New Books in Food

Bradley Borougerdi joins Jana Byars to talk about Cannabis: A Global History (Reaktion, 2025). An international cultural history of the multifunctional plant. Cannabis explores the historical, pharmacological, and cultural significance of the controversial plant. Beginning with cannabis's origins as a food source in Southeast Asia, Borougerdi describes the global evolution of cannabis over the centuries, with a particular focus on its spread across the Atlantic and its modern renaissance in cuisine. The book also investigates the stimulant's mood-altering forms of consumption, from smoking to edibles and drinks. A richly illustrated guide, this book draws together a diverse account of international cannabis cultures in a single, captivating narrative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

By the end of the twentieth century, the tomato—indigenous to the Americas—had become Egypt's top horticultural crop and a staple of Egyptian cuisine. The tomato brought together domestic consumers, cookbook readers, and home cooks through a shared culinary culture that sometimes transcended differences of class, region, gender, and ethnicity—and sometimes reinforced them. In Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato (U California Press, 2025), Dr. Anny Gaul shows how Egyptians' embrace of the tomato and the emergence of Egypt's modern national identity were both driven by the modernization of the country's food system. Drawing from cookbooks, archival materials, oral histories, and vernacular culture, Dr. Gaul follows this commonplace food into the realms of domestic policy and labor through the hands of Egypt's overwhelmingly female home cooks. As they wrote recipes and cooked meals, these women forged key aspects of public culture that defined how Egyptians recognized themselves and one another as Egyptian. 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

Today I talked to Meg Bernhard about her new book Wine (Bloomsbury, 2023). Agricultural product and cultural commodity, drink of ritual and drink of addiction, purveyor of pleasure, pain, and memory - wine has never been contained in a single glass. Drawing from science, religion, literature, and memoir, Wine meditates on the power structures bound up with making and drinking this ancient, intoxicating beverage. While wine drunk millennia ago was the humble beverage of the people, today the drink is inextricable with power, sophistication, and often wealth. Bottles sell for half a million dollars. Point systems tell us which wines are considered the best. Wine professionals give us the language to describe what we taste. 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

Our insatiable appetite for creativity in the kitchen – or around the open fire – is reflected in the fascinating array of objects explored in this book. Authored by food writer Jenny Linford in consultation with curators from the British Museum, Repast: The Story of Food (Thames & Hudson in partnership with the British Museum, 2025) focuses on artefacts in the museum’s collections – from ancient clay cooking vessels to exquisite gold goblets – spanning Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America and Australasia, from prehistory to the present day. Arranged into thirteen broad themes such as Hunting, Alcohol, Religion, Feasting and Eating Out, with lavish plates accompanying absorbing essays on subjects including tea (the world’s most consumed drink after water), pork (the world’s most widely consumed meat), and wheat (the source of 20% of the world’s human calorie consumption), Repast conveys the extraordinary global story of food, drink and the culinary arts. This clearly structured, beautifully illustrated book will engage and delight the growing audience interested in the history of food and drink. 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

Chef Pyet DeSpain joins the New Books Network to discuss her new cookbook, Rooted in Fire: A Celebration of Native American and Mexican Cooking (HarperOne, 2025). Drawing from her Potawatomi and Mexican heritage, DeSpain shares recipes that connect past and present, including bison meatballs with Wojape BBQ sauce, raspberry mezcal quail, and poblano-corn tamales. Each dish reflects her effort to preserve tradition while creating something new. In this conversation, Pyet talks about growing up between two cultures and how understanding their shared roots changed her approach to food and identity. She reflects on rediscovering ancestral ingredients, the meaning of her tribe’s “keeper of the fire” role, and the importance of gratitude and ceremony in her cooking. She also speaks about the family members, chefs, friends and home cooks who inspire her to keep Native American and Mexican foodways alive, ensuring that these traditions continue to be seen, shared, and celebrated. Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Beloved baker and five-time James Beard Award winner Dorie Greenspan joins the New Books Network to discuss her new cookbook, Dorie’s Anytime Cakes (Harvest, 2025), a warm, inviting collection designed to slip easily into everyday life. From celebration-worthy showstoppers to simple loaves meant for sharing over coffee, Greenspan’s latest book distills decades of experience into recipes. In this conversation, Dorie talks with host Laura Goldberg about how her life between New York, Connecticut, and Paris has shaped her sensibility as both a home baker and a recipe writer. She reflects on the cultural differences she has observed in American and French kitchens, their attitudes toward time, technique, and pleasure, and how these contrasts surface in cakes like her Franco-American Banana Bread, a recipe that bridges two culinary worlds. Dorie shares the cookbooks and culinary mentors who have most influenced her craft, as well as the joy of collaborating with a design team whose work helps the book feel lively, inviting, and full of personality. The episode also explores the book’s recipe inspirations, including holiday-ready desserts like the Thanksgiving Cake with its sweet potatoes, maple, and marshmallow frosting, and the Cocoa-Swirled Pumpkin Bundt, which links late autumn to winter festivities. She also explains her chapter on Salty Cakes, a playful reimagining of what a cake can be. Recipes such as the Harissa-Lemon Loaf and the Seaweed and Furikake Muffins show how savory ingredients can transform familiar forms into something surprising, satisfying, and perfect for lunch, snacks, or aperitif hour. Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

How did China’s Nationalists feed their armies during the long war against Japan? In her new book, Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in China’s Total War, 1937-1945 (Cambridge UP, 2025), Jennifer Yip (National University of Singapore) looks at China’s military grain systems from field to frontline. Yip examines the bureaucratic processes and deeply human stories of requisitioning, transporting, and storing grain in Nationalist-held China. This forensic look at food helps readers rethink the geographies, timings and burdens of China’s war of resistance – as well as the meanings of total war itself. By uncoupling ‘total war’ from images of industrialised warfare, Grains of Conflict shows how China’s war with Japan mobilized the labor and resources of Chinese society on a total scale. In this interview, Yip explores the achievements and difficulties of Nationalist grain mobilization and discusses how the long conflict in China became a multi-sided ‘struggle for food’ – with devastating results. Grains of Conflict is highly recommended for anyone interested in modern Chinese history and the history of war in the twentieth century. Host: Mark Baker is lecturer (assistant professor) in East Asian history at the University of Manchester, UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of the Herring: Adventures with the King of Fishes (Hurst, 2025) by Graeme Rigby contains almost everything you didn’t know you needed to know about Atlantic herrings. (Pacific and Baltic varieties are in there too.) Herrings make the world bigger: with spawnings seen from space, a trillion individuals make this one of the tastiest and most abundant vertebrates on Earth. From ‘A Beginning’ to ‘Zuiderzee’, count the wars fought over herrings; don’t forget Scotland vs the Holy Roman Empire. The herring’s high-pitched farts were logged as Soviet submarines, and one herring joke featured in a Jonson play, four Shakespeare plays and the glorious, suppressed fantasia Nashes Lenten Stuffe. Herrings mock taxonomists; physically change with sea temperature and salinity; stuff predators full to bursting, then swim away. The Great Sardine Litigation? The true history of kippers? Bloaters? Reds? Chopped herring? Shuba? All this and more. Between sustainable fishery genetics, sixteenth-century Bavaria’s ‘Herrings, herrings, stinking herrings’, and Van Gogh’s ear, every entry is a story, a comic journey, an adventure. Some even come with recipes. 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

Beloved baker and author Gesine Bullock-Prado returns to the New Books Network to chat about her delicious new cookbook, My Harvest Kitchen, the highly anticipated follow-up to her best-selling My Vermont Table. This time, she invites us back into her kitchen to celebrate the beauty of cooking with the seasons. From the tender crunch of just-picked lettuce to the simple perfection of Aunt Sis’s Tomato Sandwich, Bullock-Prado’s recipes remind us that good food starts with what’s fresh and local, whether it comes from your own garden, a farmers’ market, or the neighborhood grocery store. There’s even a revelatory recipe for perfect fries (spoiler: they’re brined and twice-fried). In this lively conversation, Gesine shares her thoughts on growing food, understanding soil, and cultivating a real connection to the ingredients we use. She’s candid about her dream of full-on homesteading and the reality checks along the way, offering an encouraging, down-to-earth perspective for anyone who loves the idea of living closer to the land. Her stories, like her recipes, are full of humor, heart, and honesty, and they’ll leave you inspired to savor whatever’s in season, wherever you are. Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at Vittlesvamp.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

My Dinner with Andre (1981) is a film that uses the simple premise of two men sharing a meal as a vehicle for exploration of how we should live our lives. It asks fundamental questions about happiness and self-fulfillment that it doesn't wholly answer. The Trip (2010) uses the same premise as a way to dramatize two men earnestly debating who does the better impressions of Michael Caine, Al Pacino, and Sean Connery. But for all its playground sensibility, The Trip is not without ideas regarding how friendships are formed and sustained. Join us for a conversation about the real reason why men befriend each other and what they want from each other. Hint: it’s not sympathy, high regard, or a non-judgmental ear. If watching The Trip makes you want to make a reservation at your favorite spot, you may want to first read Adam Reiner’s The New Rules of Dining Out: An Insider's Guide to Enjoying Restaurants. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. 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 X and 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

The humble goat has played a surprising and important role throughout the history of the United States. Despite this, goats are often overlooked by many Americans, even if they have strong opinions about these complex creatures. In Goats in America: A Cultural History (Oregon State UP, 2025) Dr. Tami Parr calls attention to these disregarded animals, uncovering the remarkable stories behind everything from goat meat and milk to goat yoga and more. Since arriving in North America with cattle and other domesticated livestock in the sixteenth century, goats have provided people sustenance and valuable products, including milk, meat, and mohair. But humans did not appreciate the animals, and as a result, throughout much of American history goats were persecuted as public nuisances and symbols of degenerate behavior. Nevertheless, over the centuries the tenacious goat has overcome many of these stereotypes and secured a spot in the hearts and minds of modern Americans, who love goat cheese and embrace goats as social media stars. Examining key moments and notable developments in goat history and culture, Goats in America outlines the history and evolving role of goats in communities across the country, from San Francisco and New York City to rural Wisconsin and the Navajo Nation. Parr shows that the evolving reputation of goats in American society ultimately reveals more about humans than it does about goats themselves. So, the next time you are enjoying your favorite goat cheese, take a moment to consider the history and role of goats within American 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

Food consumers are demanding a healthier and more sustainable food system. Yet labor is rarely part of the discussion. In Will Work for Food: Labor Across the Food Chain (U California Press, 2025), Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern and Teresa Mares chronicle labor across the food chain, connecting the entire food system--from fields to stores, restaurants, home kitchens, and even garbage dumps. Using a political economy framework, the authors argue that improving labor standards and building solidarity among frontline workers across sectors is necessary for creating a more just food system. What would it take, they ask, to move toward a food system that is devoid of human exploitation? Combining insights from food systems and labor justice scholarship with actionable recommendations for policy makers, the book is a call to action for labor activists, food studies students and scholars, and anyone interested in food justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The views expressed by the guest are their own and do not reflect those of the New Books Network or its hosts. This episode contains some content that listeners may find controversial. A home cook's guide to one of America's most diverse - and delicious - cuisines, from James Beard Award-winning author and culinary historian Michael W. Twitty 'Our cuisine, with its grits and black-eyed peas, crab cakes, red rice, and endless variations on the staple foods of the region, casts a spell that, if you're lucky, gets passed down with snapping string beans at the table and chewing cane on the back porch.' - Michael W. Twitty In the introduction to this groundbreaking recipe collection, acclaimed historian Michael W. Twitty declares, 'No one state or area can give you the breadth of the Southern story or fully set the Southern table.' To answer this, Recipes from the American South journeys from the Louisiana Bayou to the Chesapeake Bay, showcasing more than 260 of the region's most beloved dishes. Across more than 400 pages, Twitty explores the broad culinary sweep that Southern history and its many cultures represent. Recipes for breads and biscuits, mains and sides, stews, sauces, and sweets feature insightful headnotes and clear, step-by-step instructions. Home cooks will discover both iconic dishes and lesser-known specialties: Chicken and Dumplings, She-crab Soup, Red Eye Gravy, Benne Seed Wafers, Hummingbird Cake, and Mint Juleps appear alongside Shrimp Pilau, Chorizo Dirty Rice, Sumac Lemonade, and Cajun Pig's Ears Pastry. A masterful storyteller, Twitty enriches his extensive recipe collection with lyrical, deeply researched essays that celebrate the region's "multicultural gumbo" of influences from immigrants from across the globe. Vibrant food photography adds further color to the fascinating narrative. Expansive, authoritative, and beautifully designed, Recipes from the American South is a classic cookbook in the making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The first and definitive history of the use of food in American law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control, a Fast Food Nation for the Black Lives Matter era In 1779, to subjugate Indigenous nations, George Washington ordered his troops to “ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” Destroying harvests is just one way that the United States has used food as a political tool. Trying to prevent enslaved people from rising up, enslavers restricted their consumption, providing only enough to fuel labor. Since the Great Depression, school lunches have served as dumping grounds for unwanted agricultural surpluses. From frybread to government cheese, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: America’s Politics of Food, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch (Metropolitan Books, 2024) on the Ground draws on over fifteen years of research to argue that American food law and policy have created and maintained racial and social inequality. In an epic, sweeping account, Andrea Freeman, who pioneered the term “food oppression,” moves from colonization to slavery to the Americanization of immigrant food culture, to the commodities supplied to Native reservations, to milk as a symbol of white supremacy. She traces the long-standing alliance between the government and food industries that have produced gaping racial health disparities, and she shows how these practices continue to this day, through the marketing of unhealthy goods that target communities of color, causing diabetes, high blood pressure, and premature death. Ruin Their Crops on the Ground is a groundbreaking addition to the history and politics of food. It will permanently upend the notion that we freely and equally choose what we put on our plates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas, Priyanka Kumar was entranced by forest-like orchards of diverse and luscious fruit—especially apples. These biodiverse orchards seemed worlds away from the cardboard apples that lined supermarket shelves in the United States. Yet on a small patch of woods near her home in Santa Fe, Kumar discovered a wild apple tree—and the seeds of an odyssey were planted. Could the taste of a feral apple offer a doorway to the wild? In The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit, Kumar takes us on a dazzling and transformative journey to rediscover apples, unearthing a rich and complex history while illuminating how we can reimagine our relationship with nature.Apples are popular, but in our everyday lives we rarely encounter more than a handful of varieties: of the sixteen thousand apple varieties once celebrated in America, scarcely a fifth remain accessible. Kumar reveals the richness of a hidden world, bringing readers to the vibrant forests and orchards where historic trees still survive. These mature and wild orchards offer more than just fruit: they are havens for creatures from hummingbirds to bears and a living connection to generations past. She brilliantly weaves together science and childhood memories with the apple’s storied history, from its roots in Kazakhstan to Spanish orchards in the Southwest and Thomas Jefferson’s beloved Monticello fruitery. Kumar shows how—if we follow untamed paths—the tang and texture of an apple can lead us back to the wild. Our guest is: Priyanka Kumar, who is the author of Conversations with Birds, and The Light Between Apple Trees. Her essays appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Orion, and Sierra magazine. She holds an MFA, and has taught at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Southern California. Her feature documentary, The Song of the Little Road, is in the permanent collection of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and her awards include an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award, a New Mexico/New Visions Governor’s Award, an International Center for Jefferson Studies Fellowship, and an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Fellowship. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach and freelance editor. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and writes the show's newsletter. Playlist for listeners: Big Box USA In The Garden Behind the Moon Disabled Ecologies Endless Forms The Well-Gardened Mind Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Sugar is everywhere in the western diet, blamed for epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other modern maladies. Our addiction to sweetness has a long and unsavory history. Over the past five hundred years, sugar has shaped empires, made fortunes for a few, and brought misery for millions of workers both enslaved and free. How did sugar become a defining modern food and an essential global commodity? In Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar (U Chicago Press, 2025), Dr. David Singerman recasts our thinking about this crucial substance in the history of capitalism. Before the nineteenth century, sugar’s value depended on natural qualities: its color, its taste, where it was grown, and who had made it. But beginning around 1850, a combination of plantation owners, industrialists, and scientists set out to redefine sugar itself. Deploying the tools and rhetoric of science, they transformed not just how sugar was produced or traded but even how people thought about it. By changing sugar into a pure chemical object, these forces stripped power from workers and enabled—and obscured—new kinds of fraud, corruption, and monopoly. Taking us to unexplored spaces in the world of sugar, from laboratories and docks to refineries and the halls of Congress, Dr. Singerman illuminates dark intersections of the histories of corruption, science, and capitalism. 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

Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935 (Northern Illinois UP, 2025) examines the US and Soviet exchange of agricultural knowledge and technology during the interwar period. Maria Fedorova challenges the perception of the Soviet Union as a passive recipient of American technology and expertise. She reveals the circular nature of this exchange through official government bureaus, amid anxious farmers in crowded auditoriums, in cramped cars across North Dakota and Montana, and by train over the once fertile steppes of the Volga. Amid the post–World War I food insecurity, Soviet and American agricultural experts relied on transnational networks, bridging ideological differences. As Soviets traveled across the US agricultural regions and Americans plowed steppes in the southern Urals and the lower Volga, both groups believed that innovative solutions could be found beyond their own national borders. Soviets were avidly interested in American technology and American agricultural experts perceived the Soviet Union to be an ideal setting for experimenting with and refining modern farm systems and organizational practices. As Seeds of Exchange shows, agricultural modernization was not the exclusive domain of Western countries. Guest: Maria Fedorova (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian Studies at Macalester College. She received her PhD in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the history of agriculture, food insecurity, US-Russia/Soviet relations, and transnational history. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers... Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

The world needs to adapt to climate change – but how? What are the key problems and hard choices that lie ahead for the global community? Sink or Swim: How the world needs to adapt to a changing climate (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Susannah Fisher reveals all.Heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes and flooding caused by climate change are already impacting people and nature. Adaptation until now has been incremental with governments and institutions tinkering around the edges of current systems. This will not be enough.Sink Or Swim: How the World Needs to Adapt to a Changing Climate (Bloomsbury, 2025) explores the hard choices that lie ahead concerning how people earn a living, the way governments manage relationships between countries, and how communities accommodate the movement of people. Should people be encouraged to move away from the coast? How can global food supplies be managed when parts of the world are hit by simultaneous droughts? How can conflict be handled when there isn't enough water?Drawing on cutting edge research, interviews with experts, and practical examples from across the world, Dr. Fisher tells the story of the tough choices on adaptation that lie ahead, and looks at ways we can still have a liveable planet later in this century and beyond. Will we choose to sink or swim? 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

Vanilla is one of the most expensive of flavorings—so valuable that it was smuggled or stolen by pirates in the early days—and yet it is everywhere. It is a key ingredient in dishes ranging from crème brûlée to Japanese purin. It is the quintessential ice cream flavor in the United States. In Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean (Yale UP, 2025) Dr. Eric T. Jennings explains how the world’s only edible orchid, originally endemic to Central America, became embedded in the international culinary and cultural landscape. In tracing vanilla’s rise, Dr. Jennings describes how in the 1840s an enslaved boy named Edmond Albius discovered a way to pollinate vanilla orchids with a toothpick or needle—an ingenious process that is still in use. This method transformed the vanilla sector by enabling the plant to be grown outside of its natural range. Dr. Jennings also looks at how the vanilla craze led to the search for now‑pervasive substitutes, and how a vanilla lobby has fought back. He further unravels how vanilla—the world’s most expensive crop and once considered its most refined fragrance—came to mean “bland.” This tale of botany, production techniques, consumption habits, and colonial rivalry connects the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, revealing how vanilla has become a potent symbol of the modern global village. 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

Preparing the Modern Meal: Urban Capitalism and Working-Class Food in Kenya's Port City (Ohio UP, 2025) is an urban history that connects town and country. Devin Smart examines how labor migrants who left subsistence food systems in Kenya’s rural communities acquired their daily meals when they arrived in the Indian Ocean city of Mombasa, a place where cash mediated access to daily necessities. In their rural homes, people grew their own food and created mealtimes and cuisines that fit into the environments and workday routines of their agrarian societies. However, in the city, migrants earned cash that they converted into food through commercial exchange, developing foodways within the spatial dynamics of urban capitalism. Thus, Smart considers how working-class formation and urbanization, central themes of modern world history, changed East Africa’s food systems. Smart explores how these processes transformed domestic labor within migrant households, as demographic change and daily life in a capitalist city shaped the gendered dynamics of food provisioning and cooking. He also examines how urban capitalism in Mombasa, as elsewhere in the world, drove the expansion of eateries for working-class consumers. It focuses especially on street-food vendors who kept their overhead and prices low by operating on sidewalks, in alleyways, and along other open spaces in makeshift structures, where they fried, boiled, and grilled the meals that sustained working-class people in Kenya’s port city. The history of street food also provides insights on the political economy of colonial and decolonizing African cities. Despite the services and income provided by street food, Mombasa officials also regularly pursued “modernization” campaigns to remove such informal businesses from the city’s landscape, fining and arresting vendors and demolishing their structures. Preparing the Modern Meal reveals the contradictions of such urban political economies from the colonial period to the more recent neoliberal era. Devin Smart is an assistant professor of history at West Virginia University, where he teaches courses in African, European, and global history. His most recent articles have appeared in the Journal of African History and International Labor and Working-Class History, and his current research projects examine Kenya’s commercial fisheries as well as the energy transition that occurred in twentieth-century East Africa. He has two additional book projects underway, both of which address the relationship between environmental and economic change. Working the Water: Fishing and Extractivism in Twentieth-Century Kenya examines commercial fisheries as a particular kind of extractive industry, considering how these aquatic economies changed the region's lake, river, and marine environments. Dr. Smart's third book project, A Refined World: Energy Transitions in Modern East Africa, explores how different forms of energy, such as wood, coal, and petroleum, shaped daily life, the region's environments, and the political economy of colonialism and decolonization. Dr. Smart has also published articles on the history of tourism and economic development in Kenya in the African Studies Review, and on the politics of racial conflict in late-colonial Mombasa in the Journal of Eastern African Studies. You can learn more about Dr. Smart’s work here Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in Ghana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food