New Books In Food

Sweet Excess: Crafting Mishti in Bengal (Routledge, 2025) by Ishita Dey is an ethnographic work on excess. Based on a decade-long fieldwork of a single food substance – sweets – it follows sweet-making in sweetshops, domestic spaces, fairs, festivals and its representation in recipe books to understand how caste, religion, science and law inform the life of a food item with an extremely short shelf life. It shows how food items of conspicuous consumption find a meaning in everyday lives of people through its socio-cultural meanings – ritual, pride of craftsmanship, heritage and cultural identity. It also shows how sweets continue to be a ubiquitous part of ‘Bengali’ diet in a geography that has been witness to acute hunger, starvation, food movements and social welfare programmes to ensure food security. As a multi-sited ethnography on sweetness in diverse settings and its associated meanings in West Bengal and Bangladesh, this book explores everyday workplace hierarchies between artisans that reveal how cast