Food & Drink

Fifty years of trying and nobody has farmed octopus commercially yet — but within a decade it will probably be in your supermarket. Reporting from Mexico, Spain and Japan, and from a stint working on a farm in the Yucatán, on a four-billion-dollar market and the question underneath it: is it defensible to farm the most intelligent invertebrate on earth? There are honest arguments on both sides, including for the animals.

Planetary Eating is a very rigorous examination of the mechanisms of human–planet interactions, agriculture and food production, and consumption set in motion. While other books address the environmental problems associated...

C. Wright Mills argued that sociological research often springs from the intersection of personal biography and history. My book is no exception. I come from a family that bought organic foods...

Pure Adulteration is about the origins of manufactured food. More centrally, it is about the struggles people had with the introduction of new foods in the later 1800s. The book...

In Discomfort Food, I argue that representations of food are profoundly evocative, able to convey material and immaterial possibilities that are inconsistent with their seemingly mundane subject matter. Depictions of...

Although my training in architectural history was very traditional—I studied the history of architects, their patrons, and buildings produced with high budgets and aesthetic ambitions—I became interested in how people...

I would hope readers open the book at the introduction where I describe the following:Imagine a sparkling day on Sydney’s Harbour... eating creamy Sydney rock oysters and drinking a glass...

Places are human geographies of space. They name and attribute natures to spaces, marking them and frequently ranking them as self or other, desirable or undesirable, masculine or feminine. “Home”...

Culinary "heritage" isn't really the past — it's a product, something bought, sold, and traded on in the present. Comparing food revivals from the American South to the New Nordic kitchens of Noma to the traditional ingredients of India, this is a polemical argument that our nostalgia for old foods is bound up with regressive politics and a looming ecological reckoning. What if the truest way to honor the past is to go back more honestly?

Tasty is not enough to become an icon. Plenty of delicious things vanish. The ones that endure survive because they do cultural work — signaling refinement to one era, feeding families cheaply in the next, and quietly becoming "comfort" in a third. The staying power was never in the flavor.

What resists this condition is the private, the silent, the unknown, the unread, the unseen, the unspoken, the untouched, the unsmelled, the unheard—those dimensions that require time to be expressed. All life, in its material and immaterial form, demands duration that is stretched, slow, and unedited.

The Invention of Rum is my attempt to answer how people living in the Atlantic world invented rum and subsequently wrestled with the wide-ranging implications of its production and …

So the argument that pickiness is natural and inevitable doesn’t hold up. That’s extremely hard for parents to hear. I try to understand mass pickiness as a historical phenomenon that has shaped...

Kanpai, the History of Sake is about Japan's traditional alcoholic beverage, sake, which is often called rice wine, because it's made out of rice, but it's really not made like wine. When you make wine, you have fruit, typically grapes, and those already have sugar in them. You can let nature run its course, and those will naturally ferment. But with rice, you need to use a special mold called 'koji'...

The book ranges from describing the horrors of famine in some detail to musing, with tempered hope, about the prospects of eliminating famine, at least in peacetime. I would hope...

Obviously, this isn’t the first book about Starbucks. But Everything but the Coffee is first to examine the company’s rise and fall and look ahead to its uncertain future in...

Jump into Chapter 4: Has anyone talked with these guys? It gives a sense of what a great, and encouraging, story this is. The Prologue gives a short but comprehensive...

For a few decades in the seventeenth century, Rome was flooded with an astonishing amount of meat—at times a pound of it per person, per day. Why did feeding a city so much lamb and pork become a statement of religious and political power in the age of the Reformation? A story of faith, appetite, and the artisans who moved meat from pasture to table.

While Coffee Nation is about the history of one of the world’s most popular commodities, I use it to consider how North America fit into a world governed by empires...

Beneath the stories of individual foods lies a larger story about the ambivalent appetites borne of life in a modern industrial society. This is less abstract than it sounds. As...

Culinary Nostalgia focuses on Shanghai and identifies the importance of regional food culture at pivotal moments in the city’s history. Taking foodways as a window onto urban change, the book...

Fifty years of trying and nobody has farmed octopus commercially yet — but within a decade it will probably be in your supermarket. Reporting from Mexico, Spain and Japan, and from a stint working on a farm in the Yucatán, on a four-billion-dollar market and the question underneath it: is it defensible to farm the most intelligent invertebrate on earth? There are honest arguments on both sides, including for the animals.

Planetary Eating is a very rigorous examination of the mechanisms of human–planet interactions, agriculture and food production, and consumption set in motion. While other books address the environmental problems associated...

C. Wright Mills argued that sociological research often springs from the intersection of personal biography and history. My book is no exception. I come from a family that bought organic foods...

Pure Adulteration is about the origins of manufactured food. More centrally, it is about the struggles people had with the introduction of new foods in the later 1800s. The book...

In Discomfort Food, I argue that representations of food are profoundly evocative, able to convey material and immaterial possibilities that are inconsistent with their seemingly mundane subject matter. Depictions of...

Although my training in architectural history was very traditional—I studied the history of architects, their patrons, and buildings produced with high budgets and aesthetic ambitions—I became interested in how people...

I would hope readers open the book at the introduction where I describe the following:Imagine a sparkling day on Sydney’s Harbour... eating creamy Sydney rock oysters and drinking a glass...

Places are human geographies of space. They name and attribute natures to spaces, marking them and frequently ranking them as self or other, desirable or undesirable, masculine or feminine. “Home”...

Culinary "heritage" isn't really the past — it's a product, something bought, sold, and traded on in the present. Comparing food revivals from the American South to the New Nordic kitchens of Noma to the traditional ingredients of India, this is a polemical argument that our nostalgia for old foods is bound up with regressive politics and a looming ecological reckoning. What if the truest way to honor the past is to go back more honestly?

Tasty is not enough to become an icon. Plenty of delicious things vanish. The ones that endure survive because they do cultural work — signaling refinement to one era, feeding families cheaply in the next, and quietly becoming "comfort" in a third. The staying power was never in the flavor.

What resists this condition is the private, the silent, the unknown, the unread, the unseen, the unspoken, the untouched, the unsmelled, the unheard—those dimensions that require time to be expressed. All life, in its material and immaterial form, demands duration that is stretched, slow, and unedited.

The Invention of Rum is my attempt to answer how people living in the Atlantic world invented rum and subsequently wrestled with the wide-ranging implications of its production and …

So the argument that pickiness is natural and inevitable doesn’t hold up. That’s extremely hard for parents to hear. I try to understand mass pickiness as a historical phenomenon that has shaped...

Kanpai, the History of Sake is about Japan's traditional alcoholic beverage, sake, which is often called rice wine, because it's made out of rice, but it's really not made like wine. When you make wine, you have fruit, typically grapes, and those already have sugar in them. You can let nature run its course, and those will naturally ferment. But with rice, you need to use a special mold called 'koji'...

The book ranges from describing the horrors of famine in some detail to musing, with tempered hope, about the prospects of eliminating famine, at least in peacetime. I would hope...

Obviously, this isn’t the first book about Starbucks. But Everything but the Coffee is first to examine the company’s rise and fall and look ahead to its uncertain future in...

Jump into Chapter 4: Has anyone talked with these guys? It gives a sense of what a great, and encouraging, story this is. The Prologue gives a short but comprehensive...

For a few decades in the seventeenth century, Rome was flooded with an astonishing amount of meat—at times a pound of it per person, per day. Why did feeding a city so much lamb and pork become a statement of religious and political power in the age of the Reformation? A story of faith, appetite, and the artisans who moved meat from pasture to table.

While Coffee Nation is about the history of one of the world’s most popular commodities, I use it to consider how North America fit into a world governed by empires...

Beneath the stories of individual foods lies a larger story about the ambivalent appetites borne of life in a modern industrial society. This is less abstract than it sounds. As...

Culinary Nostalgia focuses on Shanghai and identifies the importance of regional food culture at pivotal moments in the city’s history. Taking foodways as a window onto urban change, the book...