Currently browsing posts about: Books

Yael Raviv.  Falafel Nation: Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel.  University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

Yael Raviv is an adjunct instructor in my department at NYU and has been researching and working on this book since I have known her.

The cuisine of Israel is trendy right now, something that Raviv could not possibly have guessed when she began this project.

Although her book focuses on the years from the Zionist immigration wave beginning in 1905 (the Second Aliya) and the 1967 Six-Day War, it deals with older and more recent ways in which food affected and was affected by the complexities and contradictions of religion, ethnicity, nationalism, and subsequent waves of immigration in this country.

Raviv is not claiming that food can solve the political problems of the region, but her book demonstrates that food can help us understand them.

Tom Farley, MD.  Saving Gotham: A Billionaire Mayor, Activist Doctors, and the Fight for Eight Million Lives.  Norton, 2015.

Dr. Farley is the former New York City Health Commissioner under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the second Tom in that position (the first was Tom Frieden, now head of the CDC).

He has produced a wonderfully written, personal, eye-witness, in-the-trenches account of how the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene led the nation in creating public health interventions to reduce smoking, get rid of trans fats. put calorie labels on restaurant menus, and reduce soda consumption—with impressive improvements in the health of New Yorkers.

His book also covers the Department’s failures to convince the USDA to allow a pilot project to get sodas out of SNAP and the courts to support the city’s proposal to cap the sizes of sugary drinks at 16 ounces.

For me, a New York City resident  who lived through these events and wrote about some of them in Soda Politics, this book was fun, even gossipy, and disclosed things I hadn’t known.  It has much to teach anyone about how the politics of city public health agencies, how to get things done in complicated city institutions, and how to treasure even the smallest successes.

This particular health department had three things going for it: courageous health commissioners, huge city health problems that desperately needed to be addressed, and a mayor fearless (and rich) enough to take on the challenges.

Farley ends the book with a quote from Bloomberg:

While government action is not sufficient alone, it is nevertheless absolutely essential.  There are powers only governments can exercise, policies only governments can mandate and enforce, and results only governments can achieve.  To halt the worldwide epidemic of noncommunicable diseases, governments at all levels must make healthy solutions the default social option.

That is, ultimately, government’s highest duty.

Amen.

Forrest Pritchard.  Growing tomorrow: A Farm-to-Table Journey in Photos and Recipes.  The Experiment, 2015.

I did a blurb for this book:

Who says that nobody is going into farming these days or that you can’t make a living growing foods organically and sustainably?  Certainly not the 18 pioneers described in this lovely, inspiring book.  Forrest Pritchard chose farmers of diverse crops—mushrooms, honey, lobsters, avocados, grain, beef, and more—and tells the personal stories of how they created lives of deep productivity and satisfaction.  Any aspiring farmer or consumer of freshly farmed products will get great pleasure from reading this book and admiring its photos.

Today is the official publication date for Soda Politics.  This means it should now be available in bookstores and open for review and comment.  

For more information, see the book page for it on this site.  There you will find the blurbs, reviews, media interviews, and the list of media resources—videos, audios, music, movies, commercials, and anti-commercials—that I ran across while working on the book.

Enjoy!

Emily Yates-Doerr.  The Weight of Obesity: Hunger and Global Health in Postwar Guatemala. University of California Press, 2015.

Emily was a student in NYU’s anthropology department and I’ve admired her work for a long time.  Her book is based on her remarkable dissertation work, and I was happy to be asked to blurb it:

Emily Yates-Doerr gives us an anthropologist’s tough analysis of how one resource-poor Guatemalan population responds to an increasingly globalized food supply as it transitions rapidly from widespread hunger and malnutrition to the increasing prevalence of obesity and its health consequences.  The Weight of Obesity views this “nutrition transition” from the unusually revealing perspective of an insider who experienced it personally with eyes wide open.

For me, the most riveting parts of her book are the transcribed conversations between clinic nutritionists and patients newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes—a case study in the cultural gap between nutrient-based advice (“nutritionism”) and the way people actually eat.  The effects of the rapid influx of “ultra-processed” products on the health of the populations studied here are also painfully clear.  This is an ethnography of the nutrition transition caught just as these cultural and dietary shifts were occurring.

Lisa F. Clark. The Changing Politics of Organic Food in North America. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015.

I did a blurb for this one.  It’s right up my alley.

Lisa Clark’s scholarly account of the development of the organic movement in the United States and Canada beautifully explains the decades-long transition from understanding organic production as inextricably tied to healthy soils, communities, and social justice (“process-based”) to views of organics as meeting certain standards for marketing purposes (“product-based”). Read this book and you will care deeply about the difference in these views as well as understand current debates about the future of organics.

In case you want to know why I favor organics, I do so from a process-based perspective.  I like what organics do for soils, communities, and social justice.  This book does a great job of explaining the basis of the debates over these issues.

On Fridays, I often post books I’ve blurbed or liked.

Today, it’s my turn.  I can’t resist posting the blurbs for Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning).   

The blurbs:

• “The soda industry is a powerful economic operator. Economic power readily translates into political power. Soda Politics is exactly the kind of carefully-researched investigative reporting needed to open the eyes of the public and parliamentarians to the health hazards of what is, as the author rightly notes, essentially liquid candy in a bottle.” –Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization
• “No book in history has so completely laid bare the soda scourge that touches every corner of the world. Marion Nestle shows how this happened, its impact on human health and well-being, who the players are, and, most importantly, what might be done. This is the right book at the right time.” –Dr. Kelly Brownell, Dean, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University
• “Marion Nestle is one of the greatest muckrakers of our time, and what she does is vitally important-for our health, our environment, and for future generations. Here, she wages war against the soda titans with such piercing clarity and so many irrefutable truths that all other arguments crumble.” –Alice Waters, Founder and Proprietor of Chez Panisse
• “Comprehensive and well-written, this book will help frame a thoughtful public policy debate about nutrition and the societal impacts and costs of obesity.” –Ann M. Veneman, Former US Secretary of Agriculture and Former Executive Director of UNICEF
• “What happens when the food industry’s most insightful critic turns her sights on soda? This razor-sharp, fun to read, plan-of-battle for one of the greatest public health fights of our time. Big soda may have all the money, but those who would enter this fray, as we all should, now have their champion.” –Michael Moss, Author of Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
• “For decades, soda companies have amassed fortunes off drinks that are making us sick. It took someone like Marion Nestle to cut through the spin and uncover the high cost of cheap sodas.” –Robert Kenner, Director/Producer, Food Inc. and Merchants of Doubt
• “Long recognized as an important and informed voice in our national and international discussions on nutrition and health, Marion Nestle has written another book that will keep us talking. With an impressive combination of scholarship and advocacy, Dr Nestle takes an unflinching look at the soda industry, its products and the impact on health. Soda Politics deserves the attention of the public and policy makers, and should make us all think more carefully about choices we can make to improve health and well-being.”–Margaret Hamburg, M.D., Former Commissioner, U.S. Food and Drug Administration 

The book officially comes out October 5, but Oxford University Press is already shipping it to preorders and Amazon starts shipping it next week.

Enjoy!

Leanne Brown.  Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4 / Day.  Workman, 2015.

Leanne Brown is a graduate of our food studies program at New York University who, while in graduate school, became concerned about the plight of SNAP (food stamp) recipients who must feed their families on an average of $4 per day.

She wrote this book for them, first as a class project, then as an online gift, free for the taking.

It was downloaded 700,000 times.

Then she went to a Kickstarter campaign to self-publish the book.  At some point Workman picked it up.

It’s won an award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals and a place for Leanne in Forbes 30 under 30 for 2015.

The book has truly delicious recipes.  It starts with tips useful for anyone on a food budget.

I’m proud of what she’s accomplished.  The book is beautifully photographed, the recipes are terrific, and every time a copy is sold, Workman will donate another one to someone who needs it.