***Prison Recipes and Prison Cookbooks***provides an innovative exploration of U.S.-based prison cookbooks using a narrative criminological approach.The book relies on the voices of prison cookbook authors to argue that cookbook narratives are a form of communication with the free world. Further, the book undertakes thematic analyses of prison cookery and narratives to illuminate the intersections of incarceration with abolition, gender, literacy, and dehumanization. The reader is ...

Dismissed as déclassé by gourmands, blamed for the scourge of obesity, and yet loved by all, the taste of sweet has long been at the center of both controversy and celebration. For anyone who has ever felt conflicted about a cupcake, this is a book to sink your teeth into. In The Taste of Sweet, unabashed dessert lover Joanne Chen takes us on an unexpected adventure into the nature of a taste you thought you knew and reveals a world you never imagined.Sweet is complicated,...

Rappoport treats the dinner table like a Freudian couch, asking us to lie back and spill our guts. Tracing our culinary customs from the Stone Age to the stovetop range, he illuminates our complex and often contradictory eating habits, and suggests that perhaps we are what we eat.

The phrase “dude food” likely brings to mind a range of images: burgers stacked impossibly high with an assortment of toppings that were themselves once considered a meal; crazed sports fans demolishing plates of radioactively hot wings; barbecued or bacon-wrapped . . . anything. But there is much more to the phenomenon of dude food than what’s on the plate. Emily J. H. Contois’s provocative book begins with the dude himself—a man who retains a degree of masculine privilege but doesn’t mee...

Food: The Key Concepts presents an exciting, coherent and interdisciplinary introduction to food studies for the beginning reader. Food Studies is an increasingly complex field, drawing on disciplines as diverse as Sociology, Anthropology and Cultural Studies at one end and Economics, Politics and Agricultural Science at the other.In order to clarify the issues, Food: The Key Concepts distills food choices down to three competing considerations: consumer identity; matters of conven...

Hidden among the simple lists of ingredients and directions for everyday foods are surprising stories. In Baking as Biography, Diane Tye considers her mother's recipe collection, reading between the lines of the aging index cards to provide a candid and nuanced portrait of one woman's life as mother, minister's wife, and participant in local Maritime women's networks.

Anthony Bourdain committed suicide in 2018 and is now more popular than ever. He is famous for being brave enough to eat things most Americans would not regard as food, including a whole cobra, raw seal’s eyeballs, and unwashed warthog rectum. His book Kitchen Confidential (2000) was his first best-seller but not his last. Though best known as an authority on food and international travel, Bourdain also wrote popular crime novels and books on history and other topics. He was a fan and frie...

Psyche A. Williams-Forson is one of our leading thinkers about food in America. In Eating While Black, she offers her knowledge and experience to illuminate how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating. She shows how mass media, nutrition science, economics, and public policy drive entrenched opinions among both Black and non-Black Americans about what is healthful and right to eat. Distorted views of how and what Black people eat are pervasive, bolstering ...

How educated and culturally savvy young people are transforming traditionally low-status manual labor jobs into elite taste-making occupationsIn today's new economy—in which "good" jobs are typically knowledge or technology based—many well-educated and culturally savvy young men are instead choosing to pursue traditionally low-status manual labor occupations as careers. Masters of Craft looks at the renaissance of four such trades: bartending, distilling, b...

For many Americans, eating is a religion. We worship at the temples of celebrity chefs. We raise our children to believe that certain foods are good and others are bad. We believe that if we eat the right foods, we will live longer, and if we eat in the right places, we will raise our social status. Yet what we believe to be true about food is, in fact, quite contradictory.Part exposé, part social commentary, The Gospel of Food is a rallying cry to abandon the fads and fal...

Everything but the Coffee casts a fresh eye on the world's most famous coffee company, looking beyond baristas, movie cameos, and Paul McCartney CDs to understand what Starbucks can tell us about America. Bryant Simon visited hundreds of Starbucks around the world to ask, Why did Starbucks take hold so quickly with consumers? What did it seem to provide over and above a decent cup of coffee? Why at the moment of Starbucks' profit-generating peak did the company lose its way, leavi...

This important cultural analysis tells two stories about food. The first depicts good food as democratic. Foodies frequent ‘hole in the wall’ ethnic eateries, appreciate the pie found in working-class truck stops, and reject the snobbery of fancy French restaurants with formal table service. The second story describes how food operates as a source of status and distinction for economic and cultural elites, indirectly maintaining and reproducing social inequality. While the first storyline ...