New Books In Food

The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urban influences. The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North (University Of Chicago Press) aims to remake this staid vision. Emily Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,” part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Pawley shows that these improvers practiced a kind of science hard for contemporary readers to recognize, in which profit was not only a goal but also the underlying purpose of the natural world. Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, northern farmers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession. Drawing from env

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Emily Wallace, author and illustrator of the new book Road Sides: An Illustrated Companion to Dining and Driving in the American South (University of Texas Press, 2019). Road Sides pays homage to popular travel guides with its short chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet containing a brief contextualizing essay followed by a feature of a specific location, business, or product. “A” is for Architecture, a tribute to buildings in the shape of foods one might find on the highway; “B” is for Billboards, their ubiquity and creativity and sometimes, as in the case of the “South of the Border” billboards, racial insensitivity. Road Sides is clearly aimed at a general audience of readers with its journalistic style of participant observation and whimsical illustrations, but Wallace makes use of her folklore training and scholarly connections in both the historical contextualizing of automobile culture and the critical lens with which she points out the good, the

Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Elizabeth A. Williams explores contemporary worries about eating through the lens of science and medicine to show us how appetite—once a matter of personal inclination—became an object of science. Williams charts the history of inquiry into appetite between 1750 and 1950, as scientific and medical concepts of appetite shifted alongside developments in physiology, natural history, psychology, and ethology. She shows how, in the eighteenth century, trust in appetite was undermined when researchers who investigated ingestion and digestion began claiming that science alone could say which ways of eating were healthy and which were not. She goes on to trace nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over the nature of appetite between mechanists and vitalists, experime

Growing up as a fat girl, Virgie Tovar believed that her body was something to be fixed. But after two decades of dieting and constant guilt, she was over it―and gave herself the freedom to trust her own body again. Ever since, she’s been helping others to do the same. Tovar is hungry for a world where bodies are valued equally, food is free from moral judgment, and you can jiggle through life with respect. In concise and candid language, You Have the Right to Remain Fat (Feminist Press, 2018) delves into unlearning fatphobia, dismantling sexist notions of fashion, and how to reject diet culture’s greatest lie: that fat people need to wait before beginning their best lives. Virgie Tovar is an author, activist and one of the nation's leading experts and lecturers on fat discrimination and body image. She is the founder of Babecamp, started the hashtag campaign #LoseHateNotWeight, and edited the groundbreaking anthology Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press 2012). Virgie has been f

By the time Bolivian President Evo Morales was deposed in December 2019, it had become increasingly clear that Latin America’s Pink Tide – the wave of left-leaning, anti-poverty governments which took hold of the region in the mid-2000s – was fast receding. Many have attempted to explain the rise and fall of that extraordinary historical movement, but few have done it with the historical depth, ethnographic subtlety, and theoretical capaciousness of Concordia University-based anthropologist Kregg Hetherington, whose new book, The Government of Beans: Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops (Duke University Press, 2020) dives not only into the fate of Paraguay’s Pink Tide regime but also the global soy industry, agricultural politics, economic inequality, expert knowledge, and the impossibility of regulatory paths out of economic and ecological crises. Written in clear, engaging prose, this book weaves fresh insights on bureaucracy and biopolitics into stories about how soy governs and is governed in rural Par

In Food In Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal (Stanford University Press, 2020), Hanna Garth examines the processes of acquiring food and preparing meals in the midst of food shortages. Garth draws our attention to the social, cultural, and historical factors Cuban’s draw upon to define an appropriate or decent meal and the struggle they undergo to produce a decent meal. Often, studies of food security overlook the process of acquiring food, which Garth demonstrates as a critical locus for understanding food access. Garth focuses on a variety of households, families, and individuals in Santiago, Cuba at different class levels and household compositions in order to show the gendered, racial, economic, social, and moral dimensions of how Cubans navigate their food landscapes and attempt to create culturally appropriate meals.  In so doing, she argues for the centrality of how local people determine their food system to be adequate. The book would be of interest to the areas of anthropology, particularly medical

Many of us have stacks of cookbooks on our shelves, which we look through for ideas and inspiration, or to transport us to distant places with different foods, smells, experiences, and sometimes memories of our visits. Kennan Ferguson, Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, argues that there is more going on in those cookbooks than just recipes. In fact, Cookbooks Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) traces a variety of politics through a myriad of different kinds of cookbooks. Ferguson came to this project in an effort to try to understand where politics interacts with our everyday experiences. Cooking and seeking out recipes to guide our cooking is a very common experience that many of us pursue. At the same time, the compilation of recipes into a book—published with glossy photos, or copied and stapled in a church basement—creates a space where there is inclusion and exclusion. Ferguson explores these dynamics in Cookbook Politics, coming to see how the cultur

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Candi K. Cann, editor of the new collection, Dying to Eat: Cross Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death and the Afterlife (University Press of Kentucky). Dying to Eat is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that examine the role of food in rituals surrounding death and dying from around the globe. Cann, who identifies herself as a death studies scholar, divides the collection into two ways of using food in death rituals: “Dining With the Dead” and “Eating After: Food and Drink in Bereavement and Remembrance.” The first essays examine rituals where food is offered to the deceased or to ancestors, while the second half focuses on sharing food between the bereaved or preparing food for mourners. This division extends from a understanding that some cultures “care for” the dead while others “remember” the dead. To care for the dead in this way may include offering food and drink, allowing the living and the deceased to maintain “an active and participatory relati

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews editors Donovan Conley and Justin Eckstein about their new book Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production (University of Alabama Press, 2020), which explores the rhetoric of contemporary food production and consumption with a focus on social boundaries. Cookery explores how food mediates both rhetorical influence and material life through the overlapping concepts of invention and production. The essays in this volume probe the many ways that food informs contemporary social life through its mediation of bodies—human and extra-human alike. Each chapter explores food’s persuasive nature through a unique prism that includes intoxication, dirt, “food porn,” strange foods, and political “invisibility.” Each case offers new insights about the relations between rhetorical influence and embodied practice through food. As a whole, Cookery articulates new ways of viewing food’s powers of persuasion, as well as the inherent role of persuasion

In Collecting Food, Collecting People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa (Yale University Press, 2016), Kathryn M. De Luna documents the evolving meanings borne in the collection of wild foods for an agricultural people in south central Africa around the turn of the first millennium. It is a history of everyday life that bears great insight into how people adapt meaning from different aspects of life to create new forms of social organization. Specifically, her study helps explain how expertise in hunting and gathering became a basis for social status in a decentralized society. In doing so, her study upends long-standing Enlightenment notions about the evolutionary role of agricultural surplus as a driver of social complexity. De Luna is the Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor at Georgetown University. Paul Bjerk is an associate professor of African History at Texas Tech University, and the author of Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania,

We are schooled to believe that states formed more or less synchronously with settlement and agriculture. In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017), James C. Scott asks us to question this belief. The evidence, he says, is simply not on the side of states. Stratified, taxing, walled towns did not inevitably appear in the wake of crop domestication and sedentary settlement. Only around 3100 BCE, some four millennia after the earliest farming and settling down, did they begin making their presence felt. What happened in these four millennia is the subject of this book: a deep history by “a card-carrying political scientist and an anthropologist and environmentalist by courtesy”, which aims to put the earliest states in their place. James Scott joins us for the fourth episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to talk about state fragility and state persistence from Mesopotamia to Southeast Asia, the politics of cereal crops, domestication an

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanati

Katarzyna J. Cwiertka and Yasuhara Miho’s Branding Japan’s Food: From Meibutsu to Washoku (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) explores historical and contemporary practices of place branding through food in Japan. The book’s narrative centers on the event that precipitated its writing, namely, the 2013 addition of “Washoku, traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese, notably for the celebration of New Year” to UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The authors argue that the definition of washoku in the UNESCO nomination is part of a longer history of manipulative place branding in Japan that has its roots in the premodern period. Contemporary Japan’s penchant for and success at gastrodiplomacy is well known, but Cwiertka and Yasuhara place this national-level soft-power branding strategy within a centuries-long history of business practices that fabricated connections between products (many of them food products) and locations. Those stories are told through the book’s

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Elizabeth Engelhardt, co-editor of the new collection The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell: Contemporary Appalachian Tables (Ohio University Press, 2019), also edited by Lora Smith and published by Ohio University Press. We are also joined by Courtney Balestier who is a contributor to the collection. Though the collection is diverse in genre – including academic essays alongside poetry, memoir, and illustration – the contents are united around challenging and complicating a notion of a single Appalachia. The editors and many of the contributors are connected to the Appalachian Food Summit, a symposium of foodways scholars, professionals, and enthusiasts who meet for dinners, dialogues, and annual conferences. Engelhardt describes the popular and scholarly attention to Appalachian stereotypes as “a dead end conversation” that the collection tries to avoid and undo by highlighting the creativity and diversity of the region, its people, and its food. As Engelhardt

In his book, Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in Cuba (UNC Press, 2019), Louis A. Pérez, Jr. explores how Cuba’s dependency on the sugar economy also made the island’s population dependent on food imports like rice. Despite efforts to diversify agricultural production and produce rice domestically, U.S. rice producers consistently resisted Cuban efforts to rid them of a primary market for American rice throughout the twentieth century. Struggles over rice production and consumption, Pérez argues, were a previously ignored but important factor in explaining Batista’s inability to rule in the 1950s. The Cuban revolutionaries also promoted self-sufficiency but were unable to produce a critical food staple like rice. To this day, Cuba continues to import rice, but mostly from Asia, because of the U.S. embargo. Yet Pérez notes, however, that U.S. rice interests still stake out Cuba and wait to pour their products into the Cuban market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/ad

If you’re a despot, there are two people you can’t lie to, your doctor and your chef. This is one of the nuggets explained to me by Witold Szabłowski, author of How to Feed a Dictator: Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot Through the Eyes of Their Cooks (Penguin, 2020), translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. The author, a tireless journalist, used his skills at getting people to talk and his knowledge of cooking to convince those who served some of the 20th century's most infamous tyrants to open up about the men who employed them, what they ate, and what food can tell you about power. An enlightening, terrifying and deliciously informative read. Since I co-authored a book about Donald Trump, we had some things to discuss about cheeseburgers and fries as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In recent years, commodity chain analysis – the scholarly effort to piece together the production and consumption ends of various commodities – has really taken off. For goods ranging from cotton to coffee & tobacco to tea, scholars have brought cultivators and laborers into the same frame as factory workers, retailers, taste-makers, and consumers. At first glance, Mythri Jegathesan’s new book Tea & Solidarity: Tamil Women & Work in Postwar Sri Lanka (University of Washington Press, 2019) appears like yet another contribution to a burgeoning literature on the politics of tea’s supply chain. But the book, in fact, is so much more. Based on the author’s rich fieldwork conducted amongst Hill Country Tamil women living on tea plantations, the book uses feminist and decolonial methods to tell the long story of marginalization and struggle in a war-torn Sri Lanka. Hill Country Tamil women trace their descent from indentured coolies brought to Ceylon from southern India; as such, their stories have long been narrate

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as P

Phoebe Lickwar and Roxi Thoren's book Farmscape: The Design of Productive Landscapes (Routledge, 2020) situates agriculture as a design practice, using a wide range of international case studies and analytical essays to propose lessons for contemporary landscape architects who are interested in integrating agriculture into their designs. Agricultural processes, technologies, and cycles have long shaped landscape architectural projects, from the ornamented farm of the eighteenth century, to contemporary projects that integrate agriculture and ecological restoration. The book describes the history of agriculture within landscape architecture and reveals the diversity of current design practices that use the rhythms and forms of agriculture to create productive farms that are also sites of beauty, community, ecological conservation, remediation, and pleasure. Highly illustrated in full colour, this book provides essential context, resources, and best practice examples of rural and periurban designed sites for pr

Few experiences can top sitting in a Parisian cafe and watching the world go by, a glass of something at your elbow. But if you've ever gone inside the cafe and confronted the battalion of beautiful bottles behind the bar, you may have come to the reluctant conclusion that there is a whole world of French beverages beyond wine that you may never understand. David Lebovitz to the rescue! For decades, Lebovitz has guided readers of his many books and engaging website into the world of French cuisine and Parisian life with generosity and eloquence. In his latest book, Drinking French: The Iconic Cocktails, Apéritifs, and Café Traditions of France, with 160 Recipes (Ten Speed Press, 2020), Lebovitz takes us behind the classic zinc bar and explains what goes on there, from early morning coffee to late-night liqueurs. Drinking French unravels the mystery behind the jewel-tones of Pastis, Chartreuse, Vermouth, and Creme de Cassis, the addictive botanical notes of Lillet and Dubonnet, and the emerging craft beer scen