"National Dish peels back the layers of myth, commercialization, and fetishization around the great world cuisines. In so doing, it brings us to a deep appreciation of how the country makes the food, and the food the country"--

"Join the conversation with more than one hundred women restaurateurs, activists, food writers, home cooks, and professional chefs, including Carla Hall, Ruth Reichl, Julia Turshen, Dorie Greenspan, Priya Krishna, Leah Penniman, Rachel Khong, Osayi Endolyn, Bonnie Tsui, and many others-all of whom are changing the world of food. Featuring essays, profiles, recipes, and more, Why We Cook is curated and illustrated by author and artist Lindsay Gardner,...

Devouring Cultures brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines including media studies, rhetoric, gender studies, philosophy, anthropology, literary criticism, film criticism, race theory, history, and linguistics to examine the ways food signifies both culture and identity. These scholars look for answers to intriguing questions: What does our choice of dining house say about our social class? Can restaurants teach us about a culture?...

Michael Ruhlman offers commentary on America's relationship with its food and investigates the overlooked source of so much of it -- the grocery store. In a culture obsessed with food -- how it looks, what it tastes like, where it comes from, what is good for us -- there are often more questions than answers. Ruhlman proposes that the best practices for consuming wisely could be hiding in plain sight -- in the aisles of your local supermarket. Using...

Film critic and food writer Alissa Wilkinson sits down with a hypothetical table of smart, engaging, revolutionary women of the twentieth century to explore the ways food centered each woman's creative work. As we meet these multifaceted women, we learn how to live with courage, smarts, saltiness, and sometimes feasting--even in uncertain times.

Essayist Matthew Gavin Frank examines a quintessential dish in each state, interweaving the culinary with personal and cultural associations of each region. From key lime pie (Florida) to elk stew (Montana), The Mad Feast commemorates the unexpected origins of the familiar. Dissecting the myriad intersections between history and food, Frank considers politics, sexuality, violence, grief, and pleasure: the cool, creamy whoopie pie evokes toughness...

"From the author of Paris to the Moon--one man's quest for the meaning of food in a time obsessed with what to eat. Never before have we cared so much about food. It preoccupies our popular culture, our fantasies, even our moralizing--"You still eat meat?" How could the land of Chef Boyardee have come so far overnight? And where can we possibly go from here? Locating our table ancestry in France, Adam Gopnik traces our rapid evolution from commendable...

"What we eat matters--to us, and to the planet. Cool food is a game-changing new food category and way of thinking that can help fix the climate. This ... book will show you how to make simple choices, starting today--in the supermarket, in your kitchen, and in the world--to reduce your environmental impact. Hundreds of cool foods exist, but until now have gone largely uncelebrated for their climate-positive powers. Some of these foods may already...

This book of food history, suggests that hunger and taste are the twin forces that secretly defined the course of civilization. Through war and plague, revolution and migration, people have always had to eat. What and how they ate provoked culinary upheaval around the world as ingredients were traded and fought over, and populations desperately walked the line between satiety and starvation. Parallel to the history books, a second, more obscure history...

Bonny Reichert avoided engaging with her family's Holocaust history until, in midlife, she unexpectedly confronted it while writing an article. Her father's survival in Auschwitz-Birkenau was a backdrop to her upbringing, but a transformative experience in Warsaw--a perfect bowl of borscht--sparked a journey to explore her culinary roots. This journey intertwined with her personal life, from her childhood in the restaurant business to the challenges...