Food Culture

Everybody eats. We may even consider ourselves experts on the topic, or at least Instagram experts. But are we aware that the shrimp in our freezer may be farmed and frozen in Vietnam, the grapes in our fruit bowl shipped from Chile, and the coffee in our coffee maker grown in Nicaragua, roasted in Germany, and distributed in Canada? Whether we know it or not, every time we shop for food, cook, and eat, we connect ourselves to complex supply networks, institutions, and organizations that enable our food choices.

Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and political.

What’s for breakfast in Nigeria? Snack time in Germany? How about dinner in Vietnam? Travel around the world to learn about the foods and cultural practices that make up mealtime with this fascinating series. Each book includes a simple recipe for a representative dish. This volume includes Meals in China, Meals in Germany, Meals in India, and Meals in Mexico.

Wurgaft and White use vivid storytelling to bring food practices to life, weaving stories of Panamanian coffee growers, medieval women beer makers, and Japanese knife forgers. From the Venetian spice trade to the Columbian Exchange, from Roman garum to Vietnamese nuoc cham, Ways of Eating provides an absorbing account of world food history and anthropology. Migration, politics, and the dynamics of group identity all shape what we eat, and we can learn to trace these social forces from the plate to the kitchen, the factory, and the field.

Tracing culinary customs from the Stone Age to the stovetop range, from the raw to the nuked, this book elucidates the factors and myths shaping Americans' eating habits. The diversity of food habits and rituals is considered from a psychological perspective. Explored are questions such as 'Why does the working class prefer sweet drinks over bitter?', 'Why do the affluent tend to roast their potatoes?', and 'What is so comforting about macaroni and cheese anyway?'

"What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another, this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma. Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature offers, humans have had to learn what is safe, and what isn't. Today, as America confronts what can only be described as a national eating disorder, the omnivore's dilemma has returned with an atavistic vengeance.

Night after night chefs and their crews are able to multitask and produce in a way that puts deskbound workers to shame. In Work Clean, Dan Charnas uncovers their secret: mise-en-place - the organizational system that transforms the lives of its practitioners through focus and self-discipline.

What’s for breakfast in Nigeria? Snack time in Germany? How about dinner in Vietnam? Travel around the world to learn about the foods and cultural practices that make up mealtime with this fascinating series. Each book includes a simple recipe for a representative dish. This volume includes Meals in Nigeria, Meals in Russia, Meals in Turkey, and Meals in Vietnam.

Often blamed for the rising rates of obesity and diabetes among black Americans, fast food restaurants like McDonald's have long symbolized capitalism's villainous effects on our nation's most vulnerable communities. But how did fast food restaurants so thoroughly saturate black neighborhoods in the first place? In Franchise, acclaimed historian Marcia Chatelain uncovers a surprising history of cooperation among fast food companies, black capitalists, and civil rights leaders, who believed they found an economic answer to the problem of racial inequality.

Barbecue: It's America in a mouthful. The story of barbecue touches almost every aspect of our history. It involves indigenous culture, the colonial era, slavery, the Civil War, the settling of the West, the coming of immigrants, the Great Migration, the rise of the automobile, the expansion of suburbia, the rejiggering of gender roles. It encompasses every region and demographic group. It is entwined with our politics and tangled up with our race relations. Jim Auchmutey follows the delicious and contentious history of barbecue in America....

America is more than just a fast food nation. Food Americana is the inside story of how generations of Americans have formed a national cuisine with tastes from all over the world. Fried chicken was a distinctly Southern dish - now it's the Sunday night special at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood. A Utah restaurant won Maine's annual Best Lobster Roll competition. And perhaps the ultimate all-American dish, pizza, is served up in 30 different styles, a total of three billion pies a year, an average of 23 pounds for each of us.

Nestled in the mountain shadows of Alabama lies the little town of Wicklow. It is here that Anna Kate has returned to bury her beloved Granny Zee, owner of the Blackbird Café. It was supposed to be a quick trip to close the café and settle her grandmother’s estate, but despite her best intentions to avoid forming ties or even getting to know her father’s side of the family, Anna Kate finds herself inexplicably drawn to the quirky Southern town her mother ran away from so many years ago, and the mysterious blackbird pie everybody can’t stop talking about.

While America's new reality appears to be a deeply divided body politic, many are wondering how we can or should move forward from here. Can political or social divisiveness be healed? Is empathy among people with very little ideological common ground possible? In A Decent Meal, Michael Carolan finds answers to these fundamental questions in a series of unexpected places: around our dinner tables, along the aisles of our supermarkets, and in the fields growing our fruits and vegetables. What is more common, after all, than the simple fact that we all need to eat?

Hot drinks, cold drinks, and everything in-between - this is the history of beverages through the ages. This book aims to describe the development of beverages and drinking habits, as well as their connection with other facets of life. This information will be of universal interest, no matter the listener's occupation or background. What Will You Drink? is a rather uncommon history book, as books on history generally tend to disregard the topic of food and drink. However, this book is all about quenching thirst.

Better Than Homemade is food biographer Carolyn Wyman’s freewheeling and entertaining cultural history of the innovative packaged foods that changed the way we eat. It highlights the fascinating stories behind the food inventions; the histories behind the brands and icons that have become synonymous with them; the jingles that have made them such a large part of our popular culture; and the recipes that have tutored generations of homemakers and comfort-food master chefs.

From the bestselling author and host of the wildly popular Undisclosed podcast, a warm, intimate memoir about food, body image, and growing up in a loving but sometimes oppressively concerned Pakistani immigrant family.

In Food, Genes, and Culture, renowned ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan shows why the perfect diet for one person could be disastrous for another. If your ancestors were herders in Northern Europe, milk might well provide you with important nutrients, whereas if you’re Native American, you have a higher likelihood of lactose intolerance. If your roots lie in the Greek islands, the acclaimed Mediterranean diet might save your heart; if not, all that olive oil could just give you stomach cramps.

Every country may have different foods, but almost all of them have a dish with noodles. All around the world, kids share their favorite regional pasta dish. What is your favorite sauce and noodle recipe? Do you share the same favorite as other kids from your country?

Nationally acclaimed storyteller J.J. Reneaux grew up Cajun for true, surrounded by the stories, music, food, and culture of rural communities in southeastern Texas and southern Louisiana. A traditional storyteller who collects by word-of-mouth, Reneaux has developed her repertoire over years of collecting: on front porches, school playgrounds, and her beloved fishing trips, as well as at nursing homes, airports, and at neighborhood fais-dodos.

Sourdough bread fueled the labor that built the Egyptian pyramids. The Roman Empire distributed free sourdough loaves to its citizens to maintain political stability. More recently, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, sourdough bread baking became a global phenomenon as people contended with being confined to their homes and sought distractions from their fear, uncertainty, and grief. In Sourdough Culture, environmental science professor Eric Pallant shows how throughout history, sourdough bread baking has always been about survival.