53 books like Visualizing Taste

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.

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.

Today most foods American consumers purchase are packaged. A hundred years ago this wasn’t so.

This is a dramatic change in how we get our food, what we know about it, and what we even think food is. Zeide’s book is an important read because she takes us through this with one of the earliest forms of packaged food: canned foods.

Her discussions of how the canning industry overcame food safety concerns with canned products and consumer resistance to the idea of canned as less fresh, less palatable, and cheap helped me to rethink the different ways a packaged food economy reshaped America’s foodways.

As someone researching food labeling, I was especially interested in how the canned food industry resisted and then embraced the idea of labels as a “window into the can.”

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

Eating right involves two very important things- what you need to eat a lot of for health, and what you need to avoid eating because it will make you ill. A very sobering look inside the so-called ‘food industry’ and how it is operating in the modern world, Swallow This educates us as to what ‘food’ labels mean; ‘natural flavourings’, ‘modified starch’ and so on. Once you’ve read it, you will understand completely why I put ‘food’ in inverted commas, and will develop a proper aversion to processed ‘food’, which will save you from a raft of serious health outcomes.

This is a deep investigative dive into the methods and practices global food corporations use to get us to buy and eat more – regardless of the health impacts on ourselves, families, and communities. 

It describes how companies use sophisticated neuroscience to stimulate overconsumption, create cravings, and ultimately distort eating habits. It gave me great insight into how our individual market choices are not simply a response to personal needs but are deeply manipulated by the science and practice of corporate marketing.

Kimberly writes from personal experience and from the heart. She pulls no punches. Her book covers a lot of the obstacles you’d expect – societal attitudes to breastfeeding, the formula industry, and so on – but it’s her chapter on ‘the feminist fallacy’ that really spoke to me. I’ve always been baffled by the lack of support that feminist writers have shown for breastfeeding. They talk about it as a chore, as a restriction on women’s freedom, not as something amazing that a woman’s body can do. Kimberly challenges this thinking head on, fearlessly exposing the flawed thinking that has, in the name of equality, blindly followed an agenda set by men, with the result that motherhood is devalued and breastfeeding is framed as simply an issue of ‘choice’. Her conviction provides me with the hope that we can reverse this. Brilliant.