New Books in Food

From the cassoulet that won a war to the crêpe that doomed Napoleon, from the rebellions sparked by bread and salt to the new cuisines forged by empire, the history of France is intimately entwined with its gastronomic pursuits. A witty exploration of the facts and legends surrounding some of the most popular French foods and wines by a French cheesemonger and an American academic, A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment(The New Press, 2018) tells the compelling and often surprising story of France from the Roman era to modern times. Traversing the cuisines of France’s most famous cities as well as its underexplored regions, this innovative social history explores the impact of war and imperialism, the age-old tension between tradition and innovation, and the enduring use of food to prop up social and political identities.The origins of the most legendary French foods and wines—from Roquefort and cognac to croissants and Calvados, from absinthe and oysters to Camembert and champagne—also reveal the social and political trends that propelled France’s rise upon the world stage. They help explain France’s dark history of war and conquest, as well as its most enlightened cultural achievements and the political and scientific innovations that transformed human history. These gastronomic tales will edify even the most seasoned lovers of food, history, and all things French.Stéphane Henaut grew up in Frankfurt and Nantes, before moving to London and embarking on a wide-ranging career in food, including working in the Harrods fromagerie and cooking for the Lord Mayor of London's banquets. He later returned to Nantes with his family, selling obscure vegetables in a French fruiterie,before joining one of Berlin's finest fromageries.Jeni Mitchell spent most of her adult life in Washington, DC, working as a researcher and editor in foreign affairs, before moving to London to begin graduate school. She met Stephane on her first day in London; four years later, they married. She has a PhD in war studies from King's College London, where she is a teaching fellow specializing in civil war, insurgency and rebellion.Beth Mauldin is an Associate Professor of French at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Her research interests include French cultural studies, film, and the social and cultural history of Paris. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The consumption of food and drink is much more than what we put in our mouth. Food and drink have been a focal point of modern social theory since the inception of agrarian capitalism and the industrial revolution. The origins of food and drink are rather complex. The construction of food and drink as authentic to a specific region is even more complex. Join us for a discussion with Alex Colas, Jason Edwards, Jane Levi, and Sami Zubaida about their book Food, Politics, and Society Social Theory and the Modern Food System(University of California Press, 2018). Together we will learn more about the history and sociology of how various ideas and practices shape human understanding and organization of the production, processing, preparation, serving, and consumption of food and drink in modern society. The authors divide this book into twelve chapters and draw on a wide range of historical and empirical illustrations to provide a concise, informed, and accessible survey of the interaction between social theory as well as food and drink. They provide a perfect interview for a wide range of discipline as long been a focal point of modern social theory.Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is currently conducting research on the placemaking associated with the development of farmers’ market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge.You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Jodi Campbell is Professor of History at Texas Christian University. She has written extensively on Spanish drama, royal history and women’s history. Her first book was published by Ashgate in 2006 and is titled Monarchy, Political Culture and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid: Theater of Negotiation. She also co-edited Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500-1800 (Brill, 2012). Dr. Campbell’s new book, At the First Table: Food and Social Identity in Early Modern Spain (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) focuses on food as a mechanism for the performance of social identity in early modern Spain.According to Dr. Campbell, early modern Spaniards adhered to strict regulations about food consumption based on their place in the social hierarchy as well as defined categories of gender, age, occupation and religion. The particular foods one ate as well as how they ate them were part of a display of identity and collective belonging.This enticingly-written book fills a need in food scholarship to understand Spanish customs in the broader context of early modern European food culture. Spain followed some of the general European trends for adopting New World foods, such as sugar, but its Jewish and Muslim roots inflected Spain with its own particular food heritage.“A phenomenal book… beautifully written and organized, and meticulously researched with a broad range of primary and secondary sources. There is nothing like it in English.”--Ken Albala, professor of history and the director of the Food Studies Program at the University of the Pacific and the author of Food in Early Modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

While most people in the US are familiar with the ubiquitous Kellogg cereal brand, few know how it relates to US geography, science and technology around the turn of the 20th century. In A Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Enterprise (University of California Press, 2017), Nicholas Bauch explores the digestive system as a sociomaterial landscape developed from the Battle Creek Sanitarium, as run by Dr. John Kellogg. Bauch wants to focus less on Kellogg the man, but rather on Kellogg’s ability to enroll actants (a la Latour) in his geographical digestive network. Kellogg’s religious background as a Seventh-Day Adventist, and his scientific and medical training, made purity and cleanliness his central goals at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Responding to the social and personal problems of indigestion and stagnation, Kellogg instituted a regime of tests, procedures and strict dieting (amongst other restrictions) to cure such prevalent ills. Kellogg thought that natural food was too impure a diet, so instead he turned to highly processed foods as developed in his experimental kitchen, which incidentally was how the first cereal flakes were made. Even with such plain and processed dieting, Kellogg found the human digestive system unable to process substances efficiently on its own. This problem led Kellogg to conceptualize an extended digestive system by developing a sewage system. Eventually, Kellogg became reliant upon industrial farming in rural Michigan. New developments in industrial equipment, such as grain-threshing machines, and industrial chemicals, to enrich the soil, provided a relatively clean and efficient food production process to fulfill the sanitarium’s needs. Before his death, Kellogg thus purified the nature/culture binary of food in favor of scientific approach, and engineered a collective digestive system across Battle Creek and nearby areas.While some of Kellogg’s ideas seem antiquarian to today’s standards, Bauch makes a compelling argument for why we can see Kellogg’s paradoxical influence on today’s US food production and consumption. While Kellogg railed against the dominant “natural” cuisine of his day in favor of a new approach to processed foods, the new food movements of today are decidedly critical of processed foods; while Kellogg wanted zero bacteria in the gut, today there are numerous products that are probiotics. What the new food movements gain from Kellogg is not his precise views, but rather his focus on the gut and the potential medicinal properties of food.A Geography of Digestion presents not only a geographical history, but a methodology for exploring sociomaterial processes as landscapes for future researchers to use in other contexts. As such, scholars interested in the relation between science and space, food studies, and materialist approaches to the body will find much use of this recently published work.Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests includes the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. You can follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

You eat what you are and are what you eat, right? There is an increasing number of Americans who pay great attention to the food they eat, buy organic vegetables, drink fine wines, and seek out exotic cuisine. The affordability of food across the class spectrum have become more accessible. The masses, however, still lack other forms of capital (social, cultural, and culinary) necessary to fully understand and enjoy the delights of its consumption. Further, people also seek to differentiate themselves from being labeled as an unrefined eater (e.g., the common person who lives on junk food), the food snob, a gourmet, and possibly even a foodie.In her new book Discriminating Taste: How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution (Rutgers University Press, 2017), Dr. Margot Finn argues that the rise of gourmet, ethnic, diet, and organic foods must be understood in tandem with the economy. She offers an illuminating historical perspective on current trends in the production and consumption of food. Finn also presents a parallel with the Guilded Age as a time of class division and when gourmet dinners, international cuisines, slimming diets, and pure foods became fads.Throughout her research, Finn identifies the key ways that “good food” has become conflated with high-brow culture. She considers how class serves as a false form for social stratification in culinary consumption. Finn particularly focuses on how taste hierarchies provide a false consciousness for middle-class professionals who tend to fetishize cultural commodities. The author provides a provocative exploration into the ideology of contemporary food culture. This piece teaches us to challenge the maxim that humans are what they eat.Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is currently conducting research on the placemaking associated with the development of farmers’ market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In this this interview, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Diana Hill talks with Dr. Stephan J. Guyenet, neurobiologist and obesity researcher, about the unconscious systems that lead to overeating and weight gain. Dr. Guyenet discusses why dietary guidelines alone are not enough to change our eating behavior. In The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat (Flatiron Books, 2017), hee explores the biological and evolutionary reasons for overeating and offers concrete strategies to “outsmart” our hungry brains. This episode is a perfect accompaniment to go with the holidays, when we are bombarded with tasty food cues and stress induced overeating.Stephan Guyenet is a researcher, science consultant, and science communicator. He earned a BS in biochemistry at the University of Virginia and a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Washington, where he continued as a postdoctoral fellow studying the brain mechanisms that regulate body fatness and eating behavior. His scientific publications have been cited more than 2,000 times by his peers. His book, The Hungry Brain, was named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly and called “essential” by the New York Times Book Review. He is currently a Senior Fellow at GiveWell and scientific reviewer for the Examine.com Research Digest. He grows much of his own food and brews a mean hard cider.Diana Hill, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist practicing in Santa Barbara, California, and a co-host of the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Venus Bivar documents the development of agriculture in post-1944 France. Through the Second World War, France’s agriculture was comparatively backward next to those of its neighbors and geopolitical rivals. The French government undertook a major program of “modernization” to encourage the consolidation of landholdings, increases in the productivity of agricultural labor, and the application of capital-intensive technologies. In this it was successful—at least to the extent that France became one of the world’s leading exporters of agricultural goods. However, as Bivar documents, this transformation was not without considerable resistance: plenty of farmers were unable or unwilling to change, and the transformation of the French countryside generated intense debates about the nature of quality in food and agriculture, and its relationship to the people and land of France. Venus Bivar is Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, where she pursues research and teaching in three broad fields: European, economic, and environmental history. Her interests include the history of capitalism, agriculture and international trade, and the human history of climate change. Following her book Organic Resistance, she is currently developing two new projects. The first studies the emergence of economic growth as both an economic category of analysis and a political objective, while the second examines the social consequences of port development and urban planning in Marseille. David Fouser is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College, Chapman University, and American Jewish University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine, and studies the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain and the British Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In his first book Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press 2018), historian Benjamin Robert Siegel explores independent India’s attempts to feed itself between the 1940s and 1970s. Following the devastating Bengal famine of 1943, hunger and malnutrition remained key issues for India’s politicians, planners and citizens as a new nation sought to become self-sufficient in food production. Siegel’s book follows debates on land reform, technology and native diets to understand how the food question became an entry point into larger questions of citizenship, rights and welfare, debates that continue to loom large in the battle against agrarian distress and widespread food insecurity in present-day India. Madhuri Karak holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Insurgent Difference: An Ethnography of an Indian Resource Frontier” analyzed resource extraction and development as mutually constitutive logics of rule in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The North American Free Trade Agreement—or NAFTA, as we Americans call it—is very much in the news of late, primarily because President Trump has decided to make good on what he famously called “the single worst trade deal” that the United States has ever approved. Trump’s assessment, like so many of his statements, isn’t quite the fact he’d like it to be. In study after study, economists have found that NAFTA’s impact on the U.S. economy ranges from relatively insignificant to mildly beneficial. So as the media follows the negotiations and the talking-heads talk, we once again find ourselves in the welter of not knowing what to believe. What we need—what it seems we always need of late—is someone we can trust to clarify the situation, someone who basis their analysis on facts, on research, on evidence, someone who cares not only about the truth of the matter, but who also has a moral compass we can admire. Today I interview Alyshia Gálvez, author of the new book Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico (University of California Press, 2018). She is this person. She approaches NAFTA with a wide and precise lens, examining not only the economics of the agreement, but also its impact on public health, social welfare, agricultural practices, migration patterns, government policy and so many other considerations that get overlooked when the focus gets narrowed to economics. She looks across the border and at the border itself, so we can understand how the lives of the Mexican people have changed in the twenty years since NAFTA began. Gálvez shows us that NAFTA is indeed a terrible deal, but in all of the ways that Trump doesn’t and seemingly can’t. She offers us an analysis guided by rigor, insight, thoroughness, and, above all, compassion for the lives of very people that NAFTA has destroyed. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food