New Books in Food

A detailed exploration of parents' fight for a safe environment for their kids, interrogating how race, class, and gender shape health advocacy The success of food allergy activism in highlighting the dangers of foodborne allergens shows how illness communities can effectively advocate for the needs of their members.  In Food Allergy Advocacy: Parenting and the Politics of Care (U Minnesota Press,...

School Farms: Feeding and Educating Children (Routledge, 2021) highlights the potential of school farms to fight hunger and malnutrition by providing access to locally produced, fresh, and healthy food as well as providing young students with educational opportunities to learn, interact with nature, and develop their skills. Hunger is one of the most pressing concerns we face today and there is a...

The title of the book that we are introducing today is Building a Housewife's Paradise Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century. This is not a new book, it was published in 2010, but one that deserves to be highlighted especially within the most recent debates on gender and business. Building a Housewife's Paradise studies the emergence of supermarkets in the urban Un...

How the debate over genetically modified crops in India is transforming science and politics Genetically modified or transgenic crops are controversial across the world. Advocates see such crops as crucial to feeding the world's growing population; critics oppose them for pushing farmers deeper into ecological and economic distress, and for shoring up the power of agribusinesses. India leads the w...

The toxicity of pesticides to the environment and humans is often framed as an unfortunate effect of their benefits to agricultural production. In Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture (U California Press, 2021), Adam M. Romero upends this narrative and provides a fascinating new history of pesticides in American industrial agriculture prior to World...

Shalini Sengupta thinks together ‘the mycological turn’ in the humanities and the narrative and aesthetic work that mushrooms do in some modernist literature. She draws from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and the research of Sam Solomon and Natalia Cecire. Modernist mushrooms, if they are a thing, exist in the writings of Alfred Kreymborg, Djuna Barnes, and Sylvia Plath, and the...

Grain traders wandering across the steppe; the Russian conquest of Ukraine (in the 18th century, that is); boulevard barons and wheat futures; railroads; the first fast food breakfast; and war socialism. It’s all crammed into this discussion of wheat, and what it wrought, with Scott Nelson. Scott Reynolds Nelson is the Georgia Athletics Association Professor of the Humanities at the University of...

A powerful movement is happening in farming today—farmers are reconnecting with their roots to fight climate change. For one woman, that’s meant learning her tribe’s history to help bring back the buffalo. For another, it’s meant preserving forest purchased by her great-great-uncle, among the first wave of African Americans to buy land. Others are rejecting monoculture to grow corn, beans, and squ...

Lives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly (Comstock Publishing, 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...

A Bowl for a Coin: A Commodity History of Japanese Tea (U Hawaii Press, 2019) is the first book in any language to describe and analyze the history of all Japanese teas from the plant’s introduction to the archipelago around 750 to the present day. To understand the triumph of the tea plant in Japan, William Wayne Farris begins with its cultivation and goes on to describe the myriad ways in which...

Jo Guldi tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Land is shown to be a central motor of politics in the twentieth century: the basis of movements for giving reparations to formerly colonized people, protests to limit the rent paid by urban tenants, intellectual battles among development analysts, and the capture of land by squatters taking matters into their...

Dr. Paul Geary’s Experimental Dining: Performance, Experience and Ideology in Contemporary Creative Restaurants (Intellect, 2022) examines the work of four of the world’s leading creative restaurants: Noma, elBulli, The Fat Duck and Alinea. Using ideas from performance studies, cultural studies, philosophy and economics, Dr. Geary explores the creation of the dining experience as a form of multise...

By the early 1900s, the poor farm had become a ubiquitous part of America's social welfare system. Megan Birk's history of this foundational but forgotten institution focuses on the connection between agriculture, provisions for the disadvantaged, and the daily realities of life at poor farms. Conceived as an inexpensive way to provide care for the indigent, poor farms in fact attracted wards that...

Diana Garvin’s Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women's Food Work (U Toronto Press, 2022) is an expansive and multifaceted look at women’s food work in Fascist Italy. From less-explored archives, Garvin has assembled a diverse set of sources―diaries, work songs, cookbooks, kitchen plans and utensils, factory records, and more―to tell the story of how women negotiated the daily tasks of producing a...

In this episode of the New Books in Latin America Podcast, Kenneth Sánchez spoke with Maria Elena García about her wonderful new book Gastropolitics and the Spectre of Race: Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in Peru published in 2021 by the University of California Press. In recent years, Peru has transformed from a war-torn country to a global high-end culinary destination. Connecting...

In Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), Dr. Susanne A. Wengle shows how agrotechnology served—and undermined—Soviet and Russian political projects. “The book emphasises a tight connection between political change, technological change in food systems, and the transformation of everyday lives - a connection that w...

How did people exist and resist in their daily lives under Soviet control in the Cold War period? Rebellious Cooks and Recipe Writing in Communist Bulgaria (Bloomsbury, 2021) shows how in communist Bulgaria many women passionately exchanged recipes with friends and strangers, to build substantial and impressive private collections of recipes. This activity was borderline contraband in going agains...

Our future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies, by geopolitical tensions, and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo-- pandemics and economic strife, the escalation of the climate and ecological crises--and by how we choose to respond. It will also be shaped by our emotions. It will be shaped by the meat paradox. "Should we eat...

Herring are vital to the productivity and health of marine systems, and socio-ecologically Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) is one of the most important fish species in the Northern Hemisphere. Human dependence on herring has evolved for millennia through interactions with key spawning areas, but humans have also significantly impacted the species’ distribution and abundance. Combining ethnologic...

In Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile (University of California Press, 2021), Joshua Frens-String explores the modern history and political economy of food in Chile, from World War I to the rise and fall of the Allende socialist regime in the 1970s. Drawing together a diverse cast of characters and weaving together a wide range of sources, Frens-String demon...

A World without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet (Yale University Press, 2021) by celebrated biologist Jo Handelsman lays bare the complex connections among climate change, soil erosion, food and water security, and drug discovery. Humans depend on soil for 95 percent of global food production, yet let it erode at unsustainable rates. In the United State...

In A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People: Food Not Bombs and the World-Class Waste of Global Cities (Duke UP, 2021), David Boarder Giles explores the ways in which capitalism simultaneously manufactures waste and scarcity. Illustrating how communities of marginalized people and discarded things gather and cultivate political possibilities, Giles documents the work of Food Not Bombs (FNB), a global move...

How do we engage with food through memory and imagination? Food in Memory and Imagination: Space, Place and, Taste (Bloomsbury, 2022) spans time and space to illustrate how, through food, people have engaged with the past, the future, and their alternative presents. Beth M. Forrest and Greg de St. Maurice have brought together first-class contributions, from both established and up-and-coming scho...

Food 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 ens...

Lives 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, h...