The Food Explorer: the true adventures of the globe-trotting botanist who transformed what America eats
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The true adventures of David Fairchild, a late-nineteenth-century food explorer who traveled the globe and introduced diverse crops like avocados, mangoes, seedless grapes--and thousands more--to the American plate.
"In the nineteenth century American meals were about subsistence, not enjoyment. Agriculture yielded stable, basic crops like soybeans, corn, and barley, and few growers considered variety or flavor. But as a new century approached, appetites broadened, and David Fairchild, a young botanist with an insatiable hunger to explore and experience the world, set out in search of foods that would enrich the American farmer and enchant the American eater. Boarding a steamship, Fairchild embarked with little money and even less confidence, but he abounded with curiosity. Soon he fell in with an eccentric San Francisco millionaire named Barbour Lathrop, who took a shine to the awkward young man and financed his wanderlust. Across oceans and over rails, up mountainsides and through the surf of tropical beaches, they visited five continents and more than fifty countries, encountering cultures unimaginable to his neighbors back home. Kale from Croatia, mangoes from India, and hops from Bavaria. Peaches from China, avocados from Chile, and pomegranates from Malta. Fairchild's finds weren't just limited to food: From Egypt he sent back a variety of cotton that revolutionized an industry, and from Japan he introduced the cherry blossom tree, forever brightening America's capital. Along the way he was arrested, caught diseases, and bargained with island tribes. But his culinary ambition came during a formative era, the golden age of science, travel, and a world growing more connected; and through him, America's food system was transformed into the most diverse ever.
American Foodie: taste, art, and the cultural revolution
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The Devil's Cup: a history of the world according to coffee
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Creamy and Crunchy: an informal history of peanut butter, the all-American food
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Creamy and Crunchy feature stories of Jif, Skippy, Peter Pan; the plight of black peanut farmers; the resurgence of natural or old-fashioned peanut butter; the reasons why Americans like peanut butter better than (almost) anyone else; the five ways that today's product is different from the original; the role of peanut butter in fighting Third World hunger; and the Salmonella outbreaks of 2007 and 2009, which threatened peanut butter's sacred place in the American cupboard. To a surprising extent, the story of peanut butter is the story of twentieth-century America, and Jon Krampner writes its first popular history, rich with anecdotes and facts culled from interviews, research, travels in the peanut-growing regions of the South, personal stories, and recipes.
Food Fight: GMOs and the future of the American diet
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Are GMOs really that bad? An environmental journalist takes a fresh look at what they actually mean for our food system and for us. In the past two decades, GMOs have come to dominate the American diet. Advocates hail them as the future of food, an enhanced method of crop breeding that can help feed an ever-increasing global population and adapt to a rapidly changing environment. Critics, meanwhile, call for their banishment, insisting GMOs were designed by overeager scientists and greedy corporations to bolster an industrial food system that forces us to rely on cheap, unhealthy, processed food so they can turn an easy profit. In response, health-conscious brands such as Trader Joe's and Whole Foods have started boasting that they are "GMO-free," and companies like Monsanto have become villains in the eyes of average consumers. Where can we turn for the truth? Are GMOs an astounding scientific breakthrough destined to end world hunger? Or are they simply a way for giant companies to control a problematic food system? Environmental writer McKay Jenkins traveled across the country to answer these questions and discovered that the GMO controversy is more complicated than meets the eye. He interviewed dozens of people on all sides of the debate -- scientists hoping to engineer new crops that could provide nutrients to people in the developing world, Hawaiian papaya farmers who credit GMOs with saving their livelihoods, and local farmers in Maryland who are redefining what it means to be "sustainable." The result is a comprehensive examination of the state of our food system and a much-needed guide for consumers to help them make more informed choices about what to eat for their next meal.
Animal, Vegetable, Junk: a history of food, from sustainable to suicidal
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How humankind first hunted and gathered explains our emergence as a new species and our earliest technology. Our first food systems, from fire to agriculture, tell where we settled and how civilizations expanded. The quest for food for growing populations drove exploration, colonialism, slavery, even capitalism. A century ago, food was industrialized. Since then, new styles of agriculture and food production have written a new chapter of human history, one that is driving both climate change and global health crises. Bittman offers a panoramic view of the story and explains how we can rescue ourselves from the modern wrong turn.
Candy: a century of panic and pleasure
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A lively cultural history that explains how candy became more like food and food more like candy
Crunch!: a history of the great American potato chip
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Dishrag soup & poverty cake : an Idaho potluck of essays on food
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The Fate of Food : what we'll eat in a bigger, hotter, smarter world
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Climate models show that global crop production will decline every decade for the rest of this century due to drought, heat, and flooding. Water supplies are in jeopardy. Meanwhile, the world's population is expected to grow another 30 percent by midcentury. So how, really, will we feed nine billion people sustainably in the coming decades? Journalist Amanda Little spent three years traveling through a dozen countries and as many U.S. states in search of answers to this question. Her journey took her from an apple orchard in Wisconsin to a remote control organic farm in Shanghai, from Norwegian fish farms to famine-stricken regions of Ethiopia. Through her interviews and adventures with farmers, scientists, activists, and engineers, Little tells the story of human innovation and explores approaches both new and old to food production while charting the growth of a movement that could redefine sustainable food on a grand scale. She meets small permaculture farmers and "Big Food" executives, botanists studying ancient superfoods and Kenyan farmers growing the country's first GMO corn. She travels to places that might seem irrelevant to the future of food yet surprisingly play a critical role: a California sewage plant, a U.S. Army research lab, even the inside of a monsoon cloud above Mumbai. Little asks tough questions: Can GMOs actually be good for the environment and for us? Are we facing the end of animal meat? What will it take to eliminate harmful chemicals from farming? How can a clean, climate-resilient food supply become accessible to all?
Fizz: how soda shook up the world
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The story of soda is the story of the modern world, a tale of glamorous bubbles, sparkling dreams, big bucks, miracle cures, and spreading waistlines. This book charts soda's remarkable, world-changing journey from awe-inspiring natural mystery to ubiquitous presence in all our lives.
Girl Hunter: revolutionizing the way we eat, one hunt at a time
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A classically trained chef relates the experiences that made her resolve to take up hunting, describing her research with experienced hunters and her subsequent efforts to create recipes using foods she can supply for herself.
White Bread: a social history of the store-bought loaf
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What can the history of America's one-hundred-year love-hate relationship with sliced white bread tell us about contemporary efforts to change the way we eat? How did white bread, once an icon of American progress, become "white trash"? Fluffy industrial loaves are about as far from slow, local, and organic as you can get, but the story of social reformers, food experts, and diet gurus who believed that getting people to eat certain food could restore the nation's decaying physical, moral, and social fabric will sound very familiar. This book teaches us that when Americans debate what one should eat, they are also wrestling with larger questions of race, class, immigration, and gender. Here the author argues that what we think about the humble, puffy loaf says a lot about who we are and what we want our society to look like. As he traces the story of bread, from the first factory loaf to the latest gourmet pain au levain, he shows how efforts to champion "good food" reflect dreams of a better society, even as they reinforced stark social hierarchies. As open disdain for "unhealthy" eaters and discrimination on the basis of eating habits grow increasingly acceptable, the subject of this book is a timely examination of what we talk about when we talk about food.
Glazed America: a history of the doughnut
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Three Squares: the invention of the American meal
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The story of how the simple gruel of our forefathers gave way to snack fixes and fast food, "Three Squares" also explains how Americans' eating habits may change in the years to come.
Milk! : a 10,000-year food fracas
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According to the Greek creation myth, we are so much spilt milk; a splatter of the goddess Hera's breast milk became our galaxy, the Milky Way. But while mother's milk may be the essence of nourishment, it is the milk of other mammals that humans have cultivated ever since the domestication of animals more than 10,000 years ago, originally as a source of cheese, yogurt, kefir, and all manner of edible innovations that rendered lactose digestible, and then, when genetic mutation made some of us lactose-tolerant, milk itself. Before the industrial revolution, it was common for families to keep dairy cows and produce their own milk. But during the nineteenth century mass production and urbanization made milk safety a leading issue of the day, with milk-borne illnesses a common cause of death. Pasteurization slowly became a legislative matter. And today milk is a test case in the most pressing issues in food politics, from industrial farming and animal rights to GMOs, the locavore movement, and advocates for raw milk, who controversially reject pasteurization. Profoundly intertwined with human civilization, milk has a compelling and a surprisingly global story to tell, and historian Mark Kurlansky is the perfect person to tell it. Tracing the liquid's diverse history from antiquity to the present, he details its curious and crucial role in cultural evolution, religion, nutrition, politics, and economics.
Mother's milk may be the essence of nourishment, but it is the milk of other mammals that humans have cultivated ever since the domestication of animals more than 10,000 years ago. During the nineteenth century mass production and urbanization made milk safety a leading issue of the day, with milk-borne illnesses a common cause of death. Pasteurization slowly became a legislative matter. Today milk is a test case in the most pressing issues in food politics. Kurlansky traces milk's history from antiquity to the present, detailing its curious and crucial role in cultural evolution, religion, nutrition, politics, and economics.
Save Me the Plums : my Gourmet memoir
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When Condé Nast offered Ruth Reichl the top position at America's oldest epicurean magazine, she declined. She was a writer, not a manager, and had no inclination to be anyone's boss. And yet ... Reichl had been reading Gourmet since she was eight; it had inspired her career. How could she say no? This is the story of a former Berkeley hippie entering the corporate world and worrying about losing her soul. It is the story of the moment restaurants became an important part of popular culture, a time when the rise of the farm-to-table movement changed forever the way we eat. Readers will meet legendary chefs like David Chang and Eric Ripert, idiosyncratic writers like David Foster Wallace, and a colorful group of editors and art directors who, under Reichl's leadership, transformed stately Gourmet into a cutting-edge publication. This was the golden age of print media--the last spendthrift gasp before the Internet turned the magazine world upside down. Complete with recipes, Save Me the Plums is a personal journey of a woman coming to terms with being in charge and making a mark, following a passion and holding on to her dreams--even when she ends up in a place she never expected to be.
The Way We Eat Now : how the food revolution has transformed our lives, our bodies, and our world
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In just two generations, the world has undergone a massive shift from traditional, limited diets to more globalized ways of eating-- from bubble tea to quinoa, Soylent to meal kits. Paradoxically, our diets are getting healthier and less healthy at the same time. For some, there has never been a happier food era than today: a time of unusual herbs, farmers' markets, and internet recipe swaps. Yet modern food also kills-- diabetes and heart disease are on the rise everywhere on earth. This is a book about the good, the terrible, and the avocado toast. A riveting exploration of the hidden forces behind what we eat, "The way we eat now" explains how this food revolution has transformed our bodies, our social lives, and the world we live in.
In Meat We Trust: an unexpected history of carnivore America
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The untold story of how meat made America. The moment European settlers arrived in North America, they began transforming the land into a meat-eater's paradise. Long before revolution turned colonies into nation, Americans were eating meat on a scale the Old World could neither imagine nor provide: an average European was lucky to see meat once a week, while even a poor American man put away about two hundred pounds a year. Maureen Ogle guides us from that colonial paradise through the urban meat-making factories of the nineteenth century to the hyperefficient packing plants of the late twentieth century. From Swift and Armour to Tyson, Cargill, and ConAgra. From the 1880s cattle bonanza to 1980s feedlots. From agribusiness to today's "local" meat suppliers and organic countercuisine. Along the way, Ogle explains how Americans' carnivorous demands shaped urban landscapes, Midwestern prairies, and Western ranges, and how the American system of meat making became a source of both pride and controversy.
In Food We Trust: the politics of purity in American food regulation
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One of the great myths of contemporary American culture is that the United States' food supply is the safest in the world because the government works to guarantee food safety and enforce certain standards on food producers, processors, and distributors. In reality U.S. food safety administration and oversight have remained essentially the same for more than a century, with the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 continuing to frame national policy despite dramatic changes in production, processing, and distribution throughout the twentieth century. In Food We Trust is the first comprehensive examination of the history of food safety policy in the United States, analyzing critical moments in food safety history from Upton Sinclair's publication of The Jungle to Congress's passage of the 2010 Food Safety Modernization Act. With five case studies of significant food safety crises ranging from the 1959 chemical contamination of cranberries to the 2009 outbreak of salmonella in peanut butter, In Food We Trust contextualizes a changing food regulatory regime and explains how federal agencies are fundamentally limited in their power to safeguard the food supply.
Grocery: the buying and selling of food in America
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Michael Ruhlman offers commentary on America's relationship with its food and investigates the overlooked source of so much of it -- the grocery store. In a culture obsessed with food -- how it looks, what it tastes like, where it comes from, what is good for us -- there are often more questions than answers. Ruhlman proposes that the best practices for consuming wisely could be hiding in plain sight -- in the aisles of your local supermarket. Using the human story of the family-run Midwestern chain Heinen's as an anchor to this journalistic narrative, he dives into the mysterious world of supermarkets and the ways in which we produce, consume, and distribute food. Grocery examines how rapidly supermarkets -- and our food and culture -- have changed since the days of your friendly neighborhood grocer. But rather than waxing nostalgic for the age of mom-and-pop shops, Ruhlman seeks to understand how our food needs have shifted since the mid-twentieth century, and how these needs mirror our cultural ones.
Fruit: edible, inedible, incredible
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Examines why fruits exist and how their short lives are critical to the natural order. Features razor-sharp cross-sections by visual artist Rob Kesseler using special light and scanning electron microscopy to create astonishing images of a variety of fruits and the seeds they shelter.
The Food of a Younger Land
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Using long-forgotten WPA files archived in the Library of Congress, bestselling author Mark Kurlansky paints a detailed picture of Depression Era Americans through the food that they ate and the local traditions and customs they observed when planning and preparing meals.
Berries : A Global History
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Chillies : A Global History
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There are some of us who can't even stand to look at them--and others who can't live without them: chillies have been searing tongues and watering eyes for centuries in innumerable global cuisines. In this book, Heather Arndt Anderson explores the many ways nature has attempted to take the roofs of our mouths off--from the deceptively vegetal-looking jalapeno to the fire-red ghost pepper--and the many ways we have gleefully risen to the challenge. Anderson tells the story of the spicy berry's rise to prominence, showing that it was cultivated and venerated by the ancient people of Mesoamerica for millennia before Spanish explorers brought it back to Europe. She traces the chilli's spread along trading routes to every corner of the globe, and she explores the many important spiritual and cultural links that we have formed with it, from its use as an aphrodisiac to, in more modern times, an especially masochistic kind of eating competition. Ultimately, she uses the chili to tell a larger story of global trade, showing how the spread of spicy cuisine can tell us much about the global exchange--and sometimes domination--of culture. Mixing history, botany, and cooking, this entertaining read will give your bookshelf just the kick it needs.
Coffee : A Global History
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Most of us can't make it through morning without our cup (or cups) of joe, and we're not alone. Coffee is a global beverage: it's grown commercially on four continents and consumed enthusiastically on all seven--and there is even an Italian espresso machine on the International Space Station. Coffee's journey has taken it from the forests of Ethiopia to the fincas of Latin America, from Ottoman coffee houses to "Third Wave" cafés, and from the simple coffee pot to the capsule machine. In Coffee: A Global History, Jonathan Morris explains both how the world acquired a taste for this humble bean, and why the beverage tastes so differently throughout the world. Sifting through the grounds of coffee history, Morris discusses the diverse cast of caffeinated characters who drank coffee, why and where they did so, as well as how it was prepared and what it tasted like. He identifies the regions and ways in which coffee has been grown, who worked the farms and who owned them, and how the beans were processed, traded, and transported. Morris also explores the businesses behind coffee--the brokers, roasters, and machine manufacturers--and dissects the geopolitics linking producers to consumers. Written in a style as invigorating as that first cup of Java, and featuring fantastic recipes, images, stories, and surprising facts, Coffee will fascinate foodies, food historians, baristas, and the many people who regard this ancient brew as a staple of modern life.
Honey : A Global History
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Whether drizzled into our tea or spread atop our terms of endearment, there's one thing that is always true about honey: it is sweet. As Lucy M. Long shows in this book, while honey is definitely the natural sweetener par excellence, it has a long history in our world as much more, serving in different settings as a food, tonic, medicine, and even preservative. It features in many religions as a sacred food of the gods. In this luscious history, she traces the uses and meanings of honey in myriad cultures throughout time. Long points to a crucial fact about honey: it can be enjoyed with very little human processing, which makes it one of the most natural foods we consume. Its nutritional qualities and flavors dramatically reflect the surroundings in which it is produced, and those who produce it--bees--are some of the most important insects in the world, the chief pollinators of wild plants and domesticated crops alike. Showing how honey has figured in politics, religion, economics, and popular culture, Long also directly explores its tastiest use--in our food and drink--offering a history of its culinary place in the world, one sweetened with an assortment of delicious recipes. Lively and engaged, her account will give even the saltiest of us an insatiable sweet tooth.
Pasta and Noodles : A Global History
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Pasta and noodles are so ubiquitous and popular that many nations around the world claim them as their own invention. In fact, their origins are as murky as ever, a destination that Kantha Shelke sets out for in this fascinating history. Journeying across five continents and through distant lands, she takes readers on a delicious culinary adventure in order to learn more about one of the world's most popular--and satisfying--foods. Shelke traces the evolution and examines the scientific qualities of this highly adaptable staple. From there she guides us from roadside noodle stalls in Singapore to an age-old traditional pasta company in Parma, Italy; from a state-of-the-art Japanese manufacturer to pasta makers in Brazil, Mexico, and United States. She then takes the quest into our homes, offering a bonanza of recipes from around the world suitable to casual and intrepid home-cooks alike. A toothsome look at the world's comfort food, Pasta and Noodles reveals little known facts, tasty titbits, and cultural lore that will have you feeling satiated, indeed.
Pickles : A Global History
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From the fiery kimchi of Korea to American dill spears; from the spicy achar of India to the ceviche of Latin America; from Europe's sauerkraut to brined herrings and chutneys, pickles are unquestionably a global food. They are also of the moment. Growing interest in naturally fermented vegetables--pickles by another name--means that today, in the early twenty-first century, we are seeing a renaissance in the making and consumption of pickles. Across continents and throughout history, humans have relied upon pickling to preserve foods and add to their flavor. Both a cherished food of the elite and a staple of the masses, pickles have also acquired new significance in our health-conscious times: traditionally fermented pickles are probiotic and said to possess anti-aging and anti-cancer properties, while pickle juice is believed to prevent muscle cramps in athletes and reduce sugar spikes in diabetics. Nota bene: It also cures hangovers. In Pickles, Jan Davison explores the cultural and gastronomic importance of pickles from the earliest civilizations' brine-makers to twenty-first-century dilettantes of dill. Join Davison and discover the art of pickling as mastered by the ancient Chinese; find out why Korean astronaut Yi So-yeon took pickled cabbage into space in 2008; learn how the Japanese pickle the deadly puffer fish; and uncover the pickling provenance of that most popular of condiments, tomato ketchup. A compulsively consumable, globe-trotting tour sure to make you pucker, Davison's book shows us how pickles have been omnipresent in humanity's common quest not only to preserve foods, but to create them--with relish.
Bite Me : Food in Popular Culture
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Food is not only something we eat, it is something we use to define ourselves. Ingestion and incorporation are central to our connection with the world outside our bodies. Food's powerful social, economic, political and symbolic roles cannot be ignored - what we eat is a marker of power, cultural capital, class, ethnic and racial identity.Bite Me considers the ways in which popular culture reveals our relationship with food and our own bodies and how these have become an arena for political and ideological battles. Drawing on an extraordinary range of material - films, books, comics, songs, music videos, websites, slang, performances, advertising and mass-produced objects - Bite Me invites the reader to take a fresh look at today's products and practices to see how much food shapes our lives, perceptions and identities.
Black Hunger: Soul Food and America
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In 1889, the owners of a pancake mix witnessed the vaudeville performance of a white man in blackface and drag playing a character called Aunt Jemima. This character went on to become one of the most pervasive stereotypes of black women in the United States, embodying not only the pancakes she was appropriated to market but also post–Civil War race and gender hierarchies—including the subordination of African American women as servants and white fantasies of the nurturing mammy.Using the history of Aunt Jemima as a springboard for exploring the relationship between food and African Americans, Black Hunger focuses on debates over soul food since the 1960s to illuminate a complex web of political, economic, religious, sexual, and racial tensions between whites and blacks and within the black community itself. Celebrated by many African Americans as a sacramental emblem of slavery and protest, soul food was simultaneously rejected by others as a manifestation of middle-class black “slumming.” Highlighting the importance of food for men as well as women, Doris Witt traces the promotion of soul food by New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne and its prohibition by Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad and comedian turned diet guru Dick Gregory. A discussion of cookbook author Vertamae Grosvenor, who distanced herself from the myth of plantation mammy by reimagining soul food as "vibration cooking," sets the stage for Witt's concluding argument that the bodies and appetites of African American women should be viewed as central to contemporary conversations about eating disorders and reproductive rights.Witt draws on vaudeville, literature, film, visual art, and cookbooks to explore how food has been used both to perpetuate and to challenge racial stereotypes. Raising her fist in a Black Power salute, wielding her spatula like a sword, Aunt Jemima steps off the pancake box in a righteous fury.
Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers
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What's the Matter with Meat?
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It's been 111 years since the publication of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair's groundbreaking book on the cattle industry. Though improvements in animal welfare have been made since then, the industry has evolved to include issues Sinclair could never have foreseen. In What's the Matter with Meat, Katy Keiffer leads readers though a crash course on how this powerful multinational business has been able to generate such a bountiful supply of absurdly cheap animal proteins. What's the Matter with Meat? explores everything from labor issues to genetic manipulation to animal welfare to environmental degradation, illustrating just how the industrial model for meat production conjures up huge quantities of cheap meat even as it shifts many of the real costs onto the taxpayer. She describes practices few of us know about, such as land grabs in which predator companies acquire property in foreign countries for meat production, often driving out local farmers. She shows how industry consolidation entrenches cost-effective but harmful practices, creating monopolies that force competitors out of business, drive down labor costs, erode workers' rights, and exert extraordinary power over nearby communities. Keiffer demonstrates with irrefutable force that the current model for meat production--adopted worldwide--is simply not sustainable and will soon exhaust the planet's resources. A hard-hitting critique of the meat industry and its harmful effects, this book shows us just how important it is to care about where our food comes from, to support alternative production systems, and to stop those practices that are ruining our planet in the service of the burger and the nugget.
How Food Made History
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Covering 5,000 years of global history, How Food Made History traces the changing patterns of food production and consumption that have molded economic and social life and contributed fundamentally to the development of government and complex societies. Charts the changing technologies that have increased crop yields, enabled the industrial processing and preservation of food, and made transportation possible over great distances Considers social attitudes towards food, religious prohibitions, health and nutrition, and the politics of distribution Offers a fresh understanding of world history through the discussion of food
How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture
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The Story of Soy
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The humble soybean is the world's most widely grown and most traded oilseed. And though found in everything from veggie burgers to cosmetics, breakfast cereals to plastics, soy is also a poorly understood crop often viewed in extreme terms--either as a superfood or a deadly poison. In this illuminating book, Christine M. Du Bois reveals soy's hugely significant role in human history as she traces the story of soy from its domestication in ancient Asia to the promise and peril ascribed to it in the twenty-first century. Traveling across the globe and through millennia, The Story of Soy includes a cast of fascinating characters as vast as the soy fields themselves--entities who've applauded, experimented with, or despised soy. From Neolithic villagers to Buddhist missionaries, European colonialists, Japanese soldiers, and Nazi strategists; from George Washington Carver to Henry Ford, Monsanto, and Greenpeace; from landless peasants to petroleum refiners, Du Bois explores soy subjects as diverse as its impact on international conflicts, its role in large-scale meat production and disaster relief, its troubling ecological impacts, and the nutritional controversies swirling around soy today. She also describes its genetic modification, the scandals and pirates involved in the international trade in soybeans, and the potential of soy as an intriguing renewable fuel. Featuring compelling historical and contemporary photographs, The Story of Soy is a potent reminder never to underestimate the importance of even the most unprepossesing sprout.
Tortillas: A Cultural History
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“The ordinary tortilla was an extraordinary bond between the human and divine. . . . From birthdays to religious ceremonies, the people of Mesoamerica commemorated important events with tortillas. One Maya tribe even buried their dead with tortillas so that the dogs eaten as dinner during life would not bite the deceased in revenge.”—from Tortillas: A Cultural History For centuries tortillas have remained a staple of the Mexican diet, but the rich significance of this unleavened flatbread stretches far beyond food. Today the tortilla crosses cultures and borders as part of an international network of people, customs, and culinary traditions. In this entertaining and informative account Paula E. Morton surveys the history of the tortilla from its roots in ancient Mesoamerica to the cross-cultural global tortilla. Morton tells the story of tortillas and the people who make and eat them—from the Mexican woman rolling the mano over the metate to grind corn, to the enormous wheat tortillas made in northern Mexico, to twenty-first-century elaborations like the stuffed burrito. This study—the first to extensively present the tortilla’s history, symbolism, and impact—shows how the tortilla has changed our understanding of home cooking, industrialized food, healthy cuisine, and the people who live across borders.
The Story Behind the Dish: Fifty Classic American Foods
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Americans have increasingly embraced food culture, a fact proven by the rising popularity of celebrity chefs and the prominence of television shows celebrating food themes. This fascinating overview reveals the surprising story behind the foods America loves. The Story Behind the Dish: Classic American Foods is an engaging pop culture resource which helps tell the story of American food. Each chapter is devoted to one of 48 distinctive American dishes and features the story of where the food developed, what inspired its creation, and how it has evolved. The book not only covers each food as a single entry, but also analyzes the themes and events that connect them, making the text useful as both a reference and a narrative on the history of food.
Pumpkin: the curious history of an American icon
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Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making
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Meat Culture
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The analysis of meat and its place in Western culture has been central to Human-Animal Studies as a field. Meat Culture brings into focus urgent critiques of hegemonic ‘meat culture', animal farming and the wider animal industrial complex.
