Award winning journalist Maryn McKenna reveals the fascinating history of chicken in her new book, Big Chicken. She talks with us about chicken's rise in popularity through the routine use of antibiotics, a practice that would transform agriculture, change the world's eating habits, and contribute to the deadly rise of drug-resistant infections around the globe.

In his new book, ACID TRIP: Travels in the World of Vinegar (Abrams Books), Michael Harlan Turkell takes us on a fermented look into vinegar's soured past and bright future. He shares tales and experiences from his travels throughout North America, France, Italy, Austria, and Japan to learn about vinegar-making practices in places where the art has evolved over centuries.

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Most biographers pay little attention to people’s attitudes toward food, but once we ask how somebody relates to food, we find a whole world of different and provocative ways to understand her. Historian Laura Shapiro uses the lens of food to look at the lives of six women, each famous in her time, and most are still famous in ours; but until now, nobody has told their lives from the point of view of the kitchen and the table.

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Scents and Flavors is a 13th century Syrian cookbook which historian and Arabic scholar Charles Perry has edited and translated. Unlike many early recipe manuals this book gives us a glimpse of the social history of the medieval period in Syria. Charles talks about an inventive cuisine that elevates simple ingredients by combining various aromas of herbs, spaces, fruits and flower essences. He shares stories and descriptions of ingredients and recipes for food and drink as well as the fragrances that garnish the meals and perfume the diners.

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First patented in 1856, baking powder sparked a classic American struggle for business supremacy. For nearly a century, brands battled to win loyal consumers for the new leavening miracle, transforming American commerce and advertising even as they touched off a chemical revolution in the world's kitchens. Linda Civitello chronicles the titanic struggle that reshaped America's diet and rewrote its recipes.

From early trading posts to retail chains and superstores, award winning author Michael Ruhlman--The Soul of a Chef, The Elements of Cooking--traces the history and evolution of the American grocery store in his new book, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America. On this episode Ruhlman shares his views of grocery stores as a reflection of our culture. He examines how rapidly supermarkets—and our food and culture—have changed since the days of your friendly neighborhood grocer.

John T. Edge joins Linda today for a conversation about his new book, The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South. John T., an esteemed writer of Southern food, traces how the food of the poorest Southerners has become the signature trend of modern American haute cuisine. He puts names and faces on the familiar dishes as he examines the food, race and politics in the South over the past 60 years.

Since 2013, David Shields has been the chairman of Slow Food's Ark of Taste Committee for the South, and will be a participant in Slow Food Nations Festival in Denver, July 14-16. There he will talk about the heirloom grains which have been revived with the help of farmers and chefs. He spoke with Linda about his work reviving many of the heirloom ingredients that made up the original flavors of southern cuisine.

Dr. Shields, Distinguished Professor at University of South Carolina, and the Chairman of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, is the author of Southern Provisions: the Creation and Revival of a Cuisine (Univ of Chicago Press: 2015).

Author Megan Elias explores the role words play in the creation of taste on both a personal and a national level. From Fannie Farmer to The Joy of Cooking to food blogs, she argues, American cookbook writers have commented on national cuisine while tempting their readers to the table. By taking cookbooks seriously as a genre and by tracing their genealogy, her new book, Food on the Page, explains where contemporary assumptions about American food came from and where they might lead.

It’s been 111 years since the publication of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s groundbreaking book on the cattle industry. Though improvements in animal welfare have been made since then, the industry has evolved to include issues Sinclair could never have foreseen. In her new book, What’s the Matter with Meat?, Katy Keiffer, host of What Doesn’t Kill You here on HRN, leads readers though a crash course on how this powerful multinational business has been able to generate such a bountiful supply of absurdly cheap animal proteins.