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
Michelle Jurkovich, "Feeding the Hungry: Advocacy and Blame in the Global Fight Against Hunger" (Oxford UP, 2020)
February 07, 2022 09:00 - 44 minutesFood insecurity poses one of the most pressing development and human security challenges in the world. Feeding the Hungry: Advocacy and Blame in the Global Fight Against Hunger (Oxford UP, 2020) examines the social and normative environments in which international anti-hunger organizations are working and argues that despite international law ascribing responsibility to national governments to ensure the right to food of their citizens, there is no shared social consensus on who ought to do w...
John Cardina, "Lives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly" (Cornell UP, 2021)
January 19, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourLives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly (Cornell UP, 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 struggle...
Suzanne Cope, "Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement" (Lawrence Hill Books, 2021)
January 17, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to Suzanne Cope about her new book Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement (Lawrence Hill Books, 2021) In early 1969 Cleo Silvers and a few Black Panther Party members met at a community center laden with boxes of donated food to cook for the neighborhood children. By the end of the year, the Black Panthers would be feeding more children daily in all of their breakfast programs than the state of California was at that...
Rebecca Corbett, "Cultivating Femininity: Women and Tea Culture in Edo and Meiji Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)
January 17, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourThe overwhelming majority of tea practitioners in contemporary Japan are women, but there has been little discussion on their historical role in tea culture (chanoyu). In Cultivating Femininity: Women and Tea Culture in Edo and Meiji Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2019), Rebecca Corbett (USC East Asian Library) writes women back into this history and shows how tea practice for women was understood, articulated, and promoted in the Edo (1603–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods. Viewing chanoyu 茶の湯 fro...
Alison Hope Alkon, "A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City" (NYU Press, 2020)
December 31, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourA Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City (NYU Press, 2020), edited by Alison Hope Alkon, Yuki Kato, and Joshua Sbicca, is a collection of essays examining how gentrification uproots the urban food landscape, and what activists are doing to resist it. From hipster coffee shops to upscale restaurants, a bustling local food scene is perhaps the most commonly recognized harbinger of gentrification. A Recipe for Gentrification explores this widespread phenomenon, showin...
Clarissa Hyman, "Tomato: A Global History" (Reaktion Books, 2019)
December 24, 2021 09:00 - 51 minutesIn the history of food, the tomato is a relative newcomer but it would now be impossible to imagine the food cultures of many nations without them. The journey taken by the tomato from its ancestral home in the southern Americas to Europe and back is a riveting story full of discovery, innovation, drama and dispute. Today it is at the forefront of scientific advances and heritage conservation, but the tomato has faced challenges every step of the way into our gardens and kitchens including th...
Dave Goulson, "Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse" (Harper, 2021)
December 24, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourDrawing on thirty years of research, Goulson has written an accessible, fascinating, and important book that examines the evidence of an alarming drop in insect numbers around the world. "If we lose the insects, then everything is going to collapse," he warned in a recent interview in the New York Times--beginning with humans' food supply. The main cause of this decrease in insect populations is the indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides. Hence, Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse...
Rebecca J. Lester, "Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America" (U California Press, 2019)
December 21, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourWhen Rebecca Lester was eleven years old--and again when she was eighteen--she almost died from anorexia nervosa. Now both a tenured professor in anthropology and a licensed social worker, she turns her ethnographic and clinical gaze to the world of eating disorders--their history, diagnosis, lived realities, treatment, and place in the American cultural imagination. Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America (U California Press, 2019), the culmination of over two decades of anthro...
Shelley L. Koch, "Gender and Food: A Critical Look at the Food System" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019)
December 17, 2021 09:00 - 35 minutesGender and Food: A Critical Look at the Food System (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) synthesizes existing theoretical and empirical research on food, gender, and intersectionality to offer students and scholars a framework from which to understand how gender is central to the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Shelley L. Koch is professor of sociology at Emory & Henry College. She is the author of A Theory of Grocery Shopping: Food, Choice, and Conflict and co-editor of Food, Ma...
Vivian Nun Halloran, "The Immigrant Kitchen: Food, Ethnicity, and Diaspora" (Ohio State UP, 2016)
December 17, 2021 09:00 - 23 minutesIn The Immigrant Kitchen: Food, Ethnicity, and Diaspora (Ohio State UP, 2016), Vivian Nun Halloran examines food memoirs by immigrants and their descendants and reveals how their treatment of food deeply embeds concerns about immigrant identity in the United States. Halloran argues that by offering a glimpse into the authors' domestic lives through discussions of homemade food, these memoirs demystify the processes of immigration, assimilation, acculturation, and expatriation--ultimately exam...
Kristy Nabhan-Warren, "Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland" (UNC Press, 2021)
December 13, 2021 09:00 - 43 minutesWhether valorized as the heartland or derided as flyover country, the Midwest became instantly notorious when COVID-19 infections skyrocketed among workers in meatpacking plants—and Americans feared for their meat supply. But the Midwest is not simply the place where animals are fed corn and then butchered. Native midwesterner Kristy Nabhan-Warren (Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa) spent years interviewing Iowans who work in the meatpacking industry, both native-born residents a...
Bryant Terry, "Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora" (4 Color Books, 2021)
December 13, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourJames Beard and NAACP Image Award-winning chef and educator, Bryant Terry calls Black Food a “communal shrine to the shared culinary histories of the African diaspora.” Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora (4 Color Books, 2021) weaves together a diverse collection of more than 100 different contributors, including food writers, chefs, scholars, activists, and leaders exploring the food, experience, and community across the diaspora. As the editor, Terry exten...
Priya Fielding-Singh, "How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America" (Little Brown Spark, 2021)
December 10, 2021 09:00 - 34 minutesInequality in America manifests in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in how we eat. From her years of field research, sociologist and ethnographer Priya Fielding-Singh brings us into the kitchens of dozens of families from varied educational, economic, and ethnoracial backgrounds to explore how—and why—we eat the way we do. In How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America (Little Brown Spark, 2021), we get to know four families intimately: the Bakers, a Bl...
Ramin Ganeshram, "Saffron: A Global History" (Reaktion Books, 2020)
December 07, 2021 09:00 - 25 minutesExplore the dramatic history of the world’s most expensive spice in Saffron: A Global History (Reaktion Books, 2020). Literally worth their weight in gold, sunset-red saffron threads are prized internationally. Saffron can be found in cave art in Mesopotamia, in the frescoes of ancient Santorini, in the dyed wrappings of Egyptian mummies, in the saffron-hued robes of Buddhist monks, and in unmistakable dishes around the world. It has been the catalyst for trade wars as well as smuggling schem...
Fabio Parasecoli, "Food" (MIT, 2019)
December 06, 2021 09:00 - 36 minutesEverybody eats. We may even consider ourselves experts on the topic, or at least Instagram experts. But are we aware that the shrimp in our freezer may be farmed and frozen in Vietnam, the grapes in our fruit bowl shipped from Chile, and the coffee in our coffee maker grown in Nicaragua, roasted in Germany, and distributed in Canada? Whether we know it or not, every time we shop for food, cook, and eat, we connect ourselves to complex supply networks, institutions, and organizations that enab...
Jonatan Leer and S. G. S. Krogager, "Research Methods in Digital Food Studies" (Routledge, 2021)
December 02, 2021 09:00 - 38 minutesResearch Methods in Digital Food Studies (Routledge, 2021) offers the first methodological synthesis of digital food studies. It brings together contributions from leading scholars in food and media studies and explores research methods from textual analysis to digital ethnography and action research. In recent times, digital media has transformed our relationship with food which has become one of the central topics in digital and social media. This spatiotemporal shift in food cultures has l...
Joseph C. Ewoodzie, "Getting Something to Eat in Jackson: Race, Class, and Food in the American South" (Princeton UP, 2021)
December 01, 2021 09:00 - 54 minutesGetting Something to Eat in Jackson (Princeton Press, 2021) uses food—what people eat and how—to explore the interaction of race and class in the lives of African Americans in the contemporary urban South. Dr. Joseph Ewoodzie Jr. examines how “foodways”—food availability, choice, and consumption—vary greatly between classes of African Americans in Jackson, Mississippi, and how this reflects and shapes their very different experiences of a shared racial identity. Ewoodzie spent more than a yea...
Pascale Joassart-Marcelli, "The Sixteen-Dollar Taco: Contested Geographies of Food, Ethnicity, and Gentrification" (U Washington Press, 2021)
November 30, 2021 09:00 - 42 minutesWhite middle-class eaters are increasingly venturing into historically segregated urban neighborhoods in search of "authentic" eating in restaurants run by-and originally catering to-immigrants and people of color. What does a growing white interest in these foods mean for historically immigrant neighborhoods and communities of color? What role does foodie culture play in gentrification? In The Sixteen-Dollar Taco: Contested Geographies of Food, Ethnicity, and Gentrification (U Washington Pre...
Demet Güzey, "Mustard: A Global History" (Reaktion Books, 2019)
November 30, 2021 09:00 - 22 minutesWhether grainy or smooth, spicy or sweet, Dijon, American, or English, mustard accompanies our food and flavors our life around the globe. It has been a source of pleasure, health, and myth from ancient times to the present day, its tiny seed a symbol of faith and its pungent flavor a testimony to refined taste. There are stories of mustard plasters used to treat melancholy, runners eating mustard to prevent cramps, and Christians spreading mustard seeds along pilgrimage trails. Mustard: A Gl...
Joshua Sbicca, "Food Justice Now!: Deepening the Roots of Social Struggle" (U Minnesota Press, 2018)
November 23, 2021 09:00 - 44 minutesFood Justice Now: Deepening the Roots of Social Struggle (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) charts a path from food activism to social justice activism that integrates the two. In an engrossing, historically grounded, and ethnographically rich narrative, Joshua Sbicca argues that food justice is more than a myopic focus on food, allowing scholars and activists alike to investigate the causes behind inequities and evaluate and implement political strategies to overcome them. Joshua Sbicca i...
Rose Wellman, "Feeding Iran: Shi`i Families and the Making of the Islamic Republic" (U California Press, 2021)
November 22, 2021 09:00 - 43 minutesSince Iran's 1979 Revolution, the imperative to create and protect the inner purity of family and nation in the face of outside spiritual corruption has been a driving force in national politics. Through extensive fieldwork, Rose Wellman examines how Basiji families, as members of Iran's voluntary paramilitary organization, are encountering, enacting, and challenging this imperative. Her ethnography reveals how families and state elites are employing blood, food, and prayer in commemorations ...
Xavier Naville, "The Lettuce Diaries: How A Frenchman Found Gold Growing Vegetables In China" (Earnshaw Books, 2021)
November 18, 2021 09:00 - 44 minutesMany Western entrepreneurs and businesses have foundered in trying to set up shop in China. Different expectations, different ways of doing business, different institutions and platforms—all come together to remove any pretensions that one can easily transplant a foreign business model into the Chinese market. One of these entrepreneurs was Xavier Naville, who moved to China in 1997 where he built Creative Food. Unlike many others, his venture was a success. It's now a key supplier to major r...
Jeff Miller, "Avocado: A Global History" (Reaktion Books, 2020)
November 18, 2021 09:00 - 36 minutesThe avocado is the iconic food of the twenty-first century. It has gone from a little-known regional food to a social media darling in less than a hundred years. This is an astounding trajectory for a fruit that isn’t sweet, becomes bitter when it is cooked and has perhaps the oddest texture of any fruit or vegetable. But the idea that this rich and delicious fruit is also healthy despite being fatty and energy-dense gives it unicorn status among modern eaters, especially millennials. Through...
Rosa Abreu-Runkel, "Vanilla: A Global History" (Reaktion Books, 2020)
November 15, 2021 09:00 - 42 minutesToday I talked to Rosa Abreu-Runkel about her new book Vanilla: A Global History (Reaktion Books, 2020). Intoxicating and evocative, vanilla is so much more than a spice rack staple. It is a flavor that has defined the entire world—and its roots reach deep into the past. With its earliest origins dating back seventy million years, the history of vanilla begins in ancient Mesoamerica and continues to define and enhance today’s traditions and customs. It has been used by nearly every culture as...
Jen Corrinne Brown, "Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West" (U Washington Press, 2017)
November 12, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourFrom beer labels to literary classics like A River Runs Through It, trout fishing is a beloved feature of the iconography of the American West. But as Jen Brown demonstrates in Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West (U Washington Press, 2017), the popular conception of Rocky Mountain trout fishing as a quintessential experience of communion with nature belies the sport's long history of environmental manipulation, engineering, and, ultimately, transformation. A...
Edward Slingerland, "Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization" (Hachette, 2021)
November 10, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourEver since Noah exited the ark, human beings have been wanting to get drunk and high. Why? Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization (Hachette, 2021) is the latest attempt to answer that question. Drunk elegantly cuts through the tangle of urban legends and anecdotal impressions that surround our notions of intoxication to provide the first rigorous, scientifically-grounded explanation for our love of alcohol. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive ...
Jonathan Morris, "Coffee: A Global History" (Reaktion Books, 2018)
November 09, 2021 09:00 - 40 minutesIn Coffee: A Global History (Reaktion Books, 2019), Jonathan Morris discusses the diverse cast of caffeinated characters who drank coffee, why and where they did so, as well as how it was prepared and what it tasted like. He identifies the regions and ways in which coffee has been grown, who worked the farms and who owned them, and how the beans were processed, traded, and transported. Morris also explores the businesses behind coffee—the brokers, roasters, and machine manufacturers—and disse...
Hannah Kirshner, "Water, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town" (Viking, 2021)
November 08, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourWater, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town (Viking, 2021) is memoir, ethnography, cookbook, and sketchbook rolled into one." This is the Princeton Independence's description of the polyvocal and artistic text, written by Hannah Kirshner. I cannot agree more with the following review they made on the creative quality of the book: "It evokes the best of the nature writing of Rachel Carson and Wendell Berry, as well as the food writing of M.F.K. Fis...
A Chemistry Professor Shares his Grief and his Favorite Recipes: A Conversation with David Smith
November 04, 2021 08:00 - 51 minutesWelcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Professor David Smith’s path to becoming a chemistry professor Why he’s passionate about making science inclusive and representational His husband’s death Being an academic and a single parent How sharing stories about food and cooking dinner helps him process his grief A discussion of his book Tw-eat: A Little Book with Big Feelings and Short Recipes for Very Busy Lives Today’s book is: Tw-eat: A Little Book with Big Fee...
Peter S. Ungar, "Evolution's Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins" (Princeton UP, 2018)
November 01, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourWhether we realize it or not, we carry in our mouths the legacy of our evolution. Our teeth are like living fossils that can be studied and compared to those of our ancestors to teach us how we became human. In Evolution's Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins (Princeton UP, 2018), noted paleoanthropologist Peter Ungar brings together for the first time cutting-edge advances in understanding human evolution and climate change with new approaches to uncovering dietary clues from foss...
Julian Agyeman and Sydney Giacalone, "The Immigrant-Food Nexus: Borders, Labor, and Identity in North America" (MIT Press, 2020)
October 26, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe Immigrant-Food Nexus: Borders, Labor, and Identity in North America (MIT Press, 2020) considers the intersection of food and immigration at both the macroscale of national policy and the microscale of immigrant foodways—the intimate, daily performances of identity, culture, and community through food. Taken together, the chapters—which range from an account of the militarization of the agricultural borderlands of Yuma, Arizona, to a case study of Food Policy Council in Vancouver, Canada—d...
Nicolette Hahn Niman, "Defending Beef: The Ecological and Nutritional Case for Meat" (Chelsea Green, 2021)
October 26, 2021 08:00 - 53 minutesIn Defending Beef: The Ecological and Nutritional Case for Meat (Chelsea Green, 2021), Nicolette Hahn Niman makes the expanded case for large ruminants as part of the solution to the climate crisis. In our discussion, Hahn Niman does some myth-busting and presents a system for managing beef cattle that can enhance ecosystems rather than degrade them. Hahn Niman recognizes not all beef enterprises are equal in their impact and argues components of the industry are tone-deaf. To move the indust...
Seth M. Siegel, "Troubled Water: What's Wrong with What We Drink" (Thomas Dunne, 2020)
October 18, 2021 08:00 - 43 minutesThere’s nothing more vital to survival than water. “Water water everywhere, and not a drop to drink!”, said the Ancient Mariner, in the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Besides widespread water shortage, too much of America’s water is undrinkable. From big cities and suburbs to the rural heartland, chemicals linked to cancer, heart disease, obesity, birth defects, and lowered IQ routinely spill from our taps. The tragedy is that existing technologies could launch a new age of clean, healthy, ...
Robert Hellyer, "Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups" (Columbia UP, 2021)
October 15, 2021 08:00 - 46 minutesRobert Hellyer’s Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups (Columbia UP, 2021) is a tale of American and Japanese teaways, skillfully weaving together stories of Midwesterners drinking green tea (with milk and sugar, to be sure), the recent and complex origins of Japan's love of now-ubiquitous sencha, Ceylon tea merchants exploiting American racism, Chinese tea production expertise, and the author’s own family history in the Japan-America tea trade going back to the nine...
From Animal Rights to Human Rights: Supporting Sustainable Farming Practices to Improve Livelihoods
October 14, 2021 08:00 - 18 minutesIn September-October 2021, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts exploring the role that research plays in understanding and advocating for human rights in Southeast Asia. For the final episode in the series, Dr Thushara Dibley is joined by Emeritus Professor Peter Windsor who brings to light how research improving animal health and production is intrinsically linked to human rights issues. Reflecting on his extensive field-based research on transboundary livestock disease i...
Rebecca Earle, "Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
October 11, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourPotatoes are the world's fourth most important food crop, yet they were unknown to most of humanity before 1500. Rebecca Earle, Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato (Cambridge UP, 2020) traces the global journey of this popular foodstuff from the Andes to everywhere. The potato's global history reveals the ways in which our ideas about eating are entangled with the emergence of capitalism and its celebration of the free market. It also reminds us that ordinary people make history in...
Jonathan Rees, "The Chemistry of Fear: Harvey Wiley's Fight for Pure Food" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)
September 28, 2021 08:00 - 56 minutesThough trained as a medical doctor, chemist Harvey Wiley spent most of his professional life advocating for "pure food"—food free of both adulterants and preservatives. A strong proponent of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, still the basis of food safety legislation in the United States, Wiley gained fame for what became known as the Poison Squad experiments—a series of tests in which, to learn more about the effects of various chemicals on the human body, Wiley's own employees at the Depa...
Bob Quinn and Liz Carlisle, "Grain by Grain: A Quest to Revive Ancient Wheat, Rural Jobs, and Healthy Food" (Island Press, 2019)
September 27, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourHow can farmers adapt to climate changes? How can regenerative farmers have livelihoods that nourish themselves and their communities? How can we break free of the commodity mindset and rethink the US food system? Bob Quinn’s remarkable memoir of his decades living and working on a Montana farm offers unique insights into all of these pressing questions, with creativity, intelligence, and a healthy dash of humor. Quinn is a farmer and sustainable business leader. He founded a regional mill fo...
Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez, "Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human" (Princeton UP, 2021)
September 23, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourNature, it has been said, invites us to eat by appetite and rewards by flavor. But what exactly are flavors? Why are some so pleasing while others are not? Delicious is a supremely entertaining foray into the heart of such questions. With generous helpings of warmth and wit, Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez offer bold new perspectives on why food is enjoyable and how the pursuit of delicious flavors has guided the course of human history. They consider the role that flavor may have played in the i...
Matt Frazier and Robert Cheeke, "The Plant-Based Athlete: A Game-Changing Approach to Peak Performance" (HarperOne, 2021)
September 16, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe Plant-Based Athlete: A Game-Changing Approach to Peak Performance (HarperOne, 2021) by Matt Frazier and Robert Cheeke reveals the incontrovertible proof that the human body does not need meat, eggs, or dairy to be strong. Instead, research shows that a consciously calibrated plant-based diet offers the greatest possible recovery times, cell oxidation, injury prevention, and restorative sleep, and allows athletes to train more effectively, with better results. However, committing to a plan...
Ann Vileisis, "Abalone: The Remarkable History and Uncertain Future of California's Iconic Shellfish" (Oregon State UP, 2020)
September 15, 2021 08:00 - 50 minutesFrom rocky coves at Mendocino and Monterey to San Diego’s reefs, abalone have held a cherished place in California culture for millennia. Prized for iridescent shells and delectable meat, these unique shellfish inspired indigenous artisans, bohemian writers, California cuisine, and the popular sport of skin diving, but also became a highly coveted commercial commodity. Mistakenly regarded as an inexhaustible seafood, abalone ultimately became vulnerable to overfishing and early impacts of cli...
Ken Meter, "Building Community Food Webs" (Island Press, 2021)
September 08, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourOur current food system has decimated rural communities and confined the choices of urban consumers. Even while America continues to ramp up farm production to astounding levels, net farm income is now lower than at the onset of the Great Depression, and one out of every eight Americans faces hunger. But a healthier and more equitable food system is possible. In Building Community Food Webs (Island Press, 2021), Ken Meter shows how grassroots food and farming leaders across the U.S. are tackl...
Arnab Dey, "Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
September 07, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India (Cambridge UP, 2021), Arnab Dey examines the intersecting role of law, ecology, and agricultural sciences in shaping the history of tea plantations in British Colonial India. He suggests that looking afresh at the legal, environmental, and agro-economic aspects of tea production illuminate covert, expedient, and often illegal administrative and commercial dealings that had an immediate and long-term human and envir...
Lindsay Naylor, "Fair Trade Rebels: Coffee Production and Struggles for Autonomy in Chiapas" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)
September 06, 2021 08:00 - 49 minutesFair trade certified coffee is now commonly found on the supermarket shelves of the Global North, but the connections between the consumer and producer of fair trade coffee are far from simple. Lindsay Naylor’s book, Fair Trade Rebels: Coffee Production and Struggles for Autonomy in Chiapas (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), examines the contested politics of fair trade coffee production in the indigenous highlands of Mexico. Using theoretical approaches based in diverse economies scholar...
Jessica Fanzo, "Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet?" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)
September 03, 2021 08:00 - 36 minutesHow can consumers, nations, and international organizations work together to improve food systems before our planet loses its ability to sustain itself and its people? Do we have the right to eat wrongly? As the world's agricultural, environmental, and nutritional needs intersect—and often collide—how can consumers, nations, and international organizations work together to reverse the damage by changing how we make, distribute, and purchase food? Can such changes in practice and policy revers...
Lettie Gay, "Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking" ( U South Carolina Press, 2021)
September 01, 2021 08:00 - 56 minutesSouthern Food Historian Rebecca Sharpless discusses a new edition of Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking released in 2021 by University of South Carolina Press. Sharpless added a new critical introduction to the historic cookbook, first published in 1930 from a New York press as a collaboration between Blanche Rhett, Helen Woodward, and Lettie Gay. Woodward had married into a family with South Carolina ties and for a time rented a home that shared a courtyard with Rhett. As Woodward tells...
Susan V. Spellman, "Cornering the Market: Independent Grocers and Innovation in American Small Business" (Oxford UP, 2016)
September 01, 2021 04:00 - 1 hourIn this episode for the Economic and Business History channel, I interviewed Dr. Susan V. Spellman, Associate Professor of History at Miami University. She is the author of Cornering the Market Independent Grocers and Innovation in American Small Business (Oxford University Press, 2016). In popular stereotypes, local grocers were avuncular men who spent their days in pickle-barrel conversations and checkers games; they were backward small-town merchants resistant to modernizing impulses. Corn...
Hélène Jawhara Piñer, "Sephardi: Cooking the History. Recipes of the Jews of Spain and the Diaspora, from the 13th Century Onwards" (Cherry Orchard, 2021)
August 30, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourHelene Jowhara-Piner has produced a masterpiece of culinary history. Sephardi: Cooking the History. Recipes of the Jews of Spain and the Diaspora, from the 13th Century Onwards (Cherry Orchard, 2021) recreates and reconstructs recipes of Sephardic Jews consumed during the Inquisition, the Renaissance and medieval Spain and North Africa into meals that anyone can prepare with ease in their own kitchen. Recipes from Turkey to Mexico, Brazil to Spain, are offered accompanied by anecdotes explain...
Thomas C. Hubka, "Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn: The Connected Farm Buildings of New England" (UP of New England, 2004)
August 24, 2021 08:00 - 34 minutes“Big house, little house, back house, barn”―this rhythmic cadence was sung by nineteenth-century children as they played. It also portrays the four essential components of the farms where many of them lived. The stately and beautiful connected farm buildings made by nineteenth-century New Englanders stand today as a living expression of a rural culture, offering insights into the people who made them and their agricultural way of life. A visual delight as well as an engaging tribute to our ni...
Zuza Zak, "Amber & Rye: A Baltic Food Journey: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania" (Allen & Unwin, 2021)
August 20, 2021 08:00 - 52 minutesFood writer Zuza Zak’s latest book, Amber & Rye: A Baltic Food Journey: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (Allen & Unwin, 2021) is a remarkable exploration of one of Europe’s better-kept secrets: the food and culture of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, known collectively as the three “Baltic States.” But as “Amber & Rye” proves so ably, each of these countries has its own unique and distinct culinary roots and culture, and each country is currently experiencing a lively culinary renaissance, which ma...