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
Yael Raviv, “Falafel Nation: Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel” (University of Nebraska Press, 2015)
December 17, 2015 12:47 - 42 minutesIn the late nineteenth century, Jewish immigrants inspired by Zionism began to settle in Palestine. Their goal was not only to establish a politically sovereign state, but also to create a new, modern, Hebrew nation. With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the Zionist movement realized its political goal. It then sought to acculturate the multitude of Jewish immigrant groups in the new state into a unified national culture. Yael Raviv highlights the role of food and cuisine in ...
Francesca Bray et al.,eds., “Rice: Global Networks and New Histories” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
December 14, 2015 12:07 - 1 hourThe new edited volume by Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, Edda Fields-Black and Dagmar Schafer is a wonderfully interdisciplinary global history of rice, rooted in specific local cases, that spans 15 chapters written by specialists in the histories of Africa, the Americas, and several regions of Asia. Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (Cambridge University Press, 2015) creates a conversation among regional and disciplinary modes of studying and narrating rice histories that have often be...
Ted Merwin, “Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli” (NYU Press, 2015)
December 14, 2015 11:46 - 31 minutesIn Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (New York University Press, 2015), Ted Merwin, Associate Professor of Religion and Judaic Studies at Dickinson College, serves up the first full-length history of the New York Jewish deli. A social space and symbol, the deli demonstrated American Jews’ connection to their heritage and to their new surroundings. Merwin addresses the rise and fall of the Jewish delicatessen in America, how we remember it, and its contemporary resurg...
Anna L. Tsing, “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins” (Princeton UP, 2015)
December 06, 2015 12:16 - 1 hourAnna L. Tsing‘s new book is on my new (as of this post) list of Must-Read-Books-That-All-Humans-Who-Can-Read-Should-Read-And-That-Nonhumans-Should-Find-A-Way-To-Somehow-Engage-Even-If-Reading-Is-Not-Their-Thing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015) joyfully bursts forth in a “riot of short chapters” that collectively open out into a mushroom-focused exploration of what Tsing refers to as a “third nature,” or “w...
Matthew Gavin Frank, “The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour through America’s Food” (Liveright, 2015)
November 29, 2015 21:54 - 47 minutesLet’s say you had a curiosity about, maybe even a hankering for, Indiana’s signature dessert, sugar cream pie. You might search for it and, on a typical foodie website, find this description, written in typical foodie prose: “As Indiana’s state pie, this rich, nutmeg-dusted custard pie also goes by the name ‘Hoosier Pie.’ Born from Amish and Shaker communities that settled in Indiana in the 1800s, this “desperation pie”–a category that refers to pies made when fresh fruit wasn’t available or ...
Tom Jackson, “Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again” (Bloomsbury, 2015)
August 19, 2015 16:17 - 56 minutesTom Jackson‘s Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again (Bloomsbury, 2015) is a completely engrossing look into the history and technology of refrigeration. This book reads like an expanded chapter of James Burke’s classic book Connections.Refrigeration is not only one of the most important foundation stones of our technological society, it’s also one that we take for granted. It’s hard to say which is more interesting; the realization that people were aware of a coo...
Josh Kun, “To Live and Dine in L.A.: Menus and the Making of the Modern City” (Angel City Press, 2015)
June 02, 2015 17:17 - 52 minutesThis book is a ton of fun. To Live and Dine in L.A.: Menus and the Making of the Modern City (Angel City Press) taps the deep and colorful collection of Southern California restaurant menus archived by the Los Angeles Public Library. Author Josh Kun, a professor in the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism at the University of Southern California, presides over beautiful pages showing a century of menus, ranging from the Art Deco high points of the Brown Derby (purportedly where ...
Reid Mitenbuler, “Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America’s Whiskey” (Viking, 2015)
May 18, 2015 11:09 - 45 minutesMost of the year, when the weather lets us, my wife and I wind down on our front porch with a bourbon. We live out in the countryside and, for no particular reason, bourbon feels like the right choice as we watch the long grass waving on the hillside and the birds shuttling back and forth between the far trees. Every so often, I’ll suggest we change things up: maybe a Scotch or an Irish whiskey–not really such a big change in the grand scheme of things–but my wife looks at me as though I’ve m...
Tom Hertweck, “Food on Film” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014)
April 26, 2015 18:03 - 1 hourMovies and television shows often include scenes of eating, either as a side activity of the actors or as an integralpart of a scene. University of Nevada, Reno Professor Tom Hertweck compiled 14 essays in his collection, Food on Film: Bringing Something New to the Table (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014). He talks with me about the overall procedure of editing a group of essays, as well as the themes he discovered in this process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Eugene N. Anderson, “Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)
March 15, 2015 12:00 - 1 hourEugene N. Anderson‘s new book offers an expansive history of food, environment, and their relationships in China. From prehistory through the Ming and beyond, Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) pays careful attention to a wide range of contexts of concern with nature and its resources. Readers of Anderson’s book will find fascinating discussions of rice agriculture and fermentation, the etiquette of food and eating, concerns with deforest...
Sarah Besky, “The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Plantations in India” (U of California Press, 2014)
January 14, 2015 12:54 - 46 minutesIn this wonderful ethnography of Darjeeling tea, Sarah Besky explores different attempts at bringing justice to plantation life in north east India. Through explorations into fair trade, geographic indication and a state movement for the Nepali tea workers, Besky critically assesses the limits of projects that fail to address underlying exploitative structures. The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014) is a readable...
Laura Silver, “Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food” (Brandeis University Press, 2014)
April 26, 2014 16:22 - 53 minutesSomething nice and filling for you here! Laura Silver‘s book Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food (Brandeis University Press, 2014) concerns itself not only with the round — or is it square? — savory pastry brought to America from somewhere in Europe to fill the working bellies of not well-to-do immigrants. The tale of the knish is a way to tell the story of where an ethnic group has been, where they think they are, and where they might be going. A free-ranging talk between Lower East Sid...
Leona Rittner, W. Scott Haine, and Jeffrey H. Jackson, eds. “The Thinking Space” (Ashgate, 2013)
March 27, 2014 10:23 - 1 hourBelieve it or not, the origins of this podcast and the entire New Books Network can be traced to a conversation I had in a cafein Ann Arbor, Michigan (Sweetwaters in Kerrytown, as it happens) in 2004. I was sitting there minding my own business when I overheard Ed Vielmetti and Lou Rosenfeldtalking about something called “del.icio.us” [sic]. It sounded interesting, so I asked them–complete strangers though they were–about it. They kindly brought me up to speed on something else called “Web 2....
Allen Salkin “From Scratch: Inside the Food Network” (Putnam, 2013)
October 05, 2013 15:20 - 1 hourWhen I was growing up the only cooking show on TV I remember was Julia Child. I sometimes watched “The French Chef,” not so much to learn anything about cooking, but rather just to watch Julia. She was a hoot. When I saw the famous “Saturday Night Live” in 1978, I wasn’t sure which was funnier–Dan Aykroyd as Julia or Julia herself. Today, of course, cooking is very serious business on TV and the reason, of course, is the Food Network. It grew from virtually nothing twenty years ago to a mass...
Marlene Zuk, “Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live” (Norton, 2013)
April 22, 2013 13:28 - 57 minutesThe Hebrews called it “Eden.” The Greeks and Romans called it the “Golden Age.” The philosophes–or Rousseau at least–called it the “State of Nature.” Marx and Engels called it “Primitive Communism.” The underlying notion, however, is the same: there was a time, long ago, when things were much better than they are today because we were then “in tune” with God, nature, or whatever. Thereafter we “fell,” usually due to our own stupidity, and landed in our present corrupted state. Today we are t...
E. C. Spary, “Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
February 18, 2013 13:26 - 1 hourBy focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spary’s work is at the same time a rich and embodied history of food, diet, and digestion in French Enlightenment science, and an account of how social and epistemological authority were produced amid the emergence of new Enlightenment publics. In Eatin...
Barak Kushner, “Slurp!: A Social and Culinary History of Ramen – Japan’s Favorite Noodle Soup” (Global Oriental, 2012)
December 20, 2012 16:53 - 1 hourI bet you’ve never heard of the “Smash the Baltic Fleet Memorial Togo Marshmallow.” I hadn’t either, before reading Barak Kushner‘s lively and illuminating new book on the history of ramen in Japan. Grounded in ample research that incorporates archival and ethnographic methods, Slurp!: A Social and Culinary History of Ramen – Japan’s Favorite Noodle Soup (Global Oriental, 2012) takes us from the early history of noodles and breadstuffs in China and Japan to the styrofoam bowl of instant ramen...
Signe Rousseau, “Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet” (AltaMira Press, 2012)
December 13, 2012 13:43 - 54 minutesThe other day I found myself in a cooking situation that’s fairly common: I had a few odd ingredients–some oxidized strips of bacon, a withered red pepper, a bunch of half-wilted parsley–and needed to use them before they went bad, but how? The cookbooks on my counter didn’t have an index in which I could search for multiple ingredients, and I didn’t have time to flip through all of the recipes for each ingredient in the hopes of a possible hit. So I popped them into Google, along with the se...
William Kerrigan, “Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural History” (Johns Hopkins, 2012)
November 18, 2012 19:02 - 1 hourNot many of us, not even the most ardent foodies, think of the crab apple as a fruit worth eating, much less extolling, but Henry David Thoreau saw something like the American pioneer spirit in this hard, gnarled, sour hunk of fruit. In his essay “Wild Apples,” he celebrates the apple because it “emulates man’s independence and enterprise.” Like America’s first settlers, he goes on, “it has migrated to this New World, and is even, here and there, making its way amid the aboriginal trees.” He ...
Bob Spitz, “Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child” (Knopf, 2012)
November 14, 2012 19:47 - 37 minutesI confess I knew nothing about Julia Child prior to reading Bob Spitz‘s new book. And yet, from the dramatic opening passages through its 500+ pages, Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child (Knopf, 2012) held me captive. How many people, much less women, change our attitudes, beliefs, and culture? Julia Child did. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that she did so by becoming a television star at the age of 50. One of the problems of biography is that women’s lives are so often wri...
Catherine Higgs, “Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa” (Ohio University Press, 2012)
November 14, 2012 17:42 - 1 hourWith elegant and accessible prose, Catherine Higgs takes us on a journey in Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa (Ohio University Press, 2012). It is a fascinating voyage fueled by the correspondence of Joseph Burtt, a man who had helped found a utopian commune before being sent by the chocolate magnate William Cadbury in the early 1900s to investigate labor conditions on cocoa plantations in Africa. For almost two years, Burtt observed and wrote and fevered his way to the l...
John S. Allen, “The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship to Food” (Harvard University Press, 2012)
October 23, 2012 21:21 - 52 minutesDid Proust have it right? Does food, whether it’s a madeleine from an aristocratic childhood or the Velveeta mac-and-cheese my mom used to make, have a special significance for our memory, perhaps even our very being? In his new book, The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship to Food (Harvard University Press, 2012), neuroanthropologist John. S. Allen takes up this question by guiding us into the inner structures of the brain, into the hippocampus and amygdala, where memories and emotio...
Andrew P. Haley, "Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920" (UNC Press, 2011)
September 07, 2012 08:00 - 52 minutesRestaurants almost feel indigenous to American landscape, whether you're weaving past them by the thousands when you're driving through a metropolis on the East or West Coast or whether, like me, you find yourself in a small town in the middle of the Midwest, which still manages to boast one Indian restaurant, two Middle Eastern restaurants, and a handful of Mexican and Chinese restaurants. But did you ever wonder just how someone living in Athens, Ohio, could end up eating seaweed egg drop s...
Roel Sterckx, “Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
August 11, 2012 20:58 - 1 hourRoel Sterckx‘s book Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China (Cambridge University Press, 2011) had me at drunken seances. (Drunken seances! Do you really need another excuse to read it?) It is a compelling and engaging read, and a wonderful resource for anyone interested in early China, the history of food, ritual studies, or the history of sensation. Sterckx’s work explores the culture, philosophies, and practices of sacrificial religion in early China, focusing on the ways that food a...
Merry White, “Coffee Life in Japan” (University of California Press, 2012)
June 15, 2012 17:13 - 51 minutesMerry (Corky) White‘s new book Coffee Life in Japan (University of California Press, 2012) opens with a memory of stripping naked and being painted blue in an underground coffeehouse, and closes with a guide to some of the author’s favorite cafes in Japan. This framing alone is worth the price of admission. In addition to being an extraordinarily spirited, witty, and enjoyable book, however, Coffee Life in Japan is also a thoughtfully argued and exhaustively researched account of the history ...
Orla Ryan, “Chocolate Nations: Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa” (Zed Books, 2011)
April 27, 2012 17:23 - 49 minutesWhen was the last time you ate some chocolate? If you live in the developed world there’s a strong chance that you’ve been munching on some fairly recently. At the basic level chocolate is an everyday treat and at the top end it is a seriously indulgent luxury product. But how much thought have you ever put into where that chocolate comes from and how it touches the lives of those involved in making it – and the countries in which they live? If you live in the parts of Africa at the centre o...
Cecilia Leong-Salobir, “Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire” (Routledge, 2011)
September 13, 2011 19:20 - 1 hourHobson-Jobson was not just about administration and geopolitics- the language of Empire extended to its culinary endeavours as well. Thus chota hazri, tiffin,and curry puffs at Peliti’s were the things that sustained an army of civil servants as they went about registering land records in the United Provinces, negotiating with Malay sultans or checking out logging operations in Sabah. Cecilia Leong-Salobir’s book, Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire (Routledge, 2011), looks at t...
Eric Rath, “Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan” (University of California Press, 2010)
August 04, 2011 17:15 - 1 hourCuisine in early modern Japan was experienced and negotiated through literature and ritual, and the uneaten or inedible was often as important as what was actually consumed. Eric Rath‘s recent book Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2010) is a rich study of the culture, practices, performance, and literature of food in early modern Japan. Rath takes us from medieval culinary manuscripts penned by men of the knife, all the way to sukiyaki recipes clipped fr...
Danyelle Freeman, “Try This: Traveling the Globe without Leaving the Table” (Ecco, 2011)
June 14, 2011 15:48 - 59 minutesDanyelle Freeman, better known as “Restaurant Girl” and a judge on Top Chef Masters, is single. But if you are considering asking out the petite and spunky brunette, you are going to have to compete with some stiff competition. “I prefer a great steak over a great man,” Danyelle said during an interview I did with her at a Borders bookstore in New York on the occasion of the release of her new book Try This: Traveling the Globe without Leaving the Table (Ecco, 2011) The book is a memoir of ...
Thomas R. Sinclair and C. J. Sinclair, “Bread, Beer and the Seeds of Change” (CABI, 2010)
May 25, 2011 01:18 - 58 minutesThe men, women and beasts aboard Noah’s Ark almost certainly were drunk a lot of those 40 days and 40 nights, according to Thomas R. Sinclair, a professor of Crop Science at North Carolina State University, and his wife Carol Janas Sinclair, a researcher, the authors of Bread, Beer and the Seeds of Change (CABI, 2010). “Noah was a beer trader on the Euphrates River,” Professor Sinclair said. The book manages to link man’s thirst for beer with nearly every important moment in history, from the...