Imperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri La, 1900-1969 (UCL Press, 2026) is a global history project that examines the diffusion of scientific
and environmental discourses from India to Britain and the US.
Ashok Malhotra examines how imperial agendas and colonial stereotyping shaped
dietary and agricultural research carried out in th ... Show More
Jun 1
Helen Veit, "Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History" (St Martin's Press, 2026)
Are children naturally picky? It sure seems that way. Yet, amazingly, pickiness used to be almost nonexistent. Well into the 20th century, Americans saw children as joyful omnivores who were naturally curious and eager to eat. Of course, this doesn't make sense today. Don't kids ... Show More
43m 14s
May 31
Jonatan Leer and Stinne Gunder Strøm Krogager, "Food Porn: Food Aesthetics in a Digital Age" (Bristol UP, 2026)
Is food porn a vibrant and democratic new expression of modern food culture or a superficial addition to an image-saturated world? Tracing its origins from the 1970s to today, this timely book examines the evolution of food porn as a desire-inducing aesthetic practice and a visua ... Show More
40m 31s
May 29
Ashley Rose Young, "Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in New Orleans" (Oxford UP, 2025)
For much of the Crescent City's history, days began with the cries of roaming street vendors and the percussive thwack of butchers' meat cleavers echoing out from the municipal markets. Generations of New Orleanians—Black and white, enslaved and free, men and women, wealthy and w ... Show More
51m 35s
Feb 2024
Rob Percival, "The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat" (Pegasus, 2022)
Our future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies, by geopolitical tensions, and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo-- pandemics and economic strife, the escalation of the climate and ecological crises--and by ... Show More
47m 23s
Oct 2023
Janet Chrzan and Kima Cargill, "Anxious Eaters: Why We Fall for Fad Diets" (Columbia UP, 2022)
What makes fad diets so appealing to so many people? And how did these fads become so central to conversations about food and nutrition?
Anxious Eaters: Why We Fall for Fad Diets (Columbia University Press, 2022) shows that fad diets are popular because they fulfill crucial socia ... Show More
1h 4m
May 2023
Eva Haifa Giraud, "What Comes After Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion" (Duke UP, 2019)
By foregrounding the ways that human existence is bound together with the lives of other entities, contemporary cultural theorists have sought to move beyond an anthropocentric worldview. Yet as Eva Haifa Giraud contends in What Comes After Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentri ... Show More
38m 22s
May 2023
Eva Haifa Giraud, "What Comes After Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion" (Duke UP, 2019)
By foregrounding the ways that human existence is bound together with the lives of other entities, contemporary cultural theorists have sought to move beyond an anthropocentric worldview. Yet as Eva Haifa Giraud contends in What Comes After Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentri ... Show More
38m 22s
Aug 2023
Travis Holloway, "How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene" (Stanford UP, 2022)
the near universal disappearance of shared social enterprise: the ruling class builds walls and lunar shuttles, while the rest of us contend with the atrophy of institutional integrity and the utter abdication of providing even minimal shelter from looming disaster.
The irony of ... Show More
51m 14s
Nov 2020
James Staples, "Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian: The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India" (U Washington Press, 2020)
Bovine politics exposes fault lines within contemporary Indian society, where eating beef is simultaneously a violation of sacred taboos, an expression of marginalized identities, and a route to cosmopolitan sophistication. The recent rise of Hindu nationalism has further polariz ... Show More
1h 5m
May 2024
Cathy Stanton, "Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
An anthropologist walks into a grocery store—no that’s not the start of a joke, that’s the true story of how Cathy Stanton came to be involved with Quabbin Harvest, a food co-op in the former mill town of Orange, Massachusetts.
Part memoir and part history, Stanton’s new book Fo ... Show More
44m 31s