New Books in Food

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with Carol J. Adams about two new books: Burger, from the Object Lessons series by Bloomsbury (2018), and Protest Kitchen, a cookbook with over 50 vegan recipes and practical daily actions from Conari press. Both books were published in 2018. Audiences probably know Adams best as the author of The Sexual Politics of Meat, now available in a 25th anniversary edition from Bloomsbury. In Burger, Adams offers a history of the hamburger as a cultural object, as much a food item as a symbol in American culture. Through the lens of a vegan feminist critique (Adams describes herself as “a heretic to the religion of the burger”), Adams explores the links between the hamburger and American identity through a history of cattle and colonialism, technology and slaughter, gender and marketing, and the “Teflon” burger’s insistence on maintaining its hold even through “Mad Cow” scares and indisputable evidence of environmental crises. Adams concludes by looking toward the future plant-based “Moonshot” burgers which, as Adams argues, have the ability to replace the beef patty as “the unmarked, slaughterless burger” without losing the cultural symbolism of the Burger. Protest Kitchen is a cookbook that pairs recipes with specific social and environmental problems and describes how those recipes are acts of resistance or steps toward solving that problem. Adams and Messina take on climate change, food justice, and misogyny while offering advice for “cultivating compassion” and self-care as an act of resistance. Together, the two books are an excellent example of the ways that Adams’s work has always spoken easily to both scholars and popular audiences, and the ways that her work is both highly theoretical and remarkably practical.Carol J. Adams is a feminist-vegan advocate, activist, and independent scholar. She is the co-editor of several important anthologies, including most recently Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth (with Lori Gruen). Carol is also the author of books on living as a vegan including Even Vegans Die: A Practical Guide to Caregiving, Acceptance, and Protecting Your Legacy of Compassion, with co-authors Patti Breitman, and Virginia Messina. Follow Adams on Twitter at _CarolJAdams.Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her new 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 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

In their introduction to Seasoned Socialism: Gender & Food in Late Soviet Everyday Life (Indiana University Press, 2019), Anastasia Lakhtikova, Angela Brintlinger, and Irina Glushchenko invite the reader to “imagine a society where food is managed by officialdom like a controlled substance and everyone is addicted to it.”Food plays a pivotal role throughout Russian history, but perhaps no more so than during the Soviet era, when the perennial Russian cycle of feast and famine took on a highly political aspect.  Access to food was a powerful tool wielded by the State, from the Kholodomor to the ration cards of the eighties, Soviet citizens were forced to make daily choices about food, which often brought with them unwelcome moral dilemmas.For a topic that is such a fulcrum of political, economic, sociological, and historical, studies, far too little scholarship on the topic has been produced either in Russia or the West. We can posit the reasons why: probably too feminine a topic, definitely too domestic, not serious, too private, but the fact is indisputable and the lack of relevant scholarship of Russian culinary studies makes Seasoned Socialism all the more timely and welcome.This collection of essays by noted scholars from a range of fields, including literary studies, film studies, food studies, history, and sociology examines the intersection of gender, food, and culture in the post-1960s era.  In them, we discover oral history, personal cookbooks, memorable scenes from the Golden Age of Soviet Cinema, poetry, and even stories of survival in the Gulags.  We are transported inside steamy communal apartment kitchens and out to the welcome fresh air of a dacha.  We discover the lore of the cabbage and the magic of tea, and we come to know the people whose lives revolved around sourcing, preparing, and enjoying food in the late Soviet Era.Seasoned Socialism: Gender & Food in Late Soviet Everyday Life joins the canon of “must-reads” for serious students of Russian and Soviet history, culture, and, of course, cuisine.Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who divides her time between Riga, Latvia, and New England.  Jennifer writes about travel, food, lifestyle, and Russian history and culture with bylines in Reuters, Fodor’s, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life.  She is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander & Roberts, and the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door:  Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow.  Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Academic discussions of ethnic food have tended to focus on the attitudes of consumers, rather than the creators and producers. In this ground-breaking new book, The Ethnic Restaurateur (Bloomsbury, 2016), Krishnendu Ray reverses this trend by exploring the culinary world from the perspective of the ethnic restaurateur.Focusing on New York City, he examines the lived experience, work, memories, and aspirations of immigrants working in the food industry. He shows how migrants become established in new places, creating a taste of home and playing a key role in influencing food cultures as a result of transactions between producers, consumers and commentators.Based on extensive interviews with immigrant restaurateurs and students, chefs and alumni at the Culinary Institute of America, ethnographic observation at immigrant eateries and haute institutional kitchens as well as historical sources such as the US census, newspaper coverage of restaurants, reviews, menus, recipes, and guidebooks, Ray reveals changing tastes in a major American city between the late 19th and through the 20th century.Written by one of the most outstanding scholars in the field, The Ethnic Restaurateur is an essential read for students and academics in food studies, culinary arts, sociology, urban studies and indeed anyone interested in popular culture and cooking in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life (W. W. Norton & Co., 2018), Dr. David R. Montgomery portrays hope amidst the backdrop that for centuries, agricultural practices have eroded the soil that farming depends on, stripping it of the organic matter vital to its productivity. Once a self-proclaimed dark green eco-pessimist, Dr. Montgomery finds this new hope as he travels the world, meeting farmers at the forefront of an agricultural movement to restore soil health. Readers join him driving passed no-till, precision agriculture fields in Kansas to walking around The Centre for No-Till Agriculture in Kumasi, Ghana. Each step of the way we are reminded that adopting the three tenets of conservation agriculture—ditching the plow, planting cover crops, and growing a diversity of crops—is the solution to align agricultural production and environmental outcomes. Throughout the book, evidence mounts -- maybe farmers and ranchers can feed the world, cool the planet, reduce pollution, and return profitability to the farm.What’s unique and refreshing, Dr. Montgomery cuts through the typical debates about conventional versus organic farming. Instead, Montgomery explores why practices based on the principles of conservation agriculture help restore soil health and fertility – naturally reducing the reliance on herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers.Chris Gambino works at the intersection of science and policy in hopes of creating more informed decision-making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

When the British explored the Atlantic coast of America in the 1580s, their relations with indigenous peoples were structured by food. The newcomers, unable to sustain themselves through agriculture, relied on the local Algonquian people for resources. This led to tension, and then violence. When English raiding parties struck Algonquian villages, they destroyed crops and raided food stores. According to English sources, all of this was provoked by the ‘theft’ of a silver drinking cup, perhaps offered to an Algonquian visitor and understood as a gift of hospitality -  a token of a new relationship of equals.For the historian, episodes like this are challenging to explain. We need to treat dismissals indigenous peoples as inferior with much greater scepticism. And we need to recover the intentions of peoples whose actions were interpreted and distorted by the observers who left the ‘historical’ records that we privilege as sources.Rachel Herrmann is Lecturer in Modern American History at Cardiff University. In No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution(Cornell University Press, 2019), she provides a powerfully original examination of how food and hunger structured relations of power in the revolutionary period. The book – which will be published by Cornell this autumn – ranges widely, from the villages of Iroquoia, to the lands of the Cherokee, and along routes taken by Africans to Canada and Sierra Leone. It is a feast, prepared with skill and served with considerable flair.Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Bourbon whiskey has been around since nearly the beginning of the United States. Given that longevity, it has been part of the corporate law of the United States since the beginning of the corporate law of the United States.My guest today Brian Haara traces that interconnection in his new book Bourbon Justice: How Whiskey Law Shaped America (Potomac Book, 2018). “Bourbon,” Haara writes, “is responsible for the growth and maturation of many substantive areas of the law, such as trademark, breach of contract, fraud, governmental regulation and taxation, and consumer protection.” As Brian traces the influence of bourbon on American legal history, and of litigation on the history of American bourbon, he also provides tasting notes for bourbons with connection to the cases he’s discussing. It’s an especially nice touch in a very nice book. Cheers!Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Catherine Keyser about early twentieth century fiction and the role that modern food plays in literature as a language for talking about race and racial categories. In Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions, published in 2019 by Oxford University Press, Keyser explores the ways that modern fiction writers responded to the theories and anxieties about race in the early twentieth century through related anxieties about modern industrial food. In each chapter, Keyser focuses on a few closely related authors and texts, linked by their common use of food for plot, imagery, and metaphor, each one shedding some light on how that food carried meanings of racial identity. Keyser uncovers the historical context around each food to help today’s readers see what it might have meant to the writers and their contemporary readers. Keyser examines the use of soda pop and syrup or images of effervescence in Jean Toomer’s Cane as a metaphor for inevitable racial intermixing; the promises of raw food for revitalizing African American resistance in George Schuyler’s speculative fiction; Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein’s search for a cosmopolitan identity through European terroir; the fragility of whiteness in F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s anxieties about coffee, wine, and the sticky Mediterranean; and the failure of capitalism to secure black masculinity through the figure of the grocer in Zora Neale Hurtson’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Dorothy West’s The Living is Easy. Keyser’s careful pairing of familiar texts with their less canonical contemporaries brings an important new perspective to both.Catherine Keyser is Associate Professor and McCausland Fellow at the University of South Carolina. Cat’s research focuses on Modern American Literature, African American Literature, Periodicals, Gender, and Food. She is also the author of the 2010 book Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture from Rutgers University Press, 2010. You can follow Cat on Twitter @Cat_Keyser.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 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

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Jeanette M. Fregulia about the movements of coffee beans, coffee drinking, and coffee houses from Ethiopia and Yemen, across the Mediterranean region, through Western Europe, and to the Americas. In A Rich and Tantalizing Brew: A History of How Coffee Connected the World (University of Arkansas Press, 2019), Fregulia examines the geographic movements of coffee beans through global trade as well as the social and cultural movements of coffee drinking from a medicine to an aid in religious ritual to an elite domestic drink to a public event in the coffee house. Covering a wide ranging chronology from the sixth century to today, the story of coffee as it moves East to West shares much in common with the movements of other foods like chocolate, sugar, tea, and olives, but Fregulia argues that coffee is unique among global foodstuffs for the way it transformed social structures and social behaviors to become part of the pubic sphere. Fregulia’s history decenters the European perspective of global market and cultural exchanges by drawing on archives of primary sources from Islamic histories as well as European travel narratives. For early modern Europeans, Fregulia argues, consuming coffee was a product of imperialism and Orientalism, arising from the general acquisitiveness of early modern Europeans who “consumed the East in new forms of art and architecture, in the pages of travel narratives, with the collection of artifacts, and in luxurious adornments for the body” (99). Fregulia brings a new perspective to a familiar drink by intertwining cultural, political, economic, religious, and legal histories altogether through the story of one rich and tantalizing brew.Jeanette M. Fregulia is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History at Carroll College in Helena, Montana. Jeanette’s research focuses on merchants and material, cultural, and social exchanges between early modern Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as on the role of gender in the history of Mediterranean exchanges. In addition to PhD in Renaissance Italian History, she holds a Master’s Degree in Middle East Area Studies from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, and continues to actively pursue research in the history of the Middle East and Islam.Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her new 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 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

Is alcohol a universal feature of human society? Why is problematic in some countries and not others? How was alcohol helped build the modern state? These are just a few of the questions that sociologist John O'Brien addresses in States of Intoxication: The Place of Alcohol in Civilisation(Routledge, 2018). His book offers a broad and diverse perspective on alcohol use and suggests that booze has been an important element in developing communities and building up tax bases. In the era of "superpubs" and microbreweries, O'Brien lends insight into contemporary discussions around alcohol.Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Fascination with The Titanic has not faded, though more than 105 years have passed since its tragic sinking when so many lives were lost, and an era of gilded glamor ended.  Culinary historian, Veronica Hinke’s new book, The Last Night on the Titanic: Unsinkable Drinking, Dining, and Style(Regnery History, 2019) is a celebration of the ethos of The Titanic, using the food and drink served on board as a fulcrum of a broader exploration of this fascinating episode of maritime history, the intriguing characters who sailed on her, and the enduring legacy of the world’s most famous Transatlantic crossing.Hinke tells the stories of millionaires and pastry chefs, popcorn vendors, and perfume salesmen, all gathered aboard the gargantuan ship for its celebrated maiden voyage in 1912. Hinke’s meticulous research has captured not only the glamour of the First-Class dining room but also the harrowing moments as families are separated at the lifeboats.  From menus stuffed into jacket pockets, and the archives of Gilded Age restaurants such as Delmonico’s and the St. Regis, Hinke has put together authentic recipes for many of the dishes served on the Titanic as well as the cocktails mixed at its elegant bars.Hinke’s passion for her material shines through this professionally researched, and thoroughly enjoyable exploration of Edwardian glamour and gastronomy on the high seas.Veronica Hinke is a culinary historian, food writer, and author.  She is the co-host of History Unplugged’s miniseries on The Titanic.  Find out more about Veronica by following her on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food