New Books in Food

When I was growing up the only cooking show on TV I remember was Julia Child. I sometimes watched “The French Chef,” not so much to learn anything about cooking, but rather just to watch Julia. She was a hoot. When I saw the famous “Saturday Night Live” in 1978, I wasn’t sure which was funnier–Dan Aykroyd as Julia or Julia herself. Today, of course, cooking is very serious business on TV and the reason, of course, is the Food Network. It grew from virtually nothing twenty years ago to a massive cultural and economic force. It’s watched by millions and it makes millions more. It’s changed the way Americans (and many overseas) think about both food and television. It’s sky is full of stars. How’d that happen? In his remarkably well researched, wonderfully written and engrossingly told From Scratch: Inside the Food Network (Putnam, 2013), former New York Times reporter Allen Salkin tells the–pardon the pun–saucy tale. Please listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The Hebrews called it “Eden.” The Greeks and Romans called it the “Golden Age.” The philosophes–or Rousseau at least–called it the “State of Nature.” Marx and Engels called it “Primitive Communism.” The underlying notion, however, is the same: there was a time, long ago, when things were much better than they are today because we were then “in tune” with God, nature, or whatever. Thereafter we “fell,” usually due to our own stupidity, and landed in our present corrupted state. Today we are told by some that the paleolithic period (roughly 3 million to 10,000 years ago) was, similarly, a time in which we were “in tune” with nature. According to the paleofantasists, we were selected in the paleolithic environment and it is to the Paleolithic environment that we became most “fit.” After the paleolithic, they say, came the fall (domestication, cities, states, industrialization). Today, they continue, we are “out of tune” and, as a result, we are suffering all kinds of nasty consequences. Or so the story goes. But Marlene Zuk says it just ain’t so. In Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live (W. W. Norton, 2013), she points out that we were always out of tune because evolution makes it impossible to be truly “in tune.” The environment was always changing and we were always changing;the environment is still changing and we are still changing. What is “natural” to us is a kind of moving target. One millenium something seems “natural”; the next millenium not so much. Evolution is a ceaseless and surprisingly rapid process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

By focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spary’s work is at the same time a rich and embodied history of food, diet, and digestion in French Enlightenment science, and an account of how social and epistemological authority were produced amid the emergence of new Enlightenment publics. In Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760 (University of Chicago Press, 2012), controversies over digestion provided a space for the working out of power struggles between political, religious, medical, and culinary thinkers. Faced with a cuisine bursting with new materials and flavors, French society debated various ways of negotiating the opposing poles of indulgence and sobriety, luxury and reform. This is illustrated in several detailed case studies that include coffee and its implication in networks of expertise; cafes as social leveling-grounds, performance spaces, and chemical laboratories; and the production of new liqueurs. Spary’s work urges us to reconsider the way we write commodity histories, and is well worth reading. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

I bet you’ve never heard of the “Smash the Baltic Fleet Memorial Togo Marshmallow.” I hadn’t either, before reading Barak Kushner‘s lively and illuminating new book on the history of ramen in Japan. Grounded in ample research that incorporates archival and ethnographic methods, Slurp!: A Social and Culinary History of Ramen – Japan’s Favorite Noodle Soup (Global Oriental, 2012) takes us from the early history of noodles and breadstuffs in China and Japan to the styrofoam bowl of instant ramen on modern grocery shelves. In Kushner’s able and playful historical hands, this genealogy of foodways is interwoven with strands of Buddhist history, urban and colonial studies, and a detailed account of the emergence of a national cuisine in nineteenth and early twentieth century Japan, memorial marshmallows and all. Kushner’s book explores the ways that military influence, the rise of “nutrition” as a health concern, and prevailing conditions of hunger and starvation created a social and political context out of which ramen emerged along with new ways of eating alone and away from home. As if all of that wasn’t enough reason to read the book, you’ll also learn about the Ramen Philosophers Hall and the technology behind making those crispy instant ramen noodles. Slurp! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The other day I found myself in a cooking situation that’s fairly common: I had a few odd ingredients–some oxidized strips of bacon, a withered red pepper, a bunch of half-wilted parsley–and needed to use them before they went bad, but how? The cookbooks on my counter didn’t have an index in which I could search for multiple ingredients, and I didn’t have time to flip through all of the recipes for each ingredient in the hopes of a possible hit. So I popped them into Google, along with the search-term “recipe,” and in .31 seconds I had 2,830,000 hits and a variety of options, from a recipe for crispy potatoes on the Food Network’s website to Martha Stewart’s recipe for gnocchi. I opted for a cold tuna salad. In her new book, Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet (AltaMira Press, 2012), Signe Rousseau begins her first chapter by reminding us just how uncommon my situation actually is and how that feeling, that sense that this is what I do, that nowadays this is what we do, is just one of the fascinating characteristics of our digitized food culture. Consider, for example, that 800 million users connect through Facebook everyday or that every week Twitter users generate a billion tweets or that there’s now a 150 million bloggers adding new content to the web everyday. With pith and insight, Rousseau looks at how this explosion of social media is changing not only how we view food, but also how we understand ourselves. (You can find Rousseau on her blog and on Twitter.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Not many of us, not even the most ardent foodies, think of the crab apple as a fruit worth eating, much less extolling, but Henry David Thoreau saw something like the American pioneer spirit in this hard, gnarled, sour hunk of fruit. In his essay “Wild Apples,” he celebrates the apple because it “emulates man’s independence and enterprise.” Like America’s first settlers, he goes on, “it has migrated to this New World, and is even, here and there, making its way amid the aboriginal trees.” He claims that “[e]ven the sourest and crabbedest apple, growing in the most unfavorable position, suggests such thoughts as these, it is so noble a fruit.” William Kerrigan quotes from this passage at the start of his fascinating book, Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural History (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) and he shows us the man behind the myth, a man very different from the one we might expect, but a man who nonetheless seems like the real-world embodiment of Thoreau’s thoughts on the apple. Born in 1774, John Chapman is the planter who would eventually become Johnny Appleseed. Kerrigan not only tells us the story of his life and afterlife, but also the story of the American apple, which begins, surprisingly enough, in Kazakhstan and goes on to our moment of genetically modified fruits and heritage varietals. At the center of this story, Kerrigan shows us the journey of an unusual American for his time and then the creation of an unusual–and perhaps timeless–American myth. (Here, by the way, is a link to Kerrigan’s blog.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

I confess I knew nothing about Julia Child prior to reading Bob Spitz‘s new book. And yet, from the dramatic opening passages through its 500+ pages, Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child (Knopf, 2012) held me captive. How many people, much less women, change our attitudes, beliefs, and culture? Julia Child did. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that she did so by becoming a television star at the age of 50. One of the problems of biography is that women’s lives are so often written so badly. Whereas the telling of men’s lives emphasizes adventure, in the lives of women biographers tend to emphasize relationships and romance. Not so Dearie. From the outset, Spitz contends that Child led a life of adventure and, while her relationships play a role in the story, they are not at its center. Rather, Child is the star from page 1. Thus, Dearie is an unconventional story of an unconventional woman who made unconventional decisions. Which is to say, biographically speaking, it is a breath of fresh air. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

With elegant and accessible prose, Catherine Higgs takes us on a journey in Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa (Ohio University Press, 2012). It is a fascinating voyage fueled by the correspondence of Joseph Burtt, a man who had helped found a utopian commune before being sent by the chocolate magnate William Cadbury in the early 1900s to investigate labor conditions on cocoa plantations in Africa. For almost two years, Burtt observed and wrote and fevered his way to the large Portuguese colony of Angola, to Mozambique in Portuguese East Africa, and finally to Transvaal in British southern Africa. Higgs’s wonderfully evocative account uses Burtt’s journey to tell a much larger story about competing British and Portuguese colonial interests in Africa that was fueled, in part, by tensions over very different notions of “labor” and “slavery.” It is a story of the co-creation of two vital commodities of the twentieth century – chocolate and human beings – that invites readers into the hospitals, roads, ships, and plantations that were such crucial sites of negotiation over the basic components of a free human life. It is an engaging and assignable book built on archival work that will satisfy both academic historians and a general audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Did Proust have it right? Does food, whether it’s a madeleine from an aristocratic childhood or the Velveeta mac-and-cheese my mom used to make, have a special significance for our memory, perhaps even our very being? In his new book, The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship to Food (Harvard University Press, 2012), neuroanthropologist John. S. Allen takes up this question by guiding us into the inner structures of the brain, into the hippocampus and amygdala, where memories and emotions mix and where food plays a surprising role. But Allen’s book doesn’t just journey into the brain. It travels back in time, to the origins of modern humanity, showing us how our evolutionary past shapes our eating present. Along the way, we learn about the eating habits of Neanderthals and chimpanzees; we discover the benefits of being omnivores and even superomnivores; and we investigate why a food quality as seemingly straightforward as crispiness makes our mouths water. Here’s a hint: the exoskeletons of insects might have something to do with our love of Colonel Sanders’ extra crispy recipe. Please join us for a discussion of how and why we eat that begins millions of years ago and ends every time we sit down at the table with our 1,400 cc of human brain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Restaurants almost feel indigenous to American landscape, whether you're weaving past them by the thousands when you're driving through a metropolis on the East or West Coast or whether, like me, you find yourself in a small town in the middle of the Midwest, which still manages to boast one Indian restaurant, two Middle Eastern restaurants, and a handful of Mexican and Chinese restaurants. But did you ever wonder just how someone living in Athens, Ohio, could end up eating seaweed egg drop soup on a Tuesday night in September? How exactly did we, as Americans, come to embrace such a rich and ethnically diverse restaurant culture?This is one of the many fascinating questions that Andrew P. Haley explores in Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Haley's book tells the story of a middle-class revolution, one that changed American restaurants from aristocratic establishments in the thrall of French culture and French food to democratic places where middle-class Americans with a few extra dollars could enjoy a night out without worrying about whether they had on the right evening gown or knew the correct pronunciation of "menu." Along the way, Haley makes insightful observations about subjects that range from the rise of middlebrow culture in America to the practice of tipping.A winner of this year's James Beard Award for scholarly work, Turning the Tables is that rare book that's satisfying to read if you're interested in academic ideas like the history and origins of class consciousness or if you're just curious about why that stereotype of the snooty French waiter remains with us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food