Historian Emine Ö. Evered’s Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity (University of Texas Press, 2024) investigates the history of alcohol, its consumption, and its proscription as a means to better understand events and agendas of the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican eras. Through a comprehensive examination of archival, literary, popular culture, media, and other sources, it unveils a traditionally overlooked—and even excluded—aspect of human history in a region that many do not associate with intoxicants, inebriation, addiction, and vigorous wet-dry debates.

Evered's account uniquely chronicles how the Turko-Islamic Ottoman Empire developed strategies for managing its heterogeneous communities and their varied rights to produce, market, and consume alcohol, or to simply abstain. The first author to reveal this experience’s connections with American Prohibition, she demonstrates how—amid modernization, sectarianism, and imperial decline—drinking practices reflected, shifted, and even prompted many of the changes that were underway and that hastened the empire’s collapse. Ultimately, Evered’s book reveals how Turkey’s alcohol question never went away but repeatedly returns in the present, in matters of popular memory, public space, and political contestation.

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Though Latinx foodways are eagerly embraced and consumed by people across the United States, the nation exhibits a much more fraught relationship with Latinx people, including the largely underpaid and migrant workers who harvest, process, cook, and sell this desirable food. In Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to Covid-19 (UNC Press, 2025), Lori A. Flores traces how our dual appetite for Latinx food and Latinx food labor has evolved from the World War II era to the COVID-19 pandemic, using the US Northeast as an unexpected microcosm of this national history.

Spanning the experiences of food workers with roots in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Central America, Flores's narrative travels from New Jersey to Maine and examines different links in the food chain, from farming to restaurants to seafood processing to the deliverista rights movement. What unites this eclectic material is Flores's contention that as our appetite for Latinx food has grown exponentially, the visibility of Latinx food workers has demonstrably decreased. This precariat is anything but passive, however, and has historically fought--and is still fighting--against low wages and exploitation, medical neglect, criminalization, and deeply ironic food insecurity.

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The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In Pub (Bloomsbury, 2025) a new addition to the Object Lessons series, Dr. Philip Howell takes the public house as an object, or rather as a series of objects: he takes the pub apart and examines its constituent elements, from pub signs to the bar staff to the calling of “time.” But Pub also explores the hidden features of the pub, such as corporate control, cultural acceptance and exclusion, and the role of the pub in communities.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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From Chinatown to Every Town: How Chinese Immigrants Have Expanded the Restaurant Business in the United States (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Zai Liang explores the recent history of Chinese immigration within the United States and the fundamental changes in spatial settlement that have relocated many low-skilled Chinese immigrants from New York City's Chinatown to new immigrant destinations. Using a mixed-method approach over a decade in Chinatown and six destination states, sociologist Dr. Liang specifically examines how the expansion and growing popularity of Chinese restaurants has shifted settlement to more rural and faraway areas.

Dr. Liang's study demonstrates that key players such as employment agencies, Chinatown buses, and restaurant supply shops facilitate the spatial dispersion of immigrants while simultaneously maintaining vital links between Chinatown in Manhattan and new immigrant destinations.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Who wrote the Haggada? Is there a thematic roadmap to the structure of the Seder? Why is the meal eaten in the middle of Hallel? These and many more questions could be asked in one's struggle to discern what the Seder is really about. All the more reason to join us as we speak with Rabbi Shmuel Goldin about his book, Unlocking the Haggada: The Complete Haggada With In-Depth Commentary (OU Press, 2018).

Rabbi Shmuel Goldin received his BS in psychology and his MA in Jewish education from Yeshiva University, and his rabbinic ordination from the Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University. He was included in Newsweek’s list of “America’s Top 50 Rabbis for 2012” and in Forward magazine’s list of Jewish communal leaders who have made a difference in the community at large.

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Chile is more than just spice, writes Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and Cal Poly Ethnic Studies professor Victor Valle in The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands (U New Mexico Press, 2023). By tracing the meaning of chile as a plant and chile eating as an act. Valle shows how Indigenous cultivation and culinary practices troubled colonizers, sustained cultures, and fostered exchange. The Poetics of Fire calls for decolonization of chile cultivation and a renewed embrace of Indigenous ideals toward land and nourishment, arguing that chiles serve as a connection point between pre-colonization Indigenous societies and twentieth century (and beyond) Chicanx and Latinx communities. At once food studies, Indigenous studies, and Latinx studies, The Poetics of Fire dispenses with Scoville units and instead thinks about how chile is a window for understanding a decolonized world.

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For McDonald’s, the Chicken McNugget, the flagship product of further processed chicken, represented a once-in-a-generation innovation, a snack item that quickly evolved into a meal, spawned a legion of imitators, and gained a large share of the global poultry market. Yet, almost as soon as the McNugget made its North American debut, it quickly became the subject of opprobrium and ridicule, taking on a symbolic status among serious food connoisseurs as an indication of Americans’ culinary decline and a growing disconnection between diners and the origins of the food that they ate.

During a time of rising beef prices and growing health concerns regarding red meats, the Chicken McNugget was received as a lighter alternative to traditional burger meals, clean and easy to consume, popular with children, and adaptable to busy “on-the-go” lifestyles of working parents. Consumers understood that they were not purchasing a premium product made from the finest cuts but selected the McNugget as a rational economic purchase that represented a new way of dining.

In reassembling the rise of poultry in the United States, Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet (University of Georgia Press, 2024) by Dr. Patrick Dixon presents a multilayered approach, connecting the entwined stories of workers and industrialists with restauranteurs and consumers, the former geographically moored within the South, the latter diverse and nationwide. Dr. Dixon centers further processed chicken within an analysis of the U.S. food system that demonstrates that consumers did not unwittingly succumb to a “junk food” diet but made deliberate and aspirational decisions based on conceptions of leisure, lifestyle, and bodily needs.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Both personal and entertaining, Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024) is the highly anticipated second book of a trilogy and shows Winnipeg author Ariel Gordon at her best: interweaving the personal with the easily-overlooked local and natural and local world around her, and passing on her contagious delight for the world at—and under—our feet.

In a diverse range of essays, Gordon showcases her background in biology, taking us deep into the fungal world, exploring mushrooms both edible and not, found and foraged, and the myriad ways in which mushrooms and trees make up our ecosystem and are in fact a reflection of the way we build our own personal communities and connections.

This collection of essays will resonate with anyone who’s ever thought, “can I eat that?” when seeing a mushroom, but also those with larger questions about our place in the natural world.

More About Ariel Gordon:

Ariel Gordon (she/her) is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. She is the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival that appears in the Winnipeg Free Press. Gordon’s essay “Red River Mudlark” was 2nd place winner of the 2022 Kloppenberg Hybrid Grain Contest in Grain Magazine and other work appeared recently in FreeFall, Columba Poetry, Canthius, and Canadian Notes & Queries. Gordon's fourth collection of poetry, Siteseeing: Writing nature & climate across the prairies, was written in collaboration with Saskatchewan poet Brenda Schmidt and appeared in fall 2023.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and tobacco promised a brighter financial future for England, even as overindulgence at home posed serious moral pitfalls.

Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751 (Bucknell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Dayne Riley is an engaging and original study that explores how literary satirists represented these consumables—and related anxieties about the changing nature of Britishness—in their work. Dr. Riley traces the satirical treatment of wine, beer, ale, gin, pipe tobacco, and snuff from the beginning of Charles II’s reign, through the boom in tobacco’s popularity, to the end of the Gin Craze in libertine poems and plays, anonymous verse, ballad operas, and the satire of canonical writers such as Gay, Pope, and Swift. Focusing on social concerns about class, race, and gender, Consuming Anxieties examines how satirists championed Britain’s economic strength on the world stage while critiquing the effects of consumable luxuries on the British body and consciousness.

 This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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What we eat, who we are, and the relationship between the two. Eating and Being: A History of Ideas about Our Food and Ourselves (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a history of Western thinking about food, eating, knowledge, and ourselves. In modern thought, eating is about what is good for you, not about what is good. Eating is about health, not about virtue. Yet this has not always been the case. For a great span of the past—from antiquity through about the middle of the eighteenth century—one of the most pervasive branches of medicine was known as dietetics, prescribing not only what people should eat but also how they should order many aspects of their lives, including sleep, exercise, and emotional management. Dietetics did not distinguish between the medical and the moral, nor did it acknowledge the difference between what was good for you and what was good. Dietetics counseled moderation in all things, where moderation was counted as a virtue as well as the way to health. But during the nineteenth century, nutrition science began to replace the language of traditional dietetics with the vocabulary of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and calories, and the medical and the moral went their separate ways. Steven Shapin shows how much depended upon that shift, and he also explores the extent to which the sensibilities of dietetics have been lost. Throughout this rich history, he evokes what it felt like to eat during another historical period and invites us to reflect on what it means to feel about food as we now do. Shapin shows how the change from dietetics to nutrition science fundamentally altered how we think about our food and its powers, our bodies, and our minds.

Steven Shapin is professor emeritus of the history of science at Harvard University.

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