New Books in Food

I first really got to know Andrew Friedman after the death of our mutual friend, the great food writer Josh Ozersky. Andrew is a widely respected food writer who has collaborated on numerous landmark cookbooks and chef memoirs. Now his labor of love, Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New American Profession (Ecco Press, 2018), is making waves in the industry. Friedman charts a course starting in the mid 1960s and winding up in the early 1990s during which the profession of cheffing became what it is today: Respectable. But what a hot, heavy, up and down journey to get there! We conducted this interview on the front sun deck of a beautiful house in Silverlake, Los Angeles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen (Rutgers University Press, 2015), Deborah Harris and Patti Giuffre trace the historical evolution of the profession, analyze more than two thousand examples of chef profiles and restaurant reviews, and conduct in-depth interviews with thirty-three women chefs. There are a number of recent books, magazines, and television programs that focused on the world of the professional chef. The media perpetually uses men as icons to market the hot and sexy field of being a chef in the professional kitchen. All the while, the work of women in the kitchen is discounted as a domestic role. This devaluation remains intact because of the exclusion of women in professional kitchens. This helps men maintain the legitimacy of the profession and perpetuates the appearance of home cooking as women’s domestic duty. Dr. Deborah A. Harris is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Texas State University. She focuses her teachings on courses in the area of stratification and inequality, qualitative research methods, rural aging, and the sociology of food. Harris’s published research has addressed the impacts of welfare reform on low-income women and their families, as well as how the closing of military facilities affects local communities. Dr. Patti Giuffre is the Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of Sociology at Texas State University. She focuses her teaching and research in the area of work and occupation, gender, sexuality, and qualitative methods. She has conducted research on sexual harassment, sexual orientation discrimination, and experiences of LGBT workers in gay-friendly workplaces. She is also an active member of the American Sociological Associations sections on Sex and Gender and Organizations, Occupations, and Work and of the Sociologists for Women in Society. Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. His most recent paper, to be presented at the upcoming American Society for Environmental History conference, is titled Down Lovers Lane: A Brief History of Necking in Cars.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America (University of California Press, 2017), Mark Padoongpatt weaves together histories of food, empire, race, immigration, and Los Angeles in the second half of the twentieth century. Flavors of Empire explores how Thai food became hyper-visible in the United States, and yet Thai people have remained relatively invisible in American life. The story of Thai food in America begins with U.S. informal empire and culinary tourism in Thailand in the 1950s. Subsequent migration and settlement in LA spurred a Thai restaurant boom in the 1970s and 1980s. Padoongpatt investigates how these culinary contact zones helped shape Thai identity while remaining attentive to tensions over ethnicity, class, and gender in these spaces. The commercially driven, multicultural sensibility that made Thai cuisine popular among Angelenos had its limits, however, and Padoongpatt uses the clash over a weekend food festival at a Thai Buddhist temple to highlight conflicting modes of suburbanization. By the 1990s, the Thai community could organize politically, and used local culinary tourism to stimulate equitable economic development in the newly designated Thai Town neighborhood of LA. As the story of Thai cuisine in the U.S. continues to unfold, Flavors of Empire urges readers to think critically about the long journeys—both geographic and historical—that our food has taken to get to our plates. Ian Shin is C3-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the History Department at Bates College, where his teaching and research focus on the history of the U.S. in the world and Asian American history. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the politics of Chinese art collecting in the United States in the early 20th century. Ian welcomes listener questions and feedback at kshin@bates.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Beer has been a part of human civilization dating back to its beginnings. In summarizing the role it has played over the millennia, Johan Swinnen and Devin Briski’s book Beeronomics: How Beer Explains the World (Oxford University Press, 2017) reveals how the evolving roles the beverage has played exposes broader trends in the economy and society. As Briski explains in this podcast, while beer has been consumed since at least as early as Sumerian times, it wasn’t until the addition of hops as a preservative by brewers in Europe during the Middle Ages that beer became commercially viable. The development of the industry reflected more general trends, from the economies of scale that took place during the Industrial Revolution to the impact of television on small brewers in the United States in the mid-20th century. Today the industry is characterized both by a few multinational conglomerates and numerous craft brewers whose products provide a diverse counterpoint from the mass-produced lagers of the large companies. Briski reveals how these products reflect the different trends of consumption throughout the world, from the increased focus upon quality consumption in the United States and western Europe to the rapid expansion of beer consumption in places like Russia, China, and Brazil. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

On September 3, 1991, a fire erupted at the Imperial Foods factory in the small town of Hamlet, North Carolina. Twenty-five people died behind the factory’s locked doors that morning. Most of the victims were women, and about half of them were black. In The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives (The New Press, 2017), Temple University history professor Bryant Simon lays out the structural failures in the American and global economic systems which killed those workers. As economic growth slowed and inflation rose in the 1970s, many Americans grew disillusioned with the New Deal era promise of high wages and a robust regulatory state. Instead, Simon argues, Americans began to embrace a culture of cheap, ready-made, products and government policies which benefitted business owners, rather than employees. Food sat high atop the list of cheap items Americans craved, particularly chicken which, just before the Hamlet fire, surpassed beef as the meat most commonly consumed by American diners. It was no coincidence that the Imperial plant in Hamlet processed chicken strips and tenders for sale at national chain grocery stores. Nor was it a coincidence that Imperial relocated to North Carolina in the 1980s, as the state defunded regulatory systems and opened its doors to businesses looking for any edge in a hyper competitive market. The Hamlet Fire is a remarkable and ultimately sad story about the hidden costs of American consumption and global systems of production at the end of the twentieth century. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Andrew Smith‘s Terror and Terroir: The Winegrowers of the Languedoc and Modern France (Manchester University Press, 2016) is a political history of wine radicalism. Focused on the producers rather than the consumers of what Roland Barthes famously referred to as the nation’s “totem-drink,” Terror and Terroir examines wine politics and activisms in the Languedoc following the Second World War. In a first chapter, Smith looks closely at the memory and legacy of the “Grand Revolt of 1907,” a series of major protests that became a cornerstone of winegrower mythology in the post-45 period. Tracing the evolution of the winegrowers’ movement in the region from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s, the book looks at a variety of groups and organizations that sought to represent the interests of producers. After 1961, the Comite Regional d’Action Viticole (CRAV) dominated the scene. Over the course of the next two decades, the CRAV engaged in a variety of forms of direct action that came to a head with the “Gunfight” at Montredon in 1976. Thinking carefully about the political violence of this and other milestone moments, the book also looks at the intersection of the Occitan and radical viticulture movements; the impact of changes at the national level on regional lives and politics; and the effects of the major forces of modernization, European integration, and globalization. Drawing on a range of material from national and regional archives and press sources to oral history interviews, Terror and Terroir combines complex and compelling storytelling with careful historical and political analysis of a movement that mobilized thousands of French citizens over decades. The book has much to offer readers interested in the histories of wine and political radicalism (in equal measure!). Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of French culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The psychology of eating disorders is poorly understood. Recent trends in research and treatment focus near-exclusively on behaviors around food and weight without sufficiently attending to their psychic undercurrents. Yet evidence shows that, when patients start putting words to the pain their eating disorders express, they start gaining freedom from these vexing patterns. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is well positioned to offer individuals such an opportunity, and the rationale for such an approach is well-described in Dr. Nina Savelle-Rocklin’s new book, Food for Thought: Perspectives on Eating Disorders (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). In her book, Dr. Nina–as she likes to be called–explains psychoanalysis’s unique perspective on eating problems: that they express relational needs and traumas when words cannot, and that treatment which focuses on “what’s eating at you” rather than “what you’re eating” offers deeper and longer-lasting healing. In our interview, Dr. Nina shares her personal journey to this realization and offers insights about our relationships with food that will speak to us all. Dr. Nina Savelle-Rocklin is a psychoanalyst, author, radio host, and internationally recognized expert in the psychology of eating. She has been featured in Psychology Today, The Los Angeles Times, Prevention, Real Simple, Redbook, Huffington Post and many other publications, as well as numerous radio shows, summits and events. Dr. Nina also writes an award-winning blog, Make Peace With Food, and hosts a call-in radio program, The Dr. Nina Show, which airs Wednesdays at 10am PST on LA Talk Radio. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He regularly presents and writes about these topics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Religion is big business nowadays. Within the global context of Muslim consumers Islamic commodities have become increasingly popular over the past few decades. Faegheh Shirazi, Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, explores the industrial and discursive production of halal products in Brand Islam: The Marketing and Commodification of Piety (University of Texas Press, 2016). In the wake of increased insecurity due to the rise of anti-Muslim sentiments and policy, Islamic-branded products have become an essential means for shaping and expressing social identities. The commodification of a religious orientation has produced a halal consumerism that pervades the branding and marketing logic of several industries. In our conversation we discuss the corporatization of the halal food industry, Islamic products and non-Muslim publics, the politics of slaughtering animals, Islamic branded toys, such as hijabi dolls, cosmetic and toiletry products, and the Muslim fashion industry. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Food is a hot topic these days, and not just among the folks posting pictures of their dinner on Instagram. A growing number of scholars in many fields study food’s production, distribution, consumption, connection to geopolitics, environmental impact and history. Alice Weinreb‘s new book, Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany (Oxford University Press, 2017), is a most welcome contribution to this rapidly expanding and timely field of study. The global industrial food system grew out of late-nineteenth-century imperialism. In 1914, that system became a weapon of war. For combatant states, maintaining (and disrupting) food supply chains emerged as a major military-strategic objective. Today, all states are caught up in the global food system, but Germany in the twentieth-century provides a unique place to observe its fascinating and often distressing historical permutations, because the country’s history condenses so many modern forms of state (imperial, fascist, socialist, liberal-democratic), not to mention global crises and political caesurae–the World Wars, the rise of National Socialism and its defeat, the country’s division and reunification. Professor Weinreb’s ambitious, wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study also offers a wealth of perspectives on such topics as food aid, school lunches, obesity, the condition of hunger, and gendered labor, among many others. Alice Weinreb is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches courses on twentieth-century Europe, on the history and politics of food, European environmental history, and on the Holocaust. Monica Black is Associate Professor and Lindsay Young Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She teaches courses in modern European and German history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In Devoured: How What We Eat Defines Who We Are (William Morrow Books, 2017), food writer and Culinary Institute of America program director Sophie Egan takes readers on an eye-opening journey through the American food psyche, examining the connections between the values that define our national character—work, freedom, and progress—and our eating habits, the good and the bad. Egan explores why these values make for such an unstable, and often unhealthy, food culture and, paradoxically, why they also make Americas cuisine so great. Egan raises a host of intriguing questions: Why does McDonalds have 107 items on its menu? Why are breakfast sandwiches, protein bars, and gluten-free anything so popular? Will bland, soulless meal replacements like Soylent revolutionize our definition of a meal? The search for answers takes her across the culinary landscape, from the prioritization of convenience over health to the unintended consequences of perks like free meals for employees; from the American obsession with having it our way to the surge of Starbucks, Chipotle, and other chains individualizing the eating experience; from high culture—artisan and organic and what exactly “natural” means—to low culture—the sale of 100 million Taco Bell Doritos Locos Tacos in ten weeks. She also looks at how America’s cuisine—like the nation itself—has been shaped by diverse influences from across the globe. Devoured weaves together insights from the fields of psychology, anthropology, food science, and behavioral economics as well as myriad examples from daily life to create a powerful and unique look at food in America. Sophie Egan is the director of programs and culinary nutrition for the Strategic Initiatives Group at The Culinary Institute of America. Holding degrees from Stanford and UC Berkeley, she has written for Sunset magazine and was named one of the UC Global Food Initiative’s 30 Under 30. Her writing has been published in WIRED, Bon Appetit, Time, The Wall Street Journal, KQED, and The New York Times Well blog. She is based in San Francisco. Lori A. Flores is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale, 2016). She is based in Brooklyn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food