New Books in Food

The battlefields were not the only places that threatened death during World War I. As conflict raged on and supply lines tightened, the allied powers of France, Britain, and Italy faced a fundamental problem: keeping their soldier and civilian populations safe from starvation. Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great War (Oxford UP, 2025) describes how, faced with this immense challenge, the Allies devised a multilateral institution--the Wheat Executive--to do what no state could do alone. Rosella Cappella Zielinski and Paul Poast examine the difficult considerations made by the allied powers when ceding authority to an international body that would make decisions for them. Beyond successfully managing wheat shipping and distribution, they argue, the Wheat Executive proved to have significant influence in the evolving landscape of interstate cooperation. As a case study, the Wheat Executive improves our understanding of international institutional design, the importance of commodities during wartime, economic coordination amongst wartime coalition members, and the legacies of international cooperation during the First World War. As one of the first great experiments in supranationalism, the Allies' management of wheat while at war provides lessons about the emergence of international organizations and their contours. Jobie Turner is a military historian who studies logistics in warfare.  His most recent work is Feeding Victory:  Innovative Logistics from Lake George to Khe Sanh, 1755-1968 which discuss the impact of technology on transportation across three centuries of warfare.  Jobie is a retired Colonel in the USAF and a pilot for United Airlines email: here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Every other movie seems to be touted as a “tour de force”--but Philip Barantini’s 2021 look at ninety minutes in the life of a chef and everyone around him really earns that praise. The entire film was shot in one take, not to be “original,” but because doing so reflects the tension and stress of the whole enterprise: a restaurant, like a film, is a complicated ecosystem in which personalities, hang-ups, failures, and backstories collide. Join us for a conversation about how the restaurant is, like so many of our jobs, a petri dish in which radically different people are placed and forced to coexist. Sometimes, things get ugly. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Adam Reiner’s The New Rules of Dining Out explains how restaurants work and complements the film like a Cabernet Sauvignon does a steak. You can also see Adam Reiner being interviewed about his book and favorite restaurant-based films here on Pages and Frames. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on Letterboxd and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Read Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Why is cows' milk, which few nonwhite people can digest, promoted as a science-backed dietary necessity in countries where the majority of the population is lactose-intolerant? Why are gigantic new dairy farms permitted to deplete the sparse water resources of desert ecosystems? Why do thousands of U.S. dairy farmers every year give up after struggling to recoup production costs against plummeting wholesale prices? Exploring these questions and many more, Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood (Columbia UP, 2023) is an unflinching and meticulous critique of the glorification of fluid milk and its alleged universal benefits. Anne Mendelson's groundbreaking book chronicles the story of milk from the Stone Age peoples who first domesticated cows, goats, and sheep to today's troubled dairy industry. Spoiled shows that drinking fresh milk was rare until Western scientific experts who were unaware of genetic differences in the ability to digest lactose deemed it superior to traditional fermented dairy products. Their flawed beliefs fueled the growth of a massive and environmentally devastating industry that turned milk into a cheap, ubiquitous commodity. Mendelson's wide-ranging account also examines the consequences of homogenization and refrigeration technologies, the toll that modern farming takes on dairy cows, and changing perceptions of raw milk since the advent of pasteurization. Unraveling the myths and misconceptions that prop up the dairy industry, Spoiled calls for more sustainable, healthful futures in our relationship with milk and the animals that provide it. Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

How would we eat if animals had rights? A standard assumption is that our food systems would be plant-based. But maybe we should reject this assumption. Indeed, this book argues that a future non-vegan food system would be permissible on an animal rights view. It might even be desirable. In Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully (Oxford University Press, 2023), Josh Milburn questions if the vegan food system risks cutting off many people's pursuit of the 'good life', risks exacerbating food injustices, and risks negative outcomes for animals. If so, then maybe non-vegan food systems would be preferable to vegan food systems, if they could respect animal rights. Could they? The author provides a rigorous analysis of the ethics of farming invertebrates, producing plant-based meats, developing cultivated animal products, and co-working with animals on genuinely humane farms, arguing that these possibilities offer the chance for a food system that is non-vegan, but nonetheless respects animals' rights. He argues that there is a way for us to have our cake, and eat it too, because we can have our cow, and eat her too. Josh Milburn is a British philosopher and a Lecturer in Political Philosophy at Loughborough University. He has previously worked at the University of Sheffield, the University of York, and Queen's University (in Canada), before which he studied at Queen's University Belfast and Lancaster University. He is the author of Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022), and the regular host of the animal studies podcast Knowing Animals. Kyle Johannsen is a philosophy instructor at Trent University and Wilfrid Laurier University. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Entangled in a nexus of commerce, industry, food security, and environmental concerns, palm oil has become a prominent topic of controversy and debate. In this episode, Dr. Ayu Pratiwi illuminates the complicated reality behind the controversy by introducing the University of Turku research project "Good and Bad Palm Oil: Food Security, Paradigm Shift and Stakeholder Negotiations in Indonesia and the EU." What is good and what is bad about palm oil, and what is the recent paradigm shift in its status between Southeast Asia and Europe? Dr. Ayu Pratiwi is a Docent in economic geography at the Department of Marketing and International Business and Senior Researcher at the Department of Biodiversity Sciences at the University of Turku. Ari-Joonas Pitkänen is a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway). We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Food justice activists have worked to increase access to healthy food in low-income communities of color across the United States. Yet despite their best intentions, they often perpetuate food access inequalities and racial stereotypes. Hanna Garth shows how the movement has been affected by misconceptions and assumptions about residents, as well as by unclear definitions of justice and what it means to be healthy. Focusing on broad structures and microlevel processes, Garth reveals how power dynamics shape social justice movements in particular ways.Drawing on twelve years of ethnographic research, Garth examines what motivates people from more affluent, majority-white areas of the city to intervene in South Central Los Angeles. She argues that the concepts of "food justice" and "healthy food" operate as racially coded language, reinforcing the idea that health problems in low-income Black and Brown communities can be solved through individual behavior rather than structural change. Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement (U California Press, 2026) explores the stakes of social justice and the possibility of multiracial coalitions working toward a better future. Hanna Garth is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, author of Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal, and coeditor of Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In this episode, we speak with Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, Katy Overstreet. Katy is coordinator for the Landscapes, Senses, and Ecological Research Cluster as well as a core-member of the Centre for Sustainable Futures – both located at the University of Copenhagen. Katy’s core fields of research include multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, feminist STS, and agrarian political economy, and she has written on themes such as farm animal welfare, foodways, bioindustrialisation, technoscience, trans-species sensory worlds, and care. Her main ethnographic fieldsites include the midwestern dairy worlds of the United States, and various sites in Denmark including pig farms, an insect farm, and a former brown coal mine. Across these sites, Katy has worked with a lot of different co-species social formations and technoscientifically modulated ways of living and dying in agriculture, and in today’s episode, she will speak to some of these, focusing on the relations between microbes, cows, and humans in raw milk consumption, production, and politics. The basis for our conversation is a talk that Katy gave on the day before we recorded the podcast as part of the BSAS seminar series. Her talk was titled ‘Digestive belonging: a microbial ethnography of raw milk in America’s Dairyland’. In the podcast, Katy unravels the notion of ‘digestive belonging’ in this ethnographic context, connecting it to farmlife, microbes, social landscapes, pasteurization politics, and rural nostalgia among other things. We further discuss different modes of care in animal farming practices, the cultivation of trans-species sensing, and the idea of ‘positive animal welfare’. The podcast was recorded in October 2025 when Katy was in Bergen to give a presentation as part of the Bergen Social Anthropology Seminar series. Resources: Katy Overstreet’s research profile Articles mentioned, authored by Katy: Digestive Belonging: A Microbial Ethnography of Raw Milk in America’s Dairyland (2026) Be the boar: sex, sows, and courtship on a Danish pig farm (2022) How to Taste Like a Cow: Cultivating Shared Sense in Wisconsin Dairy Worlds (2021) EU funded Cost Action project LIFT aimed at ‘Lifting farm animal lives’ that Katy participates in: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

What seems mundane today—walking into a supermarket, picking up goods, and paying at a checkout—was once a radical experiment. In our latest New Books Network episode, I speak with Andrew Godley about The Making of the Modern Supermarkett: Self-Service Adoption in British Food Retailing, 1950-1975 (Oxford UP, 2025), co-authored with Bridget Salmon, former archivist at J. Sainsbury plc. This is a book about far more than shopping. It is a history of technology, management, urban planning, consumer behaviour, and how everyday routines were quietly transformed in post-war Britain. Drawing on rare corporate archives, Godley and Salmon reveal how supermarkets were not inevitable but carefully designed organisations shaped by strategic choices, technological constraints, and shifting consumer expectations. In the conversation, we explore how self-service reshaped labour and productivity, why Sainsbury’s distinctive commitment to fresh meat helped define the one-stop supermarket, and how planning initiatives such as the New Towns and Abercrombie’s vision for London influenced retail geography. We also discuss early experiments with computerised ordering, the limits of technological modernisation, and what Sainsbury’s story can—and cannot—tell us about the wider evolution of retailing in Britain and Europe. Finally, Andrew reflects on the surprises hidden in corporate archives and what the history of supermarkets can teach us about today’s transformations—from online grocery shopping to automated checkouts. If you have ever wondered how the modern supermarket came to be—and what it reveals about capitalism, technology, and everyday life—this episode is for you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Italian Dumplings and Chinese Pizzas: Transcultural Food Mobilities (Fordham UP, 2025) by Dr. Gaoheng Zhang designs a novel analytical framework to approach transcultural food mobilities, a culinary phenomenon that has been with us for decades as a result of colonialism and globalization.Why is it surprising for some of us to read the pairing of “Chinese” with “pizzas” and “Italian” with “dumplings,” such as proposed in the book’s title? After all, in some regions of the two countries, Italians eat frequently dumplings, and Chinese frequently make baked, steamed, or fried flatbread with toppings or fillings. Furthermore, when dumplings are made in Italy by Chinese migrants or Chinese Italians, or when pizzas are made in China by Italian migrants, Chinese Italians, or Chinese without apparent ties with Italy, are these culinary products Chinese, Italian, Chinese-Italian, or something else? Why do we need to care for such labeling dilemmas?This book shows how China-Italy food mobilities relayed in popular culture helped forge Chi­nese and Italians’ socioeconomic identities in recent decades by fundamentally shaping contempo­rary Chinese and Italian consumer cultures. This book addresses China-Italy food cultures against the backdrops of two epoch-making socioeconomic processes. During the 1980s, Chinese cuisine became the first non-European food widely available in Italy, thanks to the widespread presence of Chinese eateries. Only American fast food, which established itself in Italy around the same time, enjoyed comparable popularity as a destination for Italian culinary tourism. Meanwhile, in the early 1990s, together with American hamburgers and fried chicken, the American food chain Pizza Hut’s pizzas and spaghetti were the first non-Asian foods that post-Mao Chinese customers recognized as “Western.” The book proposes a critical framework that analyzes transcultural food mobilities by seriously assessing the confluence of diverse mobilities and their impact on food cultures. Ulti­mately, the study shows that a sophisticated interpretation of transcultural food mobilities can help address alterity and build understanding in a world of increasing political and cultural polarization. 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

Food justice activists have worked to increase access to healthy food in low-income communities of color across the United States. Yet despite their best intentions, they often perpetuate food access inequalities and racial stereotypes. In Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement (U California Press, 2026) Hanna Garth shows how the movement has been affected by misconceptions and assumptions about residents, as well as by unclear definitions of justice and what it means to be healthy. Focusing on broad structures and microlevel processes, Garth reveals how power dynamics shape social justice movements in particular ways. Drawing on twelve years of ethnographic research, Garth examines what motivates people from more affluent, majority-white areas of the city to intervene in South Central Los Angeles. She argues that the concepts of "food justice" and "healthy food" operate as racially coded language, reinforcing the idea that health problems in low-income Black and Brown communities can be solved through individual behavior rather than structural change. Food Justice Undone explores the stakes of social justice and the possibility of multiracial coalitions working toward a better future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Sweet Excess: Crafting Mishti in Bengal (Routledge, 2025) by Ishita Dey is an ethnographic work on excess. Based on a decade-long fieldwork of a single food substance – sweets – it follows sweet-making in sweetshops, domestic spaces, fairs, festivals and its representation in recipe books to understand how caste, religion, science and law inform the life of a food item with an extremely short shelf life. It shows how food items of conspicuous consumption find a meaning in everyday lives of people through its socio-cultural meanings – ritual, pride of craftsmanship, heritage and cultural identity. It also shows how sweets continue to be a ubiquitous part of ‘Bengali’ diet in a geography that has been witness to acute hunger, starvation, food movements and social welfare programmes to ensure food security. As a multi-sited ethnography on sweetness in diverse settings and its associated meanings in West Bengal and Bangladesh, this book explores everyday workplace hierarchies between artisans that reveal how caste and religion inform the choice of who is hired into this line of work. It also highlights how discourses on food safety and the overpowering presence of World Trade Organization have affected the life of the Bengali mishti. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of ethnography, sociology, history and South Asian studies. And if you, dear reader, love mishti, you will love this, too!Satyaki Barua is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Hyderabad. His research focuses on party organisation, party institutionalisation, and political mobilisation, particularly examining the interactions between the state, society, and political parties in India and South Asia. Outside of academia, Satyaki enjoys watching and discussing movies, as well as practising Hindustani classical music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Are you a Comté connoisseur or does your heart belong to Rogue River Blue? Can you tell your Brie from your Camembert? Can you name an award-winning Indian cheese and would you recognise a cheese iron? If you take your cheese seriously then One Cheese to Rule Them All: In Search of the World's 100 Best Cheeses (Murdoch Books, 2025) is the companion you need to live your best cheese life. World Cheese Awards judges Patrick McGuigan and Carlos Yescas have a wealth of knowledge garnered from years of travelling and tasting. One Cheese to Rule Them All is a distillation of that experience through 100 cheese profiles that have won awards over the years, offering charming geekery against a backdrop of the people, places and history that define these world-class cheeses. You'll learn how cheese is made, what to drink with each cheese, its World Cheese Awards status, its texture and taste, and lots more to help you choose your cheese more wisely and enjoy it even more. 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

Taco (Bloomsbury, 2025) is a deep dive into the most iconic Mexican food from the perspective of a Mexico City native. In a narrative that moves from Mexico to the United States and back, Dr. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado discusses the definition of the taco, the question of the tortilla and the taco shell, and the existence of the taco as a modern social touchstone that has been shaped by history and geography.  Challenging the idea of centrality and authenticity, in this latest addition to the Object Lessons series, Dr. Sánchez Prado shows instead that the taco is a contemporary, transcultural food that has always been subject to transformation. 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

Ines Prodöhl’s Globalizing the Soybean: Fat, Feed, and Sometimes Food, c. 1900-1950 (Routledge, 2023) is a history of how, why, and where the soybean became a critical ingredient in industry and agriculture in the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on Japanese-dominated Manchuria, Germany, and the United States, Prodöhl shows that the soybean was a serendipitous solution to numerous and varied crises from the beginning of the century into the post-WWII decades. This story of imperialism, globalization, and technology begins in northeast China, the world’s soy cultivation center until the 1940s. It takes us to Germany, the number one importer of soybeans in the interwar period, and illuminates the various ways in which soy was integrated into the economy especially after the end of WWI as both an invaluable oilseed for industry and a source of protein-rich fodder for agriculture. Finally, Prodöhl explores how the United States first adopted the soybean mostly as a solution to overtaxed soils. Mixing economic, ecological, political, and technological/scientific history with a keen sense of the materiality of soy as a global product, Globalizing the Soybean is an accessible and enlightening book that will appeal to multiple audiences. This book is available open access here. This episode was recorded in person in the studios of Media City Bergen with technical assistance from Frode Ims. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Sweet potatoes were among the American crops Christopher Columbus brought back to Europe—where they were thought to be an aphrodisiac. In China, this versatile root became a staple that fueled rapid population growth. Introduced to Japan to stave off famine, sweet potatoes later sustained the country’s imperial expansion. Because this hardy plant can thrive in almost any soil, it has long been cultivated as a subsistence crop in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Oceania. In recent years, Western health experts have begun touting the humble sweet potato as a “superfood” with numerous nutritional benefits. Considering these events and many others, Staple to Superfood: A Global History of the Sweet Potato (Columbia UP, 2025) explores the sweet potato’s rich history and remarkable global influence. Dr. Q. Edward Wang demonstrates how this resilient root has not only nourished communities but also defined their identities. Tracing its journeys through the intricate networks of global trade and cultural exchange, he shows how the sweet potato transformed agricultural practices, culinary traditions, and social structures worldwide. From the Americas to Europe to Asia and the Pacific, the spread of this crop illuminates the varied paths that global development has taken. Dr. Wang also contrasts the sweet potato with its botanically unrelated namesake, the white potato. Blending agricultural, cultural, and historical perspectives, Staple to Superfood offers a fresh look at the power of food to transform societies. It is a compelling exploration of how the sweet potato shaped the modern world and continues to influence global food systems 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

From whiskey in the American Revolution to Spam in WWII, food reveals a great deal about the society in which it exists. Selecting 15 foods that represent key moments in the history of the United States, this book takes readers from before European colonization to the present, narrating major turning points along the way, with food as a guide. US History in 15 Foods (Bloomsbury, 2023) takes everyday items like wheat bread, peanuts, and chicken nuggets, and shows the part they played in the making of America. What did the British colonists think about the corn they observed Indigenous people growing? How are oranges connected to Roosevelt's New Deal? And what can green bean casserole tell us about gender roles in the mid-20th century? Weaving food into colonialism, globalization, racism, economic depression, environmental change and more, Anna Zeide shows how America has evolved through the food it eats. Anna Zeide is Associate Professor of History and the founding director of the Food Studies Program in the College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences at Virginia Tech, USA. She has previously written Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry (2018), which won a 2019 James Beard Media Award, and co-edited Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food (2021). Twitter. Website.  Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Travel to virtually any African country and you are likely to find a Coca-Cola, often a cold one at that. Bottled asks how this carbonated drink became ubiquitous across the continent, and what this reveals about the realities of globalisation, development and capitalism. Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Sara Byala is the first assessment of the social, commercial and environmental impact of one of the planet's biggest brands and largest corporations, in Africa. Dr. Byala charts the company's century-long involvement in everything from recycling and education to the anti-apartheid struggle, showing that Africans have harnessed Coca-Cola in varied expressions of modernity and self-determination: this is not a story of American capitalism running amok, but rather of a company becoming African, bending to consumer power in ways big and small. In late capitalism, everyone's fates are bound together. A beverage in Atlanta and a beverage in Johannesburg pull us all towards the same end narrative. This story matters for more than just the local reasons, enhancing our understanding of our globalised, integrated world. Drawing on fieldwork and research in company archives, Dr. Byala asks a question for our time: does Coca-Cola's generative work offset the human and planetary costs associated with its growth in the twenty-first century? This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Breakfast Cereal: A Global History (Reaktion, 2023) by Dr. Kathryn Dolan presents the long, distinguished and surprising history of breakfast cereal. Simple, healthy and comforting, breakfast cereals are a perennially popular way to start the day around the world. They have a long, distinguished and surprising history – around 10,000 years ago, with the advent of agriculture, people began breaking their fast with porridges made from wheat, rice, corn and other grains. It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, in the United States, that a series of entrepreneurs and food reformers created the breakfast cereals we recognize today: Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Cheerios and Quaker Oats, among others. In this global, entertaining and well-illustrated account, Dr. Dolan explores the history of breakfast cereals, including many historical and modern recipes that the reader can try at home. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In this episode of New Books Network, Laura Goldberg speaks with Thomas David DuBois, Professor at Beijing Normal University, about his book China in Seven Banquets, which traces Chinese history through seven extraordinary meals. Gastronomy and dining rituals offer a revealing historical framework: they make visible social order, ethical values, and political power, expressed through ingredients, preparation, display, and etiquette. DuBois shares stories of early ritual feasts shaped by Confucian thought and of vast imperial banquets with hundreds of dishes – diving into fermented meat sauces, courtly excess, and the arrival of new foods via the Silk Road. Conversation also turns to the modern period, considering the globalization of Chinese cuisine and the circulation of foreign foods within China. A feast from film – in the opening sequence of cult classic Eat, Drink, Man, Woman – is explored, as is the potential of food security impacting China’s culinary future. In addition, DuBois shares how he recreated dozens of traditional recipes using modern kitchen techniques – all of which he includes in the book for the intrepid home cook. Thoughtful and engaging, the discussion invites listeners to see meals not simply as nourishment, but as moments where culture, power, and history come together. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

In Food, Heresies, and Magical Boundaries in the Middle Ages (Amsterdam UP, 2024) by Dr. Andrea Maraschi & Dr. Francesca Tasca, readers will find stories about medieval heresies and “magic” from an unusual perspective: that of food studies. The time span ranges from Late Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages, while the geographical scope includes regions as different as North Africa, Spain, Ireland, continental Europe, the Holy land, and Central Asia. Food, heresies, and magical boundaries in the Middle Ages explores the power of food in creating and breaking down boundaries between different groups, or in establishing a contact with other worlds, be they the occult sides of nature, or the supernatural. The book emphasizes the role of food in crafting and carrying identity, and in transferring virtues and powers of natural elements into the eater’s body. Which foods and drinks made someone a heretic? Could they be purified? Which food offerings forged a connection with the otherworld? Which recipes allowed gaining access to the hidden powers within nature? 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