Here are 100 books that Fresh fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am the daughter of a health food fanatic whose admonitions about what to eat manifested in my early attraction to all food junky. Later in life, I became a bit of a food snob, shopping regularly at the farmers’ market for the freshest and most delicious fruits and vegetables I’ve ever tasted. My love of both good food and sharp analysis came to shape my career as an academic. Food became the object of my analyses, but always with an eye toward contradiction. I’ve written several books and articles exploring how capitalism constrains needed food system transformations, bringing me to my latest fascination with the tech sector.
While several books have been written about the horrors of industrial livestock production, none have moved me more than Blanchette’s Porkopolis.
With unforgettable stories and startling photographs, Blanchette details how workers perform all manner of intimate tasks to make industrial pigs reproduce and stay alive. I also love how he flips common-sense ideas of efficiency on their heads, showing how industrial meat production is anything but wasteful. Every bit of those pigs is used somewhere to the extent you wish they weren’t.
I have taught this book three times in my politics of food classes, and it never fails to blow my students away.
In the 1990s a small midwestern American town approved the construction of a massive pork complex, where almost 7 million hogs are birthed, raised, and killed every year. In Porkopolis Alex Blanchette explores how this rural community has been reorganized around the life and death cycles of corporate pigs. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Blanchette immerses readers into the workplaces that underlie modern meat, from slaughterhouses and corporate offices to artificial insemination barns and bone-rendering facilities. He outlines the deep human-hog relationships and intimacies that emerge through intensified industrialization, showing how even the most mundane human action,…
I am the daughter of a health food fanatic whose admonitions about what to eat manifested in my early attraction to all food junky. Later in life, I became a bit of a food snob, shopping regularly at the farmers’ market for the freshest and most delicious fruits and vegetables I’ve ever tasted. My love of both good food and sharp analysis came to shape my career as an academic. Food became the object of my analyses, but always with an eye toward contradiction. I’ve written several books and articles exploring how capitalism constrains needed food system transformations, bringing me to my latest fascination with the tech sector.
In my next pick, Romero draws on previously unexplored archives to tell stories of pesticides never told before, most notably how industrial waste was utilized to make chemicals that could kill all that got in agriculture’s way.
I love how he renders ironic the closed-looped systems so championed by environmentalists—or the use of warfare chemicals on fields that grow our foods. It is indeed strange that we use chemicals designed to kill the food that we eat to live.
The toxicity of pesticides to the environment and humans is often framed as an unfortunate effect of their benefits to agricultural production. In Economic Poisoning, Adam M. Romero upends this narrative and provides a fascinating new history of pesticides in American industrial agriculture prior to World War II. Through impeccable archival research, Romero reveals the ways in which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American agriculture, especially in California, functioned less as a market for novel pest-killing chemical products and more as a sink for the accumulating toxic wastes of mining, oil production, and chemical manufacturing. Connecting farming ecosystems to technology…
I am the daughter of a health food fanatic whose admonitions about what to eat manifested in my early attraction to all food junky. Later in life, I became a bit of a food snob, shopping regularly at the farmers’ market for the freshest and most delicious fruits and vegetables I’ve ever tasted. My love of both good food and sharp analysis came to shape my career as an academic. Food became the object of my analyses, but always with an eye toward contradiction. I’ve written several books and articles exploring how capitalism constrains needed food system transformations, bringing me to my latest fascination with the tech sector.
Against the backdrop of today’s obsessions with homemade, artisanal bread, Bobrow-Strain uses the most prosaic of foods—the industrially produced loaf of white fluff—to ask hard questions about race, class, gender, war, and modernity itself.
With so many food books falling into food porn mode, I can really appreciate a book that reminds me that the technologies of stripping wheat of its bran and germ were founded on ideas of racial purification. There’s plenty to chew on in this book.
The story of how white bread became white trash, this social history shows how our relationship with the love-it-or-hate-it food staple reflects our country’s changing values
In the early twentieth century, the factory-baked loaf heralded a bright new future, a world away from the hot, dusty, “dirty” bakeries run by immigrants. Fortified with vitamins, this bread was considered the original “superfood” and even marketed as patriotic—while food reformers painted white bread as a symbol of all that was wrong with America.
So how did this icon of American progress become “white trash”? In this lively history of bakers, dietary crusaders,…
I am the daughter of a health food fanatic whose admonitions about what to eat manifested in my early attraction to all food junky. Later in life, I became a bit of a food snob, shopping regularly at the farmers’ market for the freshest and most delicious fruits and vegetables I’ve ever tasted. My love of both good food and sharp analysis came to shape my career as an academic. Food became the object of my analyses, but always with an eye toward contradiction. I’ve written several books and articles exploring how capitalism constrains needed food system transformations, bringing me to my latest fascination with the tech sector.
Though out of print, I’ve returned to this book over and over again. Sure, it’s scholarly and theoretical (albeit also inclusive of some fascinating history), but no other book has helped me better understand how technology has developed around agriculture, shaping not only what farmers do but also who makes money from food and farm production.
The book is also remarkably prescient. Writing in the late 1980s, the authors were spot on in describing the new processes of food engineering that would become the dreams of today’s Silicon Valley techies. Here, I refer to those who think fabricating food out of microorganisms is the solution to the most pressing problems of the contemporary food system. I beg to differ.
This book provides an interpretation of the industrialization of agriculture, and proposes a new analytical framework for interpreting this transformation and the development of the contemporary food system. This analytical framework provides a critique of agricultural modernisation theories, while the authors introduce new concepts of "appropriationism" and "substitutionism" to propose an interpretation which overcomes the invitations of traditional approaches. The authors use this new theoretical framework to reconstruct the evolution of agricultural industrialization since the mid-19th century and to reinterpret the dynamics of social structures, the state and technology in shaping the modern food system.
I love a good pun and have written a joke book all about food called Lettuce Laugh. I think food is relatable to kids and they can put themselves in the food’s shoes and learn about friendship and being true to themselves through talking food characters. Humor plays a big part in the books I recommended, but it’s a great way to deliver a lasting message. Another book I wrote is also about food - Jalapeño Bagels, but unlike Bagel In Love, these bagels don’t talk! I love Bagel In Love so much I had a dress made with some of the characters embroidered on it.
Written in rhyme, this story is about a pancake and French toast that are going stale. They look for a way to refresh themselves and instead turn into baby versions. Josh Funk has set up a funny foodie world. Check out the first book, too, Lady Pancake & Sir French Toast. If you like these food puns, you’ll love the puns in Bagel In Love!
Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast worry that they're going stale, so they visit Professor Biscotti's lab to try a new despoiling procedure. But instead of beautifying them, Professor Biscotti's faulty gadget transforms them into toddlers!
Scared in the presence of the now gargantuan-looking Baron von Waffle, the mini breakfast foods take off on an adventure in the fridge, visiting everywhere from the Bran Canyon to Limes Square.
Will Baron von Waffle and Professor Biscotti figure out a way to turn them back into a grown Lady and Sir, or will they stay short & sweet forever?
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.
With veganism and vegetarianism on the rise,
it's books like these that make an important case for keeping meat, especially
beef, in our diet. While reputable science is the backbone of the book, it also
takes a look at the ethical arguments for keeping local cattle ranching alive,
the use of natural fertilizers produced by farm animals, and delicious beef on
our plates.
We're told that if we care about our health-or our planet-eliminating red meat from our diets is crucial. That beef is bad for us and cattle farming is horrible for the environment. But science says otherwise.
Beef is framed as the most environmentally destructive and least healthy of meats. We're often told that the only solution is to reduce or quit red meat entirely. But despite what anti-meat groups, vegan celebrities, and some health experts say, plant-based agriculture is far from a perfect solution.
In Sacred Cow, registered dietitian Diana Rodgers and former research biochemist and New York Times bestselling…
I am fascinated with the relationship between our individual behaviors and the social structures and institutions in which we live—and how these influence each over time. I think this sort of understanding is important if we want to consider the kind of world we want to live in, and how we might get there from where we are. I take insights from many disciplines, from physics and biology to the cognitive and social sciences, from philosophy and art to mathematics and engineering. I am currently a professor of cognitive and information sciences at the University of California, Merced, and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
I have always been fascinated by how people join and leave groups.
What are the benefits of joining a particular group? Which group should I join? What happens if someone wants to join a group, but its current members don’t want them to? I once thought such questions were merely qualitative, and when I was a graduate student I thought I’d be the first to tackle them quantitatively.
I was humbled when I stumbled upon this book, written years earlier, in which two behavioral ecologists review game theoretic models that address questions of just this sort, starting simple, and building up models of increasing nuance and complexity. I think anyone interested in the dynamics of group formation in humans or other animals should read this book.
Although there is extensive literature in the field of behavioral ecology that attempts to explain foraging of individuals, social foraging--the ways in which animals search and compete for food in groups--has been relatively neglected. This book redresses that situation by providing both a synthesis of the existing literature and a new theory of social foraging. Giraldeau and Caraco develop models informed by game theory that offer a new framework for analysis. Social Foraging Theory contains the most comprehensive theoretical approach to its subject, coupled with quantitative methods that will underpin future work in the field. The new models and approaches…
I am a Professor of History at Texas A&M University and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I teach and research broadly in the histories of Britain and its empire, North America, and the Atlantic world. I am the author of four books, including Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen through the British Press and The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire, and the War of 1812. I am especially fascinated with how imperialism shape colonizers’ cultures.
I love this book primarily for the ambitiousness of its breadth. It begins thousands of years ago with the role of early grain domestication in empire-building and stretches to the roles of modern cuisines in global trade, industry, and capitalism. Although a whirlwind of peoples and places from across human history, this beautifully written and illustrated book is easy for any reader interested in the subject to digest.
Rachel Laudan tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of the world's great cuisines from the mastery of grain cooking some twenty thousand years ago, to the present in this superbly researched book.
Probing beneath the apparent confusion of dozens of cuisines to reveal the underlying simplicity of the culinary family tree, she shows how periodic seismic shifts in culinary philosophy" beliefs about health, the economy, politics, society, and the gods prompted the construction of new cuisines, a handful of which, chosen as the cuisines of empires, came to dominate the globe.
I'm a retired professor who wrote about and taught about the American South for almost four decades. I directed a research center focused on the South, and I helped found an institute dedicated to the study of Southern food. The South’s creative traditions in music and literature are well known, and its foodways are now recognized as a distinct American cuisine that represents the region’s innovations in culture. Through reading about southern food, readers can explore the traditions of eating and cooking in the region, and the creative contributions of ethnic groups with national and global sources. I've chosen books that give flavor to thinking about the South as a distinct place in the imagination.
This book is a people’s history of the modern south, told through what people in the region have cooked and eaten.
Edge is my former student who became the founding director of the Southern Food Alliance and the author of more than a dozen books on food.
He tells a story of what the modern South inherited in terms of cooking ingredients, techniques, and traditions, and he shows the central role that cooks and waiters served in the civil rights movement. He is particularly adept at sketching profiles of southern food leaders from Paul Prudhomme to Colonel Sanders.
The book is perhaps best in showing the changes in the southern food scene over the last three centuries so that now southern food has become a shared culinary language for the nation.
“The one food book you must read this year." —Southern Living
One of Christopher Kimball’s Six Favorite Books About Food
A people’s history that reveals how Southerners shaped American culinary identity and how race relations impacted Southern food culture over six revolutionary decades
Like great provincial dishes around the world, potlikker is a salvage food. During the antebellum era, slave owners ate the greens from the pot and set aside the leftover potlikker broth for the enslaved, unaware that the broth, not the greens, was nutrient rich. After slavery, potlikker sustained the working poor, both black and white. In the…
I’ve been enthralled with history since childhood thanks to my late father, a college professor with a passion for the past. Our house was always filled with history books of all types and my father was a veritable encyclopedia who enjoyed answering my questions. When I became a crime reporter in the early 2000s, my predilection for history merged with my interest in crime and I ended up writing four books centered around historical crimes ranging in time from the 1700s to the 1960s.
In The Poison Squad, Deborah Blum explores the era in American history before food and drugs were regulated, a wild time indeed when many patent medicines contained not only morphine or cocaine but a plethora of poisonous substances that killed many users.
Even worse, unregulated candy containing adulterated ingredients led to many children’s deaths. Blum not only does a wonderful job breaking down the science and politics involved in this fascinating story but gives a vivid picture of the late 19th century and early 20th in the U.S.
Today, when many are calling for deregulation, The Poison Squad is even more relevant.
The inspiration for PBS's AMERICAN EXPERIENCE film The Poison Squad.
From Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Deborah Blum, the dramatic true story of how food was made safe in the United States and the heroes, led by the inimitable Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, who fought for change
By the end of nineteenth century, food was dangerous. Lethal, even. "Milk" might contain formaldehyde, most often used to embalm corpses. Decaying meat was preserved with both salicylic acid, a pharmaceutical chemical, and borax, a compound first identified as a cleaning product. This was…
