Currently browsing posts about: Books

Marcia Chatelain.  Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America.  Liveright, 2020.  

I did a blurb for this book, and was happy to do it:

Marcia Chatelain uses the complex interrelationship of black communities with McDonald’s to explore the history of American racism and the struggle for civil rights.   Franchise is an eye-opener for anyone who cares about why diet-related chronic disease is more prevalent in these communities and what it is really like to be black in America.

Here are a few selected excerpts to give you the idea:

The contemporary health crisis among black America—like all of our society’s most pressing problems—has a history.  By unmasking the process of how fast food “became black,” we are able to appreciate the difficult decisions black America has had to make under the stress of racial trauma, political exclusion, and social alienation.  This story is about how capitalism can unify cohorts to serve its interests, even as it dissembles communities…Ultimately, history encourages us to be more compassionate toward individuals navigating few choices, and history cautions us to be far more critical of the institutions and structures that have the power to take choices away (p. 23).

To ignore the positive impacts of franchise networks among communities of color that appreciate their contributions would be shortsighted.  It is equally shortsighted to ignore the government subsidies, civil right organization endorsements, limited community resources, and economic desperation that supports the dubious idea that fast food—and business on the whole—can breathe life into an underdeveloped community (p. 253).

The idea of financially sound black institutions is alluring across the ideological spectrum because it allows white conservatives and liberals alike to claim plausible deniability in their role in supporting systems and politics that maintain racial capitalism (p. 260).

This book is concerned with the reasons that places like Ferguson are more likely to get a fast food restaurant than direct cash aid to the poor, oversight over the police department, or jobs that pay more than $8.60 per hour (p. 263).

This book was reviewed in the New York Times:

“Franchise” is a serious work of history….“History encourages us to be more compassionate toward individuals navigating few choices,” Chatelain writes, “and history cautions us to be far more critical of the institutions and structures that have the power to take choices away.”

Aaron S. Gross, Jody Myers, and Jordan D. Rosenblum.  Feasting and Fasting: The History and Ethics of Jewish Food.  New York University Press, 2020. 

This book comes with heavy-duty endorsements: a Foreword by Hasia Diner, and an Afterword by Jonathan Safran Foer.

I was interested to read it and did a blurb for it.

Feasting and Fasting is a fascinating account of the history of Jewish food, within and outside of dietary laws.   The authors engage in Talmudic debates about how specific foods and diets as a whole do or do not define Jewish identity.  Crisco is for Jews?  Peanut oil caused such debates?  Who knew.  This book is a great read.

What to quote?  So many choices.  Here’s a snippet from Jordan Rosenblum’s chapter on Jews and garlic:

After the Exodus from Egypt, when the Israelites wandered in the desert, they grew tired of eating only manna.  Comparing the varied diet that they ate as slaves in Egypt to the unvaried diet that they now enjoyed as free women and men, a few troublemakers complained: “The riffraff in their midst felt a gluttonous craving; and then the Israelites wept and said, “If only we had meat to eat!  We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.”

This, as it turns out, is the only mention of garlic in the Hebrew Bible.  In this chapter,

we shall briefly explore the historical association between Jews and garlic that develops over the next three millennia.  In doing so, we shall see how garlic eventually functions both internally (by Jews) and externally (by non-Jews) as a symbol that represents Self and Other—or, in the terminology favored in anthropology and food studies, how garlic operates as a metanym for Jews.

Fabio Parasecoli.  Food.  MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series. 2019.

This is the latest work of my NYU Food Studies colleague, Fabio Parasecoli, a prolific scholar and writer.  The book is explained as:

A consumer’s guide to the food system, from local to global: our part as citizens in the interconnected networks, institutions, and organizations that enable our food choices.

The book is a short (200 pages or so), small-format set of seven chapters on food systems, health and nutrition, the environment, technology, hunger, and what’s next.

Here’s an quick excerpt from a section in the Health/Nutrition chapter subtitled “Looking for easy solutions.”

Superfoods offer simple–and lucrative–answers to very complex problems: rather than dealing with changes of habits or diets or trying to understand intricate metabolic functions, their consumption assuages the concerns connected with ingestion.  The attractiveness of superfoods and exotic or traditional remedies is also related to the diffusion of an approach to eating and health that has been described as nutritonism, characterized by “a reductive focus on the nutrient composition of foods as the means for understanding their healthfulness, as well as by a reductive interpretation of the focus of these nutrients in bodily health,” with little concern for the level or processing or quality.  Consumers attuned to such approaches shift their attention from foods to individual nutrients: polyphenols in red wine are good antioxidants; lycopene in tomatoes can prevent certain kinds of cancer….Why worry about a balanced diet when you can make up for any deficiencies by consuming vitamins, fiber, or fortified foods? (pages 68-69).

A man after my own heart, obviously.  This is a short, easy introduction to most of the major food system issues under discussion today.  It also comes with a useful glossary.

Full disclosure: I read and commented on an earlier draft of the nutrition chapter and like the way it—and the other chapters—came out.

Paul Freedman.  American Cuisine: And How it Got that Way.  Liveright Publishing, 2019.

Paul Freedman is an historian at Yale who in recent years has taken on food history.  His previous book, Ten Restaurants that Changed America, was on my weekend reading list in 2016.

This one covers the history of cuisine in America, addressing basic questions such as “is there such a thing as American cuisine?,” “What happened to it?,” and “What is likely to happen to it?”

The chapters cover such things as culinary nostalgia, community cookbooks, industrial food, ethnic restaurants, and the food revolution.  My favorite chapter title: “Have your cake, choose from our fifteen fabulous flavors, and eat it too.”

It’s a good read.  Here is a sample from page 367:

Americans have been enthusiastic consumers of modern products.  It is not just that historically the United States was technologically precocious or that its citizens value convenience, although these are true.  The key factor is a peculiar attitude toward food.  Americans have attempted to apply ideas about health and efficiency to diet.  Obsessed with technological progress, anxious about time-saving, and worried about physical well-being, Americans for well over a hundred years have embraced scientific nutrition, industrial food, and convenience.  They have been willing to sacrifice tradition and regional variation in favor of standard brands and their array of flavor and style.  Infatuation with science, convenience, and variety require giving up the natural taste of food in favor of texture, color, multiplicity, and simplicity of preparation.  Quick, easy, and healthful have been more important than flavor.

This is also a beautiful book, printed on high-quality paper, in an attractive easy-to-read font, and lavishly illustrated with menus, recipes, and pictures of advertisements, book covers, places, and people, many of them in color.

Reading it made me want to re-read Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad and Something From the Oven, both cited by Freedman in his chapter titled “women and food in the twentieth century.”

Jennifer Gaddis.  The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools.  University of California Press, 2019.

This book is a welcome addition to the growing library of works focusing on labor in the food system.  This topic deserves attention and Gaddis is looking at the plight of an especially neglected group, the people who make and serve food to kids in schools.   Unlike any other school program, the USDA-managed National School Lunch—and Breakfast—Programs are expected to be self-supporting through payments by parents and federal reimbursements.  They are chronically underfunded and issues of cost matter far more than food quality.

Gaddis lays out the issues in her introduction:

The NSLP [National School Lunch Program] operates largely as a social welfare program for low-income families and a public subsidy for large-scale factory farms and processed-food companies.  Since the 1970s and the widespread embrace of neoliberal political and economic projects, the pursuit of cheap food, cheap labor, and cheap care has pushed millions of middle- and upper-middle-class families out of the NSLP.  They pursue seemingly “better” algternatives for their own children, but in so doing they fail to hold Congress, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), and Bg Food companies accountable for the quality of the NSLP…[This] inadvertently reduces political will to invest in an NSLP that provides high-quality food and care for all children and families. [p. 4]

The story she tells here is not pretty—it is one of contempt for the poor coupled with protection of big business, along with lack of political will and weak civil society demand.

Her advice: organize, mobilize, advocate!

One of the great ironies of this advice is that the School Nutrition Association, which represents food service workers, opposes advocacy for better quality food, in part as Gaddis explains, because it has been captured by the processed food industry.

Let grass-roots advocacy begin!

The book comes with resources.

• Labor of Lunch_curriculum guide
• YouTube videos: these include five short videos based on the author’s fieldwork for the book.  The first is The Labor of Lunch: Scratch Cooking.  The others are listed on the right side of the page.

I’ve been seeing lots of books about meat lately.  Here are two recent ones.

Josh Berson.  The Meat Question: Animals, Humans, and the Deep History of Food.  MIT Press, 2019.

The author is an Australian social scientist, a vegan, who has produced a deep dive into the history of the use of meat as food and as cultural symbol.  As he puts it,

The aim of this book is to unpack what I’ve come to call the Meat Question–Should humans be eating meat, and if so who, and what kinds, and how much?–in the most comprehensive way possible.  The perspective…is deep deep in that it encompasses the history of human meat eating and human relationships with other gregarious vertebrates over a span of more than 2 million years.  (p. 2)

This [book’s] perspective is centered on my conviction that the economic violence of meat has less to do with who can and cannot afford it than with how meat serves to prop up a system of asymmetric benefits from all forms of human activity, not just that related to food.  Growing demand for meat is not simply an outcome of growing affluence.  It is a symptom of the inequality and oppression that have accompanied that affluence. (p. 294)

Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft.  Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food.  University of California Press, 2019.

This book examines the brand-new industry creating lab-based meat.  These products are not yet on the market but are of such enormous public and economic interest that they are well worth book-length treatment.

This book tells the story of what I found, and what I did not find, in the course of my time in the small, strange world of cultured meat, during what seemed to be the early years of an emerging technology.  I expected to spend time in laboratories…This did happen in some measure, but for the most part I found myself with very little laboratory science to observe and a great many public conversations about cultured meat to participate in and sort through.  (p. 15)

But cultured meat, too, raises moral questions.  Not questions about our moral regard for harvested cells, but questions about the implications cultured meat may hold for our moral regard for animals….It is relatively easy to see how cultured meat would or would not suit different philosophical arguments for animal protection….But assuming that cultured meat leads to abolition of animal agriculture, it will change our sense of what these creatures, these nonhuman animals, are doing in the world. (p. 133)

Both of these books deal with the moral, philosophical, cultural, historical, and socioeconomic implications of meat-eating, although from quite different perspectives.

Bettina Elias Siegel.  Kid Food: The Challenge of Feeding Children in a Highly Processed World.  Oxford University Press, 2019.

I did a blurb for this book but it is so good, so well written, and so important that nothing I can say can do it justice.

Everyone who cares about what kids eat must read Bettina Siegel’s fabulous Kid Food.  This is a gorgeously written, heartfelt, and deeply compelling manifesto arguing why and how we must do better at feeding our kids more healthfully at home, in schools, and on the soccer field.  Kid Food provides the evidence and the resources; it should inspire all of us to get busy and start advocating for better kid-food policies—right now.

The book is a treasure for what it says about feeding kids in America today—an instant classic.  Its Appendix alone makes the book a must-have: it lists resources for how to feed kids but also for how to advocate for them.

I could have picked excerpts from anywhere in the book but I’m taking the easy route and quoting from the book’s ending as an example of why this book is so worth reading.

Right now, American children are being shortchanged daily by a diet that feeds but doesn’t nourish, that staves off immediate hunger but opens the door to later disease.  The factors leading to this tragic outcome are all too human: naked corporate greed; parental ignorance, confusion, and fatigue; practical necessity, for those who can’t afford healthier food; and, in the case of “treats,” even simple love and affection.   Improving the current paradigm will require not just pushing back against powerful corporate interests, but also shifting a deeply entrenched food culture.  That’s a very heavy lift, but the difficulty of the task doesn’t make it any less urgent or critical.  And the good news is, there is no shortage of opportunities to pitch in.

This book was especially interesting to me because I know some of the players and reading it told me a lot about their backgrounds and accomplishments.  It deals with several New York City-based organizations, among them United Bronx Parents, the Park Slope Food Coop, God’s Love We Deliver, and, most prominently, the Community Food Resource Center.

Lana Dee Povitz.  Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice.  University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 

I wrote a blurb for this one.

Stirrings uses the political history of food advocacy organizations in New York City to explain why such groups focus almost exclusively on feeding hungry people rather than on addressing the root cause of that hunger–poverty.  The lessons taught by this history make this book essential reading for anyone interested in ending hunger in America.

And here is a brief paragraph from the Introduction (p. 7):

Aside from its material value as a commodity essential to human life, food acts as a lens through which we can understand dominant social values.  How and by whom food is produced, which foods are government-subsidized, who is deemed eligible for food assistance, who becomes the gatekeepers for providing that food—such arrangements speak volumes about who and what is prioritized, especially by those with decision-making power.  By extension, the history of food activism is important because it tracks how these priorities might be rearranged, how people can work to challenge or temporarily overturn established hierarchies, especially of class and race.  Just as often, the history of food activism sheds light on how inequalities and hierarchies are preserved, defended, and even extended.