The vegan diet used to be associated only with eccentric hippies and tofu-loving activists who shop at co-ops and live on compounds. We’ve come a long way since then. Now, fine-dining restaurants like Eleven Madison Park cater to chic upscale clientele with a plant-based menu, and Impossible Whoppers are available at Burger King. But can...
Joanna Crosby, "Apples and Orchards Since the Eighteenth Century: Material Innovation and Cultural Tradition" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
March 05, 2024 09:00 - 46 minutesShowing how the history of the apple goes far beyond the orchard and into the social, cultural and technological developments of Britain and the USA, Apples and Orchards since the Eighteenth Century: Material Innovation and Cultural Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Joanna Crosby takes an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the importance of the apple as a symbol of both tradition and innovation. From the 18th century in Britain, technological innovation in fruit production and orchard man...
Alessandro Gerosa, "The Hipster Economy: Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern Capitalism (UCL Press, 2024)
February 27, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesToday, being authentic has become an aspiration and an imperative. The notion of authenticity shapes the consumption habits of individuals in the most diverse contexts such as food and drinks, clothing, music, tourism and the digital sphere, even leading to the resurgence of apparently obsolescent modes of production such as craft. It also significantly transforms urban areas, their local economies and development. Alessandro Gerosa's The Hipster Economy: Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern...
The Taste of Water: A Conversation with Christy Spackman
February 26, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourAfter WAY too long a hiatus, Peoples & Things is back! GET EXCITED!! In this episode, host Lee Vinsel interviews Christy Spackman, Assistant Professor of Art/Science with a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering at Arizona State University, about her recent book, The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage (U California Press, 2023). Most Americans drink water that has gone ...
Marcia Bricker Halperin, "Kibbitz and Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow's Cafeteria" (Cornell UP, 2023)
February 25, 2024 09:00 - 33 minutesIn the middle decades of the twentieth century in New York City, Dubrow’s cafeterias in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and the garment district of Manhattan were places to get out of your apartment, have coffee with friends, or enjoy a hearty but affordable meal. They were grounded in the world of Jewish immigrants and their children, and they thrived in years when Flatbush and the Garment District each had a distinctly Jewish character. The cafeterias were also places where working class a...
Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, "Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World" (U California Press, 2022)
February 16, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutesImperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre is a bold, rigorous and award-winning history of Britain’s surprising role in creating the wine industries of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. Dr. Regan-Lefebvre bridges the genres of global commodity history and imperial history, presenting provocative new research in an accessible narrative. This is the first book to argue that today’s global wine indust...
Yamini Narayanan, "Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India" (Stanford UP, 2023)
February 11, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIndia imposes stringent criminal penalties, including life imprisonment in some states, for cow slaughter, based on a Hindu ethic of revering the cow as sacred. And yet India is among the world's leading producers of beef, leather, and milk, industries sustained by the mass slaughter of bovines. What is behind this seeming contradiction? What do bovines, deemed holy in Hinduism, experience in the Indian milk and beef industries? Yamini Narayanan asks and answers these questions, introducing c...
Julia Ornelas-Higdon, "The Grapes of Conquest: Race, Labor, and the Industrialization of California Wine, 1769–1920" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
February 03, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesCalifornia’s wine country conjures images of pastoral vineyards and cellars lined with oak barrels. As a mainstay of the state’s economy, California wines occupy the popular imagination like never before and drive tourism in famous viticultural regions across the state. Scholars know remarkably little, however, about the history of the wine industry and the diverse groups who built it. In fact, contemporary stereotypes belie how the state’s commercial wine industry was born amid social turmoi...
Use of Bacteriophages as Natural Antimicrobials to Manage Bacterial Pathogens in Aquaculture in Vietnam and Australia
February 02, 2024 09:00 - 24 minutesAquaculture is the fastest-growing protein production industry globally, with Vietnam one of the top producers and exporters of seafood products. In Vietnam, aquaculture is seen as a means of protecting rural livelihoods threatened by the consequences of climate change on agriculture. But climate change also drives the emergence of marine bacterial pathogens, causing considerable losses to aquaculture production. Traditionally, pathogen blooms have been treated with antimicrobials – but this ...
Charlotte Coté, "A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast" (U Washington Press, 2022)
January 30, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourFood is at the center of everything, writes University of Washington professor of American Indian Studies Charlotte Coté. In A Drum in One Hand, A Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast (U Washington Press, 2022), Coté shares stories from her own experience growing up and living in the Pacific Northwest. From salmon, to wild berries, to community gardens, the food abundance of this region is central to Indigenous decolonization and sovereignty. C...
James R. Fichter, "Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776" (Cornell UP, 2023)
January 24, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776 (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. James R. Fichter reveals that despite the so-called Boston Tea Party in 1773, two large shipments of tea from the East India Company survived and were ultimately drunk in North America. Their survival shaped the politics of the years ahead, impeded efforts to reimburse the company for the tea lost in Boston Harbor, and hinted at the enduring potency of consumerism in revolutionary politics. Tea prot...
Loka Ashwood et al., "Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-By-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm" (UNC Press, 2023)
January 24, 2024 09:00 - 50 minutesSince the late 1970s, Right to Farm Laws have been adopted by states across the US to limit nuisance lawsuits against farmers engaged in standard agricultural practices. But who really benefits from Right to Farm Laws? And what can be done to promote real agricultural, rural, and environmental justice? Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-By-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm (UNC Press, 2023) offers valuable history and incisive commentary on these questions. Si...
Ian MacAllen, "Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
January 22, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesIn Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Ian MacAllen traces the evolution of traditional Italian-American cuisine, often referred to as “red sauce Italian,” from its origins in Italy to its transformation in America into a new, distinct cuisine. It is a fascinating social and culinary history exploring the integration of red sauce food into mainstream America alongside the blending of Italian immigrant otherness into a national American identity. The story...
Matthew Batt, "The Last Supper Club: A Waiter's Requiem" (U of Minnesota Press, 2023)
January 12, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutesDuring a year on sabbatical from his university position, Matthew Batt realized he needed money—fast—and it just so happened that a craft brewery in Minneapolis was launching a restaurant and looking to hire. So it was that the forty-something tenured professor found himself waiting tables. And loving it. The Last Supper Club: A Waiter's Requiem (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) tells the story of Batt’s experience at the fine dining restaurant, an adventure that continued well past his ...
Martha C. Nussbaum, "Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility" (Simon & Schuster, 2022)
January 02, 2024 09:00 - 51 minutesA revolutionary new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum. Animals are in trouble all over the world. Whether through the cruelties of the factory meat industry, poaching and game hunting, habitat destruction, or neglect of the companion animals that people purport to love, animals suffer injustice and horrors at our hands every day. The world needs an ethical awakening, a consciousness-raising movement of international p...
Benjamin Lorr, "The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket" (Penguin, 2020)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 54 minutesThis episode of the New Books in Economic and Business History is an interview with New York writer Benjamin Lorr. Benjamin Lorr is the author of Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga, a book that explores the Bikram Yoga community and movement. His second book, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket is "an extraordinary investigation into the human lives at the heart of the American grocery store. T...
Benjamin R. Siegel, “Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 44 minutesIn 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...
Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, "The Cultural Roots of Slow Food: Peasants, Partisans, and the Landscape of Italian Resistance" (Lexington Books, 2023)
December 30, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe Cultural Roots of Slow Food: Peasants, Partisans, and the Landscape of Italian Resistance (Lexington Books, 2023) focuses on the work of a variety of intellectual activists, related food justice literature, and documentary films, and argues that contemporary forms of environmental activism, as they are rooted in local food and sustainable farming, are built on Italian peasant culture and its contributions to the Resistance movement. During World War II the Italian Resistance marked an un...
Benjamin A. Wurgaft and Merry White, "Ways of Eating: Exploring Food Through History and Culture" (U California Press, 2023)
December 17, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWhat we learn when an anthropologist and a historian talk about food. From the origins of agriculture to contemporary debates over culinary authenticity, Ways of Eating: Exploring Food Through History and Culture (U California Press, 2023) introduces readers to world food history and food anthropology. Through engaging stories and historical deep dives, Benjamin A. Wurgaft and Merry I. White offer new ways to understand food in relation to its natural and cultural histories and the social rul...
Chetan Choithani, "Migration, Food Security and Development: Insights from Rural India" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
December 17, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesMigration, Food Security and Development: Insights from Rural India (Cambridge UP, 2023) examines the role of migration as a livelihood strategy in influencing food access among rural households. Migration forms a key component of livelihoods for an increasing number of rural households in many developing countries. Importantly, there is now a growing consensus among academics and policymakers on the potential positive effects of migration in promoting human development. Concurrently, the sig...
Caroline J. Smith, "Season to Taste: Rewriting Kitchen Space in Contemporary Women's Food Memoirs" (U Mississippi Press, 2023)
December 14, 2023 09:00 - 32 minutesBetween 2000 and 2010, many contemporary US-American women writers were returning to the private space of the kitchen, writing about their experiences in that space and then publishing their memoirs for the larger public to consume. Season to Taste: Rewriting Kitchen Space in Contemporary Women’s Food Memoirs (U Mississippi Press, 2023) explores women’s food memoirs with recipes in order to consider the ways in which these women are rewriting this kitchen space and renegotiating their relatio...
Lynn Z. Bloom, "Recipe" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
December 13, 2023 09:00 - 36 minutesRecipe (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Lynn Z. Bloom reveals the surprising lessons that recipes teach, in addition to the obvious instructions on how to prepare a dish or perform a process. These include lessons in hospitality, friendship, community, family and ethnic heritage, tradition, nutrition, precision and order, invention and improvisation, feasting and famine, survival and seduction and love. A recipe is a signature, as individual as the cook's fingerprint; a passport to travel the world with...
Jesse Dart, "Feeding the Hustle: Free Food & Care Inside the Tech Industry" (Lexington Books, 2022)
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesFood is increasingly a subject of interest in social sciences: how we cook, consume, and share food is relevant to our social lives. In Feeding the Hustle: Free Food & Care Inside the Tech Industry (Lexington Books, 2022), Jesse Dart draws on ethnographic fieldwork to consider the ways in which free food has become ubiquitous and even compulsory within the tech industry. Packed lunches have nearly disappeared as more companies provide free food with the stated objectives of attracting and ret...
Yan Slobodkin, "The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies" (Cornell UP, 2023)
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesThe Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. Yan Slobodkin traces the history of famine in the modern French Empire, showing that hunger is intensely local and sweepingly global, shaped by regional contexts and the transnational interplay of ideas and policies all at once. By integrating food crises in Algeria, West and Equatorial Africa, and Vietnam into a broader story of imperial and transnational care, Dr. Slobodkin reveals how the ...
Grace Lin, "Chinese Menu: The History, Myths, and Legends Behind Your Favorite Foods" (Little, Brown Books, 2023)
December 08, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesNewbery and Caldecott honoree and New York Times bestselling author Grace Lin joins New Books Network to talk about her new, groundbreaking, lushly illustrated, book that explores the whimsical myths and stories behind your favorite American Chinese food. From fried dumplings to fortune cookies, she shares the magical tales and historical roots of these well-loved dishes in Chinese Menu: The History, Myths, and Legends Behind Your Favorite Foods (Little, Brown Books, 2023). From the fun conne...
Jeremy Scheck, "ScheckEats-Cooking Smarter: Friendly Recipes with a Side of Science" (Harvest, 2023)
December 07, 2023 09:00 - 30 minutesFrom next-gen culinary phenom and TikTok superstar Jeremy Scheck, joins New Books Network to talk about his very first book, sharing easy and delicious recipes for every day and beyond—plus expert tips to make you a better, happier cook. Jeremy Scheck has charmed a new generation of home cooks with his simple yet remarkably tasty recipes and his reliable culinary and food science know-how. Now, in ScheckEats-Cooking Smarter: Friendly Recipes with a Side of Science (Harvest, 2023), Jeremy shar...