Food Sociology

Rose George, acclaimed chronicler of what we would rather ignore, sails from Rotterdam to Suez to Singapore on ships the length of football fields and the height of Niagara Falls; she patrols the Indian Ocean with an anti-piracy task force; she joins seafaring chaplains and investigates the harm that ships inflict on endangered whales. Sharply informative and entertaining, Ninety Percent of Everything reveals the workings and perils of an unseen world that holds the key to our economy, our environment, and our very civilization.

In this eye-opening study, Sidney W. Mintz shows how Europeans and Americans transformed sugar from a rare foreign luxury to a commonplace necessity of modern life and how it changed the history of capitalism and industry. He discusses the production and consumption of sugar and reveals how closely interwoven sugar's origins are as a "slave" crop grown in Europe's tropical colonies, with its use first as an extravagant luxury for the aristocracy, then as a staple of the diet of the new industrial proletariat.

To a degree both engrossing and alarming, the story of fast food is the story of postwar America. Fast Food Nation is a groundbreaking work of investigation and cultural history that may change the way America thinks about the way it eats.

Terence McKenna hypothesizes that as the North African jungles receded, giving way to savannas and grasslands near the end of the most recent ice age, a branch of our arboreal primate ancestors left the forest canopy and began living in the open areas beyond. There they experimented with new varieties of foods as they adapted, physically and mentally, to the environment. Among the new foods found in this environment were psilocybin-containing mushrooms.

In this comprehensive, evidence-based guide for adults and children with food allergies and those who care for them, Dr. Scott H. Sicherer provides all the critical information you need on preventing, testing, living with, and treating food allergies. Organized in an accessible Q&A format and illustrated with case studies, the book explains how to prevent exposure to a known allergen at home, at work, at school, in restaurants, and elsewhere. Emphasizing recent advances, Sicherer touches on everything from handling an anaphylactic emergency to diagnosing allergies and intolerances.

In the hard-hitting, groundbreaking tradition of his NY Times best seller Fat Chance, which revealed the dangers of sugar, Dr Robert Lustig persuasively presents a stark exposé of how our addiction to processed foods (aided and abetted by the food industry, big ag, big pharma, institutional medicine and the government) is behind the lethal increase in major non-communicable diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease, cancer and dementia.

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The New York Times comes the explosive story of the rise of the processed food industry and its link to the emerging obesity epidemic. Michael Moss reveals how companies use salt, sugar, and fat to addict us and, more important, how we can fight back.

Inequality in America manifests in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in how we eat. From her years of field research, sociologist and ethnographer Priya Fielding-Singh brings us into the kitchens of dozens of families from varied educational, economic, and ethnoracial backgrounds to explore how - and why - we eat the way we do. We get to know four families intimately: the Bakers, a Black family living below the federal poverty line; the Williamses, a working-class white family just above it; the Ortegas, a middle-class Latinx family; and the Cains, an affluent white family.

Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood - facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf - his casual questioning took on an urgency His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong.

Taking on this story of heart and hardship, award-winning journalist Brian Reisinger weaves forgotten eras of American history with his own family’s four-generation fight for survival in Midwestern farm country. Listeners learn the truth about America’s most detrimental and unexplained socioeconomic crisis: How the family farms that feed us went from cutting a middle-class path through the Great Depression to barely making ends meet in modern America.

On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central wine warehouse in Vallejo, California. Within hours, the flames had destroyed 4.5 million bottles of California's finest wine worth more than $250 million, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. The fire had been deliberately set by a passionate oenophile named Mark Anderson, a skilled con man and thief with storage space at the warehouse who needed to cover his tracks.

This book includes a wealth of information and recipes to help you reclaim your enthusiasm for your cooking if you've recently been diagnosed with diabetes or if you've been living with diabetes for years. One of the realities that a persons with diabetes must face is how to cope with the disease on a daily basis. What should I do? What should I avoid doing? What should I eat? What is the best way to avoid suffering? The list of inquiries goes on and on. It might become exhausting at times, especially if you become entirely immersed in the process.

The food system is broken, but there is a revolution underway to fix it. Bite Back presents an urgent call to action and a vision for disrupting corporate power in the food system, a vision shared with countless organizers and advocates worldwide.

An exploration, both personal and deeply reported, of how we learn to eat in today's toxic food culture. When her newborn daughter stopped eating after a medical crisis, Virginia Sole-Smith spent two years teaching her how to feel safe around food again - and in the process, realized just how many of us are struggling to do the same thing.

In January 2023, bestselling author Johann Hari started to inject himself once a week with Ozempic, the diabetes drug that produces significant weight loss. He wasn’t alone—credible predictions suggest that in two years, a quarter of the U.S. population will be taking this class of drug. Proponents say that this is a biological solution to a biological problem. While 95 percent of diets fail, the average person taking one of the new drugs will lose a quarter of their body weight in six months, and keep it off for as long as they take it.

In Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein recounts her struggle with disordered eating alongside the stories of other women: historical figures, pop culture celebrities, and the girls she’s known and loved. Through the story of her own sickness, the raw recollections of interview subjects, and dispatches from social media rabbit holes, Clein challenges stereotypes and renders statistics and science deeply personal and urgent.

The Spirit of Animal Healing is chock-full of the very latest integrative medical knowledge (which combines conventional therapies with complementary and alternative medicine). Coupled with the vast amount of specialized expertise and learning Dr. Marty has gained from his own practice over the past 55 years, the book takes listeners on a journey to the leading edge of integrative veterinary understanding to achieve greater insight into the minds and bodies of their animal companions.

Half of America's two million farms made less than $300 in 2019. Between rising land costs, ever-more expensive equipment, the growing uncertainty of the climate, and few options for health care, farming today is a risky business. For many, simply staying afloat is a constant struggle. Bet the Farm chronicles this struggle through Beth Hoffman's eyes as a beginning farmer. She must contend with her father-in-law, who is reluctant to hand over control of the land. The couple also must balance the books, hoping that farming isn't a fantasy that takes every cent of their savings.

Welcome to the frontlines of modern survival—where dignity costs $7 and the dollar menu is both battlefield and blueprint. The Dollar Menu Philosopher is not another diet book, lifestyle manifesto, or foodie memoir. It’s a field guide for navigating capitalism’s most accessible meal system with eyes wide open. Written with surgical wit and economic precision, this book dissects the fast food landscape through the lens of price psychology, labor exploitation, surveillance apps, combo meal algorithms, and the quiet dignity of parking lot solitude. Every chapter unpacks a system hidden ...

Throughout World War II, when Saturday nights came around, servicemen and hostesses happily forgot the war for a little while as they danced together in USO clubs, which served as havens of stability in a time of social, moral, and geographic upheaval. Meghan Winchell demonstrates that in addition to boosting soldier morale, the USO acted as an architect of the gender roles and sexual codes that shaped the "greatest generation".