New Books in Food

Anna L. Tsing‘s new book is on my new (as of this post) list of Must-Read-Books-That-All-Humans-Who-Can-Read-Should-Read-And-That-Nonhumans-Should-Find-A-Way-To-Somehow-Engage-Even-If-Reading-Is-Not-Their-Thing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015) joyfully bursts forth in a “riot of short chapters” that collectively open out into a mushroom-focused exploration of what Tsing refers to as a “third nature,” or “what manages to live despite capitalism.” Tsing’s book is based on fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2011 in the US, Japan, Canada, China, and Finland, plus interviews with scientists, foresters, and matsutake traders in those places and in Denmark, Sweden, and Turkey. The book is an exemplar of the kind of work that can come out of thoughtful and extended scholarly collaboration, here resulting from Tsing’s work with the Matsutake Worlds Research Group. The book treats matsutake mushrooms as objects and companions that are good to think with, offering an exuberant picture of what it might look like to live “in our messes” as parts of contaminated and contaminating multispecies worlds and assemblages. Tsing calls for renewed attention to the importance of “arts of noticing,” of curiosity, of play, of polyphony, of adventure. And at the same time as it accomplishes all of this, The Mushroom at the End of the World is deeply committed to telling stories, taking us into moments in the lives of individual smellers and sellers and pickers and tasters and bosses and crusaders. It is a wonderful work of ethnography that, in many ways, transcends genre and discipline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Let’s say you had a curiosity about, maybe even a hankering for, Indiana’s signature dessert, sugar cream pie. You might search for it and, on a typical foodie website, find this description, written in typical foodie prose: “As Indiana’s state pie, this rich, nutmeg-dusted custard pie also goes by the name ‘Hoosier Pie.’ Born from Amish and Shaker communities that settled in Indiana in the 1800s, this “desperation pie”–a category that refers to pies made when fresh fruit wasn’t available or money was short–is as simple as it is delicious.” Now, sugar cream pie may be delicious, but there’s nothing delicious, nothing delectable, in that description. Compare that to the one Matthew Gavin Frank offers in his new book, The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour through America’s Food (Liveright, 2015): “Our Hoosier Cream Pie is so soft we can cut it with our pinkies. So sweet, we can think only of how it moves us, speeds our hearts, allows us to run from towns called Amboy and Amo, Trafalgar and Troy. Running, we can think of all our dead aunts and uncles, all of the filled-in quarries, their ceilings waiting to collapse, the kinds of state histories buried beneath rock and dust and tablespoons of sugar we allow to burn, harden, lacquer the tops of our Hoosier Cream Pies.” Frank’s description is no historical tidbit or bland factoid. It’s something more like a tribute, though only if a tribute can embrace the sadness of what it celebrates, the troubled soul beneath its shinning surface. And, like the rest of Frank’s book, it’s wonderfully written. Here’s a food writer who cares as much about the words on the page as the food in our mouths. And the result of Frank’s attention to both is a book that gives us a fresh look at America and its food. Frank takes up fifty signature dishes from fifty states in fifty essays, each as surprising and engaging as a dish cooked up by a half-crazed, half-genius chef who’s determined that the best tastes make the familiar strange, but no less enticing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Tom Jackson‘s Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again (Bloomsbury, 2015) is a completely engrossing look into the history and technology of refrigeration.  This book reads like an expanded chapter of James Burke’s classic book Connections.Refrigeration is not only one of the most important foundation stones of our technological society, it’s also one that we take for granted. It’s hard to say which is more interesting; the realization that people were aware of a cooling method almost two millennia before the birth of Christ, the history of refrigeration from the Middle Ages to the present, or the possibilities for refrigeration technology in the world of the future. Chilledis a fascinating look into one of the most amazing and important technologies that man has ever developed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

This book is a ton of fun. To Live and Dine in L.A.: Menus and the Making of the Modern City (Angel City Press) taps the deep and colorful collection of Southern California restaurant menus archived by the Los Angeles Public Library. Author Josh Kun, a professor in the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism at the University of Southern California, presides over beautiful pages showing a century of menus, ranging from the Art Deco high points of the Brown Derby (purportedly where the Cobb Salad was invented) to the low points of “Southern” style joints whose menus used stereotype Aunt Jemima-type depictions of African American women to draw in customers. My favorites include a menu for the Hangman’s Tree Cafe, a joint in the San Fernando Valley that seemed to be working the theme of serving last meals. Fun? Kun uses the images to spin a narrative about class, race and, of course, food in the history of Los Angeles. Enjoy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Most of the year, when the weather lets us, my wife and I wind down on our front porch with a bourbon. We live out in the countryside and, for no particular reason, bourbon feels like the right choice as we watch the long grass waving on the hillside and the birds shuttling back and forth between the far trees. Every so often, I’ll suggest we change things up: maybe a Scotch or an Irish whiskey–not really such a big change in the grand scheme of things–but my wife looks at me as though I’ve made some horrible faux pas, as though I’ve suggested a tumbler full of cotton-candy vodka or bacon grease. Bourbon, she insists, that’s what goes with the landscape. And she’s not alone. As Reid Mitenbuler points out in Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America’s Whiskey (Viking, 2015), bourbon is our native spirit. This is the fact that Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning affirmed in 2007, when he sponsored a bill to declare September “National Bourbon Heritage Month.” Bourbon, the bill stressed, captures the American values of “family heritage, tradition, and deep-rooted legacy.” Like most American icons, bourbon’s true history isn’t so rosy. It is, however, fascinating, as Mitenbuler shows us by tracing the spirit’s place in every era of America’s past, from the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 to the “Declaration of Independence” for bourbon, which wasn’t passed until 1964, when congress voted on a resolution deeming bourbon, in lackluster language, “a distinctive product of the United States.” Yet here, too, Mitenbuler finds a great story, about power brokers, corporate maneuvering, and a forgotten man named Lewis Rosenstiel, who is the reason we now have whiskeys aged over eight years. Mitenbuler offers us a rich sense of the true heritage, tradition, and legacy behind the bourbon in our glasses, and it’s as complexly American as the country itself. Scotch whiskey? Irish whiskey? My wife is certainly right. What was I thinking? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Movies and television shows often include scenes of eating, either as a side activity of the actors or as an integralpart of a scene. University of Nevada, Reno Professor Tom Hertweck compiled 14 essays in his collection, Food on Film: Bringing Something New to the Table (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014). He talks with me about the overall procedure of editing a group of essays, as well as the themes he discovered in this process.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Eugene N. Anderson‘s new book offers an expansive history of food, environment, and their relationships in China. From prehistory through the Ming and beyond, Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) pays careful attention to a wide range of contexts of concern with nature and its resources. Readers of Anderson’s book will find fascinating discussions of rice agriculture and fermentation, the etiquette of food and eating, concerns with deforestation in classical literature, the emergence of principles and practices of environmental management, and much more. Throughout the book, Anderson situates China within a larger frame of Central Asian history, with extensive discussions of the Silk Road and the importance of Mongol empire for the movement and circulation of food- and environment-related materials and practices. Though the main part of the book ends with the Ming Dynasty, a final chapter considers the themes of the book as they thread through modern and contemporary China. Two appendices offer further introductions to related themes – “Conservation Among China’s Neighbors” and “An Introduction to Central Asian Food.” Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In this wonderful ethnography of Darjeeling tea, Sarah Besky explores different attempts at bringing justice to plantation life in north east India. Through explorations into fair trade, geographic indication and a state movement for the Nepali tea workers, Besky critically assesses the limits of projects that fail to address underlying exploitative structures. The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014) is a readable and theoretically nuanced book that should be of interest to many. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Something nice and filling for you here! Laura Silver‘s book Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food (Brandeis University Press, 2014) concerns itself not only with the round — or is it square? — savory pastry brought to America from somewhere in Europe to fill the working bellies of not well-to-do immigrants. The tale of the knish is a way to tell the story of where an ethnic group has been, where they think they are, and where they might be going. A free-ranging talk between Lower East Side resident Allen Salkin and the author, with stops along the way for smoked fish, hot dogs and pasta. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Believe it or not, the origins of this podcast and the entire New Books Network can be traced to a conversation I had in a cafein Ann Arbor, Michigan (Sweetwaters in Kerrytown, as it happens) in 2004. I was sitting there minding my own business when I overheard Ed Vielmetti and Lou Rosenfeldtalking about something called “del.icio.us” [sic]. It sounded interesting, so I asked them–complete strangers though they were–about it. They kindly brought me up to speed on something else called “Web 2.0.” Then I begin thinking… Turns out a lot thinking is done in cafes, as Leona Rittner, W. Scott Haine, and Jeffrey H. Jacksonpoint out in their fascinating book The Thinking Space: The Cafe as a Cultural Institution in Paris, Italy and Vienna (Ashgate, 2013). At one time or another, most modern Western intellectuals found themselves in one or another cafedrinking coffee, dreaming big dreams, and often arguing with another. The caffeine helped, but the atmosphere and company helped even more. Unhurried, quiet, comfortable, warm, public, inexpensive, full of reading material, open long hours, and right on the corner. The coffee house is an ideal “third place” for cerebral types. To my mind the most fascinating thing about this remarkable collection of essays is the variety of kinds of coffee houses found around Europe. Needless to say, they didn’t (and don’t) all look like your local Starbucks. If you like cafes, you should grab a copy of this book and read it . . . in a cafe, of course. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food