Here are 35 books that Canned fans have personally recommended if you like
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People tend to think of food as being simple and self-evident, or at least feel it should be. In fact, almost every aspect of modern food has been dramatically reshaped by science and technology. Something that fascinates me as a historian is thinking about past transformations in our foodways and how they explain the social tensions and political struggles we live with today. My book From Label to Table tells a biography of the food label, using it as a prism to explore Americans’ anxieties about industrial foodways. I found these books to be an excellent primer for understanding the emergence of America’s packaged food economy and its many problems.
Nature’s Metropolis is a rare work that transforms scholarship, yet whose easy flow and engaging tone make it approachable for non-specialists.
Its main arguments —how humans and cities are embedded in nature, the interwoven, strained ties between rural and urban, and how technologies transformed our connection to nature— are guiding themes of my own work.
Reading the passage in this book about a sack’s journey, on how grain moved from farm to market before and after the appearance of the train in the West, was the spark that lit my imagination on how packaging transformed modern foodways.
In this groundbreaking work, William Cronon gives us an environmental perspective on the history of nineteenth-century America. By exploring the ecological and economic changes that made Chicago America's most dynamic city and the Great West its hinterland, Mr. Cronon opens a new window onto our national past. This is the story of city and country becoming ever more tightly bound in a system so powerful that it reshaped the American landscape and transformed American culture. The world that emerged is our own.
People tend to think of food as being simple and self-evident, or at least feel it should be. In fact, almost every aspect of modern food has been dramatically reshaped by science and technology. Something that fascinates me as a historian is thinking about past transformations in our foodways and how they explain the social tensions and political struggles we live with today. My book From Label to Table tells a biography of the food label, using it as a prism to explore Americans’ anxieties about industrial foodways. I found these books to be an excellent primer for understanding the emergence of America’s packaged food economy and its many problems.
I think one of the most important yet hardest things to study with food in history is its sensory appeal.
Taste and smell are so important to how we experience food, but don’t leave a record. Visualizing Taste is a smart, fun look at the role of the senses in food marketing, and how businesses remade markets around visual selling.
To illustrate what an incredible revolution this was, just think about the following: when you walk into a supermarket, what do you smell? Chances are, if it’s a decent one, the answer is nothing. Which is kind of crazy since food should smell!
Hisano shows us how modern marketers changed our relationship to food, elevating color over other attributes of food, such that today we rely more on sight than taste or smell to buy our food.
Ai Hisano exposes how corporations, the American government, and consumers shaped the colors of what we eat and even the colors of what we consider "natural," "fresh," and "wholesome."
The yellow of margarine, the red of meat, the bright orange of "natural" oranges-we live in the modern world of the senses created by business. Ai Hisano reveals how the food industry capitalized on color, and how the creation of a new visual vocabulary has shaped what we think of the food we eat. Constructing standards for the colors of food and the meanings we associate with them-wholesome, fresh, uniform-has been…
People tend to think of food as being simple and self-evident, or at least feel it should be. In fact, almost every aspect of modern food has been dramatically reshaped by science and technology. Something that fascinates me as a historian is thinking about past transformations in our foodways and how they explain the social tensions and political struggles we live with today. My book From Label to Table tells a biography of the food label, using it as a prism to explore Americans’ anxieties about industrial foodways. I found these books to be an excellent primer for understanding the emergence of America’s packaged food economy and its many problems.
Consumers in America today take for granted what it means to go to a supermarket and pick from shelves upon shelves of products. But this is, from a historical perspective, a weird way to shop for food.
Deutsch’s book is an excellent study of the “self-service revolution” in food retailing. She also breaks down all the gender, race, and class dimensions to it in a way that will make the reader rethink the “ease” and straightforwardness of supermarket shopping.
The most powerful aspect of this book was how it challenged me to think about all the work that goes into shopping. What once required skill and savvy to negotiate prices and manage customer relationships was transformed by supermarkets, through store layout and other tactics, to bury the politics of shopping for food.
Supermarkets are a mundane feature in the landscape, but as Tracey Deutsch reveals, they represent a major transformation in the ways that Americans feed themselves. In her examination of the history of food distribution in the United States, Deutsch demonstrates the important roles that gender, business, class, and the state played in the evolution of American grocery stores.
Deutsch's analysis reframes shopping as labor and embeds consumption in the structures of capitalism. The supermarket, that icon of postwar American life, emerged not from straightforward consumer demand for low prices, Deutsch argues, but through government regulations, women customers' demands, and retailers'…
People tend to think of food as being simple and self-evident, or at least feel it should be. In fact, almost every aspect of modern food has been dramatically reshaped by science and technology. Something that fascinates me as a historian is thinking about past transformations in our foodways and how they explain the social tensions and political struggles we live with today. My book From Label to Table tells a biography of the food label, using it as a prism to explore Americans’ anxieties about industrial foodways. I found these books to be an excellent primer for understanding the emergence of America’s packaged food economy and its many problems.
Markets were once marketplaces, physical spaces where the buying and selling of food was a messy, smelly, and socially dynamic activity that required all kinds of logistical work and infrastructure.
Food markets were also once the lifeblood of the city, a necessary stop in most people’s daily to do list. Tangires tells us how that changed. Over the course of the twentieth century, city market after city market got moved from town center to city periphery as urban planners sought to upgrade market infrastructures and beautify city centers, moving the messy chaos of traditional wholesale markets out of sight.
For me this is a big part of the story of how consumers lost touch with where their food came from, since they no longer talked with the people who moved food from farm to table.
The untold story of America's wholesale food business.
In nineteenth-century America, municipal deregulation of the butcher trade and state-incorporated market companies gave rise to a flourishing wholesale trade. In Movable Markets, Helen Tangires describes the evolution of the American wholesale marketplace for fresh food, from its development as a bustling produce district in the heart of the city to its current indiscernible place in food industrial parks on the urban periphery.
Tangires follows the middlemen, those intermediaries who became functional necessities as the railroads accelerated the process of delivering perishable food to the city. Tracing their rise and decline in…
I’m a political economist interested in development which I’ve been studying, researching, and writing about since my undergraduate days in the early 1990s.
This short (190-page) book shows how the global food system is intrinsically connected to world region’s diverse developmental trajectories, covering the colonial era to the green revolution to the contemporary corporate-dominated food system.
Historically, agriculture has been subordinated ever more tightly to capitalist imperatives of profit – based upon increased, faster, and cheaper production. Agriculture has been transformed from a ‘closed loop system’, where soil fertility was renewed based upon locally-available resources (such as animal manure), to a through-flow system dependent upon external inputs.
This shift raised yields for a while, but at the cost of soil exhaustion and the accumulation of power and resources in the hands of agrochemical companies at the expense of the small farmer sector.
Weis suggests that we need to consider new ways of producing our food, which would also establish new forms of world development.
The Global Food Economy examines the human and ecological cost of what we eat.
The current food economy is characterized by immense contradictions. Surplus 'food mountains', bountiful supermarkets, and rising levels of obesity stand in stark contrast to widespread hunger and malnutrition. Transnational companies dominate the market in food and benefit from subsidies, whilst farmers in developing countries remain impoverished. Food miles, mounting toxicity and the 'ecological hoofprint' of livestock mean that the global food economy rests on increasingly shaky environmental foundations.
This book looks at how such a system came about, and how it is being enforced by the…
I’m a novelist and a teacher of writing. My books are fueled by curiosity above all else. I have no expertise in science, so I stand in wonder at complicated systems that remain mostly hidden to me. My interest in food is similarly recreational. I’m married to a great chef and cookbook author, so I’ve learned a lot by osmosis. But when I think back on the process of writing OnePotato, I have to give a lot of credit to my students. They seem to be part of a generation that’s genuinely passionate about eating in healthy, equitable, and sustainable ways. Much of my book was sparked by conversations in the classroom.
This is the newest book on my list, and it reads like a glimpse into the future. Zimberoff investigates big tech’s scramble to create eggs without chickens, milk without cows, and meat without animals. It’s remarkable in both its breadth and its access to key players. I mentioned my character’s struggle to balance nature and technology earlier. In this arena, the line is even finer. If there’s ever a sequel to my own book, it will surely explore alternative proteins.
The full inside story of the technology paradigm shift transforming the food we eat and who is making it
Ultra-processed and secretly produced foods are roaring back into vogue, cheered by consumers and investors because they are plant-based-often vegan-and help address societal issues. And as our food system leaps ahead to a sterilized lab of the future, we think we know more about our food than we ever did, but because so much is happening so rapidly, we actually know less. In Technically Food, investigative reporter Larissa Zimberoff pokes holes in the marketing mania behind today's changing food landscape and…
My life's work has been to educate and encourage others to take food into their own hands with the intention of reclaiming real nutrition and declaring independence from the conventional food system. I'm humbled by the fact that my DIY Kombucha business has been successful, and it means that enough people are realizing the importance of intentionality when considering the food and drink we put in our bodies. I'd say that our motto of "Changing the world, one gut at a time" accurately represents what we're doing every day.
Sandor Katz is one of the most important faces
in the modern fermentation movement, and The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved
proves that his influence extends beyond the microbial sphere. This incredible
book shows how ordinary people can resist the dominant food system, revive
their community, and take direct action to benefit their own health and
nutrition.
An instant classic for a new generation of monkey-wrenching food activists. Food in America is cheap and abundant, yet the vast majority of it is diminished in terms of flavor and nutrition, anonymous and mysterious after being shipped thousands of miles and passing through inscrutable supply chains, and controlled by multinational corporations. In our system of globalized food commodities, convenience replaces quality and a connection to the source of our food. Most of us know almost nothing about how our food is grown or produced, where it comes from, and what health value it really has. It is food as…
I started my career as an academic social scientist and seem set to end it as a gardener, small-scale farmer, and accidental ecological activist. I’ve learned a lot of things along the way from these different parts of my life that I channel in my writing. I don’t claim much expertise. In fact, I think claims to expert knowledge that can ‘solve’ modern problems are a big part of our modern problems. I’ve always been interested in how people and communities try to figure things out for themselves, often by picking up the pieces when big ideas have failed them. My writing arises out of that.
If there were justice in this world, Simon Fairlie would be a national treasure. A life lived at the margins of polite society informs his magnum opus Meat, which is only partly about meat and livestock.
At a deeper level, it’s about what a sensible, fair, renewable, and low-impact society would look like in modern Britain – the answer in a nutshell being a society substantially of small mixed farms geared to local needs. Forensic data analysis, deep historical knowledge, a conversational style, and a rare wit combine to make this book a classic of modern agricultural writing.
Meat is a groundbreaking exploration of the difficult environmental, ethical and health issues surrounding the human consumption of animals. Garnering huge praise in the UK, this is a book that answers the question: should we be farming animals, or not? Not a simple answer, but one that takes all views on meat eating into account. It lays out in detail the reasons why we must indeed decrease the amount of meat we eat, both for the planet and for ourselves, and yet explores how different forms of agriculture--including livestock--shape our landscape and culture.At the heart of this book, Simon Fairlie…
I’ve always been interested in food, even as young as 3 years old I remember wanting to taste everything, and I found the process of cooking fascinating. But I really got interested in food as a topic for research during my time studying Greek culture for my PhD thesis. People on the island of Kalymnos, where I’ve conducted research for 30 years, made a strong connection between food and memory, but it was a connection that few scholars have written about until recently. So I’ve been excited to participate in a new field reflected by all of these books, and hope you will be as well.
This is the first book of its kind to combine a focus on women’s food knowledge from growing and harvesting to cooking.
The author draws from a wide array of sources to provide a rare cross-cultural and historical perspective on women’s food practices and their significance to “sexual politics.” Written in accessible and lively prose that is both informative and a pleasure to read.
Women have always been inextricably linked to food, especially in its production and preparation. This link, which applies cross-culturally, has seldom been fully acknowledged or celebrated. The role of women in this is usually taken for granted and therefore often rendered unimportant or invisible. This book presents a wide-ranging, interdiscplinary and comprehensive feminist analysis of women's central role in many aspects of the world's food systems and cultures. This central role is examined through a range of lenses, namely cross-cultural, intergenerational, and socially diverse.
I am a plant and soil ecologist, and have spent my working life researching and teaching within the university system. I am also a reader of poetry and literature, and particularly drawn to authors who write so well that you are pulled into a topic that you didn’t know was of interest. I wrote a biography of wheat because I really like plants, and I thought that writing about one of our crop plants could attract readers who like to eat. Along the way, I got fascinated by the layered complexities of our food system. Reading about it is another way to reflect on our relationship with the planet.
Part of a functioning food system is supporting the farmers who grow our crops. In Lentil Underground, Liz Carlisle introduces us to a network of farmers in Montana who made the decision to grow organic lentils and the work it took to make that economically viable. Carlisle’s writing has you sitting at the kitchen table with innovative members of the agricultural community.
A protégé of Michael Pollan shares the story of a little known group of renegade farmers who defied corporate agribusiness by launching a unique sustainable farm-to-table food movement.
The story of the Lentil Underground begins on a 280-acre homestead rooted in America’s Great Plains: the Oien family farm. Forty years ago, corporate agribusiness told small farmers like the Oiens to “get big or get out.” But twenty-seven-year-old David Oien decided to take a stand, becoming the first in his conservative Montana county to plant a radically different crop: organic lentils. Unlike the chemically dependent grains American farmers had been told…
