Book picks similar to
Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry about What We Eat by Harvey Levenstein
food
non-fiction
history
nonfiction
Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals
Hal Herzog - 2010
Herzog’s groundbreaking research on animal rights activists, cockfighters, professional dog-show handlers, veterinary students, and biomedical researchers. Blending anthropology, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology, and philosophy, Herzog carefully crafts a seamless narrative enriched with real-life anecdotes, scientific research, and his own sense of moral ambivalence.Alternately poignant, challenging, and laugh-out-loud funny, this enlightening and provocative book will forever change the way we look at our relationships with other creatures and, ultimately, how we see ourselves.
It Starts with Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways
Dallas Hartwig - 2012
Your success story begins with "The Whole30," Dallas and Melissa Hartwig's powerful 30-day nutritional reset.Over the last three years, their underground Whole30 program has quietly led tens of thousands of people to weight loss, improved quality of life and a healthier relationship with food—accompanied by stunning improvements in sleep, energy levels, mood and self-esteem. More significantly, devotees of their program have reported the "magical" elimination of hundreds of lifestyle-related diseases and conditions.Now, Dallas and Melissa detail the theories behind the Whole30, summarizing the science in a simple, accessible manner. It Starts With Food will show you how certain foods may be having negative effects on how you look, feel and live—in ways that you'd never associate with your diet. More importantly, they outline their life-long strategy for Eating Good Food in one clear and detailed action plan designed to help you create a healthy metabolism, heal your digestive tract, calm systemic inflammation and put an end to unhealthy cravings, habits, and relationships with food.Infused with their signature wit, tough love and common sense approach, It Starts With Food is based on the latest scientific research and real-life experience, and includes success stories, a shopping guide, a meal planning template, a 30-day meal plan with creative, delicious recipes, and much more.
Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love
Simran Sethi - 2015
While much of this is invisible, what we do know is that food is beginning to look and taste the same, whether you’re strolling through a San Francisco farmers market, at a Midwestern potluck—or a McDonald’s in India. Ninety-five percent of the world’s calories now come from only 30 species, and a closer look at America’s cornucopia of grocery store options reveals that our foods are primarily made up of corn, wheat, rice, palm oil and soybeans. The diversity of our food supply is dwindling.Part journey to six continents in pursuit of delicious and endangered tastes, part investigation of the loss of biodiversity from soil to plate, Bread, Wine, Chocolate tells the story of what we are losing, how we are losing it, and the inspiring people and places that are sustaining the foods we love—celebrating the fact that the solutions to the loss of agrobiodiversity aren’t difficult; they’re delicious.Join award-winning journalist Simran Sethi as she travels from wild coffee forests in Ethiopia to cocoa plantations of Ecuador, from the brewery to the bakery and the temple, to meet scientists, farmers, chefs, wine makers, beer brewers, coffee roasters and chocolate connoisseurs to discuss the reasons for this loss and learn what it means to experience food in a whole new way, tasting foods more deeply through each one of our senses in order to savor—and save—the foods we love.
What Caesar Did for My Salad: The Curious Stories Behind Our Favorite Foods
Albert Jack - 2010
the term "hot dog" is believed to have been coined during a baseball game between the Yankees and the Giants in 1901? calzones get their name from their less-than-glamorous looks: calzone means "trouser leg" or "drooping sack" in Italian? the word "salary" comes from Roman soldiers being paid their wages in salt? shrimp cocktail became popular in the 1920s as a safe way of "having a cocktail" during Prohibition? the Cobb salad was invented by Robert H. Cobb-founder of the Brown Derby restaurant chains-who threw the salad together for Sidney Grauman-owner of the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood-as a midnight snack based on ingredients in his refrigerator?In What Caesar Did For My Salad, historian Albert Jack offers a fascinating look at the unexpected stories, creators, and bizarre origins behind the world's most beloved dishes. Who was Margherita, for instance, and why was the world's most famous pizza named after her?Why do we call our favorite kinds of coffee espresso or cappuccino? Did medieval Turkish soldiers really invent the kebab by threading bits of meat on to their swords and balancing them on top of their campfires? What exactly does horseradish sauce have to do with our equine friends?From your morning eggs to America's favorite pies, fries, and martinis, you'll never look at your kitchen pantry or refrigerator in the same light again.
Tastes Like Chicken: A History of America's Favorite Bird
Emelyn Rude - 2016
Today, those numbers are strikingly different: we consumer nearly twenty-five times as much chicken as our great-grandparents did.Collectively, Americans devour 73.1 million pounds of chicken in a day, close to 8.6 billion birds per year. How did chicken rise from near-invisibility to being in seemingly "every pot," as per Herbert Hoover's famous promise?Emelyn Rude explores this fascinating phenomenon in Tastes Like Chicken. With meticulous research, Rude details the ascendancy of chicken from its humble origins to its centrality on grocery store shelves and in restaurants and kitchens. Along the way, she reveals startling key points in its history, such as the moment it was first stuffed and roasted by the Romans, how the ancients’ obsession with cockfighting helped the animal reach Western Europe, and how slavery contributed to the ubiquity of fried chicken today.In the spirit of Mark Kurlansky’s Cod and Bee Wilson's Consider the Fork, Tastes Like Chicken is a fascinating, clever, and surprising discourse on one of America’s favorite foods.
Tea: The Drink that Changed the World
Laura C. Martin - 2007
A simple beverage, served either hot or iced, tea has fascinated and driven us, calmed and awoken us, for well over two thousand years.The most extensive and well presented tea history available, Tea: The Drink that Changed the World tells of the rich legends and history surrounding the spread of tea throughout Asia and the West, as well as its rise to the status of necessity in kitchens around the world. From the tea houses of China's Tang Dynasty (618-907), to fourteenth century tea ceremonies in Korea's Buddhist temples' to the tea plantations in Sri Lanka today, this book explores and illuminates tea and its intricate, compelling history.Topics in Tea: The Drink that Changed the World include:From Shrub to Cup: and Overview.History and Legend of tea.Tea in Ancient China and Korea.Tea in Ancient Japan.The Japanese Tea Ceremony.Tea in the Ming Dynasty.Tea Spreads Throughout the World.The British in India, China and Ceylon.Tea in England and the United States.Tea Today and Tomorrow.Whether you prefer green tea, back tea, white tea, oolong tea, chai, Japanese tea, Chinese tea, Sri Lankan tea, American tea or British tea, you will certainly enjoy reading this history of tea and expanding your knowledge of the world's most celebrated beverage.
The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture
Rebecca L. Spang - 2000
This is a book about the French Revolution in taste and of the table--a book about how Parisians invented the modern culture of food, thereby changing their own social life and that of the world.During the 1760s and 1770s, those who were sensitive and supposedly suffering made public show of their delicacy by going to the new establishments known as restaurateurs' rooms and there sipping their bouillons. By the 1790s, though, the table was variously seen as a place of decadent corruption or democratic solidarity. The Revolution's tables were sites for extending frugal, politically correct hospitality, and a delicate appetite was a sign of counter-revolutionary tendencies. The restaurants that had begun as purveyors of health food became symbols of aristocratic greed. In the early nineteenth century, however, the new genre of gastronomic literature worked within the strictures of the Napoleonic police state to transform the notion of restaurants and to confer star status upon oysters and champagne. Thus, the stage was set for the arrival of British and American tourists keen on discovering the mysteries of Frenchness in the capital's restaurants. From restoratives to Restoration, Spang establishes the restaurant at the very intersection of public and private in French culture--the first public place where people went to be private.
The How Not to Die Cookbook
Michael Greger - 2017
Michael Greger’s bestselling book, How Not to Die, presented the scientific evidence behind the only diet that can prevent and reverse many of the causes of premature death and disability. Now, The How Not to Die Cookbook puts that science into action. From Superfood Breakfast Bites to Spaghetti Squash Puttanesca to Two-Berry Pie with Pecan-Sunflower Crust, every recipe in The How Not to Die Cookbook offers a delectable, easy-to-prepare, plant-based dish to help anyone eat their way to better health.Rooted in the latest nutrition science, these easy-to-follow, stunningly photographed recipes will appeal to anyone looking to live a longer, healthier life. Featuring Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen—the best ingredients to add years to your life—The How Not to Die Cookbook is destined to become an essential tool in healthy kitchens everywhere.
Real Food Fermentation: Preserving Whole Fresh Food with Live Cultures in Your Home Kitchen
Alex Lewin - 2012
Learn the process of fermentation from start to finish, and stock your pantry and refrigerator with delicious fruits, vegetables, dairy, and more. Fermenting is an art and a science, and Alex Lewin expertly takes you through every step, including an overview of food preserving and the fermentation process. Get to know the health benefits of fermented foods, and learn the best tools, supplies, and ingredients to use. Then start making wholesome preserved foods and beverages with step-by-step recipes for sauerkraut, kombucha, kefir, yogurt, preserved lemons, chutney, kimchi, and more, getting the best out of every season’s bounty. The book is filled with beautiful photos and clear instructions help you build your skills with confidence. It’s no wonder people are fascinated with fermenting—the process is user friendly, and the rewards are huge. Inside you’ll find:an overview of the art and craft of home preservingwhy fermented foods are good for youhow to troubleshoot recipes, and how to modify them to suit your tastewhich vegetables and fruits are best for fermentationthe best seasonings to usehow to ferment dairy products to create yogurt, kefir, and buttermilkhow to create fermented beverages, including mead, wine, and ginger aleWith this book as your guide, you’ll feel in control of your food and your health. See why so many people are discovering the joys of fermenting!
Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them
Dan Saladino - 2022
This is not the decadence or the preciousness we might associate with a word like "foodie," but a form of reverence . . . Enchanting. --Molly Young, The New York Times Dan Saladino's Eating to Extinction is the prominent broadcaster's pathbreaking tour of the world's vanishing foods and his argument for why they matter now more than everOver the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of the roughly six thousand different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these--rice, wheat, and corn--now provide fifty percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still:The source of much of the world's food--seeds--is mostly in the control of just four corporations. Ninety-five percent of milk consumed in the United States comes from a single breed of cow. Half of all the world's cheese is made with bacteria or enzymes made by one company. And one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer.If it strikes you that everything is starting to taste the same wherever you are in the world, you're by no means alone. This matters: when we lose diversity and foods become endangered, we not only risk the loss of traditional foodways, but also of flavors, smells, and textures that may never be experienced again. And the consolidation of our food has other steep costs, including a lack of resilience in the face of climate change, pests, and parasites. Our food monoculture is a threat to our health--and to the planet.In Eating to Extinction, the distinguished BBC food journalist Dan Saladino travels the world to experience and document our most at-risk foods before it's too late. He tells the fascinating stories of the people who continue to cultivate, forage, hunt, cook, and consume what the rest of us have forgotten or didn't even know existed. Take honey--not the familiar product sold in plastic bottles, but the wild honey gathered by the Hadza people of East Africa, whose diet consists of eight hundred different plants and animals and who communicate with birds in order to locate bees' nests. Or consider murnong--once the staple food of Aboriginal Australians, this small root vegetable with the sweet taste of coconut is undergoing a revival after nearly being driven to extinction. And in Sierra Leone, there are just a few surviving stenophylla trees, a plant species now considered crucial to the future of coffee.From an Indigenous American chef refining precolonial recipes to farmers tending Geechee red peas on the Sea Islands of Georgia, the individuals profiled in Eating to Extinction are essential guides to treasured foods that have endured in the face of rampant sameness and standardization. They also provide a roadmap to a food system that is healthier, more robust, and, above all, richer in flavor and meaning.
America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA - the Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts That Define Real American Food
Pat Willard - 2008
With the unpublished WPA manuscript as her guide, Willard visits the sites of American food’s past glory to rediscover the vibrant foundation of America’s traditional cuisine. She visits a booyah cook-off in Minnesota, a political feast in Mississippi, a watermelon festival in Oklahoma, and a sheepherders ball in Idaho, to name a few. Featuring recipes and never-before-seen photos, including those from the WPA by Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and Marion Post Wolcott, America Eats! is a glowing celebration of American food, past and present.
The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin - 1825
Brillat-Savarin (1783-1833) made famous the aphorism, "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are." He believed that food defines a nation.
Vitamania: Our Obsessive Quest For Nutritional Perfection
Catherine Price - 2015
What's more, what we think we know is harming both our personal nutrition and our national health. By focusing on vitamins at the expense of everything else, we've become blind to the bigger picture: despite our belief that vitamins are an absolute good--and the more of them, the better--vitamins are actually small and surprisingly mysterious pieces of a much larger nutritional puzzle. In Vitamania, award-winning journalist Catherine Price offers a lucid and lively journey through our cherished yet misguided beliefs about vitamins and reveals a straightforward, blessedly anxiety-free path to enjoyable eating and good health.
The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
Peter Singer - 2006
Transparency: We have the right to know how our food is produced.2. Fairness: Producing food should not impose costs on others.3. Humanity: Inflicting unnecessary suffering on animals is wrong.4. Social Responsibility: Workers are entitled to decent wages and working conditions.5. Needs: Preserving life and health justifies more than other desires.Peter Singer, the groundbreaking ethicist who "may be the most controversial philosopher alive" (The New Yorker), now sets his critical sights on the food we buy and eat: where it comes from, how it's produced, and whether it was raised humanely. Teaming up once again with attorney Jim Mason, his coauthor on the acclaimed Animal Factories, Singer explores the impact our food choices have on humans, animals, and the environment.In The Way We Eat, Singer and Mason examine the eating habits of three American families with very different diets. They track down the sources of each family's food to probe the ethical issues involved in its production and marketing. What kinds of meat are most humane to eat? Is "organic" always better? Wild fish or farmed? Recognizing that not all of us will become vegetarians, Singer and Mason offer ways to make the best food choices. As they point out: "You can be ethical without being fanatical."
My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life
Ruth Reichl - 2015
No one was more stunned by this unexpected turn of events than its beloved editor in chief, Ruth Reichl, who suddenly faced an uncertain professional future. As she struggled to process what had seemed unthinkable, Reichl turned to the one place that had always provided sanctuary. “I did what I always do when I’m confused, lonely, or frightened,” she writes. “I disappeared into the kitchen.”My Kitchen Year follows the change of seasons—and Reichl’s emotions—as she slowly heals through the simple pleasures of cooking. While working 24/7, Reichl would “throw quick meals together” for her family and friends. Now she has the time to rediscover what cooking meant to her. Imagine kale, leaves dark and inviting, sautéed with chiles and garlic; summer peaches baked into a simple cobbler; fresh oysters chilling in a box of snow; plump chickens and earthy mushrooms, fricasseed with cream. Over the course of this challenging year, each dish Reichl prepares becomes a kind of stepping stone to finding joy again in ordinary things. The 136 recipes collected here represent a life’s passion for food: a blistering ma po tofu that shakes Reichl out of the blues; a decadent grilled cheese sandwich that accompanies a rare sighting in the woods around her home; a rhubarb sundae that signals the arrival of spring. Here, too, is Reichl’s enlivening dialogue with her Twitter followers, who become her culinary supporters and lively confidants. Part cookbook, part memoir, part paean to the household gods, My Kitchen Year may be Ruth Reichl’s most stirring book yet—one that reveals a refreshingly vulnerable side of the world's most famous food editor as she shares treasured recipes to be returned to again and again and again.