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 published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food
Episodes
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Introduction to Migrant Foodways and Culinary Mobilities in Japan
In this episode, James Farrer of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective and Alejandra Dorado-Vinay talk about their introduction to the new special section on migrant foodways and culinary mobilities in Japan. Taking listeners into the neighborhoods of superdiverse Tokyo through everyday experiences...
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In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World with Elizabeth F. S. Roberts (Princeton UP, 2026)
Elizabeth Roberts has experienced the suffering wrought by addiction: her sister’s destructive alcoholism and dependency on prescription drugs, her mother’s hoarding, and her own struggles with binge eating. As for so many of us, addiction brought about self-loathing, reflecting her individual...
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Safar: Finding Home, History, and Culture through Punjabi Food in the American West with Madhushree Ghosh (Bloomsbury, 2026)
In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Madhushree Ghosh about her memoir Safar: Finding Home, History, and Culture through Punjabi Food in the American West (Bloomsbury, 2026). Blends memoir and history to explore the role of Punjabi food in fostering community and identity among...
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American Bread: A History with Andrew Coe (U California Press, 2026)
There is no humbler food than bread, none easier to take for granted. So ancient that it shows up in prehistoric sites, bread is still full of surprises. Heirloom grains and artisan loaves fetch top dollar, while home bakers pour their passion into naan and challah, anadama and pistolet. In...
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A Mellified Redemption? Learning to Live with a Pest Through Spotted Lanternfly Honey
Rosi Song of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective hosts authors Eve Z. Bratman and Anna Purchase in a discussion of their newly published research article on lanternfly honey. Eve and Anna bring a social science perspective to their study of the spotted lanternfly. Noting the spotted lanternfly’s...
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Marion Nestle and Lisa Sutherland, "Sugar Coated: Unboxing the Hidden Forces Shaping America's Favorite Breakfast Food" (U California Press, 2026)
In Sugar Coated: Unboxing the Hidden Forces Shaping America's Favorite Breakfast Food (U California Press, 2026), world-renowned food politics expert Marion Nestle joins forces with former cereal executive Lisa Sutherland to examine what cereal boxes reveal about American culture and food...
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Sarah Trad, "A House in the Lebanese Mountains: Recipes & Stories from Beit Trad" (Thames & Hudson, 2026)
High in the Lebanese mountains above Beirut sits Beit Trad, an eighteenth-century family home that Sarah Trad transformed into a guesthouse devoted to Levantine hospitality. The house brings together family history, Lebanese design, food, and the belief that welcoming someone into your home is an...
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Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, "Pierogi: An American Story of Polish Food" (Columbia UP, 2026)
Today, pierogi are the most recognizable Polish food in the United States and a symbol of Polish American identity. How did this humble dish attain such lofty status? In Pierogi: An American Story of Polish Food (Columbia UP, 2026), Professor Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann explores the surprising...
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Justin Ellen, "Better Than Grandma's: Comfort Desserts We Grew Up Loving" (Rolling Pin Press, 2026)
We all love the desserts we grew up with-the ones tied to family, tradition, and the moments we remember most. But as much as we love those recipes, they don't always turn out the way we'd want. That's where this book comes in. From cakes and cookies to pies, breads, and more, each recipe in…
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The Next Issue: Fall 2026 (26.3)
In this episode, Melissa Fuster and Rosi Song of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective introduce the journal’s latest issue, Fall 2026 (volume 26, issue 3), now available online. Melissa talks with Rosi about what goes into putting a Gastronomica issue together and the backstory of issue 26.3. Rosi...
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Edward Cutler, "This Beautiful Country: How Italy's Nature Shaped Its Culture and Civilisation" (Chelsea Green, 2026)
In This Beautiful Country: How Italy's Nature Shaped Its Culture and Civilisation (Chelsea Green, 2026), discover Italy’s unique ecological past and how it has shaped its present—and its future, with this riveting look at the incredibly diverse natural history and our need to preserve it. Italy…
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Gastronomy as Sensory Engineering
One year after the publication of Gastronomica’s special feature on food and philosophy, Robert T. Valgenti of the Editorial Collective revisits the question of what a philosophical perspective could bring to addressing food-related issues. In this episode, he talks with Gastronomica author and...
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Claudia Kreklau, "The Making of Modern Eating: How the German Middle Class Forged the Way We Eat, 1780–1910" (Berghahn, 2026)
Nineteenth-century Germany invented the way we eat. Women experimenting in households, French chefs fleeing guillotines, and one of the most rapidly evolving food industries in the world forged recognizably modern eating practices between 1780 and 1910. While central Europeans merely aimed to...
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Po-Yi Hung, "Routes of Taiwan Tea: Mobility, Borders, and Territoriality" (U Washington Press, 2026)
From misty mountain oolongs to the global boba boom, Taiwan’s teas carry far more than flavor. They embody contested borders, evolving identities, and the complexities of nationhood. Routes of Taiwan Tea: Mobility, Borders, and Territoriality (U Washington Press, 2026) by Dr. Po-Yi Hung traces…
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Dan Du, "This World in a Teacup: Credit, Taste, and Power in the U. S.-China Tea Trade, 1784–1911" (U Nebraska Press, 2026)
Popular history tells the story of how the tea boycott during the American Revolution caused a transition in American taste from tea to coffee, making the young country a coffee-drinking nation. In truth, Americans did not give up their tea so easily, and the United States grew to be the...
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Matias E. Margulis, "Shadow Negotiators: How UN Organizations Shape the Rules of World Trade for Food Security" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Shadow Negotiators: How UN Organizations Shape the Rules of World Trade for Food Security (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Matias E. Margulis is the first book to demonstrate that United Nations (UN) organizations have intervened to influence the discourse, agenda, and outcomes of...
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Sophie Chao, "Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger" (Duke UP, 2025)
In Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger (Duke UP, 2025), Sophie Chao examines how Indigenous Marind communities understand and theorize hunger in lowland West Papua, a place where industrial plantation expansion and settler-colonial violence are radically reconfiguring…
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The Microbiopolitics of Novel Foods
What role do microbes play in aquaponic farming and cultivated meat production, and how might such novel food technologies impact microbiomes? In this episode, Ishita Dey of Gastronomica hosts Lukáš Senft, Tereza Stöckelová, and Varvara Borisova in a conversation about their new article, “The...
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Robert Lee Maril, "Hungry Oklahoma: Confronting Poverty and Food Insecurity" (U Oklahoma Press, 2026)
In Oklahoma, one out of every six residents is poor. One in five children lives in poverty and faces food insecurity. In Hungry Oklahoma: Confronting Poverty and Food Insecurity (U Oklahoma Press, 2026), native son and sociologist Robert Lee Maril follows in the tradition of the national...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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…
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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,...
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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,...
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Ryan Angulo and Doug Crowell, "Kindness & Salt: Recipes for the Care & Feeding of Your Friends & Neighbors" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018)
When Brooklyn restaurateurs Doug Crowell and Ryan Angulo opened Buttermilk Channel in Carroll Gardens in 2008, they created more than a restaurant—they built a neighborhood institution. Known for dishes like Buttermilk Fried Chicken with Cheddar Waffles and towering Popovers, the restaurant…
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Ashok Malhotra, "Imperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri La, 1900-1969" (UCL Press, 2026)
Imperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri La, 1900-1969 (UCL Press, 2026) is a global history project that examines the diffusion of scientific and environmental discourses from India to Britain and the US. Ashok Malhotra examines how imperial agendas and colonial…
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Helen Veit, "Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History" (St Martin's Press, 2026)
Are children naturally picky? It sure seems that way. Yet, amazingly, pickiness used to be almost nonexistent. Well into the 20th century, Americans saw children as joyful omnivores who were naturally curious and eager to eat. Of course, this doesn't make sense today. Don't kids have special…
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Jonatan Leer and Stinne Gunder Strøm Krogager, "Food Porn: Food Aesthetics in a Digital Age" (Bristol UP, 2026)
Is food porn a vibrant and democratic new expression of modern food culture or a superficial addition to an image-saturated world? Tracing its origins from the 1970s to today, this timely book examines the evolution of food porn as a desire-inducing aesthetic practice and a visually extravagant...
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Ashley Rose Young, "Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in New Orleans" (Oxford UP, 2025)
For much of the Crescent City's history, days began with the cries of roaming street vendors and the percussive thwack of butchers' meat cleavers echoing out from the municipal markets. Generations of New Orleanians—Black and white, enslaved and free, men and women, wealthy and working...
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Kate Brown, "Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present and Future of the Self-Provisioning City" (W. W. Norton, 2026)
Kate Brown, Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at MIT joins Michael Stauch to discuss her new book Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present and Future of the Self-Provisioning City (W. W. Norton, 2026) on the 300-year history of urban gardening, from feudal England to the Paris...
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Marissa Nicosia, "Shakespeare in the Kitchen" (Routledge, 2026)
Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. Shakespeare in the Kitchen (Routledge, 2026) by Dr. Marissa Nicosia asks what Shakespeare’s works can tell us about Renaissance culinary recipes, and what these recipes...
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Lim Tse Wei, "Little Perfections: Eating in Singapore" (Kitchen Arts and Letters, 2026)
Despite the implications of its subtitle, this is not a travel guide to Singapore, although readers run the risk of becoming tempted to venture there. Author Lim Tse Wei begins this collection of essays with the candid admission, “I am a somewhat unusual cook. My main qualification for the...
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Cooking Sections, "Waves Lost at Sea" (Spector Books, 2026)
Waves Lost at Sea (Spector Books, 2026) traces the evolving practice of Cooking Sections, whose work spans visual arts, architecture, and ecology. Since 2013, they have been investigating anthropogenic infrastructures, industrial food systems, and human-made climates: from artificially colored...
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Mapping Out Food and Philosophy
This episode introduces a special issue on food and philosophy. Robert T. Valgenti, of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective, talks with Andrea Borghini about the increasing attention to food within philosophy over the last three decades and shares the inspiration behind their special issue. They...
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Helen Goh, "Baking and the Meaning of Life: How to Find Joy in 100 Recipes" (Abrams, 2025)
Pastry chef, longtime collaborator with Yotam Ottolenghi, and practicing psychologist Helen Goh joins the New Books Network to discuss Baking and the Meaning of Life: How to Find Joy in 100 Recipes, a debut that brings together more than a decade of recipe development with her clinical work in...
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Constance Bailey et al. "Get It While It's Hot: Gas Station, Roadside, and Convenience Cuisine in the U.S. South" (LSU Press, 2026)
Get It While It’s Hot (LSU Press, 2026) is an innovative collection that examines an increasingly commonplace belief across the U.S. South—that some of the best, most enjoyable food comes from places you would not expect: a gas station, the back of a pickup truck, or a ramshackle building made of...
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Kasey Jernigan, "Commod Bods: Embodied Heritage, Foodways, and Indigeneity" (U Arizona Press, 2026)
The term "commod bod" is used with humor and affection. It also offers a critical way to describe bodies shaped by long-term reliance on U.S. federal commodity food programs. In Commod Bods: Embodied Heritage, Foodways, and Indigeneity (University of Arizona Press, 2026), Kasey Jernigan shares…
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Mark A. Johnson, "American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon" (U Georgia Press, 2026)
In American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon (U Georgia Press, 2026), Dr. Mark A. Johnson asks (and answers) a seemingly simple question: How has bacon overcome centuries of religious prohibition, cultural contempt, and dietary advice to become a twenty-first-century culinary and cultural...
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Rawlston Williams, "The Caribbean Cookbook" (Phaidon Press, 2026)
An exploration of Caribbean cuisine and culinary history, featuring more than 380 authentic home cooking recipes from across the region Caribbean cuisine reveals a culture of boundless imagination and creativity. It is the result of resourcefulness and ingenuity, where the need to survive and...
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Fermenting and Foraging: Resourcefulness in the Historical and Contemporary Kitchen
Today, techniques such as fermenting and foraging are increasingly appealing to those seeking to create economical, nourishing, waste-free meals. This panel, moderated by Jane Ziegelman and featuring chefs Ari Miller and Jeremy Umansky, will explore today’s innovative tactics and the historical...
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Christian Henderson, "Monarchies of Extraction: The Gulf States in the Global Food System" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
In a region known for its export of oil, Monarchies of Extraction: The Gulf States in the Global Food System (Cambridge UP, 2026) explores how the Gulf states are simultaneously defined by the importation of food. Charting the economics and politics of the Gulf through an examination of its food...
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Chiang Mai 2015
The Gastronomica podcast returns to the air, bringing listeners new interviews with authors from the latest issues of Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies. In this episode, Alyssa James of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective hosts award-winning writer and historian Camille Bégin for a...
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Allan Greer, "Canada in the Age of Rum" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2026)
Awash in a sea of rum describes the years between the 1670s and the 1830s in the colonies that would later become Canada. Millions of litres of the sugar-based liquor were imported every year to supply a comparatively small population of colonists and Indigenous people. Why rum, and why so much?...
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Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese Food
For many Ashkenazi Jews in the United States, Christmastime sparks memories of egg rolls and General Tso's chicken. How did the affinity for Chinese food amongst many Jews begin? Trace this delicious history from the turn-of-the-century Lower East Side to today’s take-out lo mein with Andrew Coe,...
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Patricia B. O'Hara, "Food Chemistry in Small Bites: The Alchemist in the Kitchen" (U California Press, 2025)
Food Chemistry in Small Bites takes readers on an up-close scientific journey through the transformation of food when meals are prepared. Organized in bite-size, digestible units, this innovative text introduces students to food's molecular makeup as well as the perception of food by the five...
About this show
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 published research with another expert in their field.
Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com
Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/
Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food
Hosted by
Marshall Poe