Episodios

  • Kathryn L. Beasley, "The Proof Is in the Dough: Rural Southern Women, Extension, and Making Money" (University of Georgia Press, 2025)

    Kathryn L. Beasley, "The Proof Is in the Dough: Rural Southern Women, Extension, and Making Money" (University of Georgia Press, 2025)
    Jun 22 2025
    The Proof Is in the Dough: Rural Southern Women, Extension, and Making Money (University of Georgia Press, 2025) examines how rural white and African American women in Alabama and Florida used the Cooperative Extension Service's home demonstration programming between 1914 and 1929 as a means to earn extra income. Kathryn L. Beasley explores an area of rural women's history that has not been closely examined--that is, how rural American women involved with home demonstration used the skills they learned as a way to better themselves economically. Furthermore, Beasley traces how this extra income allowed these women to shape their own producing and consuming habits. While most home demonstration programming during the Progressive Era and 1920s focused on ways to save money--among other objectives--rural women in Alabama and Florida used different strategies to earn more money and gain some economic independence. Beasley's research shows how Alabama and Florida's rural women exercised their own determination and resourcefulness to create ways to economically sustain themselves by using food, tangible items, handicrafts, small businesses, and more to their advantage. However, while there were similarities in how these rural women earned extra money, the states in which they lived differed in important agricultural ways. Florida offered a wider variety of growing and environmental seasons and, as a result, a larger diversity of crops. By taking a comparative approach--both Florida versus Alabama and Black versus white--Beasley details the unique and innovative ways that rural southern women applied their considerable agricultural and domestic skills to improve their lives and the lives of their families. In so doing, she also reveals how disposable income helped establish ideas of empowerment and financial independence in the years before the economic struggles of the 1930s. 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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    1 h y 15 m
  • L. Sasha Gora, "Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada" (University of Toronto Press, 2025)

    L. Sasha Gora, "Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada" (University of Toronto Press, 2025)
    Jun 16 2025
    Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2025) by Dr. L. Sasha Gora explores the complex relationships between wild plants and introduced animals, Indigenous foodways, and Canadian regulations. Blending food studies with environmental history, the book examines how cuisines reflect social and political issues related to cultural representation, restaurants, and food sovereignty. Dr. Gora chronicles the rise of Indigenous restaurants and their influence on Canadian food culture, engaging with questions about how shifts in appetite reflect broader shifts in imaginations of local environments and identities. Drawing on a diverse range of sources – from recipes and menus to artworks and television shows – the book discusses both historical and contemporary representations of Indigenous foodways and how they are changing amid the relocalization of food systems. Culinary Claims tells a new story of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance, emphasizing the critical role that restaurants play in Canada’s cultural landscape. It investigates how food shapes our understanding of place and the politics that underpin this relationship. Ultimately, the book asks, What insights can historians gain from restaurants – and their legacies – as reflections of Indigenous and settler negotiations over cultural claims to land? Culinary Claims presents a comprehensive history of Indigenous restaurants in Canada, highlighting their significant role in the evolution of Canadian food culture. 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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    1 h
  • Barry W. Enderwick, "Sandwiches of History: The Cookbook: All the Best (and Most Surprising) Things People Have Put Between Slices of Bread" (Harvard Common Press, 2024)

    Barry W. Enderwick, "Sandwiches of History: The Cookbook: All the Best (and Most Surprising) Things People Have Put Between Slices of Bread" (Harvard Common Press, 2024)
    Jun 15 2025
    Barry Enderwick has been making, eating, and sharing historical sandwiches for years on social media @sandwichesofhistory and recently in live shows. In Sandwiches of History: The Cookbook: All the Best (and Most Surprising) Things People Have Put Between Slices of Bread (Harvard Common Press, 2024) he painstakingly recreates dozens of recipes, staying faithful to the original sandwiches while also providing guidance on how to make each more amenable to a contemporary palate. The recipes provide a window into the kinds of sandwiches that were common in prior eras and also highlight some of the ways that ingredients and techniques have changed. Ingredients like nasturtium leaves, watercress, and sardines may be surprising now but were common in the past. Other combinations speak to the new found prosperity and international interests of the post World War II years. Above all, Barry's good humor and respect for both the sandwiches and the sandwich eaters make this book a compelling exploration of changing tastes and circumstances. Although some of the combinations are surprising or even downright baffling, the book provides the context to make sense of the past. As just one example, the Toast Sandwich - yes, that's a piece of toast between two buttered pieces of untoasted bread -- was for people on restricted diets to provide some texture and taste to an otherwise bland eating experience. This peek into the humble sandwich becomes a highly personal culinary experience deeply rooted in curiosity about the past and the enjoyment of a good meal today. Author recommended reading: The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen by Jacques Pépin Hosted by Meghan Cochran 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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    44 m
  • Laura Lee Flanagan, "Hardcore Vegetarian: Welcome to the Vegedome!" (Process Media, 2025)

    Laura Lee Flanagan, "Hardcore Vegetarian: Welcome to the Vegedome!" (Process Media, 2025)
    May 30 2025
    Laura Lee Flanagan's Hardcore Vegetarian (Feral House, 2025) is a celebration of food and love for everyone! Hardcore Vegetarian is a journey into vegetarianism led by someone who fell into it inadvertently and is happily still learning as she goes. As a passionate home cook, Flanagan became what she describes as a "lazy vegetarian" while figuring out how to cook for herself and her vegetarian husband, musician Harley Flanagan. It is a narrative guide for the vegetarian-curious, for home cooks who want to explore vegetarianism and introduce plant-based recipes into their households. It explores the meaning of food in our lives, how we interact with it, and how our relationship to it evolves as over time. Included are short personal accounts, as Flanagan engages readers as she gently and humorously shares her own learning curve, along with road-tested, beloved, and delicious recipes. Hardcore Vegetarian brings readers along for the successes and sometimes failures as Flanagan overhauls her kitchen and recipes from meaty to beety. She shares tips and insights from the people who taught her how to cook for the people she loves. Hardcore Vegetarian is organized into easily digestible sections that cover every meal and includes a guide to vegetarian pantry essentials. As she writes, "Food is a primordial expression of love," and there is nothing more Hardcore than love. 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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    41 m
  • Andrew Ofstehage, "Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado" (Cornell UP, 2025)

    Andrew Ofstehage, "Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado" (Cornell UP, 2025)
    May 19 2025
    Following a group of US Midwest farmers who purchased tracts of land in the tropical savanna of eastern Brazil, Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado (Cornell University Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Ofstehage investigates industrial farming in the modern developing world. Seeking adventure and profit, the transplanted farmers created what Dr. Ofstehage calls "flexible farms" that have severed connections with the basic units of agriculture: land, plants, and labor. But while the transnational farmers have destroyed these relationships, they cannot simply do as they please. Regardless of their nationality, race, and capital, they must contend with pests, workers, the Brazilian state, and the land itself. Welcome to Soylandia explores the frictions that define the new relationships of flexible farming—a paradigm that Dr. Ofstehage shows is ready to be reproduced elsewhere in Brazil and exported to the rest of the globe, including the United States. Through this compelling ethnography, Dr. Ofstehage takes readers on a tour of Soylandia and the new world of industrial agriculture, globalized markets, international development, and environmental change that it heralds. 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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    46 m
  • Carrie Helms Tippen, "Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

    Carrie Helms Tippen, "Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
    May 16 2025
    The cookbook genre is highly conventional with an orientation toward celebration and success. From glossy photographs to heartwarming stories and adjective-rich ingredient lists, the cookbook tradition primes readers for pleasure. Yet the overarching narrative of the region is often one of pain, loss, privation, exploitation, poverty, and suffering of various kinds. While some cookbook writers go to great lengths to avoid reminding readers of this painful past, others invoke that pain as a marker of southern authenticity. Still others use stories of southern suffering as an opportunity to make space for reconciliation, reparation, or apology for past wrongs. In Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks (UP of Mississippi, 2025), author Carrie Helms Tippen attempts to understand the unique rhetorical situation of the southern cookbook as it negotiates a tension between the expectations of the genre and the prevailing metanarratives of the southern experience, one focused on pleasure and the other rooted in pain. Through an analysis of commercially published “southern” cookbooks from the 1990s to the present, Tippen examines the range of rhetorical purposes and strategies writers have employed, some of which undermine the reality of a painful past and cause harm or violence, and others which serve as tools for truth and reconciliation. 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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    1 h y 17 m
  • Annalisa Marzano, "Plants, Politics and Empire in Ancient Rome" (Cambridge UP. 2022)

    Annalisa Marzano, "Plants, Politics and Empire in Ancient Rome" (Cambridge UP. 2022)
    Apr 28 2025
    Plants, Politics and Empire in Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Annalisa Marzano investigates the cultural and political dimension of Roman arboriculture and the associated movement of plants from one corner of the empire to the other. It uses the convergent perspectives offered by textual and archaeological sources to sketch a picture of large-scale arboriculture as a phenomenon primarily driven by elite activity and imperialism. Arboriculture had a clear cultural role in the Roman world: it was used to construct the public persona of many elite Romans, with the introduction of new plants from far away regions or the development of new cultivars contributing to the elite competitive display. Exotic plants from conquered regions were also displayed as trophies in military triumphs, making plants an element of the language of imperialism. Dr. Marzano argues that the Augustan era was a key moment for the development of arboriculture and identifies colonists and soldiers as important agents contributing to plant dispersal and diversity. 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. Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there aredumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative tostudents. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to makeacademic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New BooksNetwork with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word. Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn,or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here toreceive our weekly newsletter. 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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    49 m
  • Fernando Collantes, "Milk in Spain and the History of Diet Change: The Political Economy of Dairy Consumption Since 1950" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

    Fernando Collantes, "Milk in Spain and the History of Diet Change: The Political Economy of Dairy Consumption Since 1950" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
    Apr 27 2025
    In barely three generations the Spanish diet has changed beyond recognition. The traditional concerns around nutritional health and scarcity have been mostly left behind, but they have given way to new problems linked to excess. In Milk in Spain and the History of Diet Change: The Political Economy of Dairy Consumption since 1950 (Bloomsbury, 2024) Dr. Fernando Collantes shows how the dairy industry has been central to this societal shift. From widespread calcium deficiency in the 1950s to the more recent, and controversial, turn to highly processed foods, it provides a recent history of diet change in Spain. Probing the reasons behind why this shift has occurred, and how, it shows that when it comes to food society, politics, economics and the law are intrinsically linked.Taking the reader beyond the world of food, Milk in Spain and the History of Diet Change combines qualitative and quantitative methods to position diet change within the broader debate on consumer society and 'the good life'. Contrasting two models of food consumption, it shows that unless public policy takes the challenge of affluence seriously, the food system can become an obstacle to a better society. 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. Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there are dumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative to students. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to make academic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New Books Network with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word. Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food
    Más Menos
    1 h
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