New Books In Food

I love this book, am using its recipes, and was thrilled to interview Dr. Koufman, an iconoclast who appears poised to torpedo a terribly wasteful and dangerous arm of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex. As the advertising copy for Dr. Koufman’s Acid Reflux Diet (Katalitix, 2015) notes: “Combining 35 years of work in the field of acid reflux, including scientific research and the treatment of thousands of patients at the Voice Institute of New York, Dr. Jamie Koufman has identified the causes and the cures for this much-misunderstood health crisis.” The opening section of the book explains the science of why this diet works, and the contains recipes. Our talk covered science along with the doctor’s personal biography.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James A. Benn‘s new book is a history of tea as a religious and cultural commodity in China before it became a global commodity in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the Tang and Song dynasties (with brief extensions earlier and later), Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) demonstrates that a “shift to drinking tea” in China “brought with it a total reorientation of Chinese culture.” Benn pays careful attention to the challenges and opportunities offered by the sources of China’s tea history, and each chapter offers a critical introduction to and analysis of some of those sources while also narrating a key moment and theme in the history of tea. (Because of this wonderful focus on the sources of tea historiography – including some great partial and whole translations of key documents of all sorts – the book makes not only a great read, but also a very useful pedagogical resource!) The coverage of Tea in China ranges

In the late nineteenth century, Jewish immigrants inspired by Zionism began to settle in Palestine. Their goal was not only to establish a politically sovereign state, but also to create a new, modern, Hebrew nation. With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the Zionist movement realized its political goal. It then sought to acculturate the multitude of Jewish immigrant groups in the new state into a unified national culture. Yael Raviv highlights the role of food and cuisine in the construction of the Israeli nation. Raviv’s book, Falafel Nation: Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel (University of Nebraska Press, 2015) examines how national ideology impacted cuisine, and vice versa, during different periods of Jewish settlement in Palestine and Israel. Early settlers, inspired by socialist ideology and dedicated to agricultural work, viewed food as a necessity and treated culinary pleasure as a feature of bourgeois culture to be shunned. Working the land, and later buying

The new edited volume by Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, Edda Fields-Black and Dagmar Schafer is a wonderfully interdisciplinary global history of rice, rooted in specific local cases, that spans 15 chapters written by specialists in the histories of Africa, the Americas, and several regions of Asia. Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (Cambridge University Press, 2015) creates a conversation among regional and disciplinary modes of studying and narrating rice histories that have often been conducted in isolation. Specifically, the project brings together two large-scale debates that emerge from very different rice historiographies: the “Black Rice” and “agricultural involution” debates frame the inquiry here, and as you listen to my conversation with Francesca and Dagmar (the two co-editors with whom I spoke for the podcast) you’ll hear them offer an overview of the nature and stakes of both of those areas of inquiry. In the course of the conversation we also had a chance to

In Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (New York University Press, 2015), Ted Merwin, Associate Professor of Religion and Judaic Studies at Dickinson College, serves up the first full-length history of the New York Jewish deli. A social space and symbol, the deli demonstrated American Jews’ connection to their heritage and to their new surroundings. Merwin addresses the rise and fall of the Jewish delicatessen in America, how we remember it, and its contemporary resurgence.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anna L. Tsing‘s new book is on my new (as of this post) list of Must-Read-Books-That-All-Humans-Who-Can-Read-Should-Read-And-That-Nonhumans-Should-Find-A-Way-To-Somehow-Engage-Even-If-Reading-Is-Not-Their-Thing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015) joyfully bursts forth in a “riot of short chapters” that collectively open out into a mushroom-focused exploration of what Tsing refers to as a “third nature,” or “what manages to live despite capitalism.” Tsing’s book is based on fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2011 in the US, Japan, Canada, China, and Finland, plus interviews with scientists, foresters, and matsutake traders in those places and in Denmark, Sweden, and Turkey. The book is an exemplar of the kind of work that can come out of thoughtful and extended scholarly collaboration, here resulting from Tsing’s work with the Matsutake Worlds Research Group. The book tre

Let’s say you had a curiosity about, maybe even a hankering for, Indiana’s signature dessert, sugar cream pie. You might search for it and, on a typical foodie website, find this description, written in typical foodie prose: “As Indiana’s state pie, this rich, nutmeg-dusted custard pie also goes by the name ‘Hoosier Pie.’ Born from Amish and Shaker communities that settled in Indiana in the 1800s, this “desperation pie”–a category that refers to pies made when fresh fruit wasn’t available or money was short–is as simple as it is delicious.” Now, sugar cream pie may be delicious, but there’s nothing delicious, nothing delectable, in that description. Compare that to the one Matthew Gavin Frank offers in his new book, The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour through America’s Food (Liveright, 2015): “Our Hoosier Cream Pie is so soft we can cut it with our pinkies. So sweet, we can think only of how it moves us, speeds our hearts, a

Tom Jackson‘s Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again (Bloomsbury, 2015) is a completely engrossing look into the history and technology of refrigeration.  This book reads like an expanded chapter of James Burke’s classic book Connections.Refrigeration is not only one of the most important foundation stones of our technological society, it’s also one that we take for granted. It’s hard to say which is more interesting; the realization that people were aware of a cooling method almost two millennia before the birth of Christ, the history of refrigeration from the Middle Ages to the present, or the possibilities for refrigeration technology in the world of the future. Chilledis a fascinating look into one of the most amazing and important technologies that man has ever developed.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This book is a ton of fun. To Live and Dine in L.A.: Menus and the Making of the Modern City (Angel City Press) taps the deep and colorful collection of Southern California restaurant menus archived by the Los Angeles Public Library. Author Josh Kun, a professor in the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism at the University of Southern California, presides over beautiful pages showing a century of menus, ranging from the Art Deco high points of the Brown Derby (purportedly where the Cobb Salad was invented) to the low points of “Southern” style joints whose menus used stereotype Aunt Jemima-type depictions of African American women to draw in customers. My favorites include a menu for the Hangman’s Tree Cafe, a joint in the San Fernando Valley that seemed to be working the theme of serving last meals. Fun? Kun uses the images to spin a narrative about class, race and, of course, food in the history of Los Angeles. Enjoy.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoi

Most of the year, when the weather lets us, my wife and I wind down on our front porch with a bourbon. We live out in the countryside and, for no particular reason, bourbon feels like the right choice as we watch the long grass waving on the hillside and the birds shuttling back and forth between the far trees. Every so often, I’ll suggest we change things up: maybe a Scotch or an Irish whiskey–not really such a big change in the grand scheme of things–but my wife looks at me as though I’ve made some horrible faux pas, as though I’ve suggested a tumbler full of cotton-candy vodka or bacon grease. Bourbon, she insists, that’s what goes with the landscape. And she’s not alone. As Reid Mitenbuler points out in Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America’s Whiskey (Viking, 2015), bourbon is our native spirit. This is the fact that Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning affirmed in 2007, when he sponsored a bill to declare September “National Bourbon Heritage Month.&#

Movies and television shows often include scenes of eating, either as a side activity of the actors or as an integralpart of a scene. University of Nevada, Reno Professor Tom Hertweck compiled 14 essays in his collection, Food on Film: Bringing Something New to the Table (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014). He talks with me about the overall procedure of editing a group of essays, as well as the themes he discovered in this process.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eugene N. Anderson‘s new book offers an expansive history of food, environment, and their relationships in China. From prehistory through the Ming and beyond, Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) pays careful attention to a wide range of contexts of concern with nature and its resources. Readers of Anderson’s book will find fascinating discussions of rice agriculture and fermentation, the etiquette of food and eating, concerns with deforestation in classical literature, the emergence of principles and practices of environmental management, and much more. Throughout the book, Anderson situates China within a larger frame of Central Asian history, with extensive discussions of the Silk Road and the importance of Mongol empire for the movement and circulation of food- and environment-related materials and practices. Though the main part of the book ends with the Ming Dynasty, a final chapter considers the themes of the book as they thread through m

In this wonderful ethnography of Darjeeling tea, Sarah Besky explores different attempts at bringing justice to plantation life in north east India. Through explorations into fair trade, geographic indication and a state movement for the Nepali tea workers, Besky critically assesses the limits of projects that fail to address underlying exploitative structures. The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014) is a readable and theoretically nuanced book that should be of interest to many. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Something nice and filling for you here! Laura Silver‘s book Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food (Brandeis University Press, 2014) concerns itself not only with the round — or is it square? — savory pastry brought to America from somewhere in Europe to fill the working bellies of not well-to-do immigrants. The tale of the knish is a way to tell the story of where an ethnic group has been, where they think they are, and where they might be going. A free-ranging talk between Lower East Side resident Allen Salkin and the author, with stops along the way for smoked fish, hot dogs and pasta.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Believe it or not, the origins of this podcast and the entire New Books Network can be traced to a conversation I had in a cafein Ann Arbor, Michigan (Sweetwaters in Kerrytown, as it happens) in 2004. I was sitting there minding my own business when I overheard Ed Vielmetti and Lou Rosenfeldtalking about something called “del.icio.us” [sic]. It sounded interesting, so I asked them–complete strangers though they were–about it. They kindly brought me up to speed on something else called “Web 2.0.” Then I begin thinking… Turns out a lot thinking is done in cafes, as Leona Rittner, W. Scott Haine, and Jeffrey H. Jacksonpoint out in their fascinating book The Thinking Space: The Cafe as a Cultural Institution in Paris, Italy and Vienna (Ashgate, 2013). At one time or another, most modern Western intellectuals found themselves in one or another cafedrinking coffee, dreaming big dreams, and often arguing with another. The caffeine helped, but the atmosphere and company helpe

When I was growing up the only cooking show on TV I remember was Julia Child. I sometimes watched “The French Chef,” not so much to learn anything about cooking, but rather just to watch Julia. She was a hoot. When I saw the famous “Saturday Night Live” in 1978, I wasn’t sure which was funnier–Dan Aykroyd as Julia or Julia herself. Today, of course, cooking is very serious business on TV and the reason, of course, is the Food Network. It grew from virtually nothing twenty years ago to a massive cultural and economic force. It’s watched by millions and it makes millions more. It’s changed the way Americans (and many overseas) think about both food and television. It’s sky is full of stars. How’d that happen? In his remarkably well researched, wonderfully written and engrossingly told From Scratch: Inside the Food Network (Putnam, 2013), former New York Times reporter Allen Salkin tells the–pardon the pun–saucy tale. Please listen in.Learn

The Hebrews called it “Eden.” The Greeks and Romans called it the “Golden Age.” The philosophes–or Rousseau at least–called it the “State of Nature.” Marx and Engels called it “Primitive Communism.” The underlying notion, however, is the same: there was a time, long ago, when things were much better than they are today because we were then “in tune” with God, nature, or whatever. Thereafter we “fell,” usually due to our own stupidity, and landed in our present corrupted state. Today we are told by some that the paleolithic period (roughly 3 million to 10,000 years ago) was, similarly, a time in which we were “in tune” with nature. According to the paleofantasists, we were selected in the paleolithic environment and it is to the Paleolithic environment that we became most “fit.” After the paleolithic, they say, came the fall (domestication, cities, states, industrialization). Today, they continue, we are

By focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spary’s work is at the same time a rich and embodied history of food, diet, and digestion in French Enlightenment science, and an account of how social and epistemological authority were produced amid the emergence of new Enlightenment publics. In Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760 (University of Chicago Press, 2012), controversies over digestion provided a space for the working out of power struggles between political, religious, medical, and culinary thinkers. Faced with a cuisine bursting with new materials and flavors, French society debated various ways of negotiating the opposing poles of indulgence and sobriety, luxury and reform. This is illustrated in several detailed case studies that include coffee and its implicat

I bet you’ve never heard of the “Smash the Baltic Fleet Memorial Togo Marshmallow.” I hadn’t either, before reading Barak Kushner‘s lively and illuminating new book on the history of ramen in Japan. Grounded in ample research that incorporates archival and ethnographic methods, Slurp!: A Social and Culinary History of Ramen – Japan’s Favorite Noodle Soup (Global Oriental, 2012) takes us from the early history of noodles and breadstuffs in China and Japan to the styrofoam bowl of instant ramen on modern grocery shelves. In Kushner’s able and playful historical hands, this genealogy of foodways is interwoven with strands of Buddhist history, urban and colonial studies, and a detailed account of the emergence of a national cuisine in nineteenth and early twentieth century Japan, memorial marshmallows and all. Kushner’s book explores the ways that military influence, the rise of “nutrition” as a health concern, and prevailing conditions of hunger a

The other day I found myself in a cooking situation that’s fairly common: I had a few odd ingredients–some oxidized strips of bacon, a withered red pepper, a bunch of half-wilted parsley–and needed to use them before they went bad, but how? The cookbooks on my counter didn’t have an index in which I could search for multiple ingredients, and I didn’t have time to flip through all of the recipes for each ingredient in the hopes of a possible hit. So I popped them into Google, along with the search-term “recipe,” and in .31 seconds I had 2,830,000 hits and a variety of options, from a recipe for crispy potatoes on the Food Network’s website to Martha Stewart’s recipe for gnocchi. I opted for a cold tuna salad. In her new book, Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet (AltaMira Press, 2012), Signe Rousseau begins her first chapter by reminding us just how uncommon my situation actually is and how that feeling, that sense that this is what I do, that nowa