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This brand new book—all 498 pages of it—is open access.

As the publisher explains,

• This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access
• Analyzes the connections between agriculture and resource use, commodity trade, food businesses, and retail markets
• Provides diagrams and data visualizations to explain, predict, and assess changes in the food system
• Features rich visualizations and primary source information for updated charts from US and international sources

The authors have gone to a lot of trouble to make basic economic concepts clear.  For example,

We use the term monopoly to describe a market with just one seller and the less common term monopsony when there is just one buyer. The two are symmetrical, so both kinds of market power are sometimes called monopoly power. But distinguishing between monopoly and monopsony is useful because food businesses can potentially exercise both at the same time. For example, a large dairy processor and distributor might become a monopsonist in buying raw milk from farmers and a monopolist in selling dairy products to consumers. Their potential market power is ‘two-sided’, similar to online platforms for food delivery that could potentially become the only intermediary between restaurants and customers.

They also have lots of ifnteresting points to make.

The persistence of family farming is among the most surprising facts about the economics of food. In the U.S. and elsewhere most farms do not sell directly to consumers but operate behind the scenes, selling their produce in bulk to specialists for transport and distribution, often for use as ingredients in packaged and processed foods. Unlike farms, the food companies with whom consumers usually interact are typically owned by investors and run by hired managers. They buy ingredients from various sources, often combining produce from many different farms. Consumers everywhere in the world often seek out opportunities to buy directly from individual farmers, but that is special in part because it is relatively rare.

Take advantage of this offer!

• Download book PDF
• Download book EPU

Welcome to the online Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies, edited by Darra Goldstein.

The articles submitted to this project so far are here.

I wrote one for it: Nestle M.  Food Politics and Policy.

I looks to me as though these articles are Open Access, meaning you can read them for free.

Enjoy!

Jennifer Grayson.  A Call to Farms: Reconnecting to Nature, Food, and Community in a Modern World.  Countryman Press, 2024.

What a great title! I did a blurb for Jennifer Grayson’s previous book, Unlatched: The Evolution of Breastfeeding and the Making of a Controversy, and was happy to have the chance to blurb this one too, not least because “A Call to Farms” is such a great title.  Grayson, as it happens, is one terrific writer.   

Here’s the new blurb:

In this deeply inspiring book, Jennifer Grayson examines the motives, practices, problems, and successes of a diverse collection of young small-scale farmers growing food sustainably and achieving enormous satisfaction and joy in the process. The farmers described in A Call to Farms, provide abundant reasons for hope in the future of food healthier for people and the planet as well as for its producers.  If you are looking for hope, here it is.

And here is a short excerpt capturing its essence:

A week into my first farm job, I realized it was the most joyful and fulfilling work I had ever experienced.  After two months of being outside all day, nearly every day, I felt the best—both physically and mentally—that I ever had in my life.  But the real transformation occurred as I began to meet and learn bout the new and driven farmers, graziers, and food activists emerging all over the country.  They hadn’t grown up in farming families; they came from backgrounds vastly underrepresented in agriculture; and many of them were far younger than I was, not to mention decades younger than the average American farmer.  I was awestruck by their intention and ingenuity.  They hadn’t turned to this way of life as some back-to-the-land fantasy.  They had chosen sustainable agriculture as a tactile way to effect environmental activism and food justice; for cultural reclamation; to reconnect to nature, food, and community; to live aligned with their values; to do, in the words of one farmer you’ll meet in this book, “something that means something.”

As I said, inspiring.  Get out there and farm!

Jennifer E. Gaddis and Sarah A. Robert.  Transforming School Food Politics Around the World.  MIT Press, 2024 (322 pages)

This is an edited volume describing programs and policies to improve school food in the United Sttates, but also Japan, Canada, Peru, Finland, India, Brazil, and South Korea.

Every country does school food its own way.  Only three countries—India, Brazil, and South Korea—have universal school meals, although some U.S. states do too (one chapter explains how states managed it).

Overall, the chapters explain what school food advocates are doing and what works.

If you are interested in school food advocacy, this book is your Bible.

It is especially so because it is Open Access.  You don’t believe this?  Here is a link to a pdf of the entire book.

Even more, the authors wrote a guide to the book with chapter-by-chapter discussion questions, activities, and other resources useful for college classes and practitioner book clubs.  This too is Open Access: here is the link to the study guide.

Enjoy!  And use!

Chuck Schwerin.  Ghosts of Glencoe.  North Country Books, 2024.  472 pages.

I don’t usually recommend books here that are not about food politics.  This one, a rare exception, has only the most tenuous connection to the theme of this blog.

It is set in a fictional location much like the North Country School, a boarding school for teenagers near Lake Placid and the Adirondacks.  The school was one of the first to adopt an Edible Schoolyard project, still going strong.

I am making the exception because Chuck Schwerin is my next-door neighbor in Ithaca.  I had no idea he was writing a novel.  When he asked me to read the manuscript for a blurb, I didn’t know what to think.  What if I hated it?

Fortunately, I did not.  I could not put it down.  It is one fabulous adventure story.

Here’s my blurb:

Ghosts of Glencoe is a thrillingly plotted, utterly authentic coming-of-age story of what we can all learn from wilderness, at any age. I cared what happened to these characters, and couldn’t stop reading until its most satisfying conclusion.

I’m not a mountain person but I know plenty of people who are.

They would rather be climbing peaks than doing anything else, regardless of weather, rocky terrain, or mortal danger.

This book captures that sense, through the actions of teachers and students at the fictional Glencoe school, all of them human in their own unique ways.  You get to know these people well.   You care about what they do, the decisions they make, and the consequences of their decisions.

It’s a terrific read—just the thing for a summer vacation.

Enjoy!

Addition

There is an audio book.  Access at Kobo Books here.

Tinight at 6:00, I’m moderating a conversation with Michelle King about her new book, at:

Archestratus Books, 164 Huron, Greenpoint, Brooklyn.  Information here.

Michelle T. King.  Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food.  WW Norton, 2024.

I had never heard of Fu Pei-mei when this book was sent to me so I was curious to find out who she was and what she had done to deserve such a close look from a food studies scholar.

My ignorance.

Fu (1931-2004) is most easily understood as the Julia Child of Taiwan, whose televised cooking shows charmed and enlightened cooks for decades after World War II.

Fu left mainland China for Taiwan in 1949 as a war refugee, and soon married.  She did not know how to cook, but housewives were expected to and her husband complained.  She was forced to learn, and hired restaurant cooks to teach her.  Once she did learn, she began teaching others and eventually landed on TV just when it was starting.  This, in turn, led to a remarkable career as a TV personality, cook, cookbook author, and world traveler.

But this book is much more than a biography.  It is also a cultural history.  As King puts it,

The circumstances of her birth and the timing of her culinary career gave Fu a front row seat to every major political and social event affecting modern Taiwan’s history for more than seventy years.  Through the pages of Fu’s cookbooks and the story of her life, we come to understand not only the twists and turns of Taiwan’s modern political history, but also the dynamic shift in women’s roles during the postwar economic boom, when women begn to leave kitchens and cooking behind for jobs in offices and factories.

Fu was mainland Chinese and her work got caught up in the politics of mainland vs. Taiwan; she represented Taiwan although her food represented—and highlighted—regional mainland Chinese cooking with Taiwanese cuisine only added later.

Reading this book raised a personal question for me: how did Fu do it?  Her husband did not want his wife working outside the home and it’s hard to imagine his approving her travel and fame.  Somehow, she managed.  King suggests that perhaps by not challenging her husband’s control of the family or its finances, she was able to be free to conduct her career.  Fu must have been one formidible woman.

Along with the biography and history, King includes “kitchen conversations,”excerpts from interviews with Chinese-Americans who have cooked from Fu’s books.

All of this made me want to find one of Fu’s bilingual cookbooks and see if I can produce some of my favorite Chinese dishes.  By all reports, the English translations of her recipes were clear, and they worked.

And so does Chop Fry Watch Learn.  

Can’t wait to find out more about it.  Join me tonight!

Nina Guilbeault.  The Good Eater: A Vegan’s Search for the Future of Food.  Bloomsbury, 2024.

I did a back-cover blurb for this book:

The Good Eater is a vegan sociologist’s remarkably open-minded exploration of the historical, ethical, health, environmental, and social justice implications of not eating meat.  Guilbeault’s extensive research and interviews get right into the tough questions about this movement, leaving us free to choose for ourselves whether to eat this way.

Guilbeault has followed vegan dietary practices (no animal products) for a long time but was troubled by the self-righteousness and proselytizing of many vegans.  As a trained sociologist, she set out to investigate the origins, practices, and effects of vegan diets, through reading but also through interviews with what seems like everyone having anything to do with animal welfare and plant-forward diets.  The result is an exceptionally broad look at the who’s who of veganism, from historical figures to contemporary entrepreneurs and chefs.  The book is well written, rational, and not at all uncritical.

Here’s are a couple of excerpts:

Projections show that to avert environmental disaster by 2050 we need to reduce our meat consumption by at least a third, and by half in North America and Europe…But many people still eat eggs for breakfast and yogurt as a snack, put dairy milk in their coffee, add a slice of ham to their sandwich for lunch, and choose a piece of meat or fish for dinner, all in one day.  A reduction from that daily menu to a couple of eggs and a small piece of meat or fish once a week seems like a hefty drop, yet that is how humanity has eaten for most of our natural history.  (pp 284-285)

I can understand why, for many people, a vegan lifestyle seems unappealing, overwhelming, or even downright offensive.  As we know, meat has played a key part in our cultural and evolutionary history, and habits are notoriously difficult to break.  Veganism requires a shift in identity as well as the embrace of a social category still on the fringe….This is partly because being vegan in a non-vegan world is hard, but also because the vegan movement places an emphasis on moral perfection.  Yet…long-lasting, sustainable change doesn’t come from a place of shame, judgment, and guilt.  It comes from a place of joy and a sense of belonging.  (p 290)

 

The exclamation point is because this is my department’s long-awaited book ,for which I wrote the Foreword and part of one of the last chapters.

If you are in the New York area, come to its celebration on April 1 at 5:3 p.m. at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge, 20 Cooper Square (South of 3rd Ave and North of The Bowery between 4th and 8th Streets), 5th Floor.  For information and registration for the event, click here.

There will also be an online presentation of the book on April 29 through the NYU Library’s Critical Topics series.  For details, watch for the announcement.

To buy the book from NYU Press, click here.

My department at NYU, now known as the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, invented the field of Food Studies in 1996.  Now, more than 25 years later, practically every college in America, and plenty outside the U.S., offers courses or programs about the role of food in society, commerce, and the environment.

Food studies is highly interdisciplinary (my doctoral degree is in molecular biology, for example).  As NYU Press puts it, scholars from an enormous range of fields

felt limited by the conventions of their traditional discipline. Many gravitated to food studies to be able to describe and critically examine their specific areas of interest beyond the borders of academic disciplines.

Faculty and doctoral graduates from our department wrote extraordinarily personal essays for this book to explain their connection to Food Studies and how this new filed made their work possible.

We do not necessarily agree with each other about what Food Studies is, exactly, and whether and how it fostered our work.  We argue throughout, respectfully, of course.

I think the book is enormous fun and I could not be more proud of what it accomplishes.

Here are two of the blurbs:

“NYU’s Food Studies department has a lot to teach: about pedagogy, art, library sciences, the limits of traditional disciplinary fields, and the world beyond the academy. With essays that blend biography with analysis, this anthology finds the universal in the particular. Anyone interested in how to address the urgent  and practical questions, while confronting the systemic ones, will find inspiration in this fine anthology.” ― Raj Patel, University of Texas at Austin

“Food studies provides a home for deeply interdisciplinary scholars; Practicing Food Studies packages that intellectual belonging into a single book that you’ll want to not just read but keep close. The editors, each a leading voice in the field, use NYU’s program as a case study that delivers a must-read history of food studies itself. Critical reflections, warmth, and candor leap from each page, fascinating and endearing at every turn.” ― Emily J.H. Contois, The University of Tulsa