New Books in Food

The café, long a European institution, was also a stimulant and a refuge for European Jewish culture. In cities across Europe, and later in Palestine, Israel, and the United States, Jewish journalists, poets, and thinkers gathered in cafés to socialize, argue, create, and simply to be in a space that welcomed them. In A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture (NYU Press, 2018), Shachar M. Pinsker, Professor of Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan, provides a rich and detailed portrait of café life in six major centers of Jewish life and thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. The book is a welcome addition to the study of European Jewish thought and culture, and to the understanding of the motive forces behind Jewish creativity during a period that included large-scale emancipation, immigration, and destruction in the Jewish world. David Gottlieb earned his PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago in 2018. He serves on the teaching faculty of Claremont Lincoln University, and teaches for Orot: The Center for New Jewish Learning in Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The concept of “Southern hospitality” began to take form in the late eighteenth century and became especially associated with Virginia’s grand plantations. This state was home to many of our founding fathers. Their galas, balls, feasts, and entertainments became famous internationally as well as at home. On whose shoulders did this success rest? Not the mistress, whose role was mainly that of social director. The labor was slavery, the abundant and spectacular food was produced by enslaved cooks. Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine (University Press of Kentucky, 2017) is their story. Let’s start with where you can’t learn about them. Colonial Williamsburg and many plantation houses that are tourist destinations did their best in the early twentieth century to remove all traces of slavery. Field hand houses and kitchens alike were razed. Author Kelley Fanto Deetz is director of programming, education, and visitor engagement at Stratford Hall, the birthplace of Robert E. Lee, near Lynchburg, Virginia. She has made it her work to restore the history of the “disappeared.” First, the kitchen: an external brick building with at least one hearth burning constantly, where the enslaved cooks and their families often lived upstairs. The author examines the question whether being a “house slave” was better that being a field hand. Yes and not. The reader learns why. When the transatlantic slave trade was banned internationally in 1803, Virginia plantation owners began to come under scrutiny from their business associates and abolition groups on both sides of the Atlantic. Discussions at table were becoming problematic, not in small part because enslaved butlers and waiters were hearing about what the world beyond the plantation thought. This gave rise to “protective” architecture between the external kitchen and the house, which Deetz describes in detail (Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello is an outstanding example). Nat Turner’s failed slave rebellion in 1831 had a further reactionary result: it because illegal for a slave to learn to read or write. The irony is that enslaved cooks did learn to read, write, and do simple math because it was required in their work: reading and writing down recipes, and changing measurements. Labor without negotiating power was the enslaved cook lot. The dynamic between mistress and slave was complex, and the enslaved cook, while powerless, still worked to find ways to bend the power struggle in their own favor. This was inevitable given that the enslaved cook was a de facto member of the master’s family, feeding them (often tweaking dishes with African ingredients such as okra), providing companionship to her mistress (plantations were isolated from each other) and her children likewise providing playmates for the mistress’s children. And everyone had an enslaved “mammy.” Some details in this book dismay, some shock, but perhaps the most jaw-dropping story is about George Washington and his famous enslaved cook Hercules. This alone makes Bound to the Fire a book to read and reread. Kelle Fanto Deetz has a doctorate in African Diaspora Studies from UC Berkeley and is founding director of the Shared History Project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Consumers today have a lot of choices. Whether in stores or online, people are inundated by an abundance of options for what to buy. At the same time, the products we consume seem to have more and more ingredients, additives, and chemicals in them that put our health at risk, and even their packaging could be harmful to us. How do consumers make sense of the choices they have to make to reduce their own and their family’s exposure to everyday toxics? In her engaging and insightful new book, Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics (University of California Press, 2018), sociologist Norah MacKendrick shows readers how today’s regulatory environment in the United States came about, how so much of what we consume remains unregulated, and how environmental health groups, food retail stores, and consumers have adjusted to these realities. In an age of deregulation, when individuals are forced to take on an increasing amount of risk with decreasing support from societal institutions, MacKendrick argues that many consumers today are practicing what she calls “precautionary consumption,” or a pattern of “green” or non-toxic shopping to try to ward off the harms of conventional modern products. The burden of such an intensive, resource-consuming approach to shopping, however, falls disproportionately on women, who remain charged with the responsibility of caring for the household (shopping, cooking, cleaning), and especially mothers, who still do the lion’s share of child raising. Furthermore, MacKendrick questions the ability of precautionary consumption to truly achieve environmental justice and equitable forms of widespread regulation, so that the burden for preventing exposure to everyday toxics doesn’t fall on the individual, and especially not on the groups bearing excessive responsibility to do so (women, mothers) or receiving a disproportionate amount of the harm (the poor). Examining everyday toxics from a variety of angles, MacKendrick’s book is an impressive analysis of how many of us shop today, why we do so, and what we can do to achieve greater equality. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Diet books are a multi-billion dollar industry and in Diet and the Disease of Civilization (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Adrienne Rose Bitar explores the narratives of those books. Bitar looks at the ways in which diet books not only present American’s with dieting advice, but also create cultural narratives about how we should live. Through the exploration of hundreds of diet books over the past century (and sometimes more), Bitar examines four popular diets, viewing them as narratives for American culture. She looks at the Paleo Diet, the Garden of Eden Diet, The Pacific Island Diet and the Detox Diet as larger myths about American culture and social movements. Bitar’s work explores how diet books call for a healthier society by urging readers to create what they believe to be a more perfect world. She argues that diet books criticize excess, addiction, alienation, and the disruption and disappearance of traditional lifeways showing readers how to return to conditions that create optimal health and a more “natural” way of eating and existing in our world. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in peoples lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Is life without coffee possible? Before you answer, first admit that you know almost nothing about the plant that you depend on to deliver you conscious into your day. You will learn from Jeff Koehler’s wide-ranging history Where the Wild Coffee Grows: The Untold Story of Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup (Bloomsbury, 2017) that the true origin of coffee is the cloud forest in the Kafa highlands of southwest Ethiopia, where it is a wild-growing, shade-loving tree. How Caffea arabica migrated first to the Arabian Peninsula (which accounts for its being incorrectly named arabica instead of ethiopica), then traveled further to Brazil, Indonesia, Kenya, and beyond, is a fascinating tale. This local plant becomes a global necessity; a tropical variety evolves into the cash crop of Central America, a monoculture of short plants crowded into straight rows. But on its home ground, coffee doesn’t play by these rules. Ethiopians consume 50 percent of their production domestically. “Coffee is our bread.” As it was embraced in the West in the early 1600s, it was regularly condemned by religious leaders in every country. Coffee houses brought people of different classes together, creating conversation and the exchange of ideas. This was dangerous. Not in Ethiopia. The coffee-drinking habit defines Ethiopian culture. Everyone drinks it, all day in small clay cups, and always with others, never alone. It is the definition of community. “Coffee is our bread.” By contrast, the North American bond with the morning cup of joe (Chock Full o’Nuts, Maxwell House) is undergoing a evolution into a pricey “boutique drink” (started by Seattle’s Starbucks and Berkeley’s Peet’s). Four or five dollars for a cup of coffee? But coffee is first a plant, so agriculture is destiny. Due to its genetic vulnerability (Koehler reveals a historical lack of coordination in international research among the coffee-growing nations), it could too easily become the Irish potato of the twenty-first century. Coffee leaf rust, caused by a fungus, is one of its greatest threats. This fungus brought the discovery of the variety Robusta (Caffea canephora) by Dutch growers in Java in the late nineteenth century. Robusta is the wunderkind of instant coffee due to its stronger flavor and higher caffeine content compared to Arabica. Robusta’s tropical durability made it the crop of choice in Central America, but coffee leaf rust has followed it there. When a crop fails, the grower is ruined. Sometimes the only option is to migrate elsewhere. The other enemy is climate change. Increase the growing temperatures by two degrees and production is affected. This also hits water availability for crop irrigation. And then there is man. Will UNESCO’s designation of World Heritage Site protect the Kafa Forest from rampant deforestation? And why did the poet Arthur Rimbaud end his days as a coffee planter in Yemen? Will you now ponder these uncertainties as you sip your doubleshot iced latte macchiato? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Most everything Americans eat today comes out of cans. Some of it emerges from the iconic steel cylinders and much of the rest from the mammoth processed food empire the canning industry pioneered. Historian Anna Zeide, in Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry (University of California Press, 2018), carefully traces how canners convinced a nation of consumers who ate little but seasonal, fresh food to dare to crack open an opaque container of unknown origins and put its contents into their bodies. The feat required reshaping everything from federal regulatory practices and the makeup of academic faculties to the way food was advertised and the genetic composition of peas. When the canning industry has seen its hard-won reputation for providing a wholesome staple of American pantries come under attack from consumer groups and environmentalists starting in the 1960s and 70s, it has doubled down on its techniques of obfuscation, brand burnishing, and regulatory capture. For those endeavoring to reform the American food system, the book is a sobering presentation of just what they are up against. Anna Zeide is Assistant Professor of Professional Practice in the Department of History at Oklahoma State University. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Chef Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota and originally from Pine Ridge Reservation, has become one of the most important voices in the Indigenous foods revitalization movement. By researching in the archives, visiting elders, and experimenting with new uses for traditional ingredients and techniques, he has created a new vision for modern Native American cuisine. That vision is realized inThe Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Particularly making use of the traditional foods of Minnesotan tribal peoples, his company The Sioux Chef and the related non-profit North American Traditional Food Systems (NATIFS) have now released their first cookbook with the University of Minnesota Press, described as follows: “Sherman dispels outdated notions of Native American fare—no fry bread or Indian tacos here—and no European staples such as wheat flour, dairy products, sugar, and domestic pork and beef. The Sioux Chef’s healthful plates embrace venison and rabbit, river and lake trout, duck and quail, wild turkey, blueberries, sage, sumac, timpsula or wild turnip, plums, purslane, and abundant wildflowers. Contemporary and authentic, his dishes feature cedar braised bison, griddled wild rice cakes, amaranth crackers with smoked white bean paste, three sisters salad, deviled duck eggs, smoked turkey soup, dried meats, roasted corn sorbet, and hazelnut-maple bites.” James Mackay is Assistant Professor of British and American Studies at European University Cyprus, and is one of the founding editors of the open access Indigenous Studies journal Transmotion. He can be reached at j.mackay@euc.ac.cy   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Environmental historian Peter A. Kopp‘s book Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley (University of California Press, 2016) examines the fascinating history of a very special plant: the hop. From its prehistoric origins to its use in ancient and medieval beermaking, the hop was already an important crop in human agriculture when it first appeared on Colonial American shores, but when it made its way to Oregon’s lush Willamette Valley in the mid-19th century, it changed itself, the region, and the world forever. Savvy farmers, brewers and marketers soon turned the Willamette Valley into the “Hops Capital of the World,” and began to bend the entire world’s beer industry to their will. The hop somehow managed to survive and even flourish during Prohibition of the 1920s and 1930s, then almost fell victim to a disease that nearly destroyed the fields of aromatic plenty, but laboratory science and big business spelled a resurrection for the hardy hop. This book is a highly readable and interesting new look at the history of beer and the origins of the Pacific Northwest’s famed craft brewing culture. Peter A. Kopp is Associate Professor and Director of Public History at New Mexico State University in las Cruces, New Mexico. In addition to researching hops and beer, Dr. Kopp also works on the history of tourism and various aspects of environmental history in the U.S. Southwest. His book Hoptopia won the American Historical Association’s Pacific Coast Branch Book Award last year, 2017. Sean Munger is an author, historian, teacher and podcaster. He also has his own historical podcast, Second Decade, on the Recorded History Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

I first really got to know Andrew Friedman after the death of our mutual friend, the great food writer Josh Ozersky. Andrew is a widely respected food writer who has collaborated on numerous landmark cookbooks and chef memoirs. Now his labor of love, Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New American Profession (Ecco Press, 2018), is making waves in the industry. Friedman charts a course starting in the mid 1960s and winding up in the early 1990s during which the profession of cheffing became what it is today: Respectable. But what a hot, heavy, up and down journey to get there! We conducted this interview on the front sun deck of a beautiful house in Silverlake, Los Angeles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen (Rutgers University Press, 2015), Deborah Harris and Patti Giuffre trace the historical evolution of the profession, analyze more than two thousand examples of chef profiles and restaurant reviews, and conduct in-depth interviews with thirty-three women chefs. There are a number of recent books, magazines, and television programs that focused on the world of the professional chef. The media perpetually uses men as icons to market the hot and sexy field of being a chef in the professional kitchen. All the while, the work of women in the kitchen is discounted as a domestic role. This devaluation remains intact because of the exclusion of women in professional kitchens. This helps men maintain the legitimacy of the profession and perpetuates the appearance of home cooking as women’s domestic duty. Dr. Deborah A. Harris is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Texas State University. She focuses her teachings on courses in the area of stratification and inequality, qualitative research methods, rural aging, and the sociology of food. Harris’s published research has addressed the impacts of welfare reform on low-income women and their families, as well as how the closing of military facilities affects local communities. Dr. Patti Giuffre is the Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of Sociology at Texas State University. She focuses her teaching and research in the area of work and occupation, gender, sexuality, and qualitative methods. She has conducted research on sexual harassment, sexual orientation discrimination, and experiences of LGBT workers in gay-friendly workplaces. She is also an active member of the American Sociological Associations sections on Sex and Gender and Organizations, Occupations, and Work and of the Sociologists for Women in Society. Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. His most recent paper, to be presented at the upcoming American Society for Environmental History conference, is titled Down Lovers Lane: A Brief History of Necking in Cars.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food