New Books in Food

This episode of the New Books in Economic and Business History is an interview with Dr. Shane Hamilton, Senior Lecturer in Management at The York Management School, University of York. There he teaches Strategy and Business Humanities. He is the author of Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy (Princeton, 2008) and he is associate editor of Enterprise & Society and co-editor of the book series American Business, Politics, and Society of the University of Pennsylvania Press. He has published articles on food and agribusiness in different journals such as the Technology & Culture, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, History of Retailing and Consumption, Enterprise & Society, Business History Review, and Agricultural History. Today our interview is centered around Professor Hamilton’s latest book Supermarket USA, Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race (published by Yale University Press in 2018). America fought the Cold War in part through supermarkets—and the food economy pioneered then has helped shape the way we eat today Supermarkets were invented in the United States, and from the 1940s on they made their way around the world, often explicitly to carry American‘ style economic culture with them. This innovative history tells us how supermarkets were used as anticommunist weapons during the Cold War, and how that has shaped our current food system. The widespread appeal of supermarkets as weapons of free enterprise contributed to a “farms race” between the United States and the Soviet Union, as the superpowers vied to show that their contrasting approaches to food production and distribution were best suited to an abundant future. In the aftermath of the Cold War, U.S. food power was transformed into a global system of market power, laying the groundwork for the emergence of our contemporary world, in which transnational supermarkets operate as powerful institutions in a global food economy.I recommend you visit Dr. Shane Hamilton’s website to learn about all his publications.Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez is a consultant, historian, and digital editor. New Books Network en español editor. Edita CEO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Guest Kate Lebo discusses her newest book, The Book of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the Tart, Tender, and Unruly with Recipes (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021). While Lebo has authored more traditional cookbooks with stories, this collection of essays with recipes has more in common with creative nonfiction, autobiography, or a quirky reference book for plant identification. Lebo offers a unique blending of the academic – historical and botanical – with the narrative – personal and often painful. The book is organized in 26 chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet, represented by one fruit. Though the essays do have the encapsulated feel of being whole on their own, there are some narrative threads and mysteries that have to be worked out as you get further into the book. Unlike a traditional cookbook that emphasizes pleasure and ease, Lebo’s essays touch on quite a bit of personal pain – illness, death of loved ones, family secrets, heartache and break ups, abortion – and provide recipes that are unapologetically complicated with difficult to find ingredients. Still, readers who enjoy foraging, gardening, and good personal essays will find much to love in this collection.One of the threads that runs through the book is the slipperiness of food as poison and medicine. Starting right at the beginning with aronia and bitter almonds/cherry pits, Lebo meditates on the role that food can play in healing the body and the spirit while also being keenly aware of the way that even the most wholesome of whole fruits can carry poison. In a chapter about juniper, Lebo meditates on the berry as an ingredient in gin and as an abortifacient. The Wheat chapter describes the end of a relationship and the way that baking with flour can be healing for one person and maybe poison to her partner with celiac disease.The Book of Difficult Fruit explodes an elementary understanding of food as something that always nourishes or always brings people together. While chapters like Kiwi, Yuzu, and Zucchini return to those heartwarming moments where feeding and food seem to be metaphors for relationships of care and nurturing, even these moments do not come without complications.Kate Lebo is author the chapbook Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Entre Rios Books) and editor of the anthology Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze (Sasquatch Books), which she edited with Samuel Ligon. Kate is also the author of Pie School: Lessons in Fruit, Flour & Butter (Sasquatch Books) and the poetry/ephemera/recipe collection A Commonplace Book of Pie (Chin Music Press). Through the Arts Heritage Apprenticeship Program from the Washington Center for Cultural Traditions, she is an apprenticed cheesemaker to Lora Lea Misterly of Quillisascut Farm.Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Jon Keune's book Shared Devotion, Shared Food: Equality and the Bhakti-Caste Question in Western India (Oxford UP, 2021) is about the deceptively simple question: when Hindu devotional or bhakti traditions welcomed marginalized people-women, low castes, and Dalits-were they promoting social equality? This the modern formulation of the bhakti-caste question. It is what Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar had in mind when he concluded that the saints promoted spiritual equality but did not transform society. While taking Ambedkar's judgment seriously, when viewed in the context of intellectual history and social practice, the bhakti-caste question is more complex. This book dives deeply in Marathi sources to explore how one tradition in western India worked out the relationship between bhakti and caste on its own terms. Food and eating together were central to this. As stories about saints and food changed while moving across manuscripts, theatrical plays, and films, the bhakti-caste relationship went from being a strategically ambiguous riddle to a question that expected-and received-answers. Shared Devotion, Shared Food demonstrates the value of critical commensality to understand how people carefully negotiate their ethical ideals with social practices. Food's capacity to symbolize many things made it made an ideal site for debating bhakti's implications about caste differences. In the Vārkarītradition, strategically deployed ambiguity and the resonating of stories across media over time developed an ideology of inclusive difference-not social equality in the modern sense, but an alternative holistic view of society.Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Do you have a cookbook in you? Thinking about a memoir with recipes? How about a food blog? Have you ever yearned to be an Instagram Influencer or dreamt of joining the waning ranks of restaurant reviewers?If that’s the case, stop whatever you are doing and get ahold of Will Write for Food: Pursue Your Passion and Bring Home the Dough Writing Recipes, Cookbooks, Blogs and More by Dianne Jacob, out this month in its fourth edition by Hachette Books. It’s no exaggeration to say that Dianne Jacob is America’s foremost food writing guru, and Will Write For Food, first published in 2005, offers the most comprehensive, unvarnished look at the always developing and perennially competitive world of food writing on the market today. Will Write for Food has been translated into Korean, Chinese, and Spanish, and is used as a textbook in universities and culinary schools. Will Write for Food has received three international awards for excellence, including the Cordon D’Or International award for Best Literary Food Reference Book in 2005. The second edition won the Gourman World Cookbook Award in 2010 for best book in the USA in its category, and the third edition won a Silver Nautilus award in the Creative Process category. Now a fourth edition is being released in May 2021 by Hachette Go.When Jacob first wrote Will Write for Food, she confesses to having a somewhat “snobby” view of food bloggers, a segment of the food writing world that was just gaining momentum. In the latest iteration of Will Write for Food, Jacob dedicates a lengthy and comprehensive chapter to food blogging, charting the meteoric rise of the superstars such as David Lebovitz, Deb Perlman (The SmittenKitchen), and Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman), as well as outlining the considerable challenges to making a food blog pay.Will Write for Food also delves into the knotty problem of cultural appropriation, at a moment when food writing is becoming more global and inclusive, and offers solid advice on how to celebrate foreign cuisines not by purloining them but by assiduous attribution and helping to shine a generous spotlight on the chefs and restauranteurs creating these innovations.Will Write for Food deftly navigates the immense role played by social media in food writing today — another aspect of the guild that Jacob confesses was not on her radar screen when she wrote the first edition of the book. And while social media stardom is not a sure path to success in food writing, Jacob is at pains to point out that it is an important part of the food writer’s toolbox, as is photography and videography, and a strong writer’s voice, adroit recipe writing skills, and an ability to convey the sensual aspects of food to the page.Dianne Jacob is a writing coach, author, and free-lance editor. She has coached food writers around the world, and many have signed with major publishers and appeared in leading broadsheets, websites, podcasts, and magazines. Dianne’s popular blog and indispensable newsletter helps writers and bloggers keep up with trends, issues, and techniques in the world of food writing. Dianne is a popular speaker and teacher throughout the world. She is the co-author of two cookbooks with Chicago chef Craig Priebe, The United States of Pizza (Rizzoli, 2015) and Grilled Pizzas & Piadinas (DK Publishing, 2008). Find out more about Dianne on her website, www.diannej.com.Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Balut is a fertilized chicken or duck egg that is boiled at the seventeenth day and sold as a common street snack in the Philippines. While it is widely eaten in the Filipino community, balut is frequently used in eating “challenges” on American reality TV shows. At seventeen days, the balut egg already contains a partially developed embryo, and this aspect is sensationalized with exaggerated “performances of disgust” during these challenges.In her book Balut: Fertilized Eggs and the Making of Culinary Capital in the Filipino Diaspora (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Dr. Margaret Magat explores balut as a site of culinary nationalism and identity-making, and its rise in the American consciousness. First, Dr. Magat describes how to eat balut and sip the warm broth inside the egg. In the Philippines, balut vendors sell them in the evening or early morning as snacks at malls, transportation hubs, markets, and just about everywhere. However, Americans were primarily introduced to balut via reality tv shows where contestants were “challenged” to eat it. Dr. Magat explains that like many foods of Asian immigrants, balut was decontextualized and framed through a lens of disgust in these eating “challenges.” But in response, Filipino communities sponsored balut-eating contests that promoted balut with more cultural context and pride in Filipino heritage and identity. More recently, balut has become culinary capital for foodies and celebrity chefs to gain recognition and status as someone with broad tastes. Lastly, we raise the issue of authenticity and its dangers in calling balut an authentic food of the Philippines but as also having an “authenticating” ability to signify membership of a group.Dr. Margaret Magat an Asian American folklorist based in Sacramento, CA. Her research focuses on the folk practices of the Filipino diaspora.Nancy Yan received her PhD in folklore from The Ohio State University and taught First Year Writing, Comparative Studies, and Asian American studies for several years before returning to organizing work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Today I talked to Amanda Ciafone's (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) about her book Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation (University of California Press, 2019). Counter-Cola charts the history of one of the world’s most influential and widely known corporations, The Coca-Cola Company. Over the past 130 years, the corporation has sought to make its products, brands, and business central to daily life in over 200 countries. Amanda Ciafone uses this example of global capitalism to reveal the pursuit of corporate power within the key economic transformations—liberal, developmentalist, neoliberal—of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Coca-Cola's success has not gone uncontested. People throughout the world have redeployed the corporation, its commodities, and brand images to challenge the injustices of daily life under capitalism. As Ciafone shows, assertions of national economic interests, critiques of cultural homogenization, fights for workers’ rights, movements for environmental justice, and debates over public health have obliged the corporation to justify itself in terms of the common good, demonstrating capitalism’s imperative to either assimilate critiques or reveal its limits. This book is a great source to study the history of globalization and global capitalism through the analysis of the particular history of the US-headquartered and textbook case multinational, the Coca-Cola Company, through the twentieth century. Counter-Cola looks at how the strategies of the multinational company, mostly devised at its headquarters in Atlanta, Giorgia, developed in Colombia and India as nationalism, financial dependency, workers’ unrest, social movements, and health considerations unfolded and were opposed to the overarching and assumed benefits of the multinational in both locations. Amanda Ciafone is a cultural historian of capitalism, especially interested in culture industries and the role of the media in constructing meaning around economic and social relations.Check out Professor Ciafone’s additional and research materials related to her book Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation that are available in a digitally accessible Scalar companion that is available on her faculty profile website.Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez is an economic and business historian. Author of Gendered Capitalism: Sewing Machines and Multinational Business in Spain and Mexico, 1850-1940 (Routledge 2021) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Christina Ward’s newest book American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Spam, Bananas, and Jell-O (Process Media, 2019) examines a familiar but understudied sub-genre of commercially published cookbooks. Advertising cookbooks were most popular in the middle decades of the 20th century. They are usually published by a company or industry interest group rather than an individual chef or writer, and they serve as instructions for consumers to use the products of that company or industry. As Ward explains, advertising cookbooks introduced American consumers to new convenience foods like Jell-O and SPAM or to unfamiliar ingredients like pineapples and bananas. Ward tells a history of cookbooks that draws a direct line between Puritan austerity and gender roles, Amelia Simmons, World’s Fairs, Home Economists, and Jell-O recipes. Essentially, Ward argues that American cooks at each stage needed (or wanted) experts to tell them how to eat and cook. Advertising cookbooks fill a specific gap in knowledge home cooks can’t rely on inherited or communally held knowledge to use new ingredients or appliances. Part of this story is also the story of advertising itself and how it changed dramatically with Edward Bernays through the practices of “psychological coercion” and the birth of public relations. The book is organized into photo chapters that provide readers with an archive of examples of advertising cookbooks at work with their garish colors (the result of low quality printing, Ward suggests) and unusual combinations in elaborate arrangements. The cookbooks give today’s readers a lot to laugh at (like ham wrapped bananas with cheese sauce), but Ward also highlights the “sinister side” of advertising cookbooks. The United Fruit Company brought pineapples and bananas to consumers in creative ways, but they also participated in colonial projects that created the term “banana republic.” Similarly, advertising cookbooks played into ethnic stereotypes and created racist caricatures such as Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. Advertising cookbooks play a unique role in American food culture; it isn’t always clear if the cookbooks created demand or responded to an existing demand in the market. Either way, Ward suggests that these cookbooks represent an American cuisine and culture worthy of more scholarly attention.Christina Ward is an author and editor at Feral House. She is a contributor to Serious Eats, Edible Milwaukee, The Wall Street Journal, The Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel, Remedy Quarterly, and Runcible Spoon magazines.Eliza Weeks is a recent graduate of the Master of Food Studies program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Why We Cook: Women on Food, Identity, and Connection (Workman, 2021) includes essays, recipes, interviews and profiles of more than 100 women in the world of food; from restaurateurs and activists, to food writers, professional chefs, and home cooks. Curated, researched and beautifully illustrated by author and artist Lindsay Gardner, it brings together the stories and perspectives of a diverse array of female voices who are transforming food across the world.Find more about the book at here.Visit the author’s website here and follow her work on social media @lindsaygardnerartDaniela Gutiérrez Flores is a PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Fungal infections are amongst the leading infectious disease killers globally. They result in more deaths than malaria, and almost as many as tuberculosis. However, they are often overlooked, and receive less research attention and funding than viral or bacterial infections. Over the past decade, this has started to change as the emergence of resistance in fungal pathogens has caused global alarm. New, resistant organisms have emerged, and old familiar ones have become harder to treat - agricultural antifungal use is thought to be driving these trends.Dr Justin Beardsley spoke to Dr Natali Pearson about the problem of resistant fungal infections in Vietnam, describing how agricultural practices are contributing, and what can be done to mitigate the risks.Justin is a New Zealand trained infectious disease specialist and clinical researcher. From 2012 to 2017, he was based in the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City, where he was focused on fungal infections. There, he conducted a multinational randomised clinical trial into adjunctive steroid therapy for Cryptococcal Meningitis in Southeast Asia and Africa, alongside other work on the epidemiology of fungal infections, immune responses in Cryptococcal Meningitis, pharmacokinetics of anti-fungal drugs in the central nervous system, and temporal trends in cryptococcal drug susceptibility. His current research focuses on the emergence of anti-fungal drug resistance, especially in Southeast Asia.You can follow Justin on Twitter: @_jbeardsley_.For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Consumption and the Literary Cookbook, edited by Roxanne Harde and Janet Wesselius (published 2021 by Routledge) examines the ways in which recipe authors and readers engage with one another through reading, cooking and eating the foods contained within the pages of Literary Cookbooks. The editors define literary cookbooks as novels and memoirs that include recipes, cookbooks that include narrative, and children's books that include recipes. Divided into three parts­– “Textual Consumption,” “Consumption and Community,” and “Cultural Consumption”– the collection explores a diverse cross section of cooking literature and food culture from nineteenth century manuscript cookbooks to cookbooks built on the narratives of childhood classics Alice in Wonderland and Anne of Green Gables. Through this assortment of historical documents and cultural touchstones, Harde and Wesselius and their contributors work to convince scholars of literature and food studies that literary cookbooks offer unique insight into the era, society, and region they represent. The collection creates a foundation for an in-depth study of consumption as it pertains to the intellectual consumption of information, emotional connection and release through empathetic consumption, and of course, the physical consumption of the edible results of the recipes contained within each book. Ardent cooks and cookbook consumers, Harde and Wesselius hope that this collection will liberate literary cookbooks from kitchen shelves and incorporate them into both literature and food studies as important tools for understanding culture and society.Roxanne Harde is Professor of English at the University of Alberta's Augustana campus where she also serves as Chair of Department of Fine Arts and humanities. A Fullbright Scholar, Roxanne researches and teaches American literature and culture focusing on American women writers, children's literature, and popular culture. Find her on Twitter @ProfessorRoxy.Janet Wesselius is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta's Augustana campus. In addition to her work in feminist epistemology, she has published on philosophy and children’s literature.Eliza Weeks is a recent graduate of the Master of Food Studies program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA. She hopes to do work related to amplifying diverse and often marginalized voices within the food system so that the opportunity to represent and share food and food culture is not limited to the privileged few. When Eliza is not on the job hunt she enjoys adventuring through new recipes, sharing food and stories with others, and cohosting her podcast Dear Human.Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food