New Books in Food

Xaq Frohlich’s From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age (U California Press, 2023) is a biography of the Nutrition Facts label that adorns millions of food products and has become an integral part of the food and information landscape in the United States. Frohlich’s story unfolds in part as an institutional history of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency responsible for the label, using the agency as a way to understand the ideological and policy debates about responsibility for communicating scientific information to the public, from regulation and gatekeeping to information brokering and nudging. From Label to Table is the story of how the contemporary American food information environment emerged out of this history of transformation from paternalism to “informationism.”Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Chinese was the earliest truly global cuisine. When the first Chinese labourers began to sojourn and settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese food has the curious distinction of being both one of the world's best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood. For more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication - but today that is beginning to change.In Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food (Norton, 2023), the James Beard Award-winning cook and writer Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy and techniques of China's rich and ancient culinary culture. Each chapter examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a singular aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it's the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine. Meeting local food producers, chefs, gourmets and home cooks as she tastes her way across the country, Fuchsia invites readers to join her on an unforgettable journey into Chinese food as it is made, cooked, eaten and considered in its homeland.Weaving together historical scholarship, mouth-watering descriptions of food and on-the-ground research conducted over the course of three decades, Invitation to a Banquet is a lively, landmark tribute to the pleasures and mysteries of Chinese cuisine.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In 1965, Bob Dylan sang, “She’s got everything she needs; she’s an artist; she don’t look back.” About twenty years later, Gabriel Axel brilliantly dramatized this idea in Babette’s Feast (1987).A film as perfect as a film can be, Babette’s Feast treats the viewer to the pleasures of autotelic endeavors: things we do for their own sake because we enjoy them. Like last week’s film, Big Night, this one welcomes us to a big table in which a chef feeds others as a work of art. Mike and Dan also talk about the characters’ assumption that austerity is the key to Heaven and how the film treats this idea without mocking the characters or setting them up for a nasty surprise, as in The Witch. So pour another glass of Amontillado, sit back, and press play!The film is a faithful adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s 1955 story, found in the collection Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard.Follow us on X or Letterboxd. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Today, Peru is rightly recognized as the number one food destination on the planet. But twenty-five years ago, the world’s culinary critics were focusing their attention elsewhere. Fortunately, wine merchant–turned–archaeologist and art historian Robert C. Bradley was in Peru. His new book Eating Peru: A Gastronomic Journey (U Oklahoma Press, 2023) is the product of twenty-five years of exquisite digressions from what Bradley might call his “real job”—the culmination of decades of personal discoveries about the food of Peru and the history that led to its current culinary florescence.Bradley joins New Books Network to offer up some of the most delicious facts and foods revealed to him while he traveled Peru. From ceviche to sugar cane beer and aji peppers to coca leaves, he dives into what makes Peruvian food vibrant and flavorful – and worthy of accolades whether at an award-winning restaurant in Lima or a humble coastal seafood shack. He also talks about outside influences on the cuisine that came from African slaves, as well as Chinese and Japanese immigrants.The book is a personal tour of Peru and the food that its countrymen say is a greater point of national pride than the archaeological ruins at Machu Picchu.Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at Vittlesvamp.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Sometimes, the idea for a film would work on paper—such is the case with Big Night (1996), a film that packs in as much real life a full novel. “Love” as a secret ingredient to a great recipe may be a cliché, but how else to explain the joy people get from cooking large meals for people they care about, gathered around a big table? Mike and Dan discuss how the two restaurants in the film offer two versions of success, why “foodies” can be irritating, and the beauty of actors who act without speaking. The restaurant may fail, but the film does not. So as you wait for that timpani to settle, give it a listen!Stanley Tucci’s Taste: My Life Through Food is his memoir about the intersection of Italian food and families.Follow us on X or Letterboxd. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

How did the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program evolve from a Depression-era effort to use up surplus goods into America's foundational food assistance program? And how does SNAP survive? Incisive and original, Why SNAP Works: A Political History--And Defense--of the Food Stamp Program (U California Press, 2023) is the first book to provide a comprehensive history and evaluation of the nation's most important food insecurity and poverty alleviation effort. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly food stamps, is the nation's largest government effort for helping low-income Americans obtain an adequate diet. Everyone has an opinion about SNAP, not all of them positive, but its benefits are felt broadly and across party lines. Christopher Bosso makes a clear, nuanced, and impassioned case for protecting this unique food voucher program, exploring its history and breaking down the facts for readers across the political spectrum. Why SNAP Works is an essential resource for anyone concerned about food access, poverty, and the "welfare system" in the United States.Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

What makes fad diets so appealing to so many people? And how did these fads become so central to conversations about food and nutrition?Anxious Eaters: Why We Fall for Fad Diets (Columbia University Press, 2022) shows that fad diets are popular because they fulfill crucial social and psychological needs―which is also why they tend to fail. Authors Janet Chrzan and Kima Cargill bring together anthropology, psychology, and nutrition to explore what these programs promise yet rarely fulfill for dieters. They demonstrate how fad diets help people cope with widespread anxieties and offer tantalizing glimpses of attainable self-transformation. Chrzan and Cargill emphasize the social contexts of diets, arguing that beliefs about nutrition are deeply rooted in pervasive cultural narratives.Considering dietary beliefs and practices in terms of culture, nutrition, and individual psychological needs, Anxious Eaters refrains from moralizing or promoting a “right” way to eat. Instead, it offers new ways of understanding the popularity of a wide range of eating trends, including the Atkins Diet and other low- or no-carb diets; beliefs that ingredients like wheat products and sugars are toxic, allergenic, or addictive; food avoidance and “Clean Eating” practices; and paleo or primal diets. Anxious Eaters sheds new light on why people adopt such diets and why these diets remain so attractive even though they often fail.Janet Chrzan teaches nutritional anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Alcohol: Social Drinking in Cultural Context (2013) as well as coeditor of Research Methods for the Anthropological Study of Food and Nutrition (2017) and Organic Food, Farming, and Culture (2019).Garrett Broad is Associate Professor of Communication Studies in Rowan University’s Edelman College of Communication & Creative Arts, where he also serves as Provost’s Fellow in the Catalysts for Sustainability Initiative. His research and teaching explores the connections between contemporary social movements, food systems, and digital media technology. He is the author of More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change, as well as a variety of articles on food's relationship to environmental sustainability, economic equity, and the health of humans and nonhuman animals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Independent food historian and author Christina Ward joins New Books Network to discuss her highly anticipated book Holy Food: How Cults, Communes and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat (Process, 2023) – exploring the influence of mainstream to fringe religious beliefs on modern American food culture. In the book and over the course of the interview, Ward unravels the numerous ways religious beliefs intersect with politics and economics and, of course, food to tell a different story of America. She tells the story of true believers and charlatans, of idealists and visionaries, and of the everyday people who followed them—often at their peril. Holy Food explains how faith pioneers used societal woes and cultural trends to create new pathways of belief and reveals the interconnectivity between sects and their leaders.Religious beliefs have been the source of food "rules" since Pythagoras told his followers not to eat beans (they contain souls), Kosher and Halal rules forbade the shrimp cocktail (shellfish are scavengers, or maybe G-d just said "no"). A long-ago Pope forbade Catholics from eating meat on Fridays (fasting to atone for committed sins). Rules about eating are present in nearly every American belief, from high-control groups that ban everything except air to the infamous strawberry shortcake that sated visitors to the Oneida Community in the late 1800s. Only in the United States—where the freedom to worship the God of your choice and sometimes of your own making—could people embrace new ideas about religion. It is in this over-stirred pot of liberation, revolution, and mysticism that we discover God cares about what you put in your mouth.Holy Food looks at how the explosion of religious movements since the Great Awakenings (the nationwide religious revivals in the 1730s-40s and 1795-1835) birthed a cottage industry of food fads that gained mainstream acceptance. And at the obscure sects and communities of the 20th Century who dabbled in vague spirituality that used food to both entice and control followers. Ward skillfully navigates between academic studies, interviews, cookbooks, and religious texts to make sharp observations with new insights into American history in this highly readable journey through the American kitchen.Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at Vittlesvamp.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Bubble tea, also known as pearl milk tea, boba or tapioca milk tea is a popular drink in Asia. Wherever there is Asian diaspora, such as in the USA, one can find bubble tea as well. Bubble tea is becoming increasingly visible even in European countries where there are relatively smaller Asian communities compared with the situation in the USA. One can find various versions of bubble tea in urban areas such as Helsinki, Vienna, and London.In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen (University of Helsinki) talks to Stella Zhang about her doctoral research at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki. Stella is interested in the globalisation of food, East-Asian migration and youth culture. Her work investigates how Asia-originated bubble tea, and the wider culture surrounding it, is developing in greater Helsinki, why is it taking off, which sorts of people are involved, how bubble tea is altered – practically and symbolically – as it is made to work in the Helsinki context, and what the implications may be for wider Finnish cultural life.Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). Dr. Chen serves as one of the editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science (Springer, SSCI). Formerly, she was chair of Nordic Association of China Studies (NACS) and Editor-in-Chief of Asian Ethnicity (Taylor & Francis). You can find her on University of Helsinki Chinese Studies’ website, Youtube, and her personal Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

How did ranching become an identity? University of Arizona historian Michelle Berry explains in Cow Talk: Work, Ecology, and Western Ranchers in the Postwar Mountain West (U Oklahoma Press, 2023). During the middle decades of the twentieth century, small-scale ranchers weathered a series of crisis, rolled with increasing changes to their labor and lives, and communicated with one another through professional organizations. By engaging in "Cow Talk" - shop talk, about cows - ranchers learned each about one another's shared struggles, and gained a sense of common experience. Through professional rancher's groups, they were able to thus present a strong, united, front in politics, despite the very real disagreements and schisms behind the scenes. Cow Talk examines an understudied era in Western ranching history, after the rise and fall of the massive ranches of the nineteenth century West, and before the news media first learned the name Ammon Bundy. Berry provides a nuanced and empathetic look at how ranching labor and Western environments helped shape a group of people more complex and with a deeper history than one might think.Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food