The Secret Financial Life of Food
The Secret Financial Life of Food

Author: Kara Newman

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-10-21

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0231156715

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One morning while reading Barron's, Kara Newman took note of a casual bit of advice offered by famed commodities trader Jim Rogers. "Buy breakfast," he told investors, referring to the increasing value of pork belly and frozen orange juice futures. The statement inspired Newman to take a closer look at agricultural commodities, from the iconic pork belly to the obscure peppercorn and nutmeg. The results of her investigation, recorded in this fascinating history, show how contracts listed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange can read like a menu and how market behavior can dictate global economic and culinary practice. The Secret Financial Life of Food reveals the economic pathways that connect food to consumer, unlocking the mysteries behind culinary trends, grocery pricing, and restaurant dining. Newman travels back to the markets of ancient Rome and medieval Europe, where vendors first distinguished between "spot sales" and "sales for delivery." She retraces the storied spice routes of Asia and recounts the spice craze that prompted Christopher Columbus's journey to North America, linking these developments to modern-day India's bustling peppercorn market. Newman centers her history on the transformation of corn into a ubiquitous commodity and uses oats, wheat, and rye to recast America's westward expansion and the Industrial Revolution. She discusses the effects of such mega-corporations as Starbucks and McDonalds on futures markets and considers burgeoning markets, particularly "super soybeans," which could scramble the landscape of food finance. The ingredients of American power and culture, and the making of the modern world, can be found in the history of food commodities exchange, and Newman connects this unconventional story to the how and why of what we eat.

The Secret Life of Groceries
The Secret Life of Groceries

Author: Benjamin Lorr

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-11-09

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0553459414

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"A deeply curious and evenhanded report on our national appetites." --The New York Times In the tradition of Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma, an extraordinary investigation into the human lives at the heart of the American grocery store The miracle of the supermarket has never been more apparent. Like the doctors and nurses who care for the sick, suddenly the men and women who stock our shelves and operate our warehouses are understood as 'essential' workers, providing a quality of life we all too easily take for granted. But the sad truth is that the grocery industry has been failing these workers for decades. In this page-turning expose, author Benjamin Lorr pulls back the curtain on the highly secretive grocery industry. Combining deep sourcing, immersive reporting, and sharp, often laugh-out-loud prose, Lorr leads a wild investigation, asking what does it take to run a supermarket? How does our food get on the shelves? And who suffers for our increasing demands for convenience and efficiency? In this journey: We learn the secrets of Trader Joe's success from Trader Joe himself Drive with truckers caught in a job they call "sharecropping on wheels" Break into industrial farms with activists to learn what it takes for a product to earn certification labels like "fair trade" and "free range" Follow entrepreneurs as they fight for shelf space, learning essential tips, tricks, and traps for any new food business Journey with migrants to examine shocking forced labor practices through their eyes The product of five years of research and hundreds of interviews across every level of the business, The Secret Life of Groceries is essential reading for those who want to understand our food system--delivering powerful social commentary on the inherently American quest for more and compassionate insight into the lives that provide it.

Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics
Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics

Author: Lesley Wylie

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2023-11-15

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 1835535224

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Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics establishes the central importance of plants to the histories and cultures of the extended tropical region stretching from the U.S. South to Argentina. Through close examination of a number of significant plants – cacao, mate, agave, the hevea brasilensis, kudzu, the breadfruit, soy, and the ceiba pentandra, among others – this volume shows that vegetal life has played a fundamental role in shaping societies and in formulating cultural and environmental imaginaries in and beyond the region. Drawing on a wide range of cultural traditions and forms across literature, popular music, art, and film, the essays included in this volume transcend regional and linguistic boundaries to bring together multiple plant-centred histories or ‘understories’ – narratives that until now have been marginalized or gone unnoticed. Attending not only to the significant influence of humans on plants, but also of plants on humans, this book offers new understandings of how colonization, globalization, and power were, and continue to be, imbricated with nature in the American tropics.

Food and World Culture [2 volumes]
Food and World Culture [2 volumes]

Author: Linda S. Watts

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2022-08-23

Total Pages: 878

ISBN-13: 1440870004

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This book uses food as a lens through which to explore important matters of society and culture. In exploring why and how people eat around the globe, the text focuses on issues of health, conflict, struggle, contest, inequality, and power. Whether because of its necessity, pleasure, or ubiquity, the world of food (and its lore) proves endlessly fascinating to most people. The story of food is a narrative filled with both human striving and human suffering. However, many of today's diners are only dimly aware of the human price exacted for that comforting distance from the lived-world realities of food justice struggles. With attention to food issues ranging from local farming practices to global supply chains, this book examines how food’s history and geography remain inextricably linked to sociopolitical experiences of trauma connected with globalization, such as colonization, conquest, enslavement, and oppression. The main text is structured alphabetically around a set of 70 ingredients, from almonds to yeast. Each ingredient's story is accompanied by recipes. Along with the food profiles, the encyclopedia features sidebars. These are short discussions of topics of interest related to food, including automats, diners, victory gardens, and food at world’s fairs. This project also brings a social justice perspective to its content—weighing debates concerning food access, equity, insecurity, and politics.

Food Policy in the United Kingdom
Food Policy in the United Kingdom

Author: Martin Caraher

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-24

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1000916103

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This book provides an introduction to food policy in the United Kingdom, examining policy development, implementation, influences and current issues. The book begins by providing a wide-ranging introduction to food policy in the UK, situating it within wider global debates and establishing key drivers, such as issues related to global citizenship, trade and finance. The use of food control as a policy lever is also discussed and contrasted with alternative approaches based on behaviour change. The book presents an overview of the history of UK food policy, from which there is much to be learned, before moving onto current challenges posed by political instability, both at home and abroad, global pandemics and cost of living crises. Foremost is the need to manage public health, including both malnutrition and obesity, while promoting sustainable and healthy diets, as well as the broader issues around addressing food security and food poverty. The book also examines public sector food initiatives, such as school food and early childhood provisions, and food regulation. As a part of food regulation, chapters examine food scares and food fraud, from chalk in flour to "horsegate". The role of media, marketing and advertising is also considered within a policy perspective. Taking a wider lens, the book also discusses the impact of global food trade and the financialisation of food on food policy in the UK and vice versa. The book is supported by instructor eResources on the Routledge website designed to support student learning as well as provide regular updates on UK food policy developments. The eResources include student activities, group exercises and links to further reading and additional resources. This book serves as a key introduction to UK food and agricultural policy for students, scholars, policymakers and professionals, as well as those interested in food systems, public health and social policy more widely.

Meals Matter
Meals Matter

Author: Michael Symons

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-06-02

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0231551606

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Until the early nineteenth century, political philosophy and economics were dining companions. Both took up fundamental questions of how we should feed one another. But with the rise of corporate capitalism, modern economics lost sight of its primary task and turned away from the complexities of real people’s sustenance in favor of the single-minded pursuit of money. In Meals Matter, Michael Symons returns economics to its roots in the distribution of food and the labor required. Setting the table with vivid descriptions of conviviality, he offers a gastronomic rebuttal to the narrow worldview of mainstream economics. Engaging with a wide variety of thinkers—including Epicurus, Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the gastronomer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, and economic theorists from François Quesnay and Adam Smith through the neoliberals—Symons traces how we went astray and how we can find our way back to a more caring, sustainable way of life. He finds hope for shared “table pleasure” in institutions like community gardens, street markets, and banquets and in eating fresh, local, and “slow” food. An innovative, historically based argument at the intersection of food history and social thought, Meals Matter challenges us to reject the economics of greed in favor of a community-based economics of sharing and gastronomic enjoyment.

The Terroir of Whiskey
The Terroir of Whiskey

Author: Rob Arnold

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-12-22

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 0231550898

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Look at the back label of a bottle of wine and you may well see a reference to its terroir, the total local environment of the vineyard that grew the grapes, from its soil to the climate. Winemakers universally accept that where a grape is grown influences its chemistry, which in turn changes the flavor of the wine. A detailed system has codified the idea that place matters to wine. So why don’t we feel the same way about whiskey? In this book, the master distiller Rob Arnold reveals how innovative whiskey producers are recapturing a sense of place to create distinctive, nuanced flavors. He takes readers on a world tour of whiskey and the science of flavor, stopping along the way at distilleries in Kentucky, New York, Texas, Ireland, and Scotland. Arnold puts the spotlight on a new generation of distillers, plant breeders, and local farmers who are bringing back long-forgotten grain flavors and creating new ones in pursuit of terroir. In the twentieth century, we inadvertently bred distinctive tastes out of grains in favor of high yields—but today’s artisans have teamed up to remove themselves from the commodity grain system, resurrect heirloom cereals, bring new varieties to life, and recapture the flavors of specific local ingredients. The Terroir of Whiskey makes the scientific and cultural cases that terroir is as important in whiskey as it is in wine.

Chop Suey, USA
Chop Suey, USA

Author: Yong Chen

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-11-04

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0231538162

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American diners began to flock to Chinese restaurants more than a century ago, making Chinese food the first mass-consumed cuisine in the United States. By 1980, it had become the country's most popular ethnic cuisine. Chop Suey, USA offers the first comprehensive interpretation of the rise of Chinese food, revealing the forces that made it ubiquitous in the American gastronomic landscape and turned the country into an empire of consumption. Engineered by a politically disenfranchised, numerically small, and economically exploited group, Chinese food's tour de America is an epic story of global cultural encounter. It reflects not only changes in taste but also a growing appetite for a more leisurely lifestyle. Americans fell in love with Chinese food not because of its gastronomic excellence but because of its affordability and convenience, which is why they preferred the quick and simple dishes of China while shunning its haute cuisine. Epitomized by chop suey, American Chinese food was a forerunner of McDonald's, democratizing the once-exclusive dining-out experience for such groups as marginalized Anglos, African Americans, and Jews. The rise of Chinese food is also a classic American story of immigrant entrepreneurship and perseverance. Barred from many occupations, Chinese Americans successfully turned Chinese food from a despised cuisine into a dominant force in the restaurant market, creating a critical lifeline for their community. Chinese American restaurant workers developed the concept of the open kitchen and popularized the practice of home delivery. They streamlined certain Chinese dishes, such as chop suey and egg foo young, turning them into nationally recognized brand names.

Umami
Umami

Author: Ole Mouritsen

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-06-03

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0231537581

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In the West, we have identified only four basic tastes—sour, sweet, salty, and bitter—that, through skillful combination and technique, create delicious foods. Yet in many parts of East Asia over the past century, an additional flavor has entered the culinary lexicon: umami, a fifth taste impression that is savory, complex, and wholly distinct. Combining culinary history with recent research into the chemistry, preparation, nutrition, and culture of food, Mouritsen and Styrbæk encapsulate what we know to date about the concept of umami, from ancient times to today. Umami can be found in soup stocks, meat dishes, air-dried ham, shellfish, aged cheeses, mushrooms, and ripe tomatoes, and it can enhance other taste substances to produce a transformative gustatory experience. Researchers have also discovered which substances in foodstuffs bring out umami, a breakthrough that allows any casual cook to prepare delicious and more nutritious meals with less fat, salt, and sugar. The implications of harnessing umami are both sensuous and social, enabling us to become more intimate with the subtleties of human taste while making better food choices for ourselves and our families. This volume, the product of an ongoing collaboration between a chef and a scientist, won the Danish national Mad+Medier-Prisen (Food and Media Award) in the category of academic food communication.