New Books in Food

Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola (U Chicago Press, 2024) takes readers deep inside the secret world of corporate science, where powerful companies and allied academic scientists mould research to meet industry needs. The 1990s were tough times for the soda industry. In the United States, obesity rates were exploding. Public health critics pointed to sugary soda as a main culprit and advocated for soda taxes that might decrease the consumption of sweetened beverages—and threaten the revenues of the giant soda companies. Soda Science tells the story of how industry leader Coca-Cola mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity, a view few experts accept. Anthropologist and science studies specialist Susan Greenhalgh discovers a hidden world of science-making—with distinctive organizations, social networks, knowledge-making practices, and ethical claims—dedicated to creating industry-friendly science and keeping it under wraps. By tracing the birth, maturation, death, and afterlife of the science they made, Greenhalgh shows how corporate science has managed to gain such a hold over our lives. Spanning twenty years, her investigation takes her from the US, where the science was made, to China, a key market for sugary soda. In the US, soda science was a critical force in the making of today’s society of step-counting, fitness-tracking, weight-obsessed citizens. In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally. By following the scientists and their ambitious schemes to make the world safe for Coke, Greenhalgh offers an account that is more global—and yet more human—than the story that dominates public understanding today. Coke’s research isn’t fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim. Her gripping book raises crucial questions about conflicts of interest in scientific research, the funding behind familiar messages about health, and the cunning ways giant corporations come to shape our diets, lifestyles, and health to their own needs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

As consumers become increasingly aware of the animal agriculture industry’s cruelty and environmental devastation, clever industry marketers are adapting with alternative “humane” and “sustainable” labeling and marketing campaigns. In the absence of accurate information, it has never been more important to educate consumers on the realities behind the industry lies, and people are hungry for the truth.The Humane Hoax: Essays Exposing the Myth of Happy Meat, Humane Dairy, and Ethical Eggs (Lantern Publishing & Media, 2023) features a range of engaging and thought-provoking essays from eighteen notable experts who are at the forefront of this marketing and societal shift, chronicling every aspect with in-depth analyses and intellectual rigor. Among other timely topics, the book explores how the humane hoax intersects with feminism and environmentalism, how it is represented in the media, and the affects it has on human and non-human communities alike. The Humane Hoax will leave the reader questioning everything that they have been conditioned to believe as consumers.Hope Bohanec has been active in animal protection and environmental activism for thirty years and has published the book The Ultimate Betrayal: Is There Happy Meat? She is the Executive Director of Compassionate Living and the host of the Hope for the Animals Podcast. Hope co-founded the Humane Hoax Project, the Ahimsa Living Project, and has organized numerous online and in-person events including the Humane Hoax Online Conference, the Humane Hoax Chicken Webinar, and the Sonoma County VegFest. Over the last three decades, Hope has worked for the national non-profits United Poultry Concerns and In Defense of Animals and has contributed chapters to two anthologies.Kyle Johannsen is a Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

A Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavoured Western Cuisine (Hurst, 2024) by Christopher Beckman takes readers on a tantalising voyage through European and American gastronomic history, following the trail of a small but mighty fish: the anchovy.Whether in ubiquitous Roman garum, mass-produced British condiments, elaborate French haute cuisine or modern Spanish tapas, anchovies have been enhancing the flavour of many dishes for thousands of years. Yet, depending upon the time and place—and who was eating them—they have also been disdained as worthless little fish, deemed too small, bony and inconsequential for popular or elite consumption. From Western Europe to the USA, Beckman shows how the evolving and ambiguous position of anchovies provides surprising insights into the relationship between food, class and status throughout history.Drawing on cookbooks, literature and art, this is the hidden story of the diminutive anchovy, and its outsized role in shaping the West’s cuisine.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Poet Laureate of Kentucky Crystal Wilkinson’s food memoir, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks (Clarkson Potter, 2023), honors her kitchen ghosts, five generations of Black Appalachian women. She contends, “The concept of the kitchen ghost came to me years ago, when I realized that my ancestors are always with me and that the women are most present while I’m chopping or stirring or standing at the stove.” Wilkinson shares nearly forty family recipes like Corn Pudding, Chicken and Dumplings, and Granny Christine’s Jam Cake, with stories and family photos to bring to life the rich heritage of Black Appalachia.Dr. N’Kosi Oates is a curator. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The spice islands: Specks of land in the Indonesian archipelago that were the exclusive home of cloves, commodities once worth their weight in gold. The Portuguese got there first, persuading the Spanish to fund expeditions trying to go the other direction, sailing westward across the Atlantic.Roger Crowley, in his new book Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World (Yale University Press: 2024) covers six decades of exploration, conflict and conquest, starting from the Portuguese capture of Malacca in 1511 to the Spanish founding of Manila and the start of the galleon trade in 1571.Roger Crowley is a narrative historian of the early modern period. He is the author of five celebrated books, including City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (Faber & Faber: 2011) and Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire (Random House: 2015).You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Spice. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

A history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor.In Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans (U Chicago Press, 2024), Theresa McCulla probes the overt and covert ways that the production of food and the discourse about it both created and reinforced many strains of inequality in New Orleans, a city significantly defined by its foodways. Tracking the city’s economy from nineteenth-century chattel slavery to twentieth-century tourism, McCulla uses menus, cookbooks, newspapers, postcards, photography, and other material culture to limn the interplay among the production and reception of food, the inscription and reiteration of racial hierarchies, and the constant diminishment and exploitation of working-class people. The consumption of food and people, she shows, was mutually reinforced and deeply intertwined. Yet she also details how enslaved and free people of color in New Orleans used food and drink to carve paths of mobility, stability, autonomy, freedom, profit, and joy. A story of pain and pleasure, labor and leisure, Insatiable City goes far beyond the task of tracing New Orleans’s culinary history to focus on how food suffuses culture and our understandings and constructions of race and power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In 1971, the New York Times called the Taiwanese-Chinese chef, Fu Pei-Mei, the “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.”But, as Michelle T. King notes in her book Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (Norton, 2024), the inverse–that Julia Child was the Fu Pei-Mei of French cuisine–might be more appropriate. Fu spent decades on Taiwanese television, wrote three seminal cookbooks on Chinese cuisine, ran a famous cooking academy and even provided important culinary advice to those making packaged food and airline meals.And this all starts from humble beginnings, when she was an amateur–and not very good–home cook arriving in Taiwan from mainland China.In this interview, Michelle and I talk about Fu Pei-Mei, her humble beginnings and rise to the heights of Chinese cooking, and what Fu’s work tells us about Chinese cuisine.Michelle T. King is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she specializes in modern Chinese gender and food history. She can be followed on Instagram at @michtking.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Chop Fry Watch Learn. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In this episode, I talk to Samuel Dolbee, Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His book, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2023).In this highly original environmental history, Samuel Dolbee sheds new light on borders and state formation by following locusts and revealing how they shaped both the environment and people's imaginations from the late Ottoman Empire to the Second World War. Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, Dolbee details environmental, political, and spatial transformations in the region's history by tracing the movements of locusts and their intimate relationship to people in motion, including Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees, as well as states of the region. With locusts and moving people at center stage, surprising continuities and ruptures appear in the Jazira, the borderlands of today's Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Transcending approaches focused on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire or the creation of nation states, Dolbee provides a new perspective on the modern Middle East grounded in environmental change, state violence, and popular resistance.Deren Ertas is a PhD Candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Women across the Caribbean have been writing, reading, and exchanging cookbooks since at least the turn of the nineteenth century. These cookbooks are about much more than cooking. Through cookbooks, Caribbean women, and a few men, have shaped, embedded, and contested colonial and domestic orders, delineated the contours of independent national cultures, and transformed tastes for independence into flavours of domestic autonomy.Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence (Rutgers University Press, 2024) by Dr. Keja Valens integrates new documents into the Caribbean archive and presents them in a rare pan-Caribbean perspective. The first book-length consideration of Caribbean cookbooks, Culinary Colonialism joins a growing body of work in Caribbean studies and food studies that considers the intersections of food writing, race, class, gender, and nationality. A selection of recipes, culled from the archive that Culinary Colonialism assembles, allows readers to savour the confluence of culinary traditions and local specifications that connect and distinguish national cuisines in the Caribbean.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores—everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this second edition of Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (University of Texas Press, 2021) Dr. John Soluri presents a lively, interdisciplinary study that integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States.Beginning in the 1870s, when bananas first appeared in the U.S. marketplace, Dr. Soluri examines the tensions between the small-scale growers, who dominated the trade in the early years, and the shippers. He then shows how rising demand led to changes in production that resulted in the formation of major agribusinesses, spawned international migrations, and transformed great swaths of the Honduran environment into monocultures susceptible to plant disease epidemics that in turn changed Central American livelihoods. Soluri also looks at labor practices and workers' lives, changing gender roles on the banana plantations, the effects of pesticides on the Honduran environment and people, and the mass marketing of bananas to consumers in the United States. His multifaceted account of a century of banana production and consumption adds an important chapter to the history of Honduras, as well as to the larger history of globalisation and its effects on rural peoples, local economies, and biodiversity.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food