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
Catherine Keyser, "Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions" (Oxford UP, 2019)
July 15, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourIn this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Catherine Keyser about early twentieth century fiction and the role that modern food plays in literature as a language for talking about race and racial categories. In Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions, published in 2019 by Oxford University Press, Keyser explores the ways that modern fiction writers responded to the theories and anxieties about race in the early twentieth century through related anxieties about modern industria...
Jeanette M. Fregulia, "A Rich and Tantalizing Brew: A History of How Coffee Connected the World" (U Arkansas Press, 2019))
June 26, 2019 08:00 - 47 minutesIn this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Jeanette M. Fregulia about the movements of coffee beans, coffee drinking, and coffee houses from Ethiopia and Yemen, across the Mediterranean region, through Western Europe, and to the Americas. In A Rich and Tantalizing Brew: A History of How Coffee Connected the World (University of Arkansas Press, 2019), Fregulia examines the geographic movements of coffee beans through global trade as well as the social and cultural movements of coffee dri...
John O'Brien, "States of Intoxication: The Place of Alcohol in Civilisation" (Routledge, 2018)
June 20, 2019 08:00 - 48 minutesIs alcohol a universal feature of human society? Why is problematic in some countries and not others? How was alcohol helped build the modern state? These are just a few of the questions that sociologist John O'Brien addresses in States of Intoxication: The Place of Alcohol in Civilisation(Routledge, 2018). His book offers a broad and diverse perspective on alcohol use and suggests that booze has been an important element in developing communities and building up tax bases. In the era of "sup...
Veronica Hinke, "The Last Night on the Titanic: Unsinkable Drinking, Dining, and Style" (Regnery History, 2019)
May 30, 2019 08:00 - 53 minutesFascination with The Titanic has not faded, though more than 105 years have passed since its tragic sinking when so many lives were lost, and an era of gilded glamor ended. Culinary historian, Veronica Hinke’s new book, The Last Night on the Titanic: Unsinkable Drinking, Dining, and Style(Regnery History, 2019) is a celebration of the ethos of The Titanic, using the food and drink served on board as a fulcrum of a broader exploration of this fascinating episode of maritime history, the intri...
Nico Slate, "Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet: Eating with the World in Mind" (U Washington Press, 2019)
May 17, 2019 08:00 - 54 minutesIn this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Nico Slate, professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, about the intersections between diet, spirituality, health, and politics for one of the world’s most famous nonviolent political activists, Mahatma Gandhi. Dr. Slate, who researches anti-racist activism in the United States and India, researched Gandhi’s experiments with vegetarianism and veganism (and vegetarianism again), raw food, nut milks, fasting, and prohibitions against sal...
Kristin D. Phillips, "An Ethnography of Hunger: Politics, Subsistence, and the Unpredictable Grace of the Sun" (Indiana UP, 2018)
May 09, 2019 10:00 - 1 hourFamilies in parts of rural Tanzania regularly face periods when they cut back on their meals because their own food stocks are running short and they cannot afford to buy food. Kristin D. Phillips' new book An Ethnography of Hunger: Politics, Subsistence, and the Unpredictable Grace of the Sun (Indiana University Press, 2018) provides a deeply empathetic portrait of rural life in Singida, in central Tanzania. Her study is both a memoir of rural life during a food shortage and a deeply insight...
Stéphane Henaut and Jeni Mitchell, "A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment" (The New Press, 2018)
March 25, 2019 10:00 - 55 minutesFrom the cassoulet that won a war to the crêpe that doomed Napoleon, from the rebellions sparked by bread and salt to the new cuisines forged by empire, the history of France is intimately entwined with its gastronomic pursuits. A witty exploration of the facts and legends surrounding some of the most popular French foods and wines by a French cheesemonger and an American academic, A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment(The New Press, 2018) tel...
Alex Colas et al., "Food, Politics, and Society Social Theory and the Modern Food System" (U California Press, 2018)
March 20, 2019 10:00 - 47 minutesThe consumption of food and drink is much more than what we put in our mouth. Food and drink have been a focal point of modern social theory since the inception of agrarian capitalism and the industrial revolution. The origins of food and drink are rather complex. The construction of food and drink as authentic to a specific region is even more complex. Join us for a discussion with Alex Colas, Jason Edwards, Jane Levi, and Sami Zubaida about their book Food, Politics, and Society Social Theo...
Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing
March 19, 2019 10:00 - 32 minutesIn the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments ...
Jodi Campbell, "At the First Table: Food and Social Identity in Early Modern Spain" (U Nebraska Press, 2017)
January 29, 2019 11:00 - 33 minutesJodi Campbell is Professor of History at Texas Christian University. She has written extensively on Spanish drama, royal history and women’s history. Her first book was published by Ashgate in 2006 and is titled Monarchy, Political Culture and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid: Theater of Negotiation. She also co-edited Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500-1800 (Brill, 2012). Dr. Campbell’s new book, At the First Table: Food and ...
Nicholas Bauch, "Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Enterprise" (U California Press, 2017)
January 11, 2019 12:00 - 1 hourWhile most people in the US are familiar with the ubiquitous Kellogg cereal brand, few know how it relates to US geography, science and technology around the turn of the 20th century. In A Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Enterprise (University of California Press, 2017), Nicholas Bauch explores the digestive system as a sociomaterial landscape developed from the Battle Creek Sanitarium, as run by Dr. John Kellogg. Bauch wants to focus less on Kellogg the man, but rather ...
Margot Finn, "Discriminating Taste: How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution" (Rutgers UP, 2017)
December 20, 2018 11:00 - 53 minutesYou eat what you are and are what you eat, right? There is an increasing number of Americans who pay great attention to the food they eat, buy organic vegetables, drink fine wines, and seek out exotic cuisine. The affordability of food across the class spectrum have become more accessible. The masses, however, still lack other forms of capital (social, cultural, and culinary) necessary to fully understand and enjoy the delights of its consumption. Further, people also seek to differentiate th...
Stephan J. Guyenet, "The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat" (Flatiron Books, 2017)
December 19, 2018 11:00 - 1 hourIn this this interview, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Diana Hill talks with Dr. Stephan J. Guyenet, neurobiologist and obesity researcher, about the unconscious systems that lead to overeating and weight gain. Dr. Guyenet discusses why dietary guidelines alone are not enough to change our eating behavior. In The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat (Flatiron Books, 2017), hee explores the biological and evolutionary reasons for overeati...
Venus Bivar, “Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France” (UNC Press, 2018)
October 16, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourIn Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Venus Bivar documents the development of agriculture in post-1944 France. Through the Second World War, France’s agriculture was comparatively backward next to those of its neighbors and geopolitical rivals. The French government undertook a major program of “modernization” to encourage the consolidation of landholdings, increases in the productivity of agricultural labor,...
Alyshia Gálvez, “Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico” (U. California Press, 2018)
September 19, 2018 10:00 - 55 minutesThe North American Free Trade Agreement—or NAFTA, as we Americans call it—is very much in the news of late, primarily because President Trump has decided to make good on what he famously called “the single worst trade deal” that the United States has ever approved. Trump’s assessment, like so many of his statements, isn’t quite the fact he’d like it to be. In study after study, economists have found that NAFTA’s impact on the U.S. economy ranges from relatively insignificant to mildly benefic...
Shachar M. Pinsker, “A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture” (NYU Press, 2018)
August 06, 2018 10:00 - 50 minutesThe café, long a European institution, was also a stimulant and a refuge for European Jewish culture. In cities across Europe, and later in Palestine, Israel, and the United States, Jewish journalists, poets, and thinkers gathered in cafés to socialize, argue, create, and simply to be in a space that welcomed them. In A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture (NYU Press, 2018), Shachar M. Pinsker, Professor of Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan, pr...
Kelley Fanto Deetz, “Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine” (UP of Kentucky, 2017)
July 26, 2018 10:00 - 49 minutesThe concept of “Southern hospitality” began to take form in the late eighteenth century and became especially associated with Virginia’s grand plantations. This state was home to many of our founding fathers. Their galas, balls, feasts, and entertainments became famous internationally as well as at home. On whose shoulders did this success rest? Not the mistress, whose role was mainly that of social director. The labor was slavery, the abundant and spectacular food was produced by enslaved c...
Norah MacKendrick, “Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics” (U California Press, 2018).
July 19, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourConsumers today have a lot of choices. Whether in stores or online, people are inundated by an abundance of options for what to buy. At the same time, the products we consume seem to have more and more ingredients, additives, and chemicals in them that put our health at risk, and even their packaging could be harmful to us. How do consumers make sense of the choices they have to make to reduce their own and their family’s exposure to everyday toxics? In her engaging and insightful new book, ...
Adrienne Rose Bitar, “Diet and the Disease of Civilization” (Rutgers UP, 2018)
July 17, 2018 10:00 - 55 minutesDiet books are a multi-billion dollar industry and in Diet and the Disease of Civilization (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Adrienne Rose Bitar explores the narratives of those books. Bitar looks at the ways in which diet books not only present American’s with dieting advice, but also create cultural narratives about how we should live. Through the exploration of hundreds of diet books over the past century (and sometimes more), Bitar examines four popular diets, viewing them as narratives f...
Jeff Koelher, “Where the Wild Coffee Grows: The Untold Story of Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup” (Bloomsbury, 2017)
July 02, 2018 10:00 - 47 minutesIs life without coffee possible? Before you answer, first admit that you know almost nothing about the plant that you depend on to deliver you conscious into your day. You will learn from Jeff Koehler’s wide-ranging history Where the Wild Coffee Grows: The Untold Story of Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup (Bloomsbury, 2017) that the true origin of coffee is the cloud forest in the Kafa highlands of southwest Ethiopia, where it is a wild-growing, shade-loving tree. How Caf...
Anna Zeide, “Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry” (U California Press, 2018)
April 16, 2018 10:00 - 52 minutesMost everything Americans eat today comes out of cans. Some of it emerges from the iconic steel cylinders and much of the rest from the mammoth processed food empire the canning industry pioneered. Historian Anna Zeide, in Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry (University of California Press, 2018), carefully traces how canners convinced a nation of consumers who ate little but seasonal, fresh food to dare to crack open an opaque container of unknown o...
Sean Sherman, “The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen” (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
March 22, 2018 10:00 - 30 minutesChef Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota and originally from Pine Ridge Reservation, has become one of the most important voices in the Indigenous foods revitalization movement. By researching in the archives, visiting elders, and experimenting with new uses for traditional ingredients and techniques, he has created a new vision for modern Native American cuisine. That vision is realized inThe Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Particularly making use of the tradit...
Peter A. Kopp, “Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley” (U California Press, 2016)
March 09, 2018 11:00 - 53 minutesEnvironmental historian Peter A. Kopp‘s book Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley (University of California Press, 2016) examines the fascinating history of a very special plant: the hop. From its prehistoric origins to its use in ancient and medieval beermaking, the hop was already an important crop in human agriculture when it first appeared on Colonial American shores, but when it made its way to Oregon’s lush Willamette Valley in the mid-19th century, it...
Andrew Friedman, “Chefs, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll” (Ecco Press, 2018)
March 05, 2018 11:00 - 1 hourI first really got to know Andrew Friedman after the death of our mutual friend, the great food writer Josh Ozersky. Andrew is a widely respected food writer who has collaborated on numerous landmark cookbooks and chef memoirs. Now his labor of love, Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New American Profession (Ecco Press, 2018), is making waves in the industry. Friedman charts a course starting in the mid 1960s and winding up in the ear...
D. Harris and P. Guiffre, “Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen” (Rutgers UP, 2015)
February 22, 2018 11:00 - 30 minutesIn Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen (Rutgers University Press, 2015), Deborah Harris and Patti Giuffre trace the historical evolution of the profession, analyze more than two thousand examples of chef profiles and restaurant reviews, and conduct in-depth interviews with thirty-three women chefs. There are a number of recent books, magazines, and television programs that focused on the world of the professional chef. The media perpetually uses men ...
Mark Padoongpatt, “Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America” (U of California Press, 2017)
February 13, 2018 11:00 - 1 hourIn Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America (University of California Press, 2017), Mark Padoongpatt weaves together histories of food, empire, race, immigration, and Los Angeles in the second half of the twentieth century. Flavors of Empire explores how Thai food became hyper-visible in the United States, and yet Thai people have remained relatively invisible in American life. The story of Thai food in America begins with U.S. informal empire and culinary tourism in Thailand in...
Johan Swinnen and Devin Briski, “Beeronomics: How Beer Explains the World” (Oxford UP, 2017)
October 31, 2017 10:00 - 36 minutesBeer has been a part of human civilization dating back to its beginnings. In summarizing the role it has played over the millennia, Johan Swinnen and Devin Briski’s book Beeronomics: How Beer Explains the World (Oxford University Press, 2017) reveals how the evolving roles the beverage has played exposes broader trends in the economy and society. As Briski explains in this podcast, while beer has been consumed since at least as early as Sumerian times, it wasn’t until the addition of hops as ...
Bryant Simon, “The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives” (The New Press, 2017)
October 06, 2017 15:42 - 43 minutesOn September 3, 1991, a fire erupted at the Imperial Foods factory in the small town of Hamlet, North Carolina. Twenty-five people died behind the factory’s locked doors that morning. Most of the victims were women, and about half of them were black. In The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives (The New Press, 2017), Temple University history professor Bryant Simon lays out the structural failures in the American and global economic systems which killed ...
Andrew Smith, “Terror and Terroir: The Winegrowers of the Languedoc and Modern France” (Manchester University Press, 2016)
October 06, 2017 10:00 - 1 hourAndrew Smith‘s Terror and Terroir: The Winegrowers of the Languedoc and Modern France (Manchester University Press, 2016) is a political history of wine radicalism. Focused on the producers rather than the consumers of what Roland Barthes famously referred to as the nation’s “totem-drink,” Terror and Terroir examines wine politics and activisms in the Languedoc following the Second World War. In a first chapter, Smith looks closely at the memory and legacy of the “Grand Revolt of 1907,” a ser...
Nina Savelle-Rocklin, “Food for Thought: Perspectives on Eating Disorders” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017)
September 12, 2017 11:00 - 53 minutesThe psychology of eating disorders is poorly understood. Recent trends in research and treatment focus near-exclusively on behaviors around food and weight without sufficiently attending to their psychic undercurrents. Yet evidence shows that, when patients start putting words to the pain their eating disorders express, they start gaining freedom from these vexing patterns. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is well positioned to offer individuals such an opportunity, and the rationale for such an ...
Faegheh Shirazi, “Brand Islam: The Marketing and Commodification of Piety” (U. Texas Press, 2016)
September 05, 2017 21:31 - 30 minutesReligion is big business nowadays. Within the global context of Muslim consumers Islamic commodities have become increasingly popular over the past few decades. Faegheh Shirazi, Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, explores the industrial and discursive production of halal products in Brand Islam: The Marketing and Commodification of Piety (University of Texas Press, 2016). In the wake of increased insecurity due to the rise of anti-Musli...
Alice Weinreb, “Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany” (Oxford UP, 2017)
August 13, 2017 14:20 - 54 minutesFood is a hot topic these days, and not just among the folks posting pictures of their dinner on Instagram. A growing number of scholars in many fields study food’s production, distribution, consumption, connection to geopolitics, environmental impact and history. Alice Weinreb‘s new book, Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany (Oxford University Press, 2017), is a most welcome contribution to this rapidly expanding and timely field of study. The global industrial food s...
Sophie Egan, “Devoured: How What We Eat Defines Who We Are” (William Morrow, 2017)
July 24, 2017 15:17 - 54 minutesIn Devoured: How What We Eat Defines Who We Are (William Morrow Books, 2017), food writer and Culinary Institute of America program director Sophie Egan takes readers on an eye-opening journey through the American food psyche, examining the connections between the values that define our national character—work, freedom, and progress—and our eating habits, the good and the bad. Egan explores why these values make for such an unstable, and often unhealthy, food culture and, paradoxically, why ...
Michael W. Twitty, “The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South” (Amistad, 2017)
June 19, 2017 10:00 - 1 hourThe “ownership” of Southern food is a divisive cultural issue, reflective of the ongoing struggle for racial justice in America. Michael Twitty shares with us that struggle in The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South (Harper Collins: Amistad 2017). He brings to life the unsung heroes of American food history, the black cooks in slavery and freedom who created an innovative and syncretic cuisine. Like them, he builds upon the South’s diverse botani...
Diana Kennedy, “Nothing Fancy: Recipes and Recollections of Soul-Satisfying Food” (U of Texas Press, 2016)
May 22, 2017 04:00 - 1 hourDiana Kennedy, Nothing Fancy: Recipes and Recollections of Soul-Satisfying Food (University of Texas Press, 2016). Don’t be misled by this title. Its author, Diana Kennedy, has written nine cookbooks and spent forty years researching, preserving, and protecting the cuisines of Mexico. She teaches its regional cooking techniques in her kitchen at the Diana Kennedy Center, Quinta Diana, in Michoacan, Mexico, as well internationally through cooking tours as an ambassador of authentic Mexican cui...
Demet Guzey, “Food on Foot: A History of Eating on Trails and in the Wild” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017)
May 14, 2017 13:55 - 58 minutesNapoleon famously stated that an army marches on its stomach. Of no less importance is the food that keeps exploration moving, whether polar, desert, or on pilgrimage. Demet Guzey‘s Food on Foot: A History of Eating on Trails and in the Wild (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) is a history of staying alive on the edible, barely edible, and inedible. It is also a history of progress made on several fronts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: nutrition, medical discoveries, early fe...
Michaela DeSoucey, “Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food” (Princeton UP, 2016)
March 25, 2017 11:29 - 1 hourA heritage food in France, and a high-priced obscurity in the United States. But in both countries, foie gras, the specially fattened liver of a duck or goose, has the power to stir a remarkable array of emotions and produce heated debates. Comparing the French and American producers and consumers of this controversial food item, Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food (Princeton University Press, 2016) offers readers a broad mix of these perspectives under a clear, rich analysis...
Jordan D. Rosenblum, “The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
March 09, 2017 21:14 - 47 minutesIn The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World Jordan D. Rosenblum explores how cultures critique and defend their religious food practices. In particular he focuses on how ancient Jews defended the kosher laws, or kashrut, and how ancient Greek, Romans, and early Christians critiqued these practices. As the kosher laws are first encountered in the Hebrew Bible, this study is rooted in ancient biblical interpretation. Rosenblum explores how commentators in antiquity understood, applied, alte...
David B. Goldstein and Amy L. Tigner, eds. “Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England” (Duquesne UP, 2016)
December 19, 2016 11:19 - 45 minutesCulinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England (Duquesne University Press, 2016) is a collection of essays that offers new dimensions for reading and understanding Shakespeare’s plays. Responding to a rich scholarship on Shakespeare, the authors shift the centers and margins of literary discourse to illuminate aspects that were previously dismissed as insignificant. In Culinary Shakespeare, food is theorized as a territory where multiple dimensions intersect and overlap...
Christopher Woolgar, “The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500” (Yale UP, 2016)
September 30, 2016 18:40 - 56 minutesFood was central to the lives of people in England during the Middle Ages in ways different than it is today. As Christopher Woolgar reveals in his book The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500 (Yale University Press, 2016), it had a cultural significance that permeated nearly aspect of their society. Using a vast range of legal, archaeological, and literary sources, he explains what the English ate during the late Middle Ages, how they ate it, and what their food meant to them. The choices ...
Amy Wright, “Cracker Sonnets” (BrickRoad Poetry Press, 2016)
August 18, 2016 15:37 - 49 minutesMy grandmother, who’s now ninety-eight, lived most of her life in a little town in Southwestern Ohio called Waynesville. The town has reinvented itself in the last few years as a destination for antiquers wiling to pay top-dollar for what she might call junk, but when she was there the town was the small center of a lot of small family farms, including her own. In her years there, she helped run the farm, started a dry-cleaning business, drove the school bus, served as an EMT and worked in th...
Marta Zaraska, “Meathooked: The History and Science of our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat” (Basic Books, 2016)
July 05, 2016 17:16 - 42 minutesHere in the U.S. we’ve just celebrated the Fourth of July, with its parades, fireworks, and, of course, cook-outs. If you’re like me, the smell of a grilling burger can make you salivate from across the yard. I feel like Pavlov’s dog whenever it happens, and that includes the seven or so years I was a vegetarian. I’d like to say I react this way only on these idyllic occasions summer holidays, family barbecues, campfire weenie roasts under a star-filled sky. But the truth is I can be walking ...
Sarah Wald, “The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl” (U. of Washington Press, 2016)
June 28, 2016 19:16 - 58 minutesThe California farmlands have long served as a popular symbol of America’s natural abundance and endless opportunity. Yet, from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart to Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, many novels, plays, movies, and songs have dramatized the brutality and hardships of working in the California fields. Little scholarship has focused on what these cultural productions tell us about who belongs in America, and in wha...
Garrett M. Broad, “More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change” (U of California Press, 2016)
May 13, 2016 13:08 - 55 minutesResistance to the industrial food system has, over the past decades, led to the rise of alternative food movements. Debate about genetically modified food, sugar consumption, fast food and the obesity crisis (to name a few) is pervasive. Most often, this focuses on individual consumer choice. Garrett M.Broad argues, however, for the importance of community level initiative. He maintains that the vote with your fork movement obscures the structural foundation of the corporate food system. The ...
Roger Horowitz, “Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food” (Columbia UP, 2016)
April 21, 2016 12:29 - 32 minutesIn Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food (Columbia University Press, 2016), Roger Horowitz, director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library, looks at points of intersection between Jewish law and modern industrial foodways during the 20th century. In revealing the hidden kosher histories of products such as Coke, Jell-O and kosher meat, Horowitz highlights controversies over rabbinic authority and consump...
Jeff Koehler, “Darjeeling” (Bloomsbury, 2015)
March 31, 2016 12:49 - 1 hourDarjeeling tea, like other members of its artisanal tribe serrano peppers, Champagne, and grana padano,exists through a combination of intimate understanding of natural forces, intensive labor, and lifelong dedication. The result is a small output of unparalleled quality. The town where Darjeeling tea grows, in West Bengal, India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, is a setting of immense beauty, complicated history, and environmental fragility. Even transporting this precious tea to Kolkata,...
Sarah Bowen, “Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production” (U of California Press, 2015)
February 06, 2016 22:50 - 42 minutesIn her new book, Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production (University of California Press, 2015), Sarah Bowen presents the challenges and politics associated with the establishment of Denominations of Origin (DOs) for tequila and mezcal. On one hand, establishing these DOs protects a crucial part of Mexico’s national identity as well as the quality of these fermented beverages. On the other hand, small farmers, jimadores, and other agricultural field workers who have b...
Cindy R. Lobel, “Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)
February 06, 2016 11:13 - 54 minutesNew York City’s growth, from colonial outpost to the center of the gastronomic world is artfully crafted by Cindy R. Lobel, Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center, in her tome Urban Appetites: Food & Culture in Nineteenth Century New York (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Lobel examines the evolution of the metropolis as gastronomic capital through the lens of public markets, grocers, restaurants, dining rooms and kitchens as they rose and fell in pop...
Jamie Koufman, “Dr. Koufman’s Acid Reflux Diet” (Katalitix, 2015)
February 03, 2016 12:41 - 56 minutesI love this book, am using its recipes, and was thrilled to interview Dr. Koufman, an iconoclast who appears poised to torpedo a terribly wasteful and dangerous arm of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex. As the advertising copy for Dr. Koufman’s Acid Reflux Diet (Katalitix, 2015) notes: “Combining 35 years of work in the field of acid reflux, including scientific research and the treatment of thousands of patients at the Voice Institute of New York, Dr. Jamie Koufman has identified the cau...
James A. Benn, “Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History” (U of Hawaii Press, 2015)
January 04, 2016 11:26 - 1 hourJames A. Benn‘s new book is a history of tea as a religious and cultural commodity in China before it became a global commodity in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the Tang and Song dynasties (with brief extensions earlier and later), Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) demonstrates that a “shift to drinking tea” in China “brought with it a total reorientation of Chinese culture.” Benn pays careful attention to the challenges and opportunities ...