Episodit
-
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-La, a rapidly developing international ethno-travel destination, European histories and global capitalism are being reestablished and reformulated through viticulture, which has altered landscapes and livelihoods.
From the introduction of vineyards by nineteenth-century French and Swiss Catholic missionaries to make sacramental wine to twenty-first century commercialization, this ethnography documents the ways Tibetans are indigenizing modernity in the context of economic development on their own terms. It provides timely insight into China's rapid entry into the global wine market, highlighting the localized impacts of this emergent industry, which include transformation from subsistence agriculture to monocropping and intensified agrochemical use. It also addresses larger issues of international trade, suggesting that certain commodities - stimulants and intoxicants in particular - have long connected Europe and the Asia Pacific region, and that these connections are now being reconceived in fashioning new industries and identities.
Brendan A. Galipeau is a Lecturer in Binghamton University’s Environmental Studies program. He is the author of Crafting a Tibetan Terroir: Winemaking in Shangri-La (University of Washington Press, 2025). His research and publications broadly focus on environmental and social change and human relations with nature in southwest China and Taiwan.
Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
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, what was viewed as healthy and what was viewed as dangerous, even criminal, can help us approach larger questions of gender, class, and nation.
If you want to learn more, check out her new book, Hour of Absinthe: A Cultural History of France's Most Notorious Drink (McGill-Queens University Press, 2024). The book explores how the mythologizing of one distilled alcohol led to the creation and fabrication of a vast modern folklore. Mystique and moralizing both arose from the spirit’s relationship with empire. Some claim that French soldiers were given daily absinthe rations during France’s military conquest of Algeria to protect them against heat, diseases, and contaminated water. In fact, the overenthusiastic adoption of the drink by these soldiers, and subsequently by French settlers, was perceived as a threat to France’s colonial ambitions - an anxiety that migrated into French medicine. At the height of its popularity in the late nineteenth century, absinthe reigned in the bars, cafés, and restaurants of France and its colonial empire. Yet by the time it was banned in 1915, the famous green fairy had become the green peril, feared for its connection with declining birth rates and its apparent capacity to induce degeneration, madness, and murderous rage in its consumers.
Dr. Nina Studer is a historian working on the 19th and 20th century history of French colonies in North Africa and the Middle East. Her work focuses on the history of drinks, in particular tea, coffee, Fanta/Coca-Cola, Orangina, wine and absinthe. Her doctorate, published as
The Hidden Patients: North African Women in French Colonial Psychiatry (Böhlau, 2015) is available via Open Access. Currently she works as an associate researcher at the Institut Éthique Histoire Humanités at the University of Geneva, part of Dr. Francesca Arena’s team looking into the medical history of wet dreams between the 18th and the 20th century. The SNSF-project has the title: “Nuits polluantes: masculinité et médecine en Suisse et en France (XVIII – XX siècles)”.
The image for this episode is an advertisement for the Algerian wine "Sénéclauze" from 1933, from the personal collection of Nina S. Studer. Many thanks to Nina for sharing it with us.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
Puuttuva jakso?
-
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 Diaspora CEO Nina Oduro, this bold volume celebrates Africa’s extraordinary gastronomic past and present across a breadth of dishes. Composed of 55 countries with more than 1.4 billion people, and 2,000-plus languages spoken, Africa is home to distinct and diverse culinary traditions.
The Contemporary African Kitchen centers Africa’s multifaceted cuisine and, as Smalls writes in the introduction, seeks to bring it into the “contemporary, modern, and stunning realm, illustrated through a myriad of stories, images, and recipes, all of which highlight Africa’s gifts to the world, through people and cuisine.” To accomplish this, Smalls and Oduro meticulously selected 33 of Africa’s most innovative and influential figures working today, all of whom were born or raised across the continent or have demonstrated contributions across countries, among them: Sinoyolo Sifo, Matse Uwatse, Eric Adjepong, Rōze Traore, Mogau Seshoene, and Dieuveil Malonga.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
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—including a food bank with ties to the EU, a social restaurant serving low-cost meals made from supermarket surplus by an emergent immigrant labor force, and a social inclusion program in an urban market with a "zero food waste" pop-up cafe.
In Truffles and Trash: Recirculating Food in a Social Welfare State (UNC Press, 2024), Alexander argues that these efforts, in concert with innovative policy, effectively recirculate wasted food to new publics and produce what she terms a "spectrum of edibility." According to Alexander, these models face challenges—including reproducing the very power dynamics across race, class, and citizenship status they seek to circumvent. They also mirror the challenges of the everyday operations of the European social welfare state, which is increasingly reliant on NGOs to meet provisioning promises. Yet she finds that they also move the needle forward to reduce food waste across one city, providing an example for major urban centers around the world.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
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, media, and other sources, it unveils a traditionally overlooked—and even excluded—aspect of human history in a region that many do not associate with intoxicants, inebriation, addiction, and vigorous wet-dry debates.
Evered's account uniquely chronicles how the Turko-Islamic Ottoman Empire developed strategies for managing its heterogeneous communities and their varied rights to produce, market, and consume alcohol, or to simply abstain. The first author to reveal this experience’s connections with American Prohibition, she demonstrates how—amid modernization, sectarianism, and imperial decline—drinking practices reflected, shifted, and even prompted many of the changes that were underway and that hastened the empire’s collapse. Ultimately, Evered’s book reveals how Turkey’s alcohol question never went away but repeatedly returns in the present, in matters of popular memory, public space, and political contestation.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
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), Lori A. Flores traces how our dual appetite for Latinx food and Latinx food labor has evolved from the World War II era to the COVID-19 pandemic, using the US Northeast as an unexpected microcosm of this national history.
Spanning the experiences of food workers with roots in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Central America, Flores's narrative travels from New Jersey to Maine and examines different links in the food chain, from farming to restaurants to seafood processing to the deliverista rights movement. What unites this eclectic material is Flores's contention that as our appetite for Latinx food has grown exponentially, the visibility of Latinx food workers has demonstrably decreased. This precariat is anything but passive, however, and has historically fought--and is still fighting--against low wages and exploitation, medical neglect, criminalization, and deeply ironic food insecurity.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In Pub (Bloomsbury, 2025) a new addition to the Object Lessons series, Dr. Philip Howell takes the public house as an object, or rather as a series of objects: he takes the pub apart and examines its constituent elements, from pub signs to the bar staff to the calling of “time.” But Pub also explores the hidden features of the pub, such as corporate control, cultural acceptance and exclusion, and the role of the pub in communities.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
From Chinatown to Every Town: How Chinese Immigrants Have Expanded the Restaurant Business in the United States (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Zai Liang explores the recent history of Chinese immigration within the United States and the fundamental changes in spatial settlement that have relocated many low-skilled Chinese immigrants from New York City's Chinatown to new immigrant destinations. Using a mixed-method approach over a decade in Chinatown and six destination states, sociologist Dr. Liang specifically examines how the expansion and growing popularity of Chinese restaurants has shifted settlement to more rural and faraway areas.
Dr. Liang's study demonstrates that key players such as employment agencies, Chinatown buses, and restaurant supply shops facilitate the spatial dispersion of immigrants while simultaneously maintaining vital links between Chinatown in Manhattan and new immigrant destinations.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
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 Commentary (OU Press, 2018).
Rabbi Shmuel Goldin received his BS in psychology and his MA in Jewish education from Yeshiva University, and his rabbinic ordination from the Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University. He was included in Newsweek’s list of “America’s Top 50 Rabbis for 2012” and in Forward magazine’s list of Jewish communal leaders who have made a difference in the community at large.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
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 cultures, and fostered exchange. The Poetics of Fire calls for decolonization of chile cultivation and a renewed embrace of Indigenous ideals toward land and nourishment, arguing that chiles serve as a connection point between pre-colonization Indigenous societies and twentieth century (and beyond) Chicanx and Latinx communities. At once food studies, Indigenous studies, and Latinx studies, The Poetics of Fire dispenses with Scoville units and instead thinks about how chile is a window for understanding a decolonized world.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
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 and ridicule, taking on a symbolic status among serious food connoisseurs as an indication of Americans’ culinary decline and a growing disconnection between diners and the origins of the food that they ate.
During a time of rising beef prices and growing health concerns regarding red meats, the Chicken McNugget was received as a lighter alternative to traditional burger meals, clean and easy to consume, popular with children, and adaptable to busy “on-the-go” lifestyles of working parents. Consumers understood that they were not purchasing a premium product made from the finest cuts but selected the McNugget as a rational economic purchase that represented a new way of dining.
In reassembling the rise of poultry in the United States, Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet (University of Georgia Press, 2024) by Dr. Patrick Dixon presents a multilayered approach, connecting the entwined stories of workers and industrialists with restauranteurs and consumers, the former geographically moored within the South, the latter diverse and nationwide. Dr. Dixon centers further processed chicken within an analysis of the U.S. food system that demonstrates that consumers did not unwittingly succumb to a “junk food” diet but made deliberate and aspirational decisions based on conceptions of leisure, lifestyle, and bodily needs.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
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 range of essays, Gordon showcases her background in biology, taking us deep into the fungal world, exploring mushrooms both edible and not, found and foraged, and the myriad ways in which mushrooms and trees make up our ecosystem and are in fact a reflection of the way we build our own personal communities and connections.
This collection of essays will resonate with anyone who’s ever thought, “can I eat that?” when seeing a mushroom, but also those with larger questions about our place in the natural world.
More About Ariel Gordon:
Ariel Gordon (she/her) is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. She is the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival that appears in the Winnipeg Free Press. Gordon’s essay “Red River Mudlark” was 2nd place winner of the 2022 Kloppenberg Hybrid Grain Contest in Grain Magazine and other work appeared recently in FreeFall, Columba Poetry, Canthius, and Canadian Notes & Queries. Gordon's fourth collection of poetry, Siteseeing: Writing nature & climate across the prairies, was written in collaboration with Saskatchewan poet Brenda Schmidt and appeared in fall 2023.
About Hollay Ghadery:
Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
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. Dayne Riley is an engaging and original study that explores how literary satirists represented these consumables—and related anxieties about the changing nature of Britishness—in their work. Dr. Riley traces the satirical treatment of wine, beer, ale, gin, pipe tobacco, and snuff from the beginning of Charles II’s reign, through the boom in tobacco’s popularity, to the end of the Gin Craze in libertine poems and plays, anonymous verse, ballad operas, and the satire of canonical writers such as Gay, Pope, and Swift. Focusing on social concerns about class, race, and gender, Consuming Anxieties examines how satirists championed Britain’s economic strength on the world stage while critiquing the effects of consumable luxuries on the British body and consciousness.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
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 always been the case. For a great span of the past—from antiquity through about the middle of the eighteenth century—one of the most pervasive branches of medicine was known as dietetics, prescribing not only what people should eat but also how they should order many aspects of their lives, including sleep, exercise, and emotional management. Dietetics did not distinguish between the medical and the moral, nor did it acknowledge the difference between what was good for you and what was good. Dietetics counseled moderation in all things, where moderation was counted as a virtue as well as the way to health. But during the nineteenth century, nutrition science began to replace the language of traditional dietetics with the vocabulary of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and calories, and the medical and the moral went their separate ways. Steven Shapin shows how much depended upon that shift, and he also explores the extent to which the sensibilities of dietetics have been lost. Throughout this rich history, he evokes what it felt like to eat during another historical period and invites us to reflect on what it means to feel about food as we now do. Shapin shows how the change from dietetics to nutrition science fundamentally altered how we think about our food and its powers, our bodies, and our minds.
Steven Shapin is professor emeritus of the history of science at Harvard University.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
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-technology–have prided and put forward images of themselves as existing on the technological cutting-edge of modernity. Brinkman examines how different ideologies of farming have developed over time in the United States and how these ideologies have shaped the adoption of and ideas around new agricultural technologies. In addition to his academic work, Brinkman is also an accomplished saxophonist and jazz musician, and you can find recordings from two of his current bands, the Fabulous Nite-Life Boogie and Les Trois Chats, online.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
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 annual U.S. presidential “pardon” of a Thanksgiving turkey, and introduces us to “a tremendously handsome, outgoing, and intelligent turkey” named Cornelius. Above all, Singer explains how we can improve our holiday tables—for turkeys, people, and the planet—by liberating ourselves from the traditional turkey feast. In its place, he encourages us to consider trying a vegetarian alternative—or just serving the side dishes that many people already enjoy far more than turkey. Complete with some delicious recipes for turkey-free holiday feasting, Consider the Turkey (Princeton University Press, 2024) will make you reconsider what you serve for your next holiday meal—or even tomorrow’s dinner.
Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics, with a background in philosophy. He works mostly in practical ethics and is best known for Animal Liberation and for his writings about global poverty.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
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 war and a battalion of public relations experts and tastemakers to transform wine, beer, and whiskey into emblems of the American good life. Alcohol producers and their allies—a group that included scientists, trade associations, restaurateurs, home economists, cookbook authors, and New Deal planners—powered a publicity machine that linked alcohol to wartime food crusades and new ideas about the place of pleasure in modern American life.
In this deeply researched and engagingly written book, Dr. Jacobson shows how the yearnings of ordinary consumers and military personnel shaped alcohol’s cultural reinvention and put intoxicating pleasures at the center of broader debates about the rights and obligations of citizens.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
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 as the pig. The pig has become an iconic symbol for people to signal their Jewishness, non-Jewishness, or rebellion from Judaism. There is nothing in the Bible that suggests Jews are meant to embrace this level of pig-phobia.
In Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig (NYU Press, 2024), Jordan D. Rosenblum historicizes the emergence of the pig as a key symbol of Jewish identity, from the Roman persecution of ancient rabbis, to the Spanish Inquisition, when so-called Marranos (“Pigs”) converted to Catholicism, to Shakespeare’s writings, to modern memoirs of those leaving Orthodox Judaism. The pig appears in debates about Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-century England and in vaccine conspiracies; in World War II rallying cries, when many American Jewish soldiers were “eating ham for Uncle Sam;” in conversations about pig sandwiches reportedly consumed by Karl Marx; and in recent deliberations about the kosher status of Impossible Pork.
All told, there is a rich and varied story about the associations of Jews and pigs over time, both emerging from within Judaism and imposed on Jews by others. Expansive yet accessible, Forbidden offers a captivating look into Jewish history and identity through the lens of the pig.
Interviewee: Jordan D. Rosenblum is the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism and Director of the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food -
Today I’m speaking with Jeffrey Pilcher, Professor of Food History at the University of Toronto. We are discussing his new book, Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity (Oxford University Press, 2024). While beer, or even alcohol for that matter, is not consumed in many parts of the world, its near universality is still astonishing. Even in the Middle East, where alcohol is largely forbidden, non-alcoholic beer sells well. Perhaps most surprising is that in nearly every place where beer is consumed (with the exception of Ireland’s Guinness) the pale lager dominates in popularity. This wasn’t always the case, and the story of how this came to be is a textbook example of the standardization driven by the forces of globalization. Examined as a commodity, beer offers as important a window into understanding the development of our modern world as does oil or McDonalds. Analyzed as a cultural artifact, beer tells us something about how people identify, what groups they belong to, and what livelihoods they pursue. Hopped Up is an excellent history that will appeal to historians and beer-drinkers of all stripes— whether you prefer Guinness, Sapporo, Bud Light, or non-alcoholic beer.
Caleb Zakarin is editor 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 -
To the untrained eye there’s nothing as unexciting as tofu, normally regarded as a tasteless, beige, congealed mass of crushed, boiled soybeans. However, tofu more than stands up on its own. Reviled for decades as a vegetarian oddity, the brave, wobbly block has made a comeback.
Tofu: a Culinary History (Reaktion, 2024) by Russell Thomas is a global history of bean curd stretches from ancient creation myths and tomb paintings, via Chinese poetry and Japanese Buddhist cuisine, to deportations in Soviet Russia and struggles for power on the African continent. It describes the potentially non-Chinese roots of tofu, its myriad types, why ‘eating tofu’ is an insult in Cantonese, and its environmental impact today. Warning: this book actually makes tofu exciting. It’s anything but bland.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food - Näytä enemmän
