New Books in Food

In This Beautiful Country: How Italy's Nature Shaped Its Culture and Civilisation (Chelsea Green, 2026), discover Italy's unique ecological past and how it has shaped its present—and its future, with this riveting look at the incredibly diverse natural history and our need to preserve it. Italy is renowned for its antiquity, classical literature, philosophy, and modern-day culture, cuisine and fashion, but what has gone largely overlooked – and undocumented, even by its people – is its uniquely biodiverse landscape and wildlife. Italy has over 58,000 different species of wildlife, of which 4,777 are endemic, the highest in Europe. Italy provides a home for a third of all European flora and fauna, with a vast range of fruit and vegetable varieties: more grape varieties than France, more wheat than the US and more olives than Spain.  Edward Cutler, an art historian by trade, began to explore this history when, four years ago on his small Tuscan farm, he found a salamander that turned out to be endemic to that specific location. In understanding how Italy came together as a country, one of the youngest and still geologically active landscapes in the world, and made up of mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, glacial lakes, desert islands, caves and forests, Ed realised that this natural history has also had an incredibly important influence on its human history, especially its food culture and low-impact agriculture. And along the way, Ed discovers that Italy once was home to pygmy elephants, giant killer hedgehogs, and vampire-toothed deer. Today we can see the relics of those ancient creatures in the flashy blue lizard of Capri, gladiator crabs under the forum in Rome, the crested porcupine, the beautiful Apennine chamois and of course the Marzipan brown bear and Italian grey wolf, not forgetting its flora, including the world's rarest Christmas tree in Sicily. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

One year after the publication of Gastronomica's special feature on food and philosophy, Robert T. Valgenti of the Editorial Collective revisits the question of what a philosophical perspective could bring to addressing food-related issues. In this episode, he talks with Gastronomica author and philosopher Sascha Benjamin Fink about human perception and how people experience the world, taking up questions at the cutting edge of science, art, and gastronomy. Sascha discusses the role of the senses and sensory manipulation in gastronomy and explains how common experiences of eating can lend real-world insights into sensory engineering. Over the course of their conversation Bob and Sascha consider different examples – such as the setting of the table, spatial design, experimental cuisine, and the use of AI in recipe development – and weigh in on what sensory engineering can also reveal about gastronomy. The article Gastronomy as Sensory Engineering, co-authored by Sascha Benjamin Fink and Brandon Ashby, appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of Gastronomica. “Gastronomy as Sensory Engineering” was one of fifteen short papers in a special section dedicated to philosophical perspectives on food issues. Access the articles in volume 25.3 of the journal here and learn more about the special section in Episode 53: Mapping Food and Philosophy of the Gastronomica podcast. Sascha Benjamin Fink works on the philosophy of mind with research interests in consciousness, sensory engineering, and new technologies, and most recently has been Director of Research at the Centre for Philosophy and AI Research (PAIR) at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. As of August 2026, he works at the University of Cologne on sensory engineering in the DFG-AHRC Project SENSOR (DFG 527947799). Robert T. Valgenti is a professor of liberal arts and food studies at The Culinary Institute of America. A philosopher and translator, he works on the philosophy of food, Italian philosophy, and hermeneutics and is a member of the Editorial Collective at Gastronomica. Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies is published by the University of California Press. Quarterly issues are available in print and online. Listeners can now find the Gastronomica podcast on the New Books Network here. Subscribe to Gastronomica's podcast feed to stay updated on the newest episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Nineteenth-century Germany invented the way we eat. Women experimenting in households, French chefs fleeing guillotines, and one of the most rapidly evolving food industries in the world forged recognizably modern eating practices between 1780 and 1910. While central Europeans merely aimed to survive long winters, experiment with translated recipes and curious ingredients from abroad, and embrace the conveniences of industrial life, their consumption habits and cooking practices created a new product landscape. Throughout this transitional era of history, individuals visibly communicated their self-understandings through food. The Making of Modern Eating: How the German Middle Class Forged the Way We Eat, 1780–1910 (Berghahn, 2026) by Dr. Claudia Kreklau provides a study of central European food modernity and middle-class identity aims to provide fresh footing for discussions in our own changing global era. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

From misty mountain oolongs to the global boba boom, Taiwan's teas carry far more than flavor. They embody contested borders, evolving identities, and the complexities of nationhood. Routes of Taiwan Tea: Mobility, Borders, and Territoriality (U Washington Press, 2026) by Dr. Po-Yi Hung traces tea varieties, processing expertise, and merchants across Taiwan and Southeast Asia to reveal how a simple leaf has become a force in global politics.Drawing on decades of fieldwork and extensive archival research, Dr. Hung delves deep into the history of Taiwan's tea industry, from its roots in the Qing empire to its role in modern food nationalism. Hung shows how advocacy for Taiwanization—the movement to recover and celebrate the island's unique history and culture—occurs not only within Taiwan's food scenes but also through cross-border exchanges. Oolong cultivation in Thailand's highlands and bubble tea's rise in Vietnam demonstrate how tea acts as a nonhuman agent, fostering connections and unsettling conventional notions of sovereignty. Through these routes, tea becomes more than agriculture; it becomes an instrument of diplomacy, a marker of authenticity, and a symbol of cultural pride.Offering a fresh perspective on Taiwan's geopolitical positioning, Routes of Taiwan Tea redefines how borders are imagined and lived. It is an essential contribution to food studies, political geography, and East and Southeast Asian studies, illuminating how everyday practices like drinking tea shape global relations. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Popular history tells the story of how the tea boycott during the American Revolution caused a transition in American taste from tea to coffee, making the young country a coffee-drinking nation. In truth, Americans did not give up their tea so easily, and the United States grew to be the second-largest importer of tea from China. Diverging from British black tea traditions, U.S. consumers preferred green tea, cultivated a particular taste for Oolong tea, and invented the English Breakfast Tea brand to market Chinese black tea. This World in a Teacup: Credit, Taste, and Power in the U.S.-China Tea Trade, 1784–1911 (University of Nebraska Press, 2026) by Dr. Dan Du is the first book to detail the American tea trade with China after the American Revolution through the early twentieth century. Drawing on archival sources and perspectives from both sides of the Pacific, Dr. Du offers new insights to help understand fundamental developments in U.S.-China relations within a global context. This World in a Teacup shows that, rather than depending on hard-money transactions or a barter economy, a sophisticated credit system buttressed American tea purchases in China: Credit instruments such as promissory notes, bills of exchange, and checks financed the transactions between Chinese and U.S. tea merchants, crystallizing changing power dynamics in the global economy. This World in a Teacup explains how the circulation of these credit instruments challenged the conventional understanding of China's economy as a primitive system and how the power structure of American, British, and Chinese tea trade in the credit economy reshaped American consumption patterns. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Shadow Negotiators: How UN Organizations Shape the Rules of World Trade for Food Security (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Matias E. Margulis is the first book to demonstrate that United Nations (UN) organizations have intervened to influence the discourse, agenda, and outcomes of international trade lawmaking at the World Trade Organization (WTO). While UN organizations lack a seat at the bargaining table at the WTO, Dr. Margulis argues that these organizations have acted as "shadow negotiators" engaged in political actions intended to alter the trajectory and results of multilateral trade negotiations. He draws on analysis of one of the most contested issues in global trade politics, agricultural trade liberalization, to demonstrate interventions by four different UN organizations—the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (SRRTF). By identifying several novel intervention strategies used by UN actors to shape the rules of global trade, this book shows that UN organizations chose to intervene in trade lawmaking not out of competition with the WTO or ideological resistance to trade liberalization, but out of concerns that specific trade rules could have negative consequences for world food security—an outcome these organizations viewed as undermining their social purpose to reduce world hunger and protect the human right to food. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger (Duke UP, 2025), Sophie Chao examines how Indigenous Marind communities understand and theorize hunger in lowland West Papua, a place where industrial plantation expansion and settler-colonial violence are radically reconfiguring ecologies, socialities, and identities. Instead of seeing hunger as an individual, biophysical state defined purely in nutritional, quantitative, or human terms, Chao investigates how hunger traverses variably situated humans, animals, plants, institutions, infrastructures, spirits, and sorcerers. When approached through the lens of Indigenous Marind philosophies, practices, and protocols, hunger reveals itself to be a multiple, more-than-human, and morally imbued modality of being—one whose effects are no less culturally crafted or contested than food and eating. In centering Indigenous feminist theories of hunger, Chao offers new ways of thinking about the relationship between the environment, food, and nourishment in an age of self-consuming capitalist growth. She also considers how Indigenous theories invite anthropologists to reimagine the ethics and politics of ethnographic writing and the responsibilities, hesitations, and compromises that shape anthropological commitments in and beyond the field. Dr Sophie Chao is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney, author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua, and coeditor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice, both also published by Duke University Press. Land of Famished Beings won the 2026 ASAA Mid-Career Book Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

What role do microbes play in aquaponic farming and cultivated meat production, and how might such novel food technologies impact microbiomes? In this episode, Ishita Dey of Gastronomica hosts Lukáš Senft, Tereza Stöckelová, and Varvara Borisova in a conversation about their new article, “The Microbiopolitics of Novel Foods: The Pro- and Antibiotic Implications of Cultivated Meat and Aquaponic Farming.” In a discussion that connects food futures with environment, sustainability, health, and technology, the research team shares insights from their multisited ethnography of indoor vertical farms, bioreactors, and alternative food production in Czechia. They illuminate the emergence of new food technologies and the regulatory landscape, discuss the demand for protein and alternative protein sources, and reflect on the broader implications for microbial diversity and resilience-building in food systems. “The Microbiopolitics of Novel Foods: The Pro- and Antibiotic Implications of Cultivated Meat and Aquaponic Farming” by Lukáš Senft, Tereza Stöckelová, and Varvara Borisova, appears in issue 26.1 of Gastronomica. Their article is one of eleven in a newly published special section on microbes in food and food systems. Learn more about the two-part special section and access the articles in the Spring 2026 and Summer 2026 issues of the journal. Lukáš Senft has a PhD in sociology from Charles University and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His work on food systems has explored topics related to small-scale farming, mushroom foraging, precision agriculture, and the use of medicinal plants through multispecies ethnography and public scholarship. Tereza Stöckelová is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and also an associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Charles University. An expert in social studies of science, her current research on food and health focuses on extended metabolism in relation to bodies, ecologies, and technologies. Varvara Borisova recently completed her PhD in anthropology at Charles University and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences where she is pursuing research on science and technology, obesity, metabolism, and alternative proteins. Ishita Dey is an assistant professor of sociology at South Asian University and a member of Gastronomica's Editorial Collective. Her new book, a multisited ethnography of sweet-making titled Sweet Excess: Crafting Mishti in Bengal, was published by Routledge in 2025. Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies is published by the University of California Press. Quarterly issues are available in print and online. Listeners can now find the Gastronomica podcast on the New Books Network. Subscribe to Gastronomica's podcast feed to stay updated on the newest episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In Oklahoma, one out of every six residents is poor. One in five children lives in poverty and faces food insecurity. In Hungry Oklahoma: Confronting Poverty and Food Insecurity (U Oklahoma Press, 2026), native son and sociologist Robert Lee Maril follows in the tradition of the national bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Evicted to illuminate the lived experience of poverty and food insecurity in communities across the state. Maril's account is immediately personal. He begins with "guests," as shoppers are called by volunteers, waiting in line in the sweltering heat one summer for "Thy Will Be Done," a food pantry, to open. Unable to afford air conditioning, some guests don't buy foods that would spoil on the counter. One woman, Norma, carefully places only canned vegetables in her cart. When she returns to her twenty-year-old pickup, in the truck bed are lawn chairs, blankets, and pans-everything she owns. "The landlord told us this morning we was homeless," Norma says. "I'm not thinking straight." Drawing on interviews and participant-observation data from his volunteer work at a food pantry, as well as census and sociological data, Maril documents in rich ethnographic detail the status of poverty and low-wage workers in the state today and within historical context. He explores how institutions-such as faith-based organizations, government, and food pantries-structure and shape experiences of poverty. While Maril celebrates the nonprofit and faith-based efforts that make a difference, this book also is critical of conditions and stereotypes that have entrenched poverty in the state. Hungry Oklahoma ultimately suggests that persistent and pervasive poverty can be eliminated. Its moving accounts of real Oklahomans and their experiences make it a clarion call for not only those interested in policy issues but all Oklahomans who want a better today and tomorrow for those who call the state home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The United States' superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing nations in the Third World through its massive food aid program. Through the lens of food and agriculture, Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Samantha Iyer offers new ways to understand the roots of the post–Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Dr. Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Backyard gardens flush with cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers where bees buzz and chickens scratch. Beyond, a forest filled with blackberries and jewelweed. Inspired by childhood memories of his grandmother's overflowing backyard garden, author Andrew Flachs has embarked on a multi-continent, decades-long look at agriculture and its value. The dominant view of agriculture has focused only on what we produce. It sees value in terms of capital gains or yield efficiency, masking how our global food system produces tremendous amounts of food commodities while failing to feed people, support rural communities, or enhance ecological well-being. Feeding the World as if People Mattered: How Small Farms Produce Value Beyond Yields (University of Arizona Press, 2026) asks us to look more deeply and more humanely at what we perceive to be most valuable in our agricultural systems. This book draws on fifteen years of anthropological research, taking readers to fields in South India, Eastern Europe, and North America, where people are already feeding the future amid global change. From these fields, Flachs shows us how a radical rethinking of the value of small farms and farmers is already happening. Bringing together conversations in agriculture, economics, anthropology, and the environmental humanities, Flachs deftly shows how small farms reproduce social and ecological relationships that are the only sustainable path forward. For anyone who is curious about the food on their plate and the people who helped to get it there, Feeding the World as if People Mattered will offer a new way to find value in the food we grow and the people who grow it. Dr. Andrew Flachs researches food and agriculture systems, exploring genetically modified crops, heirloom seeds, and our own microbiomes. Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania, he graduated from Oberlin College with dual Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Arts degrees in 2010. He earned his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in April 2016 and was a 2016-2017 Volkswagen Exchange Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Heidelberg University Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies. He is currently an associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University. His work among farmers in North America, the Balkans, and South India investigates ecological knowledge and technological change in agricultural systems spanning Cleveland urban gardens and Indian GM cotton fields. His research has been supported by public and private institutions including the Department of Education, the National Geographic Society, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Social Science Research Council, while his writing on agricultural development has been featured in numerous peer-reviewed publications as well as public venues including Sapiens, Salon, and the National Geographic magazine. His work has been recognized by eight international awards, including most recently as a finalist for the Society for Economic Anthropology Kate Browne Creativity in Research Award and the International Convention of Asia Scholars' Book Prize. Sandra Elizabeth is a graduate student enrolled at the Department of Sociology in Shiv Nadar University, Delhi- NCR. She looks at rice farmers' and their way of life in Kuttanad, Kerala—which is dubbed as the state's rice granary. She can be reached out on X.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The rise of “heritage” foods—that is, the reinvention of traditional foods—has enjoyed a high profile thanks to the oft-praised efforts of chefs such as Sean Brock and René Redzepi. But Lily Kelting observes the popularity of heritage foods as something more: a global movement in response to climate catastrophe and the rise of right-wing, populist movements that center a return to the past as part of their ideology. Weaving ethnography, discourse analysis, critical theory, and sensory, embodied critique, Kelting tracks and critiques the boom of traditional food revival movements in the American South, Denmark, and India. Ultimately, Kelting argues that the heritage culinary professionals wish to revive is equal parts nostalgia and invention: They engage, subvert, and ignore food histories in their creation of new food movements. As Kelting documents our contemporary moment, she shows how the conversations surrounding these new food movements leave out people already keeping their traditions alive. Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional Foods (University of North Carolina Press, 2026), then, serves as a reparative revaluation of the work of the cooks largely excluded from the contemporary media conversation about heritage revival. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival (University of North Carolina Press, 2026), naturalist, forager, and educator Maria Pinto uncovers strange and beautiful connections between the natural and human worlds, mingling reportage, research, memoir, and nature writing, touching on topics that range from Black farmers' domestication of the unforgettable aroma of truffles, to the possibility that enslaved people wielded mycological poisons against their enslavers. Pinto brings a new perspective and a distinctive literary voice to this mix of environmental and lived history, and every page sings with her enthusiasm for the networks in which we are embedded: fungal, ecological, ancestral, and communal. Join us in pursuit of beautiful, perplexing, delicious, and deadly mushrooms as we explore this understudied kingdom's awe-inspiring diversity, discovering how fungi have been used by people, especially those on the margins, for survival, pleasure, revelation, and revolution. When she's not in the woods (and sometimes when she is), Maria Pinto is a writer, editor, and educator. She teaches writing for various literary organizations. She reads fiction for Peripheries Journal and serves on the board of Hale, an outdoor education and land conservancy nonprofit. Her writing has been supported by Assets for Artists at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Mass Cultural Council, the Writers' Room of Boston, The Mastheads, and The Garrett on the Green. You can find Maria at her Website and on Instagram.  Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In 1644 four norcini or pork butchers were accused of killing not pigs, but seven of their fellow citizens, stripping the meat from the bones, then combining it with pig to make sausages, which were then sold to Romans from their shop behind the Pantheon. In the multiple pamphlets describing this supposed crime, the authors of this accusation blamed residents of Rome themselves, who had become so obsessed with meat that they turned a blind eye to such horrendous acts. This fabricated story points to an underlying reality—that in the early seventeenth century, a series of popes dramatically increased the amount of food and wine consumed by Romans, culminating in a per capita consumption of over a pound of meat per day during the reign of Pope Urban VIII (d. 1644). The Barberini Butchers: Meat, Murder, and Warfare in Early Modern Italy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026) traces the efforts and activities of a range of actors who strove to bring meat to the Roman table. Dr. Bradford A. Bouley shows how Rome's preoccupation with food was the result of papal policy in the aftermath of the Reformation; food, and especially meat, served as religious and political propaganda, symbolizing the correctness of the Catholic faith and demonstrating the extent of papal power. Dr. Bouley details the dramatic reorganization of Roman foodways needed to satisfy this demand for meat, as large herds of animals had to be funneled from the countryside to the city. This consumption was ultimately not sustainable, triggering a crisis that fueled sensational rumors of murder and cannibalism and eventually, Dr. Bouley contends, sparked the outbreak of civil war, as vassals rebelled against papal oversight. The Barberini Butchers recovers this significant episode in food, environmental, and cultural history, one that brings early modern politics and history into conversation with concerns over human use of natural resources and consumption of animal products that continue to resonate clearly today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

For early San Franciscans, seafood was an important source of nutrition and a feature of social life, inspiring culinary developments that remain components in California cuisine more than a century later. Consumers interested in flavorful alternatives to meat and associated health benefits could follow recipes for nearly fifty types of marine life from state waters, such as salmon, flounder, and oysters. Others are no longer available, out-of-vogue, or simply forgotten. Further, overfishing and environmental damage decimated many local seafood stocks, providing a cautionary tale with global significance. In San Francisco Seafood: A History from Ocean to Table (Bloomsbury, 2026), Dr. Paul Stangl traces the development of San Francisco's fisheries, seafood markets, cookery, and dining culture from the Gold Rush to the 1920s. Migrants from around the world imported fishing techniques and cuisines, then slowly adapted as they came to understand local resources and each other. Newcomers found the tastiest fish through trial and error and assimilated the “best” into a new cuisine. Different ethnic and occupational groups collaborated, fought, and learned from one another as they irreversibly altered the natural world around them. By the end of the First World War, San Francisco's seafood cuisine scarcely resembled that of the 1850s, due to cultural adaptation, technological advancements, and changes to the natural environment. It was no longer derivative of New England and France, but included influences from the Southern states, Asia, and South America.San Francisco Seafood chronicles the city's transformation from a fish-barren town-where restaurants served canned, pickled, and dried fish from the East Coast-to a seafood-rich metropolis that harvested seafood from Mexico to Alaska. He emphasizes how the impacts on nature and local labor serve as a necessary cautionary tale for today's global seafood trade. This is a thorough and insightful history of a once emerging, and now essential, cuisine for food and history buffs alike. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In 1901, Lizzie Black Kander put together a cookbook based on the classes she taught at the Milwaukee Jewish Mission. “I was trying to teach a group of young foreign girls in a crowded neighborhood how to cook simple and nutritious food, yet have it attractive and inexpensive as we prepare it in America,” she recalled. The Settlement Cook Book would go on to be the most successful charitable cookbook in American history, remaining a best-seller into the 1970s. Despite including nonkosher recipes, it became a mainstay in Jewish kitchens and an enduring touchstone of Jewish American culture. Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of The Settlement Cook Book (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Nora Rubel tells the remarkable story of The Settlement Cook Book, demonstrating how it shaped Jewish American identity—and was in turn shaped by generations of Jewish women. Dr. Rubel traces the cookbook's evolution across forty editions over several decades, through waves of immigration, shifting gender roles, upward mobility, suburbanization, and rapid changes in Jewish life. She argues that the book celebrates pluralism, allowing it to serve at once as a tool for Americanization, a repository of tradition, and a platform for culinary innovation. Ultimately, The Settlement Cook Book is a record of American Jewish women's history, told through the food they made and the lives they led. A cultural biography of an iconic cookbook, this lively and inviting book shares an inclusive vision of American cuisine. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Stove improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient” biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to find their carefully engineered stoves abandoned in trash heaps or repurposed as storage bins, while the traditional mud chulha retains a central place in the kitchen. Why do so many Indian women continue to use wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves when they have other options? Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women's Technology in India (University of Arizona Press, 2024) by Dr. Meena Khandelwal argues that the supposedly obsolete chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the new is not a failure to embrace new technologies but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate matter that harms people's bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women's autonomy as a local, do-it-yourself technology. Dr. Khandelwal, a feminist anthropologist, describes her collaboration with engineers, archaeologists, and others. She employs critical social theory and reflections from fieldwork to bring together research from a range of fields, including history, geography, anthropology, energy and environmental studies, public health, and science and technology studies (STS). In so doing she not only demystifies multidisciplinary research but also highlights the messy reality of actual behavior. Cookstove Chronicles critically examines why, despite extensive development efforts, use of the chulha persists. It offers an important new framework for looking at development, technology, environmental change, and human behavior. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

This episode takes listeners into the latest issues of Gastronomica, with a special feature on microbes. Sarah Elton and Maya Hey talk with Dan Bender of the Gastronomica Editorial Collective about their special section on microbes and food. In a conversation that spans food systems, environment, health, dietetics, and culture, they explore human microbial relationships from the soil to the processing plant, at the grocery store, in home kitchens, and beyond. Sarah and Maya share how they each came to the study of microbes, discuss what microbes are and what it means to center microbes in food studies research, and reflect on some of the policy implications. Their two-part special section in the Spring and Summer 2026 issues of Gastronomica brings together 11 articles on microbes in food and food systems from researchers around the world. Listeners can find "Making Microbes Explicit: Introduction to Microbes, Food, and Food Systems" by Maya Hey and Sarah Elton, and their co-written follow-up piece, "Finding the Microbes in Food Studies” in Gastronomica (issues 26.1 and 26.2). Sarah Elton is an assistant professor and Eakin Chair in Critical Qualitative Health Research Methodology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. She has published widely, with her research appearing most recently in journals such as Nature Cities, Social & Cultural Geography, Qualitative Inquiry and Gastronomica. She is also the author of Locavore (HarperCollins Canada 2010) and Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Maya Hey is based in Stockholm at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where she is a postdoctoral researcher with the Environmental Humanities Laboratory. Her interdisciplinary work on microbes draws on her background in food studies, dietetics, and communication. Her new book, Singing with Invisible Worlds: Fermenting Sake on Microbial Time will be published later this year by the University of Minnesota Press. Daniel E. Bender is a professor of food studies, environmental studies, and history at the University of Toronto, the President of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS), and Co-Chair of the Editorial Collective at Gastronomica. Listeners can now find the Gastronomica podcast on the New Books Network here. Subscribe to Gastronomica's podcast feed to stay updated on the newest episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In Insatiable Appetites: Eating Out in Georgian London (Bodleian Library, 2026) by Dr. Peter Ross, step into the kitchens, streets and chop houses of Georgian London—one day, one city, countless appetites. From dawn until past midnight, Londoners dined at taverns, coaching inns, oyster rooms, confectioners, coffee shops, chocolate houses, soup shops and dining rooms. For the poor, the streets bustled with vendors offering early versions of fast food: hot green peas, baked potatoes, suet puddings, curds and whey, rice milk, gingerbread, pastry ‘pigs,' and the now-forgotten saloop, a warming drink made from orchid roots.  After dark, sex workers and their clients indulged in a glass of jelly, then considered an aphrodisiac, as a precursor to a visit to the brothel. As the empire expanded, culinary influences poured in: London's first Indian takeaway appeared in 1773, while the East End became home to Jewish fried fish, Italian baloney and German sausages. Through the course of a single day, this book takes readers on a journey through breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper in Georgian London, drawing on contemporary archives to follow hungry citizens from all walks of life as they navigate the city's diverse food landscape. It reveals not only culinary pleasures and horrors, but also the social challenges and daily struggles that shaped life in the capital. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

When Brooklyn restaurateurs Doug Crowell and Ryan Angulo opened Buttermilk Channel in Carroll Gardens in 2008, they created more than a restaurant—they built a neighborhood institution. Known for dishes like Buttermilk Fried Chicken with Cheddar Waffles and towering Popovers, the restaurant became one of Brooklyn's most beloved dining destinations. They followed it with French Louie, a warm bistro that blends French influences with the spirit of a Brooklyn neighborhood restaurant. In Kindness & Salt: Recipes for the Care and Feeding of Your Friends and Neighbors (Grand Central Publishing, 2018), Crowell and Angulo share more than 100 recipes from both restaurants, along with the philosophy that has guided their work for decades. The title reflects the two principles they believe are essential to every great meal: kindness, expressed through genuine hospitality, and salt, the attention to flavor that brings food to life. Alongside signature dishes, the book offers advice on entertaining, cocktails, wine, and the art of making guests feel welcome. Kindness & Salt stands out among restaurant cookbooks because it is as much about community as it is about cooking. Part cookbook and part neighborhood memoir, it captures the relationships among restaurateurs, staff, regulars, and the communities that grow around a dining room. At its heart, the book argues that hospitality is every bit as important as the food on the plate. Doug Crowell joins New Books Network to discuss the origins of Kindness & Salt, the legacy of Buttermilk Channel, the continued success of French Louie, and what he has learned about restaurants, hospitality, and community over nearly two decades in Brooklyn dining. Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at VittlesVamp.com, who enjoyed many wonderful meals at Buttermilk Channel and remains a regular at French Louie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Imperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri La, 1900-1969 (UCL Press, 2026) is a global history project that examines the diffusion of scientific and environmental discourses from India to Britain and the US. Ashok Malhotra examines how imperial agendas and colonial stereotyping shaped dietary and agricultural research carried out in the 1920s in British India, from soil protection initiatives to studies of diet and healthy living. It also discusses how a selective interpretation of this research, which focused on the supposed vigor of one community, the Hunzas, influenced the organic and lifestyles movements that later emerged in Britain and the US from the 1940s to the 1960s. Ashok Malhotra is a senior lecturer in British imperial history at Queen's University Belfast. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Are children naturally picky? It sure seems that way. Yet, amazingly, pickiness used to be almost nonexistent. Well into the 20th century, Americans saw children as joyful omnivores who were naturally curious and eager to eat. Of course, this doesn't make sense today. Don't kids have special taste buds? Aren't they highly sensitive to food's texture and color? Aren't children incapable of liking “adult foods,” and don't parents risk harming kids psychologically by urging them to eat?But Americans in the past didn't think any of those things. They assumed that children could enjoy the same foods as adults, and children almost always did. They loved spicy relishes, vinegary pickles, and bitter greens. They spent their allowances on raw oysters and looked forward to their daily coffee. So how did modern kids become such incredibly narrow eaters? The story is fascinating – and about much more than rising abundance. Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History (St Martin's Press, 2026) by Dr. Helen Veit shows how fussy eating came to define "children's food" and reshape American diets at large. Maybe most importantly, it explains how we can still use the tools that parents used in the past to raise happy, healthy, wildly un-picky kids today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Is food porn a vibrant and democratic new expression of modern food culture or a superficial addition to an image-saturated world? Tracing its origins from the 1970s to today, this timely book examines the evolution of food porn as a desire-inducing aesthetic practice and a visually extravagant food spectacle. Through discussions on class, gender, sexuality and national identities, Food Porn: Food Aesthetics in a Digital Age (Bristol University Press, 2026) by Dr. Jonatan Leer & Dr. Stinne Gunder Strøm Krogager questions whether food porn reinforces social hierarchies or empowers individuals. Also exploring anti-food porn aesthetics, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the deeper social implications of food's digital allure. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

For much of the Crescent City's history, days began with the cries of roaming street vendors and the percussive thwack of butchers' meat cleavers echoing out from the municipal markets. Generations of New Orleanians—Black and white, enslaved and free, men and women, wealthy and working class—gathered in public to feed the city.In Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in New Orleans (Oxford UP, 2025), historian Dr. Ashley Rose Young illuminates the central role of food in shaping the vibrant culture of New Orleans. While the city's dynamic culinary scene fostered bonds between some communities, under the surface, groups viciously vied for control over who bought and sold food and where they could do it. Dr. Young traces the intricate systems of food vendors and their customers, and how those relationships were affected by race, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. She shows how vendors and customers alike exercised considerable influence over the city's food economy and the laws that regulated it by negotiating prices, shaping taste preferences, liaising with government officials, and even openly defying ordinances they felt were unfair. The power each group gained and lost determined the success of their businesses, the well-being of their families, and their ability to shape food retail and local laws to meet their needs.Nourishing Networks vividly depicts a city that throughout its history has struggled to feed its population safely and affordably, and in documenting those challenges, it offers lessons for building a better food future. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare's poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. Shakespeare in the Kitchen (Routledge, 2026) by Dr. Marissa Nicosia asks what Shakespeare's works can tell us about Renaissance culinary recipes, and what these recipes can tell us about Shakespeare's works. Dr. Nicosia explores how Shakespeare's works reveal tensions not only within early modern food culture about who should eat, what to eat or serve guests, and when to preserve foods, but also how to undertake the embodied processes of cooking, baking, and serving. The chapters include both analysis of plays and poems, as well as updated historical recipes ready for cooking. Nicosia prepares the recipes that permeate the canon—from Falstaff's beloved capons to the cakes that invite festivity in Twelfth Night—demonstrating how the physical act of cooking can transform our understanding of once familiar texts, and asking what we can learn about food history by recreating historical recipes with twenty-first-century ingredients and tools. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Kate Brown, Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at MIT joins Michael Stauch to discuss her new book Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present and Future of the Self-Provisioning City (W. W. Norton, 2026) on the 300-year history of urban gardening, from feudal England to the Paris Commune, to Berlin's green shantytowns, to contemporary Amsterdam, Chicago, and beyond. Equal parts history, memoir, and manifesto, Brown's book weaves in her own gardening experience while exploring the political and practical, painting a picture of the necessity of self-provisioning in an increasingly chaotic world. Highlights include: How “tiny gardens” grew as a social practice among English peasants following the enclosure of the commons; The politics of “tiny gardens,” including the difference between a “gardening” state and a gardeners state; How Black “tiny gardeners” in DC's East of the River neighborhood transformed structural racism into vegetable-powered wealth; A short-but-scathing review of Yuvel Harari's Sapiens; How small changes to local ordinances in cities might allow us to reimagine a world of abundance amid contemporary fears of scarcity and instability. Guest: Kate Brown is Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at MIT and author of four previous prize-winning books, including A Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. She currently plants her gardens in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont. Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Despite the implications of its subtitle, this is not a travel guide to Singapore, although readers run the risk of becoming tempted to venture there. Author Lim Tse Wei begins this collection of essays with the candid admission, “I am a somewhat unusual cook. My main qualification for the profession is that I was born and raised in Singapore, where food is both secular obsession and national religion. I didn't learn to cook at my mother's side, or my grandmother's, and although my grandfather had been a cook for some years, we didn't speak of it in the family. In Singapore, good sons do not learn to cook.” Lim's dry commentary and insight introduces us to a world of striking juxtapositions, from expatriate French chefs preparing food for diners in Chippendale chairs to street hawkers who struggle to make a living wage, let alone one that would allow them to feel like full-fledged members of Singaporean society. He makes his grandmother's recipe for lou arh, braised duck, in suburban Massachussets and questions why anyone would export Tabasco sauce to Southeast Asia, “home of the most nuanced and varied chilli-eating culture on the planet.” There are a few recipes, some traditional, some not at all, included to illustrate ideas rather than to command us to act. And although Lim makes no attempt to be systematic in his coverage, he still paints a vivid picture of the city-state's culinary culture. Little Perfections: Eating in Singapore (Kitchen Arts and Letters, 2026) is available to purchase exclusively at Kitchen Arts & Letters.  This interview was conducted by Ernest Lee, PhD student at the University of Chicago. He researches the history of postcolonial energy through the lens of development, infrastructure and environment, with a focus on West Africa and Southeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Waves Lost at Sea (Spector Books, 2026) traces the evolving practice of Cooking Sections, whose work spans visual arts, architecture, and ecology. Since 2013, they have been investigating anthropogenic infrastructures, industrial food systems, and human-made climates: from artificially colored farmed salmon and drained buffalo wetlands to ocean-filtering oysters and Sicilian tomatoes outlawed under EU regulations. Their research-based practice exposes the legal, environmental, and metabolic struggles behind what ends up on our plates, while simultaneously working to create prospects for the future. This monograph brings together six newly commissioned essays alongside an extensive series of images with detailed captions and reflective annotations. The book traverses legal fictions, queer ecologies, disappearing landscapes, multispecies entanglements, and speculative tastes. Through these layered investigations, Waves Lost at Sea invites readers to rethink food cultures and agricultural imaginaries, decentering humans at both microscopic and planetary scales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

This episode introduces a special issue on food and philosophy. Robert T. Valgenti, of Gastronomica's Editorial Collective, talks with Andrea Borghini about the increasing attention to food within philosophy over the last three decades and shares the inspiration behind their special issue. They discuss how this issue of Gastronomica engages with different disciplines and formats by bringing together short essays and reflections on the field of philosophy from scholars around the world. By attending to ethics, value, and aesthetics through a range of topics that include art, taste, hunger, sustainability, food waste, and bioethics and GLP-1s, the special issue highlights different perspectives on how food can enter philosophical practice. Gastronomica's special issue on food and philosophy was published in Fall 2025 (25.3) and is available online here. Andrea Borghini is an associate professor of philosophy and the director of Culinary Mind, a research center for the philosophy of food, at the University of Milan. Learn more about his work here and about Culinary Mind here. Robert T. Valgenti is a professor of liberal arts and food studies at The Culinary Institute of America. A philosopher and translator, he works on the philosophy of food, Italian philosophy, and hermeneutics and is a member of the Editorial Collective at Gastronomica. Listeners can now find the Gastronomica podcast on the New Books Network here. Subscribe to Gastronomica's podcast feed to stay updated on the newest episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Pastry chef, longtime collaborator with Yotam Ottolenghi, and practicing psychologist Helen Goh joins the New Books Network to discuss Baking and the Meaning of Life: How to Find Joy in 100 Recipes, a debut that brings together more than a decade of recipe development with her clinical work in psychotherapy. In this conversation, Goh speaks with host Laura Goldberg about the central question of the book: why we mark important moments with cake. What begins as a simple observation becomes a framework for understanding baking as ritual, a way of expressing care, marking time, and creating meaning through shared experience. Goh describes baking as part of a broader “mosaic” of meaningful acts, where small gestures contribute to a sense of purpose and connection. Drawing on existential thinkers such as Viktor Frankl and Irvin Yalom, she emphasizes that meaning is something we actively construct in everyday life. The discussion also explores her framework of meaningful activity, including autonomy, competence, relatedness, beneficence, and creativity, and how baking uniquely brings these together. Recipes such as the Pandan and Coconut Chiffon Cake, Green Tea and Red Bean Brownies, and the Very Good Apple Pie reflect the book's blend of cultural memory, technical precision, and emotional resonance. Goh reflects on her path from a Malaysian Chinese upbringing without a baking tradition to an international pastry career and a parallel life in psychology. The book ultimately positions baking as something beyond necessity, an act that reveals how people create connection, ritual, and meaning in everyday life. Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at Vittlesvamp.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Get It While It's Hot (LSU Press, 2026) is an innovative collection that examines an increasingly commonplace belief across the U.S. South—that some of the best, most enjoyable food comes from places you would not expect: a gas station, the back of a pickup truck, or a ramshackle building made of plywood. These essays bring together scholars, food writers, influencers, and even a CEO to discuss the phenomenon of eating by the side of the road. They look at the delicious food that can be found in such spaces, but also at the ways that gas station, roadside, and convenience cuisine contributes to the social and cultural identities of people and communities in the U.S. South. Sometimes these roadside spaces serve goals of equity and food justice as they relate particularly to race, class, and gender, and sometimes they stymy them. Contributors address the importance of roadside vendors to low-income areas and communities of color, while also revealing how gas stations and convenience stores are particularly prone to anti-Black surveillance and community gatekeeping. Several essays examine the appearance of service stations and unconventional food vendors in southern literature. Interviews with photojournalist Kate Medley, social media influencer Stafford Shurden, and Stuckey's CEO Stephanie Stuckey provide firsthand perspectives on the diverse landscapes of food culture in the South. By surveying the importance of roadside and convenience cuisine to communities across the region, Get It While It's Hot illustrates that these spaces do not function like typical restaurants. They mark boundaries of community, establish consistency and familiarity, and invite people, sometimes paradoxically, to pull up a chair and sit a while. This is Constance's second time on the podcast. She first appeared on September 24, 2025 alongside author Kiese Laymon, discussing her book, Conversations with Kiese Laymon (University Press of Mississippi, 2025). In this episode, we also mention the Catherine Coleman Literary Arts, Food, and Social Justice Summer Program. If you are finding this episode in real time, you can attend the virtual launch for Get It While It's Hot on Facebook, Wednesday, April 29, 2026 at 2:00pm CT. You can find co-editor Constance Bailey at her website and on Instagram. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The term "commod bod" is used with humor and affection. It also offers a critical way to describe bodies shaped by long-term reliance on U.S. federal commodity food programs. In Commod Bods: Embodied Heritage, Foodways, and Indigeneity (University of Arizona Press, 2026), Kasey Jernigan shares her ongoing collaborative research with Choctaw women and describes the ways that shifting patterns of participation in food and nutrition assistance programs (commodity foods) have shaped foodways; how these foodways are linked to bodies and health, particularly "obesity" and related conditions; and how foodways and bodies are intertwined with settler colonialism and experiences of structural violence, identity making, and heritage in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Organized thematically, the book moves from a critical history of obesity and health in Indian Country to narratives of Choctaw women navigating food, memory, and belonging. Chapters such as "Food and Fellowship" and "Heritage, Embodied" center personal stories that show how food is not only sustenance but also a site of connection, resistance, and meaning making. Food is critical to cultural survival and affirmation. For Choctaw people, the intentional demise of traditional foodways and dependence on federal food programs are specific experiences that inform part of what it means to be Choctaw today. Kasey Jernigan is an assistant professor of American studies and anthropology at the University of Virginia, where she also co-directs the Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute. She is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon (U Georgia Press, 2026), Dr. Mark A. Johnson asks (and answers) a seemingly simple question: How has bacon overcome centuries of religious prohibition, cultural contempt, and dietary advice to become a twenty-first-century culinary and cultural powerhouse? Starting in early modern Britain and tracing the story of bacon through the colonial era, the Civil War, the Progressive Era, modern fad diets, and the emerging craft bacon industry, Johnson provides a new perspective on some familiar American narratives. More than a story of production, marketing, and consumption, Johnson argues, this cultural history connects bacon to race, class, and gender while also illuminating major historical forces, such as migration, warfare, urbanization and suburbanization, reform movements, cultural trends, and globalization. For Dr. Johnson, bacon's story from “most dangerous food in the supermarket” to pop culture and gastronomic phenomenon reflects the cultural values of a nation. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

An exploration of Caribbean cuisine and culinary history, featuring more than 380 authentic home cooking recipes from across the region Caribbean cuisine reveals a culture of boundless imagination and creativity. It is the result of resourcefulness and ingenuity, where the need to survive and thrive shaped dishes that stand as powerful representations of its various cultures. In The Caribbean Cookbook, chef Rawlston Williams celebrates the diverse foods, flavors, and culinary traditions of this vibrant region. Featuring more than 380 recipes from 28 countries and island nations, the book includes classic marinades, sauces, and preserves; broths and soups; rices, grains, and vegetables; and chapters dedicated to Sea & River, On Land, Flour, Sugar, Juice, and Rum. The iconic ingredients synonymous with the Caribbean - citrus, nutmeg, coconut, tamarind, pimento, pineapple, rum - are showcased throughout, with spices as the stars, elevating other ingredients to create layered and satisfying dishes. This intensively researched recipe collection includes both beloved classics and lesser-known specialties. Home cooks around the world will discover Jamaica's Jerk Chicken and Dominica's Callaloo Soup; Puerto Rico's plantain-based Mofongo; Green Fig Salad from Saint Lucia; Haiti's Seafood Creole; a sweet Cashew Cake from Aruba; and other authentic dishes. There's plenty for armchair travelers to enjoy, too: Rawlston's descriptions of the islands' histories, culture, and traditions bring each recipe to life, while stunning color photography of the food and landscapes offers a whirlwind journey across one of the world's most beautiful destinations. Beautifully designed in bold tropical shades, The Caribbean Cookbook is a powerful, joyful ode to the many flavors of this incredible region.  Dr. N'Kosi Oates is a curator. He earned his Ph.D. in the Department of Africana Studies from Brown University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Today, techniques such as fermenting and foraging are increasingly appealing to those seeking to create economical, nourishing, waste-free meals. This panel, moderated by Jane Ziegelman and featuring chefs Ari Miller and Jeremy Umansky, will explore today's innovative tactics and the historical precedents for these strategies in the Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant kitchen at the turn of the 20th century. This panel discussion originally took place on November 18, 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In a region known for its export of oil, Monarchies of Extraction: The Gulf States in the Global Food System (Cambridge UP, 2026) explores how the Gulf states are simultaneously defined by the importation of food. Charting the economics and politics of the Gulf through an examination of its food system, Christian Henderson demonstrates how these states constitute a distinct social metabolism within the global food system. Starting with the pre-oil phase, this book examines the politics of agrarian change in the Gulf. In the contemporary period, Henderson considers the way that the Gulf states have evolved into 'inverted farms', where the import of prodigious quantities of agricultural commodities has enabled these economies to overcome their lack of arable land. As a result of this trade, states such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia have developed their own agribusiness sectors. Henderson further shows how food and consumption in the Gulf states constitute political questions of diet, sustainability, and boycott. Christian Henderson is a lecturer at the University of Leiden. His research focuses on the Arab region, with a particular focus on Gulf investment in the states of North Africa and the Levant, rural development and business politics. Alongside his academic work, he has worked as a journalist in Lebanon and with Al Jazeera in Qatar. Alec Fiorini is a PhD student at Queen Mary University London's Centre for Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) researching the political economy of nitrogen fertilizer supply chains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The Gastronomica podcast returns to the air, bringing listeners new interviews with authors from the latest issues of Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies. In this episode, Alyssa James of Gastronomica's Editorial Collective hosts award-winning writer and historian Camille Bégin for a discussion of “Chiang Mai 2015,” a creative nonfiction account of a family trip and a search for sustenance that becomes entangled with questions of illness, climate, and care. In her memoir of failed culinary tourism, a story set against the smoky skies of northern Thailand, Camille asks what it means to travel, to look for meaning, and to eat ethically. In conversation with Alyssa, Camille talks about how the haze shapes her story, reflects on the politics of culinary tourism, and shows how food can become a small anchor in times of crisis. “Chiang Mai 2015” was published in the Spring 2025 issue of Gastronomica (25.1) and is available online here. Camille Bégin is the author of Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search for America's Food (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Her personal essays have appeared in Gastronomica, Adelaide Magazine, and the scientific journal, Brain. She is currently writing a food memoir called Crumbs: A Trail of Taste and Illness. Website here Alyssa A. L. James is an anthropologist and postdoctoral scholar at the USC Society of Fellows. Her current book project, Revival Grounds, examines coffee, heritage, and temporality in Martinique. Learn more here Listeners can now find the Gastronomica podcast on the New Books Network here. Subscribe to Gastronomica's podcast feed to stay updated on the newest episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Awash in a sea of rum describes the years between the 1670s and the 1830s in the colonies that would later become Canada. Millions of litres of the sugar-based liquor were imported every year to supply a comparatively small population of colonists and Indigenous people. Why rum, and why so much?Rum was cheap and plentiful. Intimately connected to the West Indian slave plantation complex, rum shipped to early Canada and around the Atlantic World was part of the early modern expansion of intercontinental trade known as the first globalization. Canada in the Age of Rum (McGill-Queen's UP, 2026) by Professor Allan Greer shows what happened to the vast quantities that came to Canadian shores. Rum was especially important to workers in the early Canadian staples industries. Fishermen and fur-trade voyageurs drank rum in massive quantities, supplied on credit and at grossly inflated prices by their employers, an arrangement that served to claw back wages and ensure the profitability of enterprises that would not have been viable otherwise. Traders deliberately sought to get hunting peoples hooked on rum in order to ensure a steady supply of pelts – alcohol was not so much a commodity for sale as it was a gift used to induce hunters to conform to the ways of the capitalist economy. However, Indigenous people drank rum in their own ways and for their own reasons; and when drinking became a serious social problem, they organized to resist it. The story ends in the 1830s when the combined effects of the temperance movement and the rise of whisky led to a sharp decline in rum consumption.This brilliant history follows the thread of a single commodity from West Indian plantations to Newfoundland, Quebec, and the west, revealing rum as a critical lubricant of the social life of early Canada and its particular version of early capitalism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Food Chemistry in Small Bites takes readers on an up-close scientific journey through the transformation of food when meals are prepared. Organized in bite-size, digestible units, this innovative text introduces students to food's molecular makeup as well as the perception of food by the five senses. Using familiar foods as examples, it explores what happens to ingredients when heated, cooled, or treated and also considers what happens when materials that don't naturally mix are forced to do so. With informative, full-color renderings and a hands-on lab section, the book encourages students to think like scientists while preparing delicious dishes. Readers will formulate hypotheses as to why certain foods taste hot despite being at room temperature, why milk separates into curds and whey when lemon is added, and other ordinary but chemically complex phenomena. This book also importantly challenges readers to think critically about the future of food in the face of a warming planet. Patricia B. O'Hara is the Amanda and Lisa Cross Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Biophysics at Amherst College, coauthor of The Chemical Story of Olive Oil, and author of numerous scholarly research publications. Melek Firat Altay is a trained musician and neurobiologist, currently a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

For many Ashkenazi Jews in the United States, Christmastime sparks memories of egg rolls and General Tso's chicken. How did the affinity for Chinese food amongst many Jews begin? Trace this delicious history from the turn-of-the-century Lower East Side to today's take-out lo mein with Andrew Coe, author of Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States. This lecture originally took place on December 22, 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Today, macaroni and cheese is the ultimate comfort food, a staple of weeknight dinners, family gatherings, and Soul Food restaurants. Humble though the dish may seem, its history is filled with surprising twists and turns. Renaissance cardinals and popes dined on elaborate pasta-and-cheese concoctions laced with costly spices. In the eighteenth century, wealthy young Englishmen made macaroni a symbol of continental sophistication. Black women, whose contribution has long been overshadowed, played a crucial role in establishing the dish as an American tradition from the nation's founding through the Civil Rights Movement. The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese: From Ancient Rome to Modern America (Columbia UP, 2026) by Dr. Karima Moyer-Nocchi is a delectable history of macaroni and cheese, tracing an extraordinary journey of cultural exchange and social change. Karima Moyer-Nocchi reveals the religious, political, and industrial forces that shaped its evolution alongside stories of the unsung figures who crafted the dish as we know it today: enslaved cooks who preserved and adapted traditions, immigrant chefs who introduced new variations, and practical homemakers looking to nourish their families with an affordable meal. She emphasizes the adaptability of macaroni and cheese, which in different times has served as both an indulgence on the elite table and sustenance to those struggling to survive, crossing borders, social classes, and cultural divides. Deeply researched and rich with enticing details, this book uncovers the creativity and resilience that brought a beloved food to our tables. The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese also shares centuries of recipes—from ancient Roman authors to celebrity chefs, reworked for modern kitchens—that provide a hands-on way to experience the evolution of this iconic dish. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In the hierarchy of foods, snacks are deemed trivial – perhaps even childish – especially in contrast to meals, which are seen as substantial and necessary. The multiple aisles devoted to sweet and savory treats in supermarkets, and the availability of snacks even at places like home improvement and department stores, speak to the popularity of snacking. But the ubiquity of snacks is relatively new and not common to all countries.In Snack (Bloomsbury, 2026), part of the Object Lessons series, Dr. Eurie Dahn traces the story of snacking culture through specific snacks, including Flamin' Hot Cheetos, cheese crackers, and Choco Pies, and in the contexts of ethnicity, popular culture, diet culture, and even parenting. Snack is an idiosyncratic cultural history that offers surprisingly filling food for thought. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food