New Books in Food

By Marshall Poe

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently publ... more

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The podcast currently has 599 episodes available.

New Books in Food episodes:

July 25, 2026 Samantha Iyer, "Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States" (Columbia UP, 2026)
The United States’ superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing nations in the Third World through its massive food aid program.
Through the lens of food and agriculture, Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Samantha Iyer offers new ways to understand the roots of the post–Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Dr. Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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46min
July 24, 2026 Andrew Flachs, "Feeding the World as If People Mattered: How Small Farms Produce Value Beyond Yields" (U Arizona Press, 2026)
Backyard gardens flush with cucumbers, tomatoes, and
peppers where bees buzz and chickens scratch. Beyond, a forest filled
with blackberries and jewelweed. Inspired by childhood memories of his
grandmother’s overflowing backyard garden, author Andrew Flachs has
embarked on a multi-continent, decades-long look at agriculture and its
value.
The dominant view of agriculture has focused only on what
we produce. It sees value in terms of capital gains or yield efficiency,
masking how our global food system produces tremendous amounts of food
commodities while failing to feed people, support rural communities, or
enhance ecological well-being. Feeding the World as if People Mattered: How Small Farms Produce Value Beyond Yields (University of Arizona Press, 2026) asks us to look more deeply and more humanely at what we perceive to be most valuable in our agricultural systems.
This
book draws on fifteen years of anthropological research, taking readers
to fields in South India, Eastern Europe, and North America, where
people are already feeding the future amid global change. From these
fields, Flachs shows us how a radical rethinking of the value of small
farms and farmers is already happening. Bringing together conversations
in agriculture, economics, anthropology, and the environmental
humanities, Flachs deftly shows how small farms reproduce social and
ecological relationships that are the only sustainable path forward.
For
anyone who is curious about the food on their plate and the people who
helped to get it there, Feeding the World as if People Mattered will
offer a new way to find value in the food we grow and the people who
grow it.
Dr. Andrew Flachs researches food and
agriculture systems, exploring genetically modified crops, heirloom
seeds, and our own microbiomes. Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania,
he graduated from Oberlin College with dual Bachelor of Music and
Bachelor of Arts degrees in 2010. He earned his PhD from Washington
University in St. Louis in April 2016 and was a 2016-2017 Volkswagen
Exchange Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Heidelberg University
Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies. He is currently
an associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University. His work
among farmers in North America, the Balkans, and South India
investigates ecological knowledge and technological change in
agricultural systems spanning Cleveland urban gardens and Indian GM
cotton fields. His research has been supported by public and private
institutions including the Department of Education, the National
Geographic Society, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the
Social Science Research Council, while his writing on agricultural
development has been featured in numerous peer-reviewed publications as
well as public venues including Sapiens, Salon, and the National
Geographic magazine. His work has been recognized by eight
international awards, including most recently as a finalist for the
Society for Economic Anthropology Kate Browne Creativity in Research
Award and the International Convention of Asia Scholars’ Book Prize.
Sandra
Elizabeth is a graduate student enrolled at the Department of Sociology
in Shiv Nadar University, Delhi- NCR. She looks at rice farmers’ and
their way of life in Kuttanad, Kerala—which is dubbed as the state’s
rice granary. She can be reached out on X.

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50min
July 24, 2026 Lily Kelting, "Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional Foods" (UNC Press, 2026)
The rise of “heritage” foods—that is, the reinvention of traditional
foods—has enjoyed a high profile thanks to the oft-praised efforts of
chefs such as Sean Brock and René Redzepi. But Lily Kelting observes the
popularity of heritage foods as something more: a global movement in
response to climate catastrophe and the rise of right-wing, populist
movements that center a return to the past as part of their ideology.
Weaving ethnography, discourse analysis, critical theory, and sensory,
embodied critique, Kelting tracks and critiques the boom of traditional
food revival movements in the American South, Denmark, and India.
Ultimately, Kelting argues that the heritage culinary professionals wish
to revive is equal parts nostalgia and invention: They engage, subvert,
and ignore food histories in their creation of new food movements. As
Kelting documents our contemporary moment, she shows how the
conversations surrounding these new food movements leave out people
already keeping their traditions alive. Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional Foods (University of North Carolina Press, 2026),
then, serves as a reparative revaluation of the work of the cooks
largely excluded from the contemporary media conversation about heritage
revival.

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1h 4min
July 21, 2026 Maria Pinto, "Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival" (UNC Press, 2026)
In Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival (University
of North Carolina Press, 2026), naturalist, forager, and educator Maria
Pinto uncovers strange and beautiful connections between the natural
and human worlds, mingling reportage, research, memoir, and nature
writing, touching on topics that range from Black farmers’ domestication
of the unforgettable aroma of truffles, to the possibility that
enslaved people wielded mycological poisons against their enslavers.
Pinto
brings a new perspective and a distinctive literary voice to this mix
of environmental and lived history, and every page sings with her
enthusiasm for the networks in which we are embedded: fungal,
ecological, ancestral, and communal. Join us in pursuit of beautiful,
perplexing, delicious, and deadly mushrooms as we explore this
understudied kingdom’s awe-inspiring diversity, discovering how fungi
have been used by people, especially those on the margins, for survival,
pleasure, revelation, and revolution.
When she’s not in the
woods (and sometimes when she is), Maria Pinto is a writer, editor, and
educator. She teaches writing for various literary organizations. She
reads fiction for Peripheries Journal and serves on the board
of Hale, an outdoor education and land conservancy nonprofit. Her
writing has been supported by Assets for Artists at Massachusetts Museum
of Contemporary Art, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Vermont Studio
Center, the Mass Cultural Council, the Writers’ Room of Boston, The
Mastheads, and The Garrett on the Green. You can find Maria at her Website and on Instagram.
Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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1h
July 18, 2026 Bradford A. Bouley, "The Barberini Butchers: Meat, Murder, and Warfare in Early Modern Italy" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026)
In 1644 four norcini
or pork butchers were accused of killing not pigs, but seven of their
fellow citizens, stripping the meat from the bones, then combining it
with pig to make sausages, which were then sold to Romans from their
shop behind the Pantheon. In the multiple pamphlets describing this
supposed crime, the authors of this accusation blamed residents of Rome
themselves, who had become so obsessed with meat that they turned a
blind eye to
such horrendous acts. This fabricated story points to an underlying
reality—that in the early seventeenth century, a series of popes
dramatically increased the amount of food and wine consumed by Romans,
culminating in a per capita consumption of over a pound of meat per day
during the reign of Pope Urban VIII (d. 1644).
The Barberini Butchers: Meat, Murder, and Warfare in Early Modern Italy (University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2026) traces the efforts and
activities of a range of actors who strove to bring meat to the Roman
table. Dr. Bradford A. Bouley shows how Rome’s preoccupation with food
was the result of papal policy in the aftermath of the Reformation;
food, and especially meat, served as religious and political propaganda,
symbolizing the correctness of the Catholic faith and demonstrating the
extent of papal power. Dr. Bouley details the dramatic reorganization
of Roman foodways needed to satisfy this demand for meat, as large herds
of animals had to be funneled from the countryside to the city. This
consumption was ultimately not sustainable, triggering a crisis that
fueled sensational rumors
of murder and cannibalism and eventually, Dr. Bouley contends, sparked
the outbreak of civil war, as vassals rebelled against papal oversight.

The Barberini Butchers
recovers this significant episode in food, environmental, and cultural
history, one that brings early modern politics and history into
conversation with concerns over human use of natural resources and
consumption of animal products that continue to resonate clearly today.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food
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50min
July 17, 2026 Paul Stangl, "San Francisco Seafood: A History from Ocean to Table" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
For early San Franciscans, seafood was an important source of
nutrition and a feature of social life, inspiring culinary developments
that remain components in California cuisine more than a century later.
Consumers interested in flavorful alternatives to meat and associated
health benefits could follow recipes for nearly fifty types of marine
life from state waters, such as salmon, flounder, and oysters. Others
are no longer available, out-of-vogue, or simply forgotten. Further,
overfishing and environmental damage decimated many local seafood
stocks, providing a cautionary tale with global significance.
In San Francisco Seafood: A History from Ocean to Table (Bloomsbury,
2026), Dr. Paul Stangl traces the development of San Francisco's
fisheries, seafood markets, cookery, and dining culture from the Gold
Rush to the 1920s. Migrants from around the world imported fishing
techniques and cuisines, then slowly adapted as they came to understand
local resources and each other. Newcomers found the tastiest fish
through trial and error and assimilated the “best” into a new cuisine.
Different ethnic and occupational groups collaborated, fought, and
learned from one another as they irreversibly altered the natural world
around them. By the end of the First World War, San Francisco's seafood
cuisine scarcely resembled that of the 1850s, due to cultural
adaptation, technological advancements, and changes to the natural
environment. It was no longer derivative of New England and France, but
included influences from the Southern states, Asia, and South America.San Francisco Seafood
chronicles the city's transformation from a fish-barren town-where
restaurants served canned, pickled, and dried fish from the East
Coast-to a seafood-rich metropolis that harvested seafood from Mexico to
Alaska. He emphasizes how the impacts on nature and local labor serve
as a necessary cautionary tale for today's global seafood trade. This is
a thorough and insightful history of a once emerging, and now
essential, cuisine for food and history buffs alike.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food
...more
1h 5min
July 15, 2026 Nora L. Rubel, "Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of the Settlement Cook Book" (Columbia UP, 2026)
In
1901, Lizzie Black Kander put together a cookbook based on the classes
she taught at the Milwaukee Jewish Mission. “I was trying to teach a
group of young foreign girls in a crowded neighborhood how to cook
simple and nutritious food, yet have it attractive and inexpensive as we
prepare it in America,” she recalled. The Settlement Cook Book would go on to be the most successful charitable cookbook in American history, remaining
a best-seller into the 1970s. Despite including nonkosher recipes, it
became a mainstay in Jewish kitchens and an enduring touchstone of
Jewish American culture.
Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of The Settlement Cook Book (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Nora Rubel tells the remarkable story of The Settlement Cook Book,
demonstrating how it shaped Jewish American identity—and was in turn
shaped by generations of Jewish women. Dr. Rubel traces the cookbook’s
evolution across forty editions over several decades, through waves of
immigration, shifting gender roles, upward mobility, suburbanization,
and rapid changes in Jewish life. She argues that the book celebrates
pluralism, allowing it to serve at once as a tool for Americanization, a
repository of tradition, and a platform for culinary innovation.
Ultimately, The Settlement Cook Book
is a record of American Jewish women’s history, told through the food
they made and the lives they led. A cultural biography of an iconic
cookbook, this lively and inviting book shares an inclusive vision of
American cuisine.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food
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45min
July 08, 2026 Meena Khandelwal, "Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women's Technology in India" (U Arizona Press, 2026)
Stove
improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient”
biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to
find their carefully engineered stoves abandoned in trash heaps or
repurposed as storage bins, while the traditional mud chulha retains a
central place in the kitchen. Why do so many Indian women continue to
use wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves when they have other options?
Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India (University of Arizona Press, 2024) by Dr. Meena Khandelwal argues that the supposedly obsolete
chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed
to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the
new is not a failure to embrace new technologies
but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha
is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate
matter that harms people’s bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and
accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also
depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women’s autonomy as a
local, do-it-yourself technology.
Dr.
Khandelwal, a feminist anthropologist, describes her collaboration with
engineers, archaeologists, and others. She employs critical social
theory and reflections from fieldwork to bring together research from a
range of fields, including history, geography, anthropology, energy and
environmental studies, public health, and science and technology studies
(STS). In so doing she not only demystifies multidisciplinary research
but also highlights the messy reality of actual behavior.
Cookstove Chronicles
critically examines why, despite extensive development efforts, use of
the chulha persists. It offers an important new framework for looking at
development, technology, environmental change, and human behavior.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food
...more
1h 2min
July 03, 2026 Making Microbes Explicit
This episode takes listeners into the latest issues of Gastronomica, with a special feature on microbes. Sarah Elton and Maya Hey talk with Dan Bender of the Gastronomica Editorial Collective about their special section on microbes and food. In a conversation that spans food systems, environment, health, dietetics, and culture, they explore human microbial relationships from the soil to the processing plant, at the grocery store, in home kitchens, and beyond. Sarah and Maya share how they each came to the study of microbes, discuss what microbes are and what it means to center microbes in food studies research, and reflect on some of the policy implications. Their two-part special section in the Spring and Summer 2026 issues of Gastronomica brings together 11 articles on microbes in food and food systems from researchers around the world.
Listeners can find "Making Microbes Explicit: Introduction to Microbes, Food, and Food Systems" by Maya Hey and Sarah Elton, and their co-written follow-up piece, "Finding the Microbes in Food Studies” in Gastronomica (issues 26.1 and 26.2).
Sarah Elton is an assistant professor and Eakin Chair in Critical Qualitative Health Research Methodology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. She has published widely, with her research appearing most recently in journals such as Nature Cities, Social & Cultural Geography, Qualitative Inquiry and Gastronomica. She is also the author of Locavore (HarperCollins Canada 2010) and Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Maya Hey is based in Stockholm at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where she is a postdoctoral researcher with the Environmental Humanities Laboratory. Her interdisciplinary work on microbes draws on her background in food studies, dietetics, and communication. Her new book, Singing with Invisible Worlds: Fermenting Sake on Microbial Time will be published later this year by the University of Minnesota Press.
Daniel E. Bender is a professor of food studies, environmental studies, and history at the University of Toronto, the President of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS), and Co-Chair of the Editorial Collective at Gastronomica.
Listeners can now find the Gastronomica podcast on the New Books Network here. Subscribe to Gastronomica’s podcast feed to stay updated on the newest episodes.

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41min
July 01, 2026 Peter Ross, "Insatiable Appetites: Eating Out in Georgian London" (Bodleian Library, 2026)
In Insatiable Appetites: Eating Out in Georgian London (Bodleian Library, 2026) by Dr. Peter Ross, step into the kitchens, streets
and chop houses of Georgian London—one day, one city, countless
appetites. From dawn until past midnight, Londoners dined at taverns,
coaching inns, oyster rooms, confectioners, coffee shops, chocolate
houses, soup shops
and dining rooms. For the poor, the streets bustled with vendors
offering early versions of fast food: hot green peas, baked potatoes,
suet puddings, curds and whey, rice milk, gingerbread, pastry ‘pigs,’
and the now-forgotten saloop, a warming drink made from orchid roots.
After
dark, sex workers and their clients indulged in a glass of jelly, then
considered an aphrodisiac, as a precursor to a visit to the brothel. As
the empire expanded, culinary influences poured in: London’s first
Indian takeaway appeared in 1773, while the East End became home to
Jewish fried fish, Italian baloney and German sausages.
Through
the course of a single day, this book takes readers on a journey through
breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper in Georgian London, drawing on
contemporary archives to follow hungry citizens from all walks of life
as they navigate the city’s diverse food landscape. It reveals not only
culinary pleasures and horrors, but also the social challenges and
daily struggles that shaped life in the capital.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food
...more
1h 3min

FAQs about New Books in Food:

How many episodes does New Books in Food have?

The podcast currently has 599 episodes available.