New Books in Food

Feb 03 2025 476 ep. 53 mins 860
New Books in Food Podcast artwork

Interviews with Food Writers about their New Books

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Shmuel Goldin, "Unlocking the Haggada: The Complete Haggada With In-Depth Commentary" (OU Press, 2018)

Feb 03 2025 19 mins  
Who wrote the Haggada? Is there a thematic roadmap to the structure of the Seder? Why is the meal eaten in the middle of Hallel? These and many more questions could be asked in one's struggle to discern what the Seder is really about. All the more reason to join us as we speak with Rabbi Shmuel Goldin about his book, Unlocking the Haggada: The Complete Haggada With In-Depth Comment

Victor M. Valle, "The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands" (U New Mexico Press, 2023)

Jan 17 2025 81 mins  
Chile is more than just spice, writes Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and Cal Poly Ethnic Studies professor Victor Valle in The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands (U New Mexico Press, 2023). By tracing the meaning of chile as a plant and chile eating as an act. Valle shows how Indigenous cultivation and culinary practices troubled colonizers, sustained

Patrick Dixon, "Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

Jan 13 2025 66 mins  
For McDonald’s, the Chicken McNugget, the flagship product of further processed chicken, represented a once-in-a-generation innovation, a snack item that quickly evolved into a meal, spawned a legion of imitators, and gained a large share of the global poultry market. Yet, almost as soon as the McNugget made its North American debut, it quickly became the subject of opprobrium an

Ariel Gordon, "Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest" (Wolsak and Wynn, 2024)

Jan 11 2025 46 mins  
Both personal and entertaining, Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024) is the highly anticipated second book of a trilogy and shows Winnipeg author Ariel Gordon at her best: interweaving the personal with the easily-overlooked local and natural and local world around her, and passing on her contagious delight for the world at—and under—our feet. In a diverse

Dayne C. Riley, "Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751" (Bucknell UP, 2024)

Jan 09 2025 47 mins  
Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and tobacco promised a brighter financial future for England, even as overindulgence at home posed serious moral pitfalls. Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751 (Bucknell University Press, 2024) by Dr

Steven Shapin, "Eating and Being: A History of Ideas about Our Food and Ourselves" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Jan 08 2025 44 mins  
What we eat, who we are, and the relationship between the two. Eating and Being: A History of Ideas about Our Food and Ourselves (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a history of Western thinking about food, eating, knowledge, and ourselves. In modern thought, eating is about what is good for you, not about what is good. Eating is about health, not about virtue. Yet this has not

Joshua Brinkman on American Farming Culture and the History of Technology

Jan 06 2025 90 mins  
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Joshua Brinkman, Assistant Teaching Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at North Carolina State University, about his book, American Farming Culture and the History of Technology (Routledge, 2024). The book provides a fascinating exploration about how American farmers–contrary to their image as backwards and even anti-techno

Peter Singer, "Consider the Turkey" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Dec 26 2024 52 mins  
A turkey is the centerpiece of countless Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Yet most of us know almost nothing about today’s specially bred, commercially produced birds. In this brief book, bestselling author Peter Singer tells their story—and, unfortunately, it’s not a happy one. Along the way, he also offers a brief history of the turkey and its consumption, ridicules the

Lisa Sheryl Jacobson. "Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey After Prohibition" (U California Press, 2024)

Dec 25 2024 93 mins  
In popular memory the repeal of US Prohibition in 1933 signaled alcohol’s decisive triumph in a decades-long culture war. But as Dr. Lisa Jacobson reveals in Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition (University of California Press, 2024), alcohol’s respectability and mass market success were neither sudden nor assured. It took a world

Jordan D. Rosenblum, "Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig" (NYU Press, 2024)

Dec 24 2024 65 mins  
Jews do not eat pig. This (not always true) observation has been made by both Jews and non-Jews for more than three thousand years and is rooted in biblical law. Though the Torah prohibits eating pig meat, it is not singled out more than other food prohibitions. Horses, rabbits, squirrels, and even vultures, while also not kosher, do not inspire the same level of revulsion for Jews