Currently browsing posts about: Books

Arleen Tuchman.  Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease.  Yale University Press, 2020.I did a blurb for this book:

This is a superb, deeply researched history of the role of racism and class bias in perceptions of type 2 diabetes.  Its root causes?  Poverty and discrimination—a new vision for a prevention agenda.

Tuchman does for type 2 diabetes what historians of other diseases have done: explore the central role of race and racism.  Racism, she explains, can

Generate ill health by producing pathological responses to the stress of living in a society in which skin color is endowed with privileges denied to others.  Racism, in other words, can make people sick.  In this way, racism—not race—becomes a fundamental cause of differential disease rates, making it impossible to draw a sharp line between what is biological and what is social.

As she documents, health professionals first viewed diabetes as a disease of the Jews—perhaps because they went to doctors more often.   It took decades for scientists to distinguish type 1 from type 2 diabetes, and more decades to recognize that its higher prevalence among non-white minority groups might be due to the obesity-promoting diets and lifestyles of poverty.

For documentation of the social determinants of health, this book is an instant classic.

Jessica Harris. Vintage Postcards from the African World: In the Dignity of Their Work and the Joy of Their Play.  University of Mississippi Press, 2020.

I reviewed this book for Food, Culture, and Society, which published my review online on July 23, 2020.  It won’t appear in print until November 2021.  Emily Contois, the fabulous book review editor, is way ahead.

Here’s what I said about it.

Some years ago, I was in Woods Hole and hopped on the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard to visit Jessica Harris at her cottage in the historic African-American community at Oak Bluffs. I knew her as the distinguished culinary historian, cookbook author, and scholar of the African food diaspora. In the early years of NYU’s food studies program, she taught brilliant courses on food and culture that I sat in on whenever I could. She is now retired from a long teaching career at Queens College.

During that Oak Bluffs visit, Harris showed me boxes packed with old postcards depicting Africans – and their descendants throughout the world – growing, carrying, preparing, and eating food. I couldn’t stop looking at them, and I’ve never stopped wondering what happened to them. This book is the answer, and a perfect fit with the University of Mississippi’s series on Atlantic Migration and the African Diaspora, which Harris edits.

In addition to her other accomplishments, Harris is a passionate deltiologist, a term new to my vocabulary meaning one who collects – and sometimes studies – postcards, which Harris had been doing for fifty years. She begins the book with three short essays – a description of when, how, and where she amassed her collection; a discussion of what can be learned from postcards and the kinds of questions that need to be asked about them (illustrated with about 25 examples); and a history of the introduction and use of postcards from the 1870s on. She also includes guidelines on how to estimate a postcard’s date (not easy).

But most of the book is devoted to 168 color illustrations of postcards from her collection, almost all from the early 1900s. These illustrate people at work and play from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States in three categories: farm, garden, and sea; marketplace, venders, cooks; and leisure, entertainments, and festivities. Their captions repeat information printed on the front, state whatever is printed or written on the back, and, if the card is stamped, give the date it was mailed. For example, a photograph of a Caribbean sugar warehouse (which reminded me of Kara Walker’s magnificent 2014 “sugar baby” sculpture in Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory), is captioned: “Stacking Bags of Raw Sugar. Back: Post Card British Manufacture. Printed for the Imperial Institute by McCorquodale & Co. Ltd. London. A Red Bromide Photograph. (Divided Back.)” (84).

That’s it. Unless the card has this information, the captions say nothing about who took the picture, where, and in what year, who is depicted, its context, its purpose, or whether it was taken in a studio. In her introductory essay, “”Interrogating the Images,” Harris says “I am not a postcard scholar” (19). She collected and selected the cards for their illustration of culinary or cultural history and colonial exploitation, but also for their beauty, curiosity, or inscrutability. If you want to know more, it’s up to you to find that out and develop your own interpretation.

Despite that protestation, Harris cannot avoid taking a scholar’s approach. She points out the colonial attitudes expressed in the images or their titles–“elegant banana seller” (30), or the bare-breasted women selling foods at a “native” market in Dakar that looks like something out of the early years of National Geographic. This market could not possibly be in Dakar, Harris notes, Senegal is a Muslim country, where women did not appear in public unclothed.

In this era of #BlackLivesMatter, it is uncomfortable to look at images of picturesque poverty or colonial exploitation: “Blacks in a Moorish café” (68), “Zulus at Mealtime” (69), or even “Water coconut vendor” (97) are depicted as exotics. Given its racist history, the United States postcards are particularly problematic: “Polly in the Peanut Patch” (110), “Negro Vegetable Vendor” (123), “Old/Southern Kitchen and Negro Manny” (130) should and do make us squirm. It’s hard to view “Food for contention” (135) as just a charming photograph of a little girl reaching for her brother’s watermelon slice if such images weren’t so fraught with racist meanings.

Each of these images has a story behind it that calls for analysis by food studies scholars. Harris’s Vintage Postcards should inspire all of us to become avid deltiologists.

I just got the first copies of my forthcoming book with Kerry Trueman, Let’s Ask Marion: What You Need to Know about the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health.

The publication date was supposed to be September 29 but University of California Press moved it up to September 1.  The y will also publish the e-book on September 1.

This means it can be used in fall classes (I’m using it in the NYU undergraduate class I’m teaching on Food Politics in the Covid-19 Era.

Information about the book and its Table of Contents are here.

You can read the Introduction here.

And UC Press sent me these photos.

It’s a tiny book, not much bigger than a coffee mug.

Here’s the back cover:

And here’s the first page of the table of contents.

David Raubenheimer and Stephen J. Simpson.  Eat Like the Animals: What Nature Teaches Us About the Science of Healthy Eating.  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.

I did a blurb for this book:

Eat Like the Animals is a must-read. This beautifully written book proposes a highly original and compelling explanation for why so many of us gain weight in today’s overprocessed food environment. Raubenheimer and Simpson are biologists who use their deep knowledge of animal and insect physiology, evolution, and feeding behavior to construct a compelling hypothesis: we share with animals an innate appetite for protein that regulates what we eat.

Here is one sample:

Our analyses, inspired all those years ago by experiments with locusts and then extended to primates in the wild, had provided a radical new insight into the obesity epidemic. Ultraprocessed foods make us fat not because we have such strong appetites for the fats and carbs they contain, as is often thought to be the case. Rather, we become overweight because our appetite for protein is stronger than our ability to limit fat and carb intake. So, when protein is diluted by fats and carbs, as it is in ultraprocessed foods, our appetite for it overwhelms the mechanisms that normally would tell us to stop eating fats and carbs. As a result, we eat more than we should, more than is good for us.”  (p. 144)

And here is another:

That realization provided one of the key insights of this book and one that has guided us ever since: the strong appetite for protein shared by all animals can lead us to eat too much or too little of other nutrients, including fats and carbs. If our protein appetite is not satisfied, we will overeat the other two. Once we get enough protein, our appetites cease driving us to eat more. That’s as simple as we can make nutrition—without oversimplifying it.  (P. 180)

Tim Lang. Feeding Britain: Our Food Problems and How to Fix Them.  Pelican, 2020.  

I reviewed this book for The Lancet.  The online version is here.

Although Lang wrote his book before the COVID-19 pandemic, it thoroughly explains the governmental weaknesses that led to the UK’s food vulnerability and delayed and inadequate response to the crisis. Lang could not be more expert; he knows the British food policy scene from the inside, having started his career as a hill farmer, spending decades as a food advocate, academic, and adviser to domestic and international agencies, and having written previous books on food systems. His purpose here is to convince British politicians to take food issues seriously, to assume moral and political leadership, and to transform the UK’s food system to one that is more self-sufficient, more resilient, and better able to reduce food insecurity, prevent obesity, and reduce environmental damage.

I’ve just sent back the page proofs for my forthcoming book with Kerry Trueman.  It’s set for publication in late September.  It’s a short (just over 200 pages), small format (4 x 6) set of 18 short essays in Q and A format.  Kerry did the Qs.  I did the As along with introductory and concluding chapters, and a resource list.

The book went into page proofs before the Coronavirus hit.  If anything, the pandemic makes the food topics we talk about in the book even more relevant.

You can pre-order the book from Amazon here.

Rebecca de Souza.  Feeding the Other: Whiteness, Privilege, and Neoliberal Stigma in Food Pantries.  MIT Press, 2019.

This must be the season for books about food banking (see last week’s Weekend Reading).

Rebecca de Souza explains her book as about

food justice and, more precisely, the stigmatizing narratives that surround people who are hungry and food insecure…I argue that stigmatizing narratives about those who are hungry and food insecure—that is, poor people, women, and racial minorities—serve to uphold and legitimize the unjust food system.  I use the term neoliberal stigma to refer to a particular kind of Western and American narrative that focuses on individualism, hard work, and personal responsibility as defining attributes of human dignity and citizenship.  When people do not live up to these parameters, for reasons out of their control, they are marked as irresponsible, unworthy, and “bad citizens,” creating the “Us and Them” phenomenon.

She demonstrates these concepts through observations of two food pantries in Duluth, Minnesota.