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Here are some of the books that have drifted my way.  These in particular are about food and cooking.

Jean-Claude Kaufmann, The Meaning of Cooking, Polity 2010.  Kaufmann is professor of sociology at the Sorbonne.  Here, he argues that the ordinary acts of creating and consuming food are how we create our most meaningful relationships with lovers, spouses, and offspring. 

Alice D. Kamps.  What’s Cooking Uncle Sam?  The Government’s Effect on the American Diet.  Records from the National Archives.  This is the terrific catalog of the terrific exhibit now playing at the National Archives in Washington DC until January 3, 2012.  The catalog contains most (not all, alas) of the illustrations from the exhibit.  These deal with the government’s role in farming, food products, dietary advice, meals for the military and other such matters.  For example:

Janet M. Cramer et al, editors.  Food as Communication; Communication as Food, Peter Lang 2011.  This is a collection of essays on scholarly food discourses, ranging from media coverage of school lunches to local, organic foods.  I blurbed this one: “Food as Communiction is a wonderful introduction to the field of food studies research.  These authors watched movies and television, examined package labels, visited exotic places, delved in wonderful libraries, and ate great food.”

If you want to work on improving the meals at your kids’ schools, much help is available.  Just in, for example:

From the Center for Ecoliteracy: Rethinking School Lunch: Cooking with California Food in K-12 Schools: a Cookbook and Professional Development Guide. You don’t have to be in California to take advantage of this resource.  It’s full of recipes and good ideas, as are other resources from the Center.

From Amy Kalafa: Lunch Wars: How to Start a School Food Revolution and Win the Battle for Our Children’s Health, Tarcher/Penguin 2011. Kalafa is the writer and producer of the film about school food—Two Angry Moms.  This is her how-to guide to getting involved in and doing something useful about your kids’ school food programs.

From Sarah A. Robert and Marcus B. Weaver-Hightower: School Food Politics: The Complex Ecology of Hunger and Feeding in Schools Around the World.  Peter Lang, 2011.  This is a collection of essays (one of them mine) from writers and thinkers about school feeding programs, domestic and international.  It ends with a long list of groups working on school food issues.

And on my bookshelf from the last couple of years:

Janet Poppendieck’s Free for All: Fixing School Food in America.  University of California Press, 2010.  My blurb says “Extraordinarily well thought out, beautifully written, sympathetic, and compelling.  Anyone who reads this book will find the present school lunch situation beyond unacceptable.  Free for All is a call for action on behalf of America’s school kids, one that we all need to join.”  Poppendieck is a strong advocate for universal school meals. Me too.

Institute of Medicine.  School Meals: Building Blocks for Health Children.  National Academies Press, 2010. This influential committee report says what needs to be done to establish food-based (rather than nutrient-based) standards for school meals.

Kevin Morgan and Roberta Sonnino.  The School Food Revolution: Public Food and the Challenge of Sustainable Development.  Earthscan (UK), 2008.  The UK has its own problems with school meals and so do other countries.  This book presents international case studies focused on sustainability and social justice.

Susan Levine.  School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program.  Princeton, 2008.  If you want to understand the history of how school lunches came to be in America, here’s the source.

Ann Cooper and Lisa M. Holmes.  Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children.  Collins, 2006.  Cooper was one of the first chefs to get into schools and get fixing.  This is a how-to from one who did it.

Robert W. Surles.  Chef Bobo’s Good Food Cookbook.  Meridith 2004.  I have a soft spot for this one because I’ve been keeping an eye on Chef Bobo’s program at the Calhoun School in Manhattan for years now.   He revolutionized school meals at one school and this book explains what he had to do to do that.  He’s still there and still cooking!

You would like to do something about school meals but don’t know how?  No excuses!

A few more for summer reading pleasure and enlightenment (for others see previous post):

Poisoned, Jeff Benedict, Mariner 2011: I blurbed this one: “In telling the entwined stories of childhood victims of food poisoning and the lawyers [Bill Marler et al!] wrangling over just compensation, Poisoned is a fast-paced thriller, a riveting illustration of how the political—in this case, the inadequate food safety system—becomes personal.”

The Sorcerer’s Apprentices, Lisa Abend, Free Press, 2011. What is a book about the celebated Spanish restaurant El Bulli doing on a food politics list?  Abend is a terrific reporter who spent a year observing how the place runs: almost entirely on the labor of dozens of food professionals who gave up their real jobs to work for six months at a time as unpaid volunteers.   The cooks are essentially piece workers.  They never see or taste the final dishes served in the restaurant.

State of the World, 2011, Worldwatch Institute. The 2011 annual report focuses on “Innovations that nourish the planet”—anti-hunger and farming projects throughout the world that are successfully improving the health of people and the planet.  Read and be inspired!

Tomatoland, Barry Estabrook, Andrews McMeel, 2011. This book is a welcome expansion of Estabrook’s stunning, prize-winning article in Gourmet.   Estabrook writes a compelling account of the injustices and social costs of industrial tomato farming to farm workers and to the environment.  We could and should do better, and Estabrook explains how.  Tomatoland scored a rave review in the New York Times, most deservedly.

…And for the under 2 set:

Rah, Rah, Radishes: A Vegetable Chant, April Pulley Sayre, Beach Lane, 2011:  It comes with gorgeous photographs of vegetables and could be fun to read to little kids:

Oh boy,

Bok choy!

Brussels sprout.

Broccoli, cauliflower.

Shout it out!

I haven’t been reviewing books on this site, mainly because so many of them flood into my office that I cannot keep up with them.  But the public relations reps for a couple of recent books have been pushing hard for mentions.  The books are good, important contributors to the food movement, and deserve readers.

I’m listing them in alphabetical order by title in two batches, now and tomorrow.  Some of them I’ve blurbed, some not, but all have plenty of useful and interesting to say.  Enjoy!

Butcher’s Guide to Well-Raised Meat, Joshua and Jessica Applestone and Alexandra Zissu, Clarkson Potter, 2011. The owners of Fleisher’s butcher shop in Kingston, New York, tell the story of how a couple of vegetarians came to open butcher shops that specialize in grass-fed and organic meats, done right.  I know lots of vegetarians who would eat meat from animals raised sustainably and humanely, and this book is a how-to guide to finding the right butcher or doing it yourself.

Cultivating an Ecological Conscience, Fred Kirschenmann, Kentucky, 2010: Kirschenmann describes himself as a farmer-philosopher and so he is as he ruminates on his vision for sustainable agriculture as practiced on his own farm.  My blurb points out that he’s “right up there with the other agronomic philosophers–Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson…It should inspire everyone to start planting and to think deeply about the food we eat.”

Fair Food, Oran Hesterman, Public Affairs, 2011: Hesterman is an agronomist who used to work with the Kellogg Foundation and now heads the Fair Food Network to work for sustainable food systems in Michigan.  The book advocates for public policies that promote sustainability and food justice and explains how to work toward that goal.  You want to change the system but don’t know how?  Start here.

Farm Together Now, Amy Franceschini and Daniel Tucker, Chronicle Books, 2010: The authors interviewed and photographed 20 farmers throughout the country who are producing food in ways that advocate for food justice, sustainable agriculture, and local food movements.  The book should inspire anyone to get out and farm.

Milk, Deborah Valenze, Yale, 2011: I blurbed this one: “Milk is the place to go to begin understanding how we got from dairy maids to industrial milk production and the current debates about the value of raw.”  This is a serious work of history with great illustrations.

More to come….

It’s been a busy summer with three books just out, all three in paperback or Kindle editions.  Click on Books above or the covers in the upper right-hand corner of the site to get information about them, or the ones below to see what Amazon has to say about them.

To be published August 4: the University of California Press paperback edition of Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine.

In June, University of California Press issued the revised edition of Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety, with a new introduction and concluding chapter that bring everything up to date since the book first came out in 2003.  I can’t help commenting that at the time the book went to press in December, the Senate had not yet passed the food safety bill.  Guess what?  It still hasn’t.

And in May, Free Press/Simon & Schuster issued Feed Your Pet Right: The Authoritative Guide to Feeding Your Dog and Cat.

Enjoy!

I’ve been hearing about Alyssa Hamilton’s new book (pub date: May 26) for some time now.  It’s called “Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice.”  From what I can tell, it takes on the orange juice industry for processing the joy out of the juice.  Hamilton is currently with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis.  She is Canadian and the Toronto Star has just interviewed her about the book.

I’m looking forward to reading it.  My son in California has an orange tree growing in his backyard.  The juice from its oranges is delicious even though it doesn’t taste nearly as sweet as commercial orange juice.   Orange juice producers want to offer a stable, consistent product.  It sounds like this book suggests that the taste-and-health costs of that consistency are pretty high.

My NYU Department developed programs in Food Studies based on the premise that food is so central to the human condition that studying it is a great way to get into much larger social questions.   I’ve just found a terrific example in the April 9 New York Review of Books in which Michael Tomasky reviews So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Goverment, by Robert G. Kaiser. I immediately ordered a copy.

According to the review, the book chronicles events in the history of a Washington, DC lobbying firm, Schlossberg – Cassidy, run by former staff members of  Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, chaired by George McGovern (Dem-SD).  The firm parlayed its thorough knowledge of food assistance programs into a consulting practice devoted to helping corporations deal with pesky regulations and policies that affect agriculture, food, nutrition, and health.  To give just one example: the firm’s first academic client was Jean Mayer, the nutritionist president of Tufts University.  He recruited the firm to get Congress to appropriate $27 million for a national nutrition center at Tufts.  The result is the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University.

But this first earmark set a precedent that led to today’s deeply corrupt system of rampant congressional earmarks,  election campaign contributions, dependence on polls and focus groups, and climate of political partisanship.

A book about food lobbying and its larger political and social consequences!  I can’t wait to read it.

In case you were wondering how come Bill Niman is no longer associated with Niman Ranch meats, yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle explains the whole sad story, one framed by the writer as a matter of idealism vs. economic realities.

Perhaps coincidentally, Nicolette Hahn Niman’s new book,  Righteous Porkchop, is just out.  This is a thoughtful and affecting memoir of her version of the events–her background as an activist lawyer, her romance with Bill, and their work together.  I blurbed it, pointing out that it should establish her as an independent national voice for efforts to reform industrial animal production.

I also blurbed Betty Fussell’s entertainingly researched cultural history of American beef, Raising Steaks. If you want to know what the fuss about humanely and sustainably raised meat is about, these books are a great starting point.