New Books in Food

Apr 06 2025 488 ep. 53 mins 915
New Books in Food Podcast artwork

Interviews with Food Writers about their New Books

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Will Potter, "Little Red Barns: Hiding the Truth, from Farm to Fable" (City Lights Books, 2025)

Apr 06 2025 38 mins  
Little Red Barns: Hiding the Truth, from Farm to Fable (City Lights Books, 2025) is a groundbreaking investigation of factory farms and the unprecedented measures being taken to hide their impact -- on animals, public health, and the environment -- from the public. Hiding behind the little red barns that dot the landscape of rural America and decorate so many of the animal-based pr

Nathalie Cooke, "Tastes and Traditions: A Journey Through Menu History" (Reaktion, 2025)

Apr 03 2025 59 mins  
Menus are invaluable snapshots of the food consumed at specific moments in time and place. Tastes and Traditions: A Journey through Menu History (Reaktion, 2025) by Nathalie Cooke provides glimpses into the meals enjoyed by royalty and rogues, and by those celebrating special occasions or sampling new culinary sensations. It describes food prepared for the great and the good, meals

Sarah Ahn and Nam Soon Ahn, "Umma: A Korean Mom's Kitchen Wisdom and 100 Family Recipes" (America's Test Kitchen, 2025)

Apr 01 2025 41 mins  
When America’s Test Kitchen social media manager Sarah Ahn started her website Ahnest Kitchen to showcase her mother’s cooking via real-time videos of their home life, her work resonated with millions on Instagram and TikTok. Ahn’s experience living at home with her immigrant parents, reconnecting to her heritage, experiencing her mom’s love through her cooking, and the rec

Amy Cox Hall, "The Taste of Nostalgia: Women, Race, and Culinary Longing in Peru" (U Texas Press, 2025)

Mar 21 2025 51 mins  
From the late 1940s to the mid 1960s, Peru’s rapid industrialization and anti-communist authoritarianism coincided with the rise of mass-produced cookbooks, the first televised cooking shows, glossy lifestyle magazines, and imported domestic appliances and foodstuffs. Amy Cox Hall’s The Taste of Nostalgia (U Texas Press, 2025) uses taste as a thematic and analytic thread to exa

Brendan A. Galipeau, "Crafting a Tibetan Terroir: Winemaking in Shangri-La" (U Washington Press, 2025)

Mar 06 2025 79 mins  
Aiming to explore the Sino-Tibetan border region, which is renamed “Shangri-La” by the Chinese government for tourism promotion, Crafting a Tibetan Terroir (U Washington Press, 2025) examines how the deployment of the French notion of terroir creates new forms of ethno-regional identities and village landscapes through the production of Tibetan wine as a commodity. In Shangri-L

Alcohol

Mar 03 2025 20 mins  
In this episode of High Theory, Nina Studer tells us about alcohol. The restrictions and prohibitions, medical and moral discourses surrounding alcohol reveal a great deal about a given society in a particular historical moment. Nina uses alcohol as a lens to analyze the history of French colonization in North Africa. Who consumed alcohol, in what places, how much, and what kinds,

Alexander Smalls and Nina Oduro, "The Contemporary African Kitchen: Home Cooking Recipes from the Leading Chefs of Africa" (Phaidon Press, 2024)

Feb 28 2025 24 mins  
The Contemporary African Kitchen: Home Cooking Recipes from the Leading Chefs of Africa (Phaidon Press, 2024) is an elegant collection of 120 home cooking recipes from Africa’s most​ exciting culinary voices today. Extensively researched and thoughtfully​ curated by James Beard Award winning chef, author, and restaurateur​ Alexander Smalls in collaboration with Dine Diaspor

Kelly Alexander, "Truffles and Trash: Recirculating Food in a Social Welfare State" (UNC Press, 2024)

Feb 24 2025 67 mins  
On a fragile planet with spreading food insecurity, food waste is a political and ethical problem. Examining the collaborative, sometimes scrappy institutional and community efforts to recuperate and redistribute food waste in Brussels, Belgium, Kelly Alexander reveals it is also an opportunity for new forms of sociality. Her study plays out across a diverse set of locations—incl

Emine Ö Evered, "Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Feb 19 2025 56 mins  
Historian Emine Ö. Evered’s Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity (University of Texas Press, 2024) investigates the history of alcohol, its consumption, and its proscription as a means to better understand events and agendas of the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican eras. Through a comprehensive examination of archival, literary, popular culture, me

Lori A. Flores, "Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to Covid-19" (UNC Press, 2025)

Feb 18 2025 79 mins  
Though Latinx foodways are eagerly embraced and consumed by people across the United States, the nation exhibits a much more fraught relationship with Latinx people, including the largely underpaid and migrant workers who harvest, process, cook, and sell this desirable food. In Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to Covid-19 (UNC Press, 2025)