Book Review

In the preface of From Saloons to Steak Houses: A History of Tampa, librarian Andrew T. Huse notes that the majority of studies and narratives of Tampa concentrate on the major forces that shaped its landscape, culture, and future: the cigar industry and its labor force, which...

Cannibalism distinguishes the civilized from the uncivilized, the moral from the depraved, and the holy from the wicked – or so the dominant Western narrative would have you think. Rachel B. Hermann’s edited collection, To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early M...

Rice in the Time of Sugar sets out to prioritize rice as a means of understanding Cuban history. Where sugar has been the focus of much research and policy, Pérez endeavors to correct the imbalance, identifying the inextricable link between the two crops and the way they have ...

Occupying a critical middle ground to these discussions, philosopher Erin McKenna provides a fresh, honest approach to this long-standing debate about eating animals in her reflective text, Livestock: Food, Fiber, and Friends.

In Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat, Robert N. Spengler III discusses foods with origins in inner Asia that are now commonplace on tables globally. In our current times of globalization, the book debates how global exchange of goods is not a new ...

Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Stacie Cassarino is about art and its influence on everyday consumption. Cassarino argues that gastronomic avant-garde literary texts influence national consumption and that these shifts subsequentl...

Iris Yellum reviews Benjamin Robert Siegel's "Hungry Nation" (2018).

Divana Olivas reviews Devon G. Peña, Luz Calvo, Pancho McFarland, and Gabriel R. Valle’s “Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements” (2017).

Anastasia Day reviews Joshua Clark Davis’s “From Head Shops to Whole Foods” (2017).

Gretchen Sneegas reviews “Reinventing the Wheel” (2017), by Bronwen and Francis Percival.

In "Burgundy: A Global Anthropology of Place and Taste," Marion Demossier tackles the various socio-cultural, political, and professional practices surrounding the oenological region of Burgundy.

In "Pressure Cooker," sociologists Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton, and Sinikka Elliott set out to challenge dominant narratives about fixing the food system. By analyzing their ethnographic study of nine women, they reveal the complex factors that form a family's eating habits.

Kevin Kosar's "Moonshine: A Global History" explores the plethora of moonshines across time and space in an effort to disavow his readers of stereotypical American associations of moonshine and moonshiners.

In "Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique," Rachel Louise Moran draws from history and women's studies to consider if the federal government should have a say in what you eat, or how a body should look.

Gitanjali G. Shahani’s edited collection “Food and Literature” prioritizes a variety of literary texts (not all Western-focused) to theorize the relationship between language and food, consumption as both reading practice and eating practice.

In "Every Nation Has Its Dish: Black Bodies & Black Food in Twentieth-Century America," Jennifer Jensen Wallach thoughtfully links Black bodies and Black food consumption as a means of national inclusion and distancing.

In "Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia," Carole Counihan examines the activities of numerous groups across the Mediterranean island, with particular focus on taste as a political and educational tool.

Anastasia Day reviews Amy B. Trubek’s “Making Modern Meals: How Americans Cook Today,” a book that problematizes the concept of cooking at every turn.

Will Payne reviews Robert Ji-Song Ku’s “Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA,” a book that illuminates the many cultural and political hazards inherent in Asian-American cuisine.

Jennifer Lacy-Nichols reviews Marion Nestle’s “Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning),” a book that explores the political strategies used by the soft drink industry.

Romina Delmonte reviews Jean Pierre Poulain’s “The Sociology of Food: Eating and the Place of Food in Society,” as translated by Augusta Dörr, which reads as a theoretical essay and an introductory guide to sociologies of food.

Jeffrey Rowe reviews Alison Hope Alkon and Julie Guthman’s edited volume “The New Food Activism: Opposition, Cooperation, and Collective Action,” which he reads as a call to action.

Erica Zurawski reviews Emma-Jayne Abbots’s “The Agency of Eating: Mediation, Food and the Body,” which unites the eater, food, and knowledge to demonstrate the entanglement of matter and meaning-making.

Catherine Price reviews John T. Lang’s “What’s So Controversial about Genetically Modified Food?” She suggests that the book uses GM debates as an entry point to examine the whole of the food system.

Jessica Carbone reviews Henry Notaker’s “A History of Cookbooks: From Kitchen to Page over Seven Centuries,” a book which she argues is a biography of the cookbook genre.

Peter Mabli reviews Camille Bégin’s “Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search for America’s Food examines the America Eats,” which sensorially interprets America Eats, a partially completed endeavor by the New Deal’s Federal Writers Project.

James Edward Malin reviews Samantha L. Martin-McAuliffe’s edited volume of thirteen original essays, which examine the intersection of food and architecture through relationships of regionalism, sustainability, craft, and authenticity.

Cassandra Malis reviews Adrian Miller’s “The President’s Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, from the Washingtons to the Obamas,” which dives into the history behind food workers in the White House, adding a historical perspective

Claudia Prieto-Piastro reviews Sarah Bowen’s “Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production,” which combines anthropological and historical methods to reveal the politics behind the increased popularity of tequila and mezcal production in Mexico.

Hannah C. Gunderman reviews Brigette Sebastia’s edited volume, “Eating Traditional Food: Politics, Identity, and Practices,” which examines the processes that produce notions of “traditional” foods, particularly within a global foodscape.

Josiah Taylor reviews Jessica Hayes-Conroy’s “Savoring Alternative Food: School Gardens, Healthy Eating, and Visceral Difference,” which reveals how social factors like culture, class, gender, and race contribute to exclude some people from the table.

Virginia Webb reviews Richard Ocejo’s “Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy,” which examines how lower status jobs (bartender, distiller, barber, and butcher) are being upscaled by educated urbanites in a post-industrial city.

Sarah Huang reviews Nora McKeon’s “Food Security Governance: Empowering Communities, Regulating Corporations,” which provides a food system analysis to understand the history of food issues from World War II to present time, from local food systems to global commodity chains.

Rituparna Patgiri writes that Utsa Ray’s “Culinary Culture in Colonial India” is an attempt to understand the relationship between the urban middle class in colonial Bengal and its cuisine.

Alexandra Rodney reviews “Gender, Class and Food: Families, Bodies and Health,” in which Julia M. Parsons draws from 75 interviews to examine everyday foodways and how they contribute to the reproduction of inequality in the United Kingdom.

Daniel Shattuck reviews Ronda Brulotte and Michael Di Giovine’s edited volume, “Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage,” which brings together food scholars from a variety of fields including anthropology, gastronomy, history, and architecture as well as from American, F...

Rose Hayden-Smith’s inaugural book, Sowing the Seeds of Victory, contextualizes the World War I war garden efforts within various progressive reform agendas and situates home front gardens as crucial models for localized, nutrition-oriented food movements for the twentieth and...

The Culinary Imagination: From Myth to Modernity is a book that has grown from Sandra M. Gilbert’s enduring interest in food and its representations, both as a scholar and as a poet. Tracing our fascination with food to myth and to fundamental facts of the food chain, The Culi...

Eating together is a powerful act, but what is it that brings people together around the table? Commensality: From Everyday Food to Feast gives readers a look at commensality from the perspectives of anthropology, sociology, archaeology, and historical research.

Describing a food chain as “farm to fork” may miss a crucial link: post-meal conversation. In Word of Mouth, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson assesses this gap in the food studies literature by examining the rhetoric of food, that which comes out of our mouths rather than in.

Eckart Woertz discusses various courses of action that governments in the Persian Gulf took in order to improve their countries’ food security after the 2008 global food crisis in Oil for Food. The extremely well-researched book takes a historical and political economic approa...

Food, Farms and Solidarity makes valuable contributions to academic scholarship within social movement studies, food studies, and political ecology, though the book’s most important impact is its integration of analysis of and analysis for food activists.

From the biodynamic viticulture of activist French winegrowers to the corporate sector–born Utz certification for global coffee trade, Food Activism: Agency, Democracy, and Economy is a collection of ethnographic case studies collected and edited by Carole Counihan and Valeria...

Kimura points out that something else is hidden in hunger discourses and practices: the voices of the very people who live with hunger, disease, and poverty, many of whom are women.

Everyone Eats draws on a nutritional context to explain the social and cultural reasons for why humans eat what they do. Anderson argues that consumption determines production by creating effective demand (4). The act of buying and acquiring food sparks particular interests.

Scrinis refers to a reductive focus on nutrient composition as “nutritionism” and illustrates how the concept shaped the practices of the food industry, nutritional science, dietary guidelines, and the public understanding of food in the past 150 years.

Featuring eleven essays penned by a veritable Who’s Who of food studies scholars, A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Age concludes the six-volume set edited by Fabio Parasecoli and Peter Scholliers that encompasses the cultural history of food from antiquity to the very ...

Jon Stobart persuasively shows that daily purchasing habits, procurement techniques, and modern retailing practices date as far back as long seventeenth century in Sugar & Spice: Grocers and Groceries in Provincial England.

George Solt’s ample narrative of the history of Japan’s beloved national food traces ramen from its origins as the calorie-rich sustenance of Chinese immigrants and manual laborers to a fashionable worldwide craze.

On one level, this book is a cross-disciplinary exploration of food and culture (Asian and Asian-American); on another, it is an intellectual yet personal yarn from a lover of all things edible whose background (Korean-American) and places of birth and residence (Los Angeles, ...

Eating Asian America addresses the question of why Asian and Asian-influenced food is an integral art of the American foodscape. The overwhelming Asian presence in the American foodscape is the result of external forces and inequalities that have restricted and defined Asians ...

Andrea S. Wiley explores the material and cultural characteristics of milk in the United States and India, illuminating how each country’s distinctive political, economic, religious, and historic context produces divergent meanings attached to dairy.

In High on the Hog, Jessica B. Harris constructs an elegant narrative history that connects the culinary experiences of the African and American continents to show how African Americans shaped the country around them.

Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900 is a cogent study of dairy production from the turn of the twentieth century to the present.

At a time when modern society is said to have left the kitchen for the couch, David Sutton’s latest book, Secrets from the Greek Kitchen, brings welcome empirical and theoretical depth previously lacking from the home cooking discourse.

Perhaps what each piece in this edited volume does best is identify, through ethnographic and archival research, what underlies, is experienced, or is even erased by use of the words “country” and “city” in conceptualizing foodways.

Andrew F. Smith’s Drinking History: Fifteen Turning Points in the Making of American Beverages demonstrates how America’s diverse and shifting beverage tastes intersect histories of politics, economics, social movements, and global influences.

Abigail Carroll’s Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal traces the evolution of the American meal from the colonial era to the present.

Charlotte Biltekoff explores the history of American dietary reform to reveal how culture, politics, and middle class moral ideologies have shaped our social understandings regarding what it means to “eat right” as an American.

In Wine and Culture, Black and Ulin curate a selection of oenocentric essays that aim to showcase how the subject of wine may fluently speak to important contemporary social and cultural discourses.

Bringing together insights drawn from nearly a decade of ethnographic research, Heather Paxson’s The Life of Cheese offers much to populate the theoretical landscape of artisanal cheese production in America.