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
Philip Lymbery, "Sixty Harvests Left: How to Reach a Nature-Friendly Future" (Bloombury, 2022)
September 19, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesFrom the United Kingdom to Italy, from Brazil to the Gambia to the USA, Philip Lymbery, the internationally acclaimed author of Farmageddon, goes behind the scenes of industrial farming and confronts 'Big Agriculture', where mega-farms, chemicals and animal cages are sweeping the countryside and jeopardising the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the nature that we treasure. In his investigations, however, he also finds hope in the pioneers who are battling to bring lands...
Sanjiv Chopra, "Coffee the Magical Elixir: Facts That Will Astound and Perk You Up" (Bookbaby, 2021)
September 14, 2022 08:00 - 36 minutesToday I talked to Sanjiv Chopra about his book Coffee the Magical Elixir: Facts That Will Astound and Perk You Up (Bookbaby, 2021) 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed globally everyday. Coffee has a myriad of health benefits the overwhelming majority are which not known to the lay public and even physicians. There has been a plethora of research published in peer reviewed scientific journals attesting to the health benefits of coffee. They are mechanistic explanations and often a dose de...
Carl A. Brasseaux and Donald W. Davis, "Asian-Cajun Fusion: Shrimp from the Bay to the Bayou" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)
September 13, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourShrimp is easily America’s favorite seafood, but its very popularity is the wellspring of problems that threaten the shrimp industry’s existence. Asian-Cajun Fusion: Shrimp from the Bay to the Bayou (University of Mississippi Press, 2022) by Carl A. Brasseaux and Donald W. Davis provides insightful analysis of this paradox and a detailed, thorough history of the industry in Louisiana. Dried shrimp technology was part of the cultural heritage Pearl River Chinese immigrants introduced into the ...
Allyson P. Brantley, "Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism" (UNC Press, 2021)
September 06, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutesBefore the craft beer revolution, Coors was a hot commodity. Impossible to find outside a few states in the West, the beer had a level of "cool" that only comes from scarcity. However, this veneer of desirability masked all manner of unfair and discriminatory labor practices within the Coors Brewing Company itself. In Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism (UNC Press, 2021), La Verne University professor Allyson Brantley describes how...
William Alexander, "Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World" (Grand Central Publishing, 2022)
September 02, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesThe tomato gets no respect. Never has. Stored in the dustbin of history for centuries, accused of being vile and poisonous, appropriated as wartime propaganda, subjected to being picked hard-green and gassed, even used as a projectile, the poor tomato is the Rodney Dangerfield of foods. Yet, the tomato is the most popular vegetable in America (and, in fact, the world). It holds a place in America's soul like no other vegetable, and few other foods. Each summer, tomato festivals crop up across...
Josh Milburn, "Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
August 31, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourAnimal lovers who feed meat to other animals are faced with a paradox: perhaps fewer animals would be harmed if they stopped feeding the ones they love. Animal diets do not raise problems merely for individuals. To address environmental crises, health threats, and harm to animals, we must change our food systems and practices. And in these systems, animals, too, are eaters. Moving beyond what humans should eat and whether to count animals as food, Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals (M...
Mélissa Mialon, "Big Food & Co" (Thierry Souccar Editions, 2021)
August 26, 2022 08:00 - 51 minutesIn the 1960s and 1970s, the exposure of Big Tobacco’s aggressive lobbying and internal efforts to obscure science showcasing the harmful effects of smoking changed U.S. public opinion of the industry and of product safety protocols, both of which had largely obscured these harms from public view for decades. Public awareness grew, triggering regulation on disclosure related to political influencing strategies, marketing tactics, and transparency regarding the devastating toll of tobacco produ...
Addressing Hunger, Food Insecurity--Local Solutions to a Global Problem
August 25, 2022 08:00 - 43 minutesWe live in a time of food paradox. In a world of historically unprecedented abundance, many don’t have enough to eat. Life-limiting obesity coexists with malnutrition - at the same time, sometimes in the very same place. Food is the complex and critical subject that we will talk about today with Joseph Gitler who works to address the issue at a local, concrete level. He feeds the hungry. Back in 2003 Joseph Gitler was moved to act when he saw significant food waste in Israel at a time of risi...
Alex Drace-Francis, "The Making of Mămăligă: Transimperial Recipes for a Romanian National Dish" (Central European UP, 2022)
August 19, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourMămăligă, maize porridge or polenta, is a universally consumed dish in Romania and a prominent national symbol. But its unusual history has rarely been told. Alex Drace-Francis surveys the arrival and spread of maize cultivation in Romanian lands from Ottoman times to the eve of the First World War, and also the image of mămăligă in art and popular culture. In The Making of Mămăligă: Transimperial Recipes for a Romanian National Dish (Central European UP, 2022), Drace-Francis shows how the ma...
Paolo Squatriti, "Weeds and the Carolingians: Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, AD 750-900" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
August 17, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutesIn Weeds and the Carolingians: Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, AD 750–900 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dr. Paolo Squatriti asks: Why did weeds matter in the Carolingian empire? What was their special significance for writers in eighth- and ninth-century Europe and how was this connected with the growth of real weeds? In early medieval Europe, unwanted plants that persistently appeared among crops created extra work, reduced productivity, and challenged theologians who b...
Angela Ki Che Leung et al., "Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)
August 16, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe twelve chapters of Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia (U Hawai’i Press, 2020) are divided into three sections: Good Foods, Bad Foods, and Moral Foods. Using case studies from nineteenth- and twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, and Malaysia, these chapters investigate the moralization of food in modern Asia. These studies on moral food regimes are highly specific, but their implications, especially about the malleability of food as an ...
Made of Corn: How Genetically Modified Corn Changed Science, Academia and Indigenous Rights in Mexico (Part 2 of 2)
August 12, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesThis is part 2 of a 2-part series from Cited - the predecessor of Darts and Letters. For the final episode of our “Activism & Academia”-themed week of programming, we’re returning to Cited’s series on genetically modified corn, Indigenous rights, and environmental law in Mexico. Return with us to our story on how the discovery of genetically modified corn in the Mexican highlands resulted in a revelatory battle over science, culture, trade and more. In this episode, we take you even further i...
Modifying Maize: How Genetically Modified Corn Changed Science, Academia and Indigenous Rights in Mexico (Part 1 of 2)
August 11, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesThis is part 1 of a 2-part series from Cited - the predecessor of Darts and Letters. When genetically modified corn was found in the highlands of Mexico, Indigenous campesino groups took to the streets to protect their cultural heritage, setting off a 20-year legal saga. The battle brought Indigenous rights, scientific methods, academic freedom, and law and trade into the mix. It’s a fascinating and eternally relevant story. You’ll hear from scientists, activists, farmers and more. In an era ...
Tara Nurin, "A Woman's Place Is in the Brewhouse: A Forgotten History of Alewives, Brewsters, Witches, and CEOs" (Chicago Review Press, 2021)
August 08, 2022 08:00 - 47 minutesTara Nurin explores women in all aspects of the brewing industry in A Women's Place is in the Brewhouse (Chicago Review Press, 2021). Women have brewed beer throughout most of human history. Their role as family and village brewer lasted for hundreds of thousands of years--through the earliest days of Mesopotamian civilization, the reign of Cleopatra, the witch trials of Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and the settling of colonial America. A Woman's Place Is in the Brewhouse celebrates the c...
Michael J. Hathaway, "What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make" (Princeton UP, 2022)
August 08, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWhat a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make (Princeton University Press, 2022) by Dr. Michael Hathaway pushes today’s mushroom renaissance in compelling new directions. For centuries, Western science has promoted a human- and animal-centric framework of what counts as action, agency, movement, and behavior. But, as Michael Hathaway shows, the world-making capacities of mushrooms radically challenge this orthodoxy by revealing the lively dynamism of all forms of life. The boo...
Christopher Craig, "Middlemen of Modernity: Local Elites and Agricultural Development in Meiji Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
August 05, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourChristopher Craig’s Middlemen of Modernity: Local Elites and Agricultural Development in Meiji Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2022) is a thoroughly research and engaging study of the role of local elites in the modernization of the Japanese countryside in the prewar era. “Agriculture,” Craig’s writes, “is given short shrift in the story of Japanese modernity. Farming and modernization seem to exist at opposite ends of a spectrum.” This is true for both contemporary historians, who tend to neglect agr...
Jin Feng, "Tasting Paradise on Earth: Jiangnan Foodways" (U Washington Press, 2019)
August 01, 2022 08:00 - 41 minutesToday I talked to Jin Feng of Grinnell College about her fascinating book Tasting Paradise on Earth: Jiangnan Foodways (U Washington Press, 2019). Preparing and consuming food is an integral part of identity formation, which in contemporary China embodies tension between fast-forward modernization and cultural nostalgia. Jin Feng's wide-ranging exploration of cities in the Lower Yangzi Delta--or Jiangnan, a region known for its paradisiacal beauty and abundant resources--illustrates how peopl...
Kelsi Matwick and Keri Matwick, "Food Discourse of Celebrity Chefs of Food Network" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019)
July 18, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesKelsi Matwick and Keri Matwick's book Food Discourse of Celebrity Chefs of Food Network (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) explores a fascinating, yet virtually unexplored research area: the language of food used on television cooking shows. It shows how the discourse of television cooking shows on the American television channel Food Network conveys a pseudo-relationship between the celebrity chef host and viewers. Excerpts are drawn from a variety of cooking show genres (how-to, travel, reality, ta...
Tanya M. Peres and Aaron Deter-Wolf, "Baking, Bourbon, and Black Drink" (U Alabama Press, 2018)
July 14, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourUnderstanding and explaining societal rules surrounding food and foodways have been the foci of anthropological studies since the early days of the discipline. Baking, Bourbon, and Black Drink: Foodways Archaeology in the American Southeast (U Alabama Press, 2018), however, is the first collection devoted exclusively to southeastern foodways analyzed through archaeological perspectives. These essays examine which foods were eaten and move the discussion of foodstuffs into the sociocultural re...
Veronica S. W. Mak, "Milk Craze: Body, Science, and Hope in China" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)
July 14, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesVeronika Mak’s Milk Craze: Body, Science, and Hope in China (U of Hawaii Press, 2021) mixes historical and ethnographic research on milk to understand the morality politics of class, labor, and identity in modern Hong Kong and the Shunde area of Guangdong. Beginning with the historical “milkscapes” of ancient China, Mak’s book explores the influence of British colonization on dairy culture in Hong Kong; the role of governments and corporations in making China one of the world’s largest produc...
Elena Conis, "How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT" (Bold Type Books, 2022)
July 13, 2022 08:00 - 48 minutesThe story of DDT as you’ve never heard it before: a fresh look at the much-maligned chemical compound as a cautionary tale of how powerful corporations have stoked the flames of science denialism for their own benefit In the 1940s, DDT helped the Allies win the Second World War by wiping out the insects that caused malaria, with seemingly no ill effects on humans. After the war, it was sprayed willy-nilly across fields, in dairy barns, and even in people's homes. Thirty years later the U.S. w...
Biscuit Art
July 04, 2022 08:00 - 12 minutesElla Hawkins talks about the biscuits she makes, inspired by her research on Elizabethan dress, and on everything from William Morris wallpapers to TV shows like Outlander and Game of Thrones. She also talks about her upcoming monograph, titled Shakespeare in Elizabethan Costume: ‘Period Dress’ in Twenty-First-Century Performance (forthcomin from Bloomsbury), which examines how early modern garments are recycled and reimagined in contemporary costume design for Shakespeare. (You’ll hear Saron...
Gina Louise Hunter, "Edible Insects: A Global History" (2021)
June 29, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesFrom grasshoppers to grubs, an eye-opening look at insect cuisine around the world. An estimated two billion people worldwide regularly consume insects, yet bugs are rarely eaten in the West. Why are some disgusted at the thought of eating insects while others find them delicious? Edible Insects: A Global History (Reaktion Books, 2021) provides a broad introduction to the role of insects as human food, from our prehistoric past to current food trends—and even recipes. On the menu are beetles,...
Francesco Buscemi, "Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda: A Political History of Italian Food TV" (Intellect, 2022)
June 23, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesThe three protagonists of Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda: A Political History of Italian Food TV (Intellect, 2022) are food, television and politics. These are the three main characters that interrelate, collaborate and fight behind the scenes, while in front of the camera the writers, intellectuals and celebrity chefs talk about, prepare or taste the best Italian dishes. In Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda, Dr. Francesco Buscemi develops a political history of Italian ‘good food’ on national televis...
On Religion, Food, and Eating in America
June 17, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesDr. Nora Rubel is the Jane and Alan Batkin Professor of Jewish Studies and Chair of the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester in New York. Dr. Ben Zeller is associate professor of religion at Lake Forest College in Illinois. They are co-editors of the book Religion, Food, and Eating in North America from Columbia University Press (2014). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksn...
Natalia Molina, "A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community" (U California Press, 2022)
June 17, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1951, Doña Natalia Barraza opened the Nayarit, a Mexican restaurant in Echo Park, Los Angeles. With A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community (U California Press, 2022), historian Natalia Molina traces the life's work of her grandmother, remembered by all who knew her as Doña Natalia--a generous, reserved, and extraordinarily capable woman. Doña Natalia immigrated alone from Mexico to L.A., adopted two children, and ran a successful business. She also sponsored...
On Buddhism, Adventures, and Cooking Ethics
June 16, 2022 08:00 - 47 minutesEric Ripert is chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin on 7th Avenue in Manhattan’s Theater District, author of the autobiography 32 Yolks: From My Mother’s Table to Working the Line from Random House, numerous cookbooks, and host of the television series AVEC Eric. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food
Danya Glabau, "Food Allergy Advocacy: Parenting and the Politics of Care" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
June 10, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesA detailed exploration of parents' fight for a safe environment for their kids, interrogating how race, class, and gender shape health advocacy The success of food allergy activism in highlighting the dangers of foodborne allergens shows how illness communities can effectively advocate for the needs of their members. In Food Allergy Advocacy: Parenting and the Politics of Care (U Minnesota Press, 2022), Danya Glabau follows parents and activists as they fight for allergen-free environments, ...
Samaa Badawi et al., "School Farms: Feeding and Educating Children" (Routledge, 2021)
June 03, 2022 08:00 - 34 minutesSchool Farms: Feeding and Educating Children (Routledge, 2021) highlights the potential of school farms to fight hunger and malnutrition by providing access to locally produced, fresh, and healthy food as well as providing young students with educational opportunities to learn, interact with nature, and develop their skills. Hunger is one of the most pressing concerns we face today and there is a clear need to provide alternative sources of food to feed a fast-growing population. School farms...
Tracey Deutsch, "Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century" (UNC Press, 2010)
May 31, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesThe title of the book that we are introducing today is Building a Housewife's Paradise Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century. This is not a new book, it was published in 2010, but one that deserves to be highlighted especially within the most recent debates on gender and business. Building a Housewife's Paradise studies the emergence of supermarkets in the urban United States by focusing on the case of Chicago. The book argues that this history, the birth, and...
Modernist Mushrooms
May 30, 2022 08:00 - 13 minutesShalini Sengupta thinks together ‘the mycological turn’ in the humanities and the narrative and aesthetic work that mushrooms do in some modernist literature. She draws from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and the research of Sam Solomon and Natalia Cecire. Modernist mushrooms, if they are a thing, exist in the writings of Alfred Kreymborg, Djuna Barnes, and Sylvia Plath, and the photography of Alfred Stieglitz. Shalini is a final year PhD student at the University of Sussex...
Adam M. Romero, "Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture" (U California Press, 2021)
May 30, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesThe toxicity of pesticides to the environment and humans is often framed as an unfortunate effect of their benefits to agricultural production. In Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture (U California Press, 2021), Adam M. Romero upends this narrative and provides a fascinating new history of pesticides in American industrial agriculture prior to World War II. Through impeccable archival research, Romero reveals the ways in which late nineteenth- a...
Aniket Aga, "Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India" (Yale UP, 2022)
May 30, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesHow the debate over genetically modified crops in India is transforming science and politics Genetically modified or transgenic crops are controversial across the world. Advocates see such crops as crucial to feeding the world's growing population; critics oppose them for pushing farmers deeper into ecological and economic distress, and for shoring up the power of agribusinesses. India leads the world in terms of the intensity of democratic engagement with transgenic crops. In Genetically Mo...
Scott Reynolds Nelson, "Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World" (Basic Books, 2022)
May 23, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourGrain traders wandering across the steppe; the Russian conquest of Ukraine (in the 18th century, that is); boulevard barons and wheat futures; railroads; the first fast food breakfast; and war socialism. It’s all crammed into this discussion of wheat, and what it wrought, with Scott Nelson. Scott Reynolds Nelson is the Georgia Athletics Association Professor of the Humanities at the University of Georgia. Author of numerous books, his latest is Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the W...
Liz Carlisle, "Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming" (Island Press, 2022)
May 23, 2022 08:00 - 51 minutesA powerful movement is happening in farming today—farmers are reconnecting with their roots to fight climate change. For one woman, that’s meant learning her tribe’s history to help bring back the buffalo. For another, it’s meant preserving forest purchased by her great-great-uncle, among the first wave of African Americans to buy land. Others are rejecting monoculture to grow corn, beans, and squash the way farmers in Mexico have done for centuries. Still others are rotating crops for the na...
John Cardina, "Lives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly" (Comstock Publishing, 2021)
May 23, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesLives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly (Comstock Publishing, 2021) explores the tangled history of weeds and their relationship to humans. Through eight interwoven stories, John Cardina offers a fresh perspective on how these tenacious plants came about, why they are both inevitable and essential, and how their ecological success is ensured by determined efforts to eradicate them. Linking botany, history, ecology, and evolutionary biology to the social dimensions of humanity's ancient...
William Wayne Farris, "A Bowl for a Coin: A Commodity History of Japanese Tea" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)
May 04, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutesA Bowl for a Coin: A Commodity History of Japanese Tea (U Hawaii Press, 2019) is the first book in any language to describe and analyze the history of all Japanese teas from the plant’s introduction to the archipelago around 750 to the present day. To understand the triumph of the tea plant in Japan, William Wayne Farris begins with its cultivation and goes on to describe the myriad ways in which the herb was processed into a palatable beverage, ultimately resulting in the wide variety of tea...
Jo Guldi, "The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights" (Yale UP, 2022)
May 03, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourJo Guldi tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Land is shown to be a central motor of politics in the twentieth century: the basis of movements for giving reparations to formerly colonized people, protests to limit the rent paid by urban tenants, intellectual battles among development analysts, and the capture of land by squatters taking matters into their own hands. The book describes the results of state-engineered “land reform” policies beginning in...
Paul Geary, "Experimental Dining: Performance, Experience and Ideology in Contemporary Creative Restaurants" (Intellect Books, 2022)
May 02, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourDr. Paul Geary’s Experimental Dining: Performance, Experience and Ideology in Contemporary Creative Restaurants (Intellect, 2022) examines the work of four of the world’s leading creative restaurants: Noma, elBulli, The Fat Duck and Alinea. Using ideas from performance studies, cultural studies, philosophy and economics, Dr. Geary explores the creation of the dining experience as a form of multisensory performance. The book examines the construction of the world of the restaurants and their c...
Megan Birk, "The Fundamental Institution: Poverty, Social Welfare, and Agriculture in American Poor Farms" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
April 22, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesBy the early 1900s, the poor farm had become a ubiquitous part of America's social welfare system. Megan Birk's history of this foundational but forgotten institution focuses on the connection between agriculture, provisions for the disadvantaged, and the daily realities of life at poor farms. Conceived as an inexpensive way to provide care for the indigent, poor farms in fact attracted wards that ranged from abused wives and the elderly to orphans, the disabled, and disaster victims. Most pe...
Diana Garvin, "Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women's Food Work" (U Toronto Press, 2022)
April 15, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourDiana Garvin’s Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women's Food Work (U Toronto Press, 2022) is an expansive and multifaceted look at women’s food work in Fascist Italy. From less-explored archives, Garvin has assembled a diverse set of sources―diaries, work songs, cookbooks, kitchen plans and utensils, factory records, and more―to tell the story of how women negotiated the daily tasks of producing and preparing food under a Fascist regime, its autarkic policies, and, as the war progressed, incr...
María Elena García, "Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race: Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in Peru" (U California Press, 2021)
April 15, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn this episode of the New Books in Latin America Podcast, Kenneth Sánchez spoke with Maria Elena García about her wonderful new book Gastropolitics and the Spectre of Race: Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in Peru published in 2021 by the University of California Press. In recent years, Peru has transformed from a war-torn country to a global high-end culinary destination. Connecting chefs, state agencies, global capital, and Indigenous producers, this “gastronomic revolution” ma...
Susanne A. Wengle, "Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food" (U Wisconsin Press, 2022)
April 15, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), Dr. Susanne A. Wengle shows how agrotechnology served—and undermined—Soviet and Russian political projects. “The book emphasises a tight connection between political change, technological change in food systems, and the transformation of everyday lives - a connection that we can grasp and understand through the lens of technopolitics.” Like all facets of daily life, th...
Albena Shkodrova, "Rebellious Cooks and Recipe Writing in Communist Bulgaria" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
April 06, 2022 08:00 - 51 minutesHow did people exist and resist in their daily lives under Soviet control in the Cold War period? Rebellious Cooks and Recipe Writing in Communist Bulgaria (Bloomsbury, 2021) shows how in communist Bulgaria many women passionately exchanged recipes with friends and strangers, to build substantial and impressive private collections of recipes. This activity was borderline contraband in going against the general disapproval of home cooking that formed part of the ideology of communism, in which...
Rob Percival, "The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat" (Pegasus, 2022)
March 23, 2022 08:00 - 49 minutesOur future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies, by geopolitical tensions, and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo-- pandemics and economic strife, the escalation of the climate and ecological crises--and by how we choose to respond. It will also be shaped by our emotions. It will be shaped by the meat paradox. "Should we eat animals?" was, until recently, a question reserved for moral philosophers and an ethically minde...
Thomas F. Thornton and Madonna L. Moss, "Herring and People of the North Pacific: Sustaining a Keystone Species" (U Washington Press, 2021)
March 16, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesHerring are vital to the productivity and health of marine systems, and socio-ecologically Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) is one of the most important fish species in the Northern Hemisphere. Human dependence on herring has evolved for millennia through interactions with key spawning areas, but humans have also significantly impacted the species’ distribution and abundance. Combining ethnological, historical, archaeological, and political perspectives with comparative reference to other No...
Joshua Frens-String, "Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile" (UC Press, 2021)
March 09, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile (University of California Press, 2021), Joshua Frens-String explores the modern history and political economy of food in Chile, from World War I to the rise and fall of the Allende socialist regime in the 1970s. Drawing together a diverse cast of characters and weaving together a wide range of sources, Frens-String demonstrates that the struggles to create a more just food system shaped modern Chile and its expansiv...
Jo Handelsman, "A World Without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet" (Yale UP, 2021)
March 07, 2022 09:00 - 56 minutesA World without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet (Yale University Press, 2021) by celebrated biologist Jo Handelsman lays bare the complex connections among climate change, soil erosion, food and water security, and drug discovery. Humans depend on soil for 95 percent of global food production, yet let it erode at unsustainable rates. In the United States, China, and India, vast tracts of farmland will be barren of topsoil within this century. The c...
Beth M. Forrest and Greg de St Maurice, "Food in Memory and Imagination: Space, Place and Taste" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
February 22, 2022 09:00 - 43 minutesHow do we engage with food through memory and imagination? Food in Memory and Imagination: Space, Place and, Taste (Bloomsbury, 2022) spans time and space to illustrate how, through food, people have engaged with the past, the future, and their alternative presents. Beth M. Forrest and Greg de St. Maurice have brought together first-class contributions, from both established and up-and-coming scholars, to consider how imagination and memory intertwine and sometimes diverge. Chapters draw on c...
David Boarder Giles, "A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People: Food Not Bombs and the World-Class Waste of Global Cities" (Duke UP, 2021)
February 22, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People: Food Not Bombs and the World-Class Waste of Global Cities (Duke UP, 2021), David Boarder Giles explores the ways in which capitalism simultaneously manufactures waste and scarcity. Illustrating how communities of marginalized people and discarded things gather and cultivate political possibilities, Giles documents the work of Food Not Bombs (FNB), a global movement of grassroots soup kitchens that recover wasted grocery surpluses and redistribute them to t...