Here are 64 books that In Defense of Food fans have personally recommended if you like
In Defense of Food.
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I have long been curious about why we eat the way we do, and how that is shaped by culture and history. I grew up in an immigrant family in a pretty homogenous place in the American South, so our diet was a marker of difference that I noticed as early as kindergarten. I also was curious about how entrenched the fast food, convenience food mode of American eating was, despite it being a pretty new phenomenon. These interests led me to study food history and environmental history and to become a professor in these fields. Reading books about these topics had opened my eyes to a whole hidden world!
Wow, reading this book is tragic and illuminating all at once.
I had never heard about the Hamlet Fire, during which twenty-five people died in a chicken-processing plant in North Carolina in 1991, before reading this book.
But the story of this industrial disaster answered so many questions about how deregulation, reduced labor and environmental protections, racism, and a desire for cheap food came together in this disaster—one that sheds light on the broader problems of the modern American food system.
For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses in search of cheap labor and almost no oversight. Imperial Food Products was one of those businesses. The company set up shop in Hamlet in the 1980s. Workers who complained about low pay and hazardous working conditions at the plant were silenced or fired. But jobs were scarce in town, so workers kept coming back, and the company continued to operate with impunity. Then, on the morning of September 3, 1991,…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I have long been curious about why we eat the way we do, and how that is shaped by culture and history. I grew up in an immigrant family in a pretty homogenous place in the American South, so our diet was a marker of difference that I noticed as early as kindergarten. I also was curious about how entrenched the fast food, convenience food mode of American eating was, despite it being a pretty new phenomenon. These interests led me to study food history and environmental history and to become a professor in these fields. Reading books about these topics had opened my eyes to a whole hidden world!
This was one of the first books that I read that brought home for me how dramatic the transformation has been from how humans ate for hundreds of thousands of years to how they eat today in most parts of the world.
Recognizing that the industrialized food system is really quite new—barely an infant!—made me think about how we got here and maybe how we can change things in healthier directions moving forward.
Vileisis’s descriptions are rich and vivid, and her writing is a pleasure to read.
Ask children where food comes from, and they'll probably answer: 'the supermarket'. Ask most adults, and their replies may not be much different. Where our foods are raised and what happens to them between farm and supermarket shelf have become mysteries. How did we become so disconnected from the sources of our breads, beef, cheeses, cereal, apples, and countless other foods that nourish us every day? Ann Vileisis' answer is a sensory-rich journey through the history of making dinner. "Kitchen Literacy" takes us from an eighteenth-century garden to today's sleek supermarket aisles, and eventually to farmer's markets that are now…
I have long been curious about why we eat the way we do, and how that is shaped by culture and history. I grew up in an immigrant family in a pretty homogenous place in the American South, so our diet was a marker of difference that I noticed as early as kindergarten. I also was curious about how entrenched the fast food, convenience food mode of American eating was, despite it being a pretty new phenomenon. These interests led me to study food history and environmental history and to become a professor in these fields. Reading books about these topics had opened my eyes to a whole hidden world!
I think the history books that hit the hardest are those that make you notice something you take for granted and realize it hasn’t always been this way.
Veit’s book, while on the surface being about food in World War II—already fascinating—made me realize that the modern-day American emphasis on being thin is a pretty new cultural construction. There was a time, not so long ago, that lots of advice pamphlets were written about how to be plump!
But the transformations that Veit describes from the early twentieth century changed these associations between diet, self-restriction, and moral strength in ways that reset beauty standards and reshaped American relationship to the food they eat.
American eating changed dramatically in the early twentieth century. As food production became more industrialized, nutritionists, home economists, and so-called racial scientists were all pointing Americans toward a newly scientific approach to diet. Food faddists were rewriting the most basic rules surrounding eating, while reformers were working to reshape the diets of immigrants and the poor. And by the time of World War I, the country's first international aid program was bringing moral advice about food conservation into kitchens around the country. In Modern Food, Moral Food, Helen Zoe Veit argues that the twentieth-century food revolution was fueled by a…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I have long been curious about why we eat the way we do, and how that is shaped by culture and history. I grew up in an immigrant family in a pretty homogenous place in the American South, so our diet was a marker of difference that I noticed as early as kindergarten. I also was curious about how entrenched the fast food, convenience food mode of American eating was, despite it being a pretty new phenomenon. These interests led me to study food history and environmental history and to become a professor in these fields. Reading books about these topics had opened my eyes to a whole hidden world!
It’s so much fun to read about these kitchens and cooks of the 1950s!
I loved all the stories that Shapiro tells about the colorful women who concocted all manner of (gag-inducing) packaged food combos during this Golden Age of Processed Food. It made me think about how gender and food and cooking and maternal love are intertwined, and how food producers and advertisers have taken advantage of those interconnections to sell more products.
The anecdote about the consumer psychologist Ernest Dichter’s role in developing packaged cake mixes will always stay with me!
Author of the forthcoming What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories (Summer 2017)
In this captivating blend of culinary history and popular culture, the award-winning author of Perfection Salad shows us what happened when the food industry elbowed its way into the kitchen after World War II, brandishing canned hamburgers, frozen baked beans, and instant piecrusts. Big Business waged an all-out campaign to win the allegiance of American housewives, but most women were suspicious of the new foods—and the make-believe cooking they entailed. With sharp insight and good humor, Laura Shapiro shows how the…
I come from a family of eaters. Food was often at the center of family stories and celebrations. I first became fascinated with apples while I was working on my Ph.D. in history, and my interest has since expanded to include all things related to food history. I’ve taught classes on food history, and a few years ago, I started collecting cookbooks. I blog about my cookbook collection and other historical food oddities on my website.
The family stories in this book bring history to life on a personal level. The five families are connected by their immigrant experience, but they approached food in different ways, from family-oriented German biergartens to kosher delis to imported olive oil. Each new wave of immigrants brought their own unique traditions to America, and the neighborhood evolved as each successive group brought something new to the metaphorical table.
I find the tension between maintaining food traditions and adapting them to a new nation fascinating. It also made me think about how much each group contributed to the American diet.
“Social history is, most elementally, food history. Jane Ziegelman had the great idea to zero in on one Lower East Side tenement building, and through it she has crafted a unique and aromatic narrative of New York’s immigrant culture: with bread in the oven, steam rising from pots, and the family gathering round.” — Russell Shorto, author of The Island at the Center of the World
97 Orchard is a richly detailed investigation of the lives and culinary habits—shopping, cooking, and eating—of five families of various ethnicities living at the turn of the twentieth century in one tenement on the…
I study culture. Ever since I was little, I’ve been fascinated by what people think, feel, believe, have, and do. I’ve always wondered why people need things to be meaningful. Why do people need an explanation for why things happen that puts the meaning outside their own minds? I wanted to get beyond the need for things to be meaningful by themselves, so I began looking into meaning-making as a thing we do. Once I realized the process was infinitely more interesting and valuable, I read books like those on my list. I hope they spark you as much as they have me.
I love that Mol weaves together three different narrative voices on the page simultaneously to force me out of my linear perspectives. In the process, I need to explore many of the meanings of food and eating as human activities.
I love gaining a new angle on something that seems so basic, fundamental, and therefore easy—eating. But Mol provides a new set of understandings of eating and all its related processes so that I learn that what I thought was basic and fundamental is instead just a meaning that I make.
As we taste, chew, swallow, digest, and excrete, our foods transform us, while our eating, in its turn, affects the wider earthly environment. In Eating in Theory Annemarie Mol takes inspiration from these transformative entanglements to rethink what it is to be human. Drawing on fieldwork at food conferences, research labs, health care facilities, restaurants, and her own kitchen table, Mol reassesses the work of authors such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas. They celebrated the allegedly unique capability of humans to rise above their immediate bodily needs. Mol, by contrast, appreciates that as humans we…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I have been researching and writing about wine, food, and travel for over 40 years (my first book, The Wine and Food of Europe, co-authored with my photographer wife Kim Millon, was published in 1982). I love to travel, I love to eat, and I love to drink wine. Most of all, I am interested in placing food and wine within a cultural and historical context. I have a weekly podcast, “Wine, Food, and Travel with Marc Millon,” which allows me to explore these topics by speaking directly to people. I hope you enjoy the books on my list as much as I do.
I love travelling to Italy’s great cities: Florence, Venice, Rome, Naples, Palermo, Bologna, Turin. One of the great pleasures is enjoying the local foods and wines. In this book, John Dickie demonstrates that Italy’s famed regional cuisines have origins not in the countryside but in the peculiar and particular workings of these great urban entities.
By exploring foods through links to cities, and cities through the foods that are unique to each, whether because of foreign influences, systems of agricultural tender, or through highlighting differences between working, merchant, and aristocratic classes, Dickie gave me greater insight and appreciation into place through the food that you or I will encounter on our plates, wherever in Italy we might happen to find ourselves.
'If only we could all write as brilliantly on Italy and its food as John Dickie does. He may well know Italy and Italians better than they know themselves' Stanley Tucci
The new edition of the much-loved classic, with a fresh chapter that brings the surprising and moreish tale of the Italian way of eating right up to the present.
Delizia! takes the reader on a revelatory historical journey through the flavours of the cities that shaped the Italian love for good eating. From the bustle of Medieval Milan, to the bombast of Fascist Rome; from the pleasure gardens of…
My twin passions in life have always been food and writing. While I chose poetry and creative writing as my primary fields of expertise, my ten-plus years of working in restaurants are just as important to who I am. I’m hungry for food writing that takes a more literary or creative approach. Cooking is a highly creative and meaningful act, and I love to see writing that aspires to do for the reader what the dedicated cook does for the eater: to nourish not only the body but the more metaphysical elements of our being, which is to say, our hearts, and maybe even our souls.
Reading this book was a bit of a revelation for me. The book is not only an intelligent assessment of the moral-ethical dilemma of eating meat, but it’s a brilliant piece of writing—nothing short of a work of art.
What sets Williams’s book apart from others on the subject is the quality and genre of the writing; rather than straight journalism/memoir, it’s an extended lyric essay, a work of creative nonfiction, which is something that’s sorely underrepresented in the wider world of food writing.
I loved every page of it, and remain haunted by the poetry of Williams’s unflinching vision of what it means to be an animal that eats other animals.
Based on years of investigative reporting, Wyatt Williams offers a powerful look at why we kill animals and why we eat meat. In order to understand why we eat meat, restaurant critic and journalist Wyatt Williams narrates his time spent investigating factory farms, learning to hunt game, working on a slaughterhouse kill floor, and partaking in Indigenous traditions of whale eating in Alaska, while charting the history of meat eating and vegetarianism.
Williams shows how mysteries springing up from everyday experiences can lead us into the big questions of life while examining the irreconcilable differences between humans and animals. Springer…
I’ve been at least a part-time environmental journalist for more than 25 years, and food and agriculture is arguably the biggest environmental problem—the biggest driver of water shortages, water pollution, deforestation, and biodiversity loss, and the second-biggest driver (after fossil fuels) of climate change. And it occurred to me in 2019 that I didn’t know squat about it! I realized that if I was spectacularly ignorant, others probably were, too, and I’ve been obsessed ever since.
I think it gets a lot wrong about agriculture, and it’s responsible for a lot of romantic myths about what farms that will make it very difficult for us to eat less of the earth—starting with the idea that the environmental tragedy of agriculture was intensification (chemicals and other modern practices that allowed farmers to grow more food per acre) rather than extensification (the transformation of nature into agriculture as farmers use more acres to grow food).
But Pollan is a beautiful writer, and he identified many real problems with industrial agriculture; there’s a reason his book has inspired so many not-nearly-as-compelling copycat books about regenerative agriculture.
What shall we have for dinner? Such a simple question has grown to have a very complicated answer. We can eat almost anything nature has to offer, but deciding what we should eat stirs anxiety. Should we choose the organic apple or the conventional? If organic, local or imported? Wild fish or farmed? Low-carb or low-cal? As the American culture of fast food and unlimited choice invades the world, Pollan follows his next meal from land to table, tracing the origin of everything consumed and the implications for ourselves and our planet. His astonishing findings will shock all who care…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I'm a fifth-generation Arizonan, a former staff writer for the Arizona Republic, and a lifelong student of the Grand Canyon State. One of my very favorite things to do is travel the backroads of this amazing state and talk with the astonishing people who live there. Along the way, I wrote eight nonfiction books, including Island on Fire, which won the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award. My day job is at Chapman University, where I am an English professor.
“They came hungry,” begins the first chapter of this delightful look at the gastronomy of America’s desert quarter.
The whole dining table is here: huevos rancheros, tamales, chili, oranges, russet potatoes, rotgut whiskey, the chimichanga (which McNamee calls “a crispy torpedo of goodness”) and the Apache home-brewed beer called tiswin.
It’s one thing to enjoy Southwestern cooking. It’s another to understand its roots.
In this entertaining history, Gregory McNamee explores the many ethnic and cultural traditions that have contributed to the food of the Southwest. He traces the origins of the cuisine to the arrival of humans in the Americas, the work of the earliest farmers of Mesoamerica, and the most ancient trade networks joining peoples of the coast, plains, and mountains. From the ancient chile pepper and agave to the comparatively recent fare of sushi and Frito pie, this complex culinary journey involves many players over space and time. Born of scarcity, migration, and climate change, these foods are now fully at…
