New Books In Food

Our 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 tackling these challenges by constructing civic networks. Overturning extractive economic structures, these inspired leaders are engaging low-income residents, farmers, and local organizations in their quest to build stronger communities.. Ken Meter is one of the most experienced food system analysts in the U.S., holding over 50 years of experience in community capacity building. Meter is co–author of a toolkit for measuring economic impacts of local food development and co-editor of Sustainable Food System Assessment: Lessons

In 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 environmental impact on the region. Critiquing this imperial commodity's advertised mandate of agrarian modernization in colonial India, Dey points to numerous tea pests, disease ecologies, felled forests, harsh working conditions, wage manipulation, and political resistance as examples of tea's unseemly legacy in the subcontinent. Dey draws together the plant and the plantation in highlighting the ironies of the tea economy and its consequences for the agrarian history of eastern India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

Fair 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 scholarship and decolonial thinking, Naylor highlights the significance of the multiple, diverse economic practices and relations that campesinos/as use in their struggle to form more dignified livelihoods. While she critiques the narratives of economic development and problematic understandings of solidarity that underpin many fair trade discourses, Naylor’s empirically grounded research produces a nuanced analysis of the possibilities and limitations inherent in contemporary fair trade coffee production. Rather than understand

How 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 reverse the trajectories of the biggest global crises impacting our world: the burden of chronic diseases, the consequences of climate change, and the systemic economic and social inequities that exist within and among nations? Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021) is a clarion call for both individual consumers and those who shape our planet's food and environmental policies that: • describes the often destructive path that foods take from farms and seas through their processing, distribution, marketing, p

Southern 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 the story, she wanted to send some recipes back to her Northern connections, and Rhett suggested she write a book of recipes instead. Gay tested the recipes in a New York kitchen, standardizing measurements and translating them to a wider audience. Sharpless immediately foregrounds the Northern sensibility that informs the rhetorical situation of the book. Published just a few years before Gone With the Wind, the cookbook represented a version of Charleston’s sumptuous antebellum past to an audience with an appetite for

In 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. Cornering the Market challenges these conventions to demonstrate that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century grocers were important but unsung innovators of business models and retail technologies that fostered the rise of contemporary retailing. Small grocery owners revolutionized business practices from the bottom by becoming the first retailers to own and operate cash registers, develop new distribution paths, and engage in transforming the grocery trade from local enterprises to a nationwide industry. Drawing on storekee

Helene 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 explaining the historical and aesthetic significance of each dish. This book is a perfect gift for Jewish holidays and special occasions on the Jewish calendar.  Ari Barbalat holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of California in Los Angeles. He lives in Toronto with his family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

“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 nineteenth-century forebears, Thomas C. Hubka's Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn: The Connected Farm Buildings of New England (UP of New England, 2004) has become one of the standard works on regional farmsteads in America. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assis

Rice is a central ingredient to Southern foodways, and it is one of the most versatile grains served around the world. It could be prepared as a side dish, an entrée, and dessert; pair it with sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla for a sweet dish or add tomatoes, onions, and peas for a savory meal. In Rice: A Savor the South Cookbook (UNC Press, 2021), Michael Twitty explores the culinary history of rice as he offers 51 recipes of how this grain is found in many culinary cultures including Creole, Acadian, soul food, Low Country, and Gulf Coast. As Twitty states, connects us to everyone and “no other ingredient tastes this much like home.” N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Food 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 makes “Amber & Rye” an especially timely and welcome addition to this season’s new cookbooks. Zak’s initial inspiration was her Lithuanian grandmother’s tales of her youth in Vilnius, and these memories launched Zak on a quest to discover the heart of the region through an examination of its food. The cuisines of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are very much a reflection of their terrain and are shaped by the bracing climate of the Baltic sea. Fish — be it fresh, salted, or smoked— is a major player in each country’s cuisine

Oil palms are ubiquitous—grown in nearly every tropical country, they supply the world with more edible fat than any other plant and play a role in scores of packaged products, from lipstick and soap to margarine and cookies. And as Jonathan E. Robins shows in Oil Palm: A Global History (UNC Press, 2021), sweeping social transformations carried the plant around the planet. First brought to the global stage in the holds of slave ships, palm oil became a quintessential commodity in the Industrial Revolution. Imperialists hungry for cheap fat subjugated Africa's oil palm landscapes and the people who worked them. In the twentieth century, the World Bank promulgated oil palm agriculture as a panacea to rural development in Southeast Asia. As plantation companies tore into rainforests, evicting farmers in the name of progress, the oil palm continued its rise to dominance, sparking new controversies over trade, land and labor rights, human health, and the environment. By telling the story of the oil palm across mul

The modern way of eating—our taste for food that is processed, packaged, and advertised—has its roots as far back as the 1870s. Many food writers trace our eating habits to World War II, but this book shows that our current food system began to coalesce much earlier. Modern food came from and helped to create a society based on racial hierarchies, colonization, and global integration. Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food (MIT Press, 2021) explores these themes through a series of moments in food history—stories of bread, beer, sugar, canned food, cereal, bananas, and more—that shaped how we think about food today. Contributors consider the displacement of native peoples for agricultural development; the invention of Pilsner, the first international beer style; the “long con” of gilded sugar and corn syrup; Josephine Baker’s banana skirt and the rise of celebrity tastemakers; and faith in institutions and experts who produced, among other things, food rankings and fake meat. Benjamin R. Co

Agriculture has been among the toughest political battlegrounds in postwar Japan and represents an ideal case study in institutional stability and change. Inefficient land use and a rapidly aging workforce have long been undermining the economic viability of the agricultural sector. Yet vested interests in the small-scale, part-time agricultural production structure have obstructed major reforms. Change has instead occurred in more subtle ways. Since the mid-1990s, a gradual reform process has dismantled some of the core pillars of the postwar agricultural support and protection regime. Harvesting State Support analyzes this process by shifting the analytical focus to the local level. In Harvesting State Support: Institutional Change and Local Agency in Japanese Agriculture (U Toronto Press, 2021), Hanno Jentzsch investigates how local actors, including farmers, local governments, and local agricultural cooperatives, have translated abstract policies into local practice. Showing how local variants are constru

As we taste, chew, swallow, digest, and excrete, our foods transform us, while our eating, in its turn, affects the wider earthly environment. In Eating in Theory (Duke UP, 2021), Annemarie Mol takes inspiration from these transformative entanglements to rethink what it is to be human. Drawing on fieldwork at food conferences, research labs, health care facilities, restaurants, and her own kitchen table, Mol reassesses the work of authors such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas. They celebrated the allegedly unique capability of humans to rise above their immediate bodily needs. Mol, by contrast, appreciates that as humans we share our fleshy substance with other living beings, whom we cultivate, cut into pieces, transport, prepare, and incorporate--and to whom we leave our excesses. This has far-reaching philosophical consequences. Taking human eating seriously suggests a reappraisal of being as transformative, knowing as entangling, doing as dispersed, and relating as

When people think of Russian food, they generally think either of the opulent luxury of the tsarist aristocracy or of post-Soviet elites, signified above all by caviar, or on the other hand of poverty and hunger--of cabbage and potatoes and porridge. Both of these visions have a basis in reality, but both are incomplete. The history of food and drink in Russia includes fasts and feasts, scarcity and, for some, at least, abundance. It includes dishes that came out of the northern, forested regions and ones that incorporate foods from the wider Russian Empire and later from the Soviet Union. Cabbage and Caviar: A History of Food in Russia (Reaktion Books, 2021) places Russian food and drink in the context of Russian history and shows off the incredible (and largely unknown) variety of Russian food. Alison Smith is Professor and Chair of History at the University of Toronto.  Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit me

Guest Gina Warren discusses her newest book Hatched: Dispatches from the Backyard Chicken Movement, published May 2021 by University of Washington Press. Warren chronicles her experience in starting a backyard chicken flock from bringing home day old chicks, feeding and housing them, and eventually butchering and cooking them as meat. Rather than offering practical advice or a how-to-guide to raising chickens, Warren instead demonstrates thoughtful grappling with what it means to be an ethical eater in a capitalist society. Warren’s journey with ethical eating begins as a vegetarian seeking alternative ways to acquire animal protein while causing the least amount of harm to animals and the environment and taking an active role in producing her own food. Warren states her mission clearly: “I chose to increase the overlapping territory in the Venn diagram between what I consume and what goods I can understand as part of a continuous process.” While raising a small flock of egg-laying chickens, Warren interrogat

Sushi and sashimi are by now a global sensation and have become perhaps the best known of Japanese foods—but they are also the most widely misunderstood. Oishii: The History of Sushi (Reaktion Books, 2020) reveals that sushi began as a fermented food with a sour taste, used as a means to preserve fish. This book, the first history of sushi in English, traces sushi’s development from China to Japan and then internationally, and from street food to high-class cuisine. Included are two dozen historical and original recipes that show the diversity of sushi and how to prepare it. Written by an expert on Japanese food history, Oishii is a must read for understanding sushi’s past, its variety and sustainability, and how it became one of the world’s greatest anonymous cuisines. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by be

In The Economics of Sustainable Food: Smart Policies for Health and the Planet (Island Press, 2021), Dr. Nicoletta Batini, and co-authors, unpack the true cost of food production. While the Green Revolution served a purpose, Dr. Batini makes the case that the industrial food complex continues to cause tremendous global economic losses in terms of malnutrition, diseases, and environmental degradation. To ensure we do not exceed the 1.5oC target, the book offers the Great Food Transformation (GFT) as a solution. The GFT entails, (1) halving animal-based food production and increasing plant-based production, (2) shifting to organic, regenerative farming, and (3) rewilding, reforesting, and afforesting land. In this interview, Dr. Batini discusses the economics and policy mechanisms to make the GFT possible. Some of the mechanisms discussed include taxes, labor market reform, alongside regulation in cases where market incentives are unlikely to work or to work fast enough. We discuss the important differences in

Today on New Books in History, Rod Phillips, Professor of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, talks about his book, French Wine: A History, out in 2016 with the University of California Press, and published in paperback in 2020. For centuries, wine has been associated with France more than with any other country. France remains one of the world’s leading wine producers by volume and enjoys unrivaled cultural recognition for its wine. If any wine regions are global household names, they are French regions such as Champagne, Bordeaux, and Burgundy. Within the wine world, products from French regions are still benchmarks for many wines. French Wine is the first synthetic history of wine in France: from Etruscan, Greek, and Roman imports and the adoption of wine by beer-drinking Gauls to its present status within the global marketplace. Rod Phillips places the history of grape growing and winemaking in each of the country’s major regions within broad historical and cultural contexts. Examining a ran

Improper pest management has led to significant yield loss in rice and other crop harvests in Cambodia, causing economic losses to farmers and environmental disruption through ill-informed chemical use. The use of broad-spectrum pesticides as a solution to all observed pests is commonplace in the rice and mung bean fields of lowland Cambodia and can be linked to unsuitable sources of agricultural information. In 2020, Professor Daniel Tan caught up with Dr Natali Pearson over Zoom to chat about his lifelong work supporting sustainable farming practices in Cambodia, including through targeted capacity-building programs and the development of image-rich mobile phone applications to assist Cambodian farmers with insect pest identification and crop management. About Daniel Tan: Daniel is Professor in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney. He is also the Country Coordinator for Cambodia at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, and a member of the Sydney Institute of Agriculture, the