New Books in Food

After decades of economic and political isolation, Myanmar’s rural economy is rapidly shifting from a narrow reliance on low-productivity agriculture, to a more diverse array of farm and non-farm activities. This transition poses urgent policy and scholarly questions for the analysis of inequality, livelihood patterns and food security among the country's rural population. Despite some gains, poverty, landlessness, access to non-farm job opportunities, and food insecurity remain significant challenges for rural Myanmar.Assistant Professor Mark Vicol caught up with Dr Thushara Dibley to discuss his work investigating the changing relationships between livelihood patterns, land, poverty and food security in Myanmar, arguing that in order to create impactful change, we need to rethink food and nutrition security and adapt to the local context.Mark Vicol is Assistant Professor in the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University, and an honorary associate of the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney. Mark is a human geographer by training and his research focuses on the intersections between rural livelihoods, smallholder agriculture and patterns of agrarian change in South and Southeast Asia.You can follow Mark on Twitter @markvicol.For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020) is an unsettling journey into the disaster-bound American food system, and an exploration of possible solutions, from leading food politics commentator and former farmer Tom Philpott.More than a decade after Michael Pollan's game-changing The Omnivore's Dilemma transformed the conversation about what we eat, a combination of global diet trends and corporate interests have put American agriculture into a state of "quiet emergency," from dangerous drought in California--which grows more than 50 percent of the fruits and vegetables we eat--to catastrophic topsoil loss in the "breadbasket" heartland of the United States. Whether or not we take heed, these urgent crises of industrial agriculture will define our future.In Perilous Bounty, veteran journalist and former farmer Tom Philpott explores and exposes the small handful of seed and pesticide corporations, investment funds, and magnates who benefit from the trends that imperil us, with on-the-ground dispatches featuring the scientists documenting the damage and the farmers and activists who are valiantly and inventively pushing back.Resource scarcity looms on the horizon, but rather than pointing us toward an inevitable doomsday, Philpott shows how the entire wayward ship of American agriculture could be routed away from its path to disaster. He profiles the farmers and communities in the nation's two key growing regions developing resilient, soil-building, water-smart farming practices, and readying for the climate shocks that are already upon us; and he explains how we can help move these methods from the margins to the mainstream.Jenny Splitter is an independent journalist covering food, farming, science, and climate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Be My Guest: Reflections on Food, Community, and the Meaning of Generosity (Knopf, 2020) is an utterly unique, deeply personal meditation on what it means to tend to others and to ourselves--and how the two things work hand in hand. Priya Basil explores how food--and the act of offering food to others--are used to express love and support. Weaving together stories from her own life with knowledge gleaned from her Sikh heritage; her years spent in Kenya, India, Britain, and Germany; and ideas from Derrida, Plato, Arendt, and Peter Singer, Basil focuses an unexpected and illuminating light on what it means to be both a host and a guest. Lively, wide-ranging, and impassioned, Be My Guest is a singular work, at once a deeply felt plea for a kinder, more welcoming world and a reminder that, fundamentally, we all have more in common than we imagine.Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Winifred Bird’s Eating Wild Japan: Tracking the Culture of Foraged Foods, with a Guide to Plants and Recipes (Stone Bridge Press, 2021) is more than just a look at the culture and meanings of foraging in Japan complete with an eclectic collection of recipes and a guide for foragers, though it is certainly that. Eating Wild records the author’s encounters with quirky people―including a caldera dweller, a bear hunter, and a seaweed scientist―in surprising places―from snowy northern mountains to quiet Kyoto streets―and is animated by an obvious and effusive love of food, of travel, of people, and of the environment. Bird begins by observing that for many in contemporary Japan, wild forage is as much about “the pleasure of picking and the incidental beauty” as it is about “anything as practical as nutritional content,” but that this attitude is very much the product of particular historical and economic circumstances. Her sensitivity to this issue is foregrounded in chapters 2 and 3, on horse chestnuts and bracken, respectively. Bird’s background as an environmental journalist is particularly noticeable, for example, in her final chapter on wild seaweeds and the costs and benefits of aquaculture. Though as its full title Eating Wild Japan indicates, Bird’s fieldwork is rooted firmly in Japan, this is a book that will appeal to foodies and travel-starved East Asia neophytes as much as to veterans and scholars of Japan.Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese and East Asian history in the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Wow! Food, family, memory, insight, body, mind - worth the effort this one.Eating with My Mouth Open (NewSouth, 2021) is food writing like you’ve never seen before: honest, brave, and exceptionally tasty. Lyrically written, Sam van Zweden offers a millennial response to classic food writers, revelling in body positivity on Instagram, remembering how Tupperware piled high with sweets can be a symptom of spiralling mental health, dissecting wellness culture and all its flaws, sharing the joys of living in a family of chefs and seeing a history of migration on her dinner plate.Recalling the writing of Lindy West and Roxane Gay, as well as classic food writers M.F.K. Fisher and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Eating with My Mouth Open considers embodiment and the meaning of true nourishment within the broken food system we live in. Not holding back from the struggles of mental illness and difficult conversations about weight and wellbeing, Sam Van Zweden advocates for a body politics that is empowering, productive and meaningful.Sam van Zweden is a Melbourne-based freelance writer interested in experimental nonfiction, essays, mental health, body writing, food, and memory. Sam’s writing has appeared in the Saturday Paper, Meanjin, The Big Issue, The Lifted Brow, Cordite, The Sydney Review of Books, The Wheeler Centre and others.Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Kaitland Byrd’s new book Real Southern Barbecue: Constructing Authenticity in Southern Food Culture (Lexington Press, 2019) examines an archive of oral histories collected by the Southern Foodways Alliance featuring the voices of barbecue pit masters and restaurant owners from the South. Byrd argues that barbecue as a cultural product has a unique relationship to the idea of authenticity. There are some clearly defined elements that seem to make it easy for diners to decide if their barbecue is authentic from the particular cuts of meat and sauces to the sights and smells of the restaurant. However, like all cuisines, barbecue has to respond to the world around it in ways that might challenge traditional definitions of authenticity. Byrd considers “authenticity” to be an unspoken agreement between producers and consumers, something that can be “constructed” and “fabricated” and “consumed.” Byrd applies the idea of “impression management” from sociology to describe how barbecue producers communicate authenticity to consumers even as they have to innovate and deviate from some of their traditional methods in response to changing circumstances. As Byrd explains, some barbecue purveyors have adapted to changes in consumer tastes and interests in health by offering leaner cuts of meat and emphasizing their traditional vegetable side dishes. They have also adapted to changes in agriculture and meat industries and responses to concerns about the environment, promoting barbecue as an original farm to table, tail to snout cuisine, embracing this vegetable-centric, lean-meat, farm-to-table movement as part of their impression management. One of the most significant challenges to authenticity that restauranteurs must manage are fire and building codes related to smoke, sometimes banning open pit smokers or requiring smokers to be separate buildings. As barbecue restaurants adopt electric smokers or impart flavor from liquid smoke, they must continue to communicate authenticity to consumers through other means. Byrd’s investigation highlights the creative and innovative methods of Southern pit masters and entrepreneurs.Kaitland Byrd is Lecturer in sociology and visiting scholar at the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan.Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.Eliza Weeks is a recent graduate of the Master of Food Studies program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA. She hopes to do work related to amplifying diverse and often marginalized voices within the food system so that the opportunity to represent and share food and food culture is not limited to the privileged few. When Eliza is not on the job hunt she enjoys adventuring through new recipes, sharing food and stories with others, and cohosting her podcast Dear Human. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

How can ethnographic research shine light on the reproduction of social inequality in upscale Los Angeles restaurants? In today’s episode we talk with Dr. Eli Wilson, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico, about his fieldwork in three LA restaurants. In the new book Front of the House, Back of the House, Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers (NYU Press, 2020), he takes readers inside the social hierarchies of upscale restaurants, where mostly white and college-educated servers and bartenders may make three times as much as the mostly Latino immigrant cooks and dishwashers who work hidden away in the back of the restaurant. Eli explains how his fieldwork emerged from his firsthand experience with the privileges of working in the front of the house. He describes the divisions between the two groups, and how he was able to build relationships with back of the house workers. He also talks about the discomfort that came from his own advantages as a tip-earner, and how he explained and managed his dual role as worker and ethnographer.Two unequal worlds of work exist within the upscale restaurant scene of Los Angeles. White, college-educated servers operate in the front of the house—also known as the public areas of the restaurant—while Latino immigrants toil in the back of the house and out of customer view. In Front of the House, Back of the House, Eli Revelle Yano Wilson shows us what keeps these workers apart, exploring race, class, and gender inequalities in the food service industry. Drawing on research at three different high-end restaurants in Los Angeles, Wilson highlights why these inequalities persist in the twenty-first century, pointing to discriminatory hiring and supervisory practices that ultimately grant educated whites access to the most desirable positions. Additionally, he shows us how workers navigate these inequalities under the same roof, making sense of their jobs, their identities, and each other in a world that reinforces their separateness. Front of the House, Back of the House takes us behind the scenes of the food service industry, providing a window into the unequal lives of white and Latino restaurant workers.Eli Revelle Yano Wilson is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. His research examines how social inequalities are both reproduced and challenged in urban labor markets.Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Nutritionists tell you to eat more fish. Environmentalists tell you to eat less fish. Apparently they are both right. It's the same thing with almonds, or quinoa, or a hundred other foods. But is it really incumbent on us as individuals to resolve this looming global catastrophe? From plastic packaging to soil depletion to flatulent cows, we are bombarded with information about the perils of our food system. Drawing on years of experience within the food industry, Anthony Warner invites us to reconsider what we think we know. In Ending Hunger: The quest to feed the world without destroying it (Simon and Schuster, 2021), he uncovers the parallels between eating locally and 1930s fascism, promotes the potential for good in genetic modification and dispels the assumption that population growth is at the heart of our planetary woes.Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People's History of Poverty (New Press, 2008), Ghettos, Tramps & Welfare Queens (Oxford, 2017), and Politics for Social Workers (Columbia, forthcoming 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Marion Nestle describes her new book as “a small, quick and dirty reader for the general audience” summarizing some of her biggest and most influential works. Let’s Ask Marion: What You Need to Know About the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health published September 2020 by University of California Press, was written in conversation with Kerry Trueman, a blogger and friend. Trueman’s questions served as prompts to organize Nestle’s 800-1000 word summaries in approachable and engaging prose. Readers familiar with Nestle’s groundbreaking Food Politics will recognize many of the ideas and information, but this new pocket-sized and affordable volume serves as an introduction for undergraduate students or readers new to Food Studies. However, Nestle does cover some new material in her explanation of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, especially the campaign for Zero Hunger. Nestle also summarizes how nutrition advice has changed in the last few years by thinking about food in categories ranging from unprocessed (corn on the cob) to ultraprocessed (Nacho Cheese tortilla chips). This reevaluation makes it easier to identify foods that are acceptable to eat without excessive focus on micronutrients. In the conversation, Nestle addresses the ethics of marketing food to children, food as a human right and access in the Covid era, the possibility of a National Food Policy Agency, the politics of food banks, and the promise of regenerative agricultural practices. Nestle concludes by talking about the pleasures of food and eating and how to establish a “loving relationship” with food that doesn’t include fear, guilt, or anxiety about nutrition.  Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, and the author of books about food politics, most recently Unsavory Truth.Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.Lindsay Herring is a first-year M.A. Food Studies Candidate at Chatham University. She loves historical cookbooks, food policy and activism through history, and vegan baking. Personally, she enjoys theatre, singing and traveling (someday again!).Archish Kashakar is a chef and culinary educator who is currently a second-year M.A. Food Studies Candidate at Chatham University. He works with the program’s research offshoot CRAFT as a Food Lab Graduate Consultant and also serves on the board of the Graduate Association of Food Studies as a Social Media Manager. He is currently working on his thesis that traces the history of Singaporean street food dishes and their development in a post-World War II era. Follow on Twitter @archishkash. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The new essay collection Food Insecurity on College Campuses edited by Katharine M. Broton and Clare L. Cady explores the widespread problem of food insecurity among college students and the overlapping and compounding issues that lead students to choose between getting enough to eat and paying the costs of a college education. As the editors make clear in the introduction to the collection, today’s college student has changed significantly from the expected “young adult, attending college full-time immediately after high school,” and the economic landscape they are dealing with is far different from what many administrators and faculty assume. Students are more likely to delay college or enter as part-time students while taking care of families or working. The essays throughout the collection describe students’ barriers to graduation as interlocking and compounding, and none of them academic. In the example of “Amarillo College: Loving Your Student from Enrollment to Graduation,” the authors concluded the top 10 reasons that students failed to complete their degrees were all financial in nature, not related to academic preparedness or ability to learn. Michael Rosen‘s essay reveals that even very small amounts of money for textbooks, car repairs, security deposits, utilities, and lab fees may derail students. The essays in the collection describe a wide range of solutions that have been tested in a variety of institutions and locations. to food insecurity from food pantries and partnerships with campus dining services to wrap-around services with social workers and emergency financial support. The editors acknowledge that supplying students with food may temporarily provide them with a meal, but these do not solve the ongoing problems of poverty. Throughout the collection, authors point time and again to the need to direct students to multiple services and resources, not just food or a check. Without significant reform in the structural inequities that keep people in poverty, these are all stop-gap measures.Katherine Broton is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Policy and Leadership Studies and (by courtesy) the Department of Sociology at the University of Iowa.Clare Cady is the cofounder of the College and University Food Bank Alliance and Director of Research and Innovation at Single Stop.Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food