New Books in Food

Napoleon famously stated that an army marches on its stomach. Of no less importance is the food that keeps exploration moving, whether polar, desert, or on pilgrimage. Demet Guzey‘s Food on Foot: A History of Eating on Trails and in the Wild (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) is a history of staying alive on the edible, barely edible, and inedible. It is also a history of progress made on several fronts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: nutrition, medical discoveries, early feminism. In the dawning days of exploration, the notion of the exploration-friendly foods was nonexistent. However, some groups had already devised travel-worthy food. Exploration owes a huge debt to the North American Cree Indians for their food, pemmican. This mixture of fat and dried meat was indestructible. Every polar expedition carried it. In the standard explorer kit (ship biscuits, chocolate, sugar, tea, powdered milk, pemmican) it was the most durable. It was not delicious. In fact, it was detested, but it was eaten. Among explorers, there was even an unofficial competition for a recipe to make pemmican better tasting. Amundsen boasted about his recipe. Mountaineers had different problems. At 14,000 feet, the appetite decreases sharply and fatigue is a constant. Sugar decreases fatigue so the consumption of hot beverages (for heat as well) is critical. And fluid consumption combats the dehydration/altitude sickness combination experienced by climbers. For people surrounded by free water in the form of snow, shortage of water seems ironic. But at high altitudes, paraffin is the fuel used (wood is too heavy to carry) and stoves took longer to boil water, using up precious paraffin. It wasn’t until the 1950s that best diet for high-altitude climbing was understood. When women entered the mountain-climbing arena, they did so with enthusiasm and a unique approach. Their observations and recording keeping (in the form of diaries) provide an excellent scientific record of the terrains they covered, something ignored by their male counterparts. The best mountain-climbing diet in the book is what the first woman to achieve Mt. Everest, Junko Miyazaki from Japan, in 1975, took. What is remarkable is that her mountaineering food can also be ordered in any Japanese restaurant. It takes a woman to know what to eat on Everest. Unlike most food-related books, Food on Foot provides the reader with a list of foods never to indulge in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

A heritage food in France, and a high-priced obscurity in the United States. But in both countries, foie gras, the specially fattened liver of a duck or goose, has the power to stir a remarkable array of emotions and produce heated debates. Comparing the French and American producers and consumers of this controversial food item, Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food (Princeton University Press, 2016) offers readers a broad mix of these perspectives under a clear, rich analysis. Assistant Professor Michaela DeSoucey takes readers to the farms in southwest France, where ducks are force-fed with tubes placed down their throats, and into the high-end restaurants in Chicago, where foie gras was temporarily banned in the 2000s and made an object of fascination. Her aim is to show how we could use what she calls gastropolitics, or the conflicts over food and culinary practices that get branded as social problems and lie at the intersection of social movements, cultural markets, and government regulation, to understand the implications and impacts these contestations have for social life in a variety of contexts. The result is a highly informative and entertaining journey through the social and symbolic terrain surrounding foie gras. Readers will truly learn a lot from liver. 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) 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

In The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World Jordan D. Rosenblum explores how cultures critique and defend their religious food practices. In particular he focuses on how ancient Jews defended the kosher laws, or kashrut, and how ancient Greek, Romans, and early Christians critiqued these practices. As the kosher laws are first encountered in the Hebrew Bible, this study is rooted in ancient biblical interpretation. Rosenblum explores how commentators in antiquity understood, applied, altered, innovated upon, and contemporized biblical dietary regulations. He shows that these differing interpretations do not exist in a vacuum; rather, they are informed by a variety of motives, including theological, moral, political, social, and financial considerations. In analyzing these ancient conversations about culture and cuisine, he dissects three rhetorical strategies deployed when justifying various interpretations of ancient Jewish dietary regulations: reason, revelation, and allegory. Finally, Rosenblum reflects upon wider, contemporary debates about food ethics. Phillip Sherman is Associate Professor of Religion at Maryville College in Maryville, TN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England (Duquesne University Press, 2016) is a collection of essays that offers new dimensions for reading and understanding Shakespeare’s plays. Responding to a rich scholarship on Shakespeare, the authors shift the centers and margins of literary discourse to illuminate aspects that were previously dismissed as insignificant. In Culinary Shakespeare, food is theorized as a territory where multiple dimensions intersect and overlap: aesthetic, social, national, political, etc. As the authors of the introduction section state, “This culinary Shakespearean moment, by crystalizing question about knowledge, power, ethics, colonialism, labor, and desire, introduces us to the grave importance of food in the early modern period and to the dangers of ignoring eating as an ontological and epistemological phenomenon” (1). A part of everyday life, food reflects the individuals engagements with the world and others, revealing intricacies of communication and world-view construction. In Shakespeare’s plays, food is copiously visible and, at the same time, exquisitely subtle. As the essays demonstrate, Shakespeare offers a variety of food engagements ranging from traditional English cuisine and exotic delicatessens to drinking, feasting and banqueting. The three parts of the collection guide readers through the levels Shakespeare’s gastronomic representations permeate: Local and Global; Body and State; Theatre and Community. The three chapters coherently illustrate the idea framed by the introduction note: “For Shakespeare, the culinary is primary” (3). Although the statement may sound categorical, it nevertheless draws attention to textual layers that contain essential information not only about Shakespeare’s plays, but also about society and the community in Early Modern England. Describing food subtleties, the contributors discuss how Shakespeare address the issues of economy and nationhood. Highlighting the perspectives that were underrepresented in the traditional scholarship, Culinary Shakespeare also invites new engagements with literature and literary criticism. Revealing shifting nature of centers, the collection provides tools for reading texts as entities that participate in and absorb a diversity of discourses. David B. Goldstein is associate professor of English at York University in Toronto. Amy L. Tigner is associate professor of English at the University of Texas, Arlington. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Food was central to the lives of people in England during the Middle Ages in ways different than it is today. As Christopher Woolgar reveals in his book The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500 (Yale University Press, 2016), it had a cultural significance that permeated nearly aspect of their society. Using a vast range of legal, archaeological, and literary sources, he explains what the English ate during the late Middle Ages, how they ate it, and what their food meant to them. The choices of food available to people typically varied based on wealth and locale, helping to define the class and status of their consumers within English society. Yet Woolgar shows that food often served as a form of connection as well, with the experience of eating within the context of elaborate settings such as celebratory feasts was an important experience of bonding within and between various groups. Together these various choices and settings gave foods and their consumption a particular social and cultural significance that defined the lives of the people who ate them as peasants, townspeople, clergy or elites. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

My grandmother, who’s now ninety-eight, lived most of her life in a little town in Southwestern Ohio called Waynesville. The town has reinvented itself in the last few years as a destination for antiquers wiling to pay top-dollar for what she might call junk, but when she was there the town was the small center of a lot of small family farms, including her own. In her years there, she helped run the farm, started a dry-cleaning business, drove the school bus, served as an EMT and worked in the sheriff’s office. She was one of the folks everyone knew. On Sundays, she cooked biscuits for the prisoners in the local penitentiary. For me, growing up, she was just grandma. I didn’t realize the richness of her character until years later, with age and distance, maybe even a little wisdom. In her latest poetry collection, Amy Wright takes this kind of realization and transforms it into powerful, moving, and often times hilarious art. She was raised in the Appalachian region of Southwest Virginia, and her poems, which she calls Cracker Sonnets (BrickRoad Poetry Press, 2016), bring this region and its characters to life. Jax Ovie, Virginia Leabus, Coralee Robins, Leda Burke, Belle Neely, and Edna Culpepper, these are just a few of the folks whose daily grinds and deep affections fill Wright’s poems. And as you can tell from these names alone, Wright portrays her people with what you’d hope from a poet: lyric delight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Here in the U.S. we’ve just celebrated the Fourth of July, with its parades, fireworks, and, of course, cook-outs. If you’re like me, the smell of a grilling burger can make you salivate from across the yard. I feel like Pavlov’s dog whenever it happens, and that includes the seven or so years I was a vegetarian. I’d like to say I react this way only on these idyllic occasions summer holidays, family barbecues, campfire weenie roasts under a star-filled sky. But the truth is I can be walking to my car in July across a 95-degree asphalt parking and smell the exhaust fan from a Burger King a block away: suddenly I need one of those flame-broiled burgers. Every time this happens I ask myself, “Why? Why is this smell such a trigger?” That’s exactly the question that drives Marta Zaraska‘s new book, Meathooked: The History and Science of our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat (Basic Books, 2016). As a science writer whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, Scientific America, and Newsweek, Zaraska has come across information thats more or less familiar to us: how bad meat is for our health, for our environment, and certainly for the animals in the massive feeding operations. And yet, as Zaraska points out, we’re eating as much meat as ever and, globally, we’re eating even more. So why? Why are we so hooked on meat? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The California farmlands have long served as a popular symbol of America’s natural abundance and endless opportunity. Yet, from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart to Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, many novels, plays, movies, and songs have dramatized the brutality and hardships of working in the California fields. Little scholarship has focused on what these cultural productions tell us about who belongs in America, and in what ways they are allowed to belong. In The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl (University of Washington Press, 2016), Sarah Wald analyzes this legacy and its consequences by examining the paradoxical representations of California farmers and farmworkers from the Dust Bowl migration to present-day movements for food justice and immigrant rights. Analyzing fiction, nonfiction, news coverage, activist literature, memoirs, and more, Wald gives us a new way of thinking through questions of national belonging by probing the relationships among race, labor, and landownership. Bringing together eco-criticism and critical race theory, she pays special attention to marginalized groups, examining how Japanese American journalists, Filipino workers, United Farm Workers members, and contemporary immigrants-rights activists, among others, pushed back against the standard narratives of landownership and citizenship. SARAH D. WALD is assistant professor of English and environmental studies at the University of Oregon. Lori A. Flores is an Assistant Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale, 2016). You can find her at http://www.loriaflores.com, lori.flores@stonybrook.edu, or hanging around Brooklyn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Resistance to the industrial food system has, over the past decades, led to the rise of alternative food movements. Debate about genetically modified food, sugar consumption, fast food and the obesity crisis (to name a few) is pervasive. Most often, this focuses on individual consumer choice. Garrett M.Broad argues, however, for the importance of community level initiative. He maintains that the vote with your fork movement obscures the structural foundation of the corporate food system. The alternative food movements, as a whole, fail to recognize that the inequities in the food system are connected to histories of racial and economic discrimination. Broad’s book More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change (University of California Press, 2016) examines the work of community-based food justice groups operating in South Los Angeles, like Community Services Unlimited (CSU). Founded as an arm of the South California Black Panther Party, CSU organizes at a grassroots level to provide community access to food, while using food as a means to foster consciousness and promote a broader movement for social justice. More Than Just Food narrates the stories of these organizations, evaluates the pitfalls and possibilities of community-level initiative, and highlights the problematic position of local groups working with national non-profit organizations, and governmental and corporate agencies. Through his engaged scholarship and nuanced analysis, Broad offers us a study of specific movements in their local context and makes recommendations to help future movements organize and act effectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food (Columbia University Press, 2016), Roger Horowitz, director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library, looks at points of intersection between Jewish law and modern industrial foodways during the 20th century. In revealing the hidden kosher histories of products such as Coke, Jell-O and kosher meat, Horowitz highlights controversies over rabbinic authority and consumption in American Jewish history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food