198 books match the query 'Food' and 11 start with m

cover of Madison Chefs: Stories of Food, Farms, and People

Madison Chefs

Stories of Food, Farms, and People

Lindsay Christians and Chris Hynes

University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

Why do Salvatore’s tomato pies have the sauce on the top? Where did chef Tami Lax learn to identify mushrooms in the woods? How did Morris develop its signature ramen?
 
Farm-to-table is a cliché, but its roots among the farmers and chefs of south-central Wisconsin are deep, vibrant, and resilient. From brats and burgers to bibimbap, Madison’s food scene looks substantially different than it did just a decade ago. Though the city has always been ahead of the locavore movement, a restaurant boom in the 2010s radically changed the dining landscape. Even when individual eateries close or chefs move on, their ideas, connections, and creativity have lasting power. Much larger cities have been unable to match the culinary variety, innovation, and depth of talent found in Wisconsin’s state capital.
 
Lindsay Christians’s in-depth look at nine creative, intense, and dedicated chefs captures the reason why Madison’s food culture remains a gem in America’s Upper Midwest. This beautifully illustrated book will leave you salivating—or making reservations.
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cover of Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean

Making Levantine Cuisine

Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean

Edited by Anny Gaul, Graham Auman Pitts, and Vicki Valosik

University of Texas Press, 2021

Melding the rural and the urban with the local, regional, and global, Levantine cuisine is a mélange of ingredients, recipes, and modes of consumption rooted in the Eastern Mediterranean. Making Levantine Cuisine provides much-needed scholarly attention to the region’s culinary cultures while teasing apart the tangled histories and knotted migrations of food. Akin to the region itself, the culinary repertoires that constitute Levantine cuisine endure and transform—are unified but not uniform. This book delves into the production and circulation of sugar, olive oil, and pistachios; examines the social origins of kibbe, Adana kebab, shakshuka, falafel, and shawarma; and offers a sprinkling of family recipes along the way. The histories of these ingredients and dishes, now so emblematic of the Levant, reveal the processes that codified them as national foods, the faulty binaries of Arab or Jewish and traditional or modern, and the global nature of foodways. Making Levantine Cuisine draws from personal archives and public memory to illustrate the diverse past and persistent cultural unity of a politically divided region.

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cover of Man Who Thought He Owned Water: On the Brink with American Farms, Cities, and Food

Man Who Thought He Owned Water

On the Brink with American Farms, Cities, and Food

Tershia d'Elgin

University Press of Colorado, 2016

The Man Who Thought He Owned Water is author Tershia d’Elgin’s fresh take on the gravest challenge of our time—how to support urbanization without killing ourselves in the process. The gritty story of her family’s experience with water rights on its Colorado farm provides essential background about American farms, food, and water administration in the West in the context of growing cities and climate change. Enchanting and informative, The Man Who Thought He Owned Water is an appeal for urban-rural cooperation over water and resiliency.
 
When her father bought his farm—Big Bend Station—he also bought the ample water rights associated with the land and the South Platte River, confident that he had secured the necessary resources for a successful endeavor. Yet water immediately proved fickle, hard to defend, and sometimes dangerous. Eventually those rights were curtailed without compensation. Through her family’s story, d’Elgin dramatically frames the personal-scale implications of water competition, revealing how water deals, infrastructure, transport, and management create economic growth but also sever human connections to Earth’s most vital resource. She shows how water flows to cities at the expense of American-grown food, as rural land turns to desert, wildlife starves, the environment degrades, and climate change intensifies.
 
Depicting deep love, obsession, and breathtaking landscape, The Man Who Thought He Owned Water is an impassioned call to rebalance our relationship with water. It will be of great interest to anyone seeking to understand the complex forces affecting water resources, food supply, food security, and biodiversity in America.
 
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cover of Manoomin: The Story of Wild Rice in Michigan

Manoomin

The Story of Wild Rice in Michigan

Barbara J Barton

Michigan State University Press, 2018

This is the first book of its kind to bring forward the rich tradition of wild rice in Michigan and its importance to the Anishinaabek people who live there. Manoomin: The Story of Wild Rice in Michigan focuses on the history, culture, biology, economics, and spirituality surrounding this sacred plant. The story travels through time from the days before European colonization and winds its way forward in and out of the logging and industrialization eras. It weaves between the worlds of the Anishinaabek and the colonizers, contrasting their different perspectives and divergent relationships with Manoomin. Barton discusses historic wild rice beds that once existed in Michigan, why many disappeared, and the efforts of tribal and nontribal people with a common goal of restoring and protecting Manoomin across the landscape.
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cover of Mesquite Pods to Mezcal: 10,000 Years of Oaxacan Cuisines

Mesquite Pods to Mezcal

10,000 Years of Oaxacan Cuisines

Verónica Pérez Rodriguez, Shanti Morell-Hart, and Stacie M. King

University of Texas Press, 2024

New case studies documenting ten thousand years of cuisines across the cultures of Oaxaca, Mexico, from the earliest gathered plants, such as guajes, to the contemporary production of tejate and its health implications.

Among the richest culinary traditions in Mexico are those of the “eight regions” of the state of Oaxaca. Mesquite Pods to Mezcal brings together some of the most prominent scholars in Oaxacan archaeology and related fields to explore the evolution of the area’s world-renowned cuisines. This volume, the first to address food practices across Oaxaca through a long-term historical lens, covers the full spectrum of human occupation in Oaxaca, from the early Holocene to contemporary times. Contributors consider the deep history of agroecological management and large-scale landscape transformation, framing food production as a human-environment relation. They explore how, after the arrival of the Spanish, Oaxacan cuisines adapted, diets changed, and food became a stronger marker of identity. Examining the present, further studies document how traditional foodways persist and what they mean for contemporary Oaxacans, whether they are traveling ancient roads, working outside the region, or rebuilding after an earthquake. Together, the original case studies in this volume demonstrate how new methods and diverse theoretical approaches can come together to trace the development of a rich food tradition, one that is thriving today.

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cover of Metabolic Living: Food, Fat, and the Absorption of Illness in India

Metabolic Living

Food, Fat, and the Absorption of Illness in India

Harris Solomon

Duke University Press, 2016

The popular narrative of "globesity" posits that the adoption of Western diets is intensifying obesity and diabetes in the Global South and that disordered metabolisms are the embodied consequence of globalization and excess. In Metabolic Living Harris Solomon recasts these narratives by examining how people in Mumbai, India, experience the porosity between food, fat, the body, and the city. Solomon contends that obesity and diabetes pose a problem of absorption between body and environment. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Mumbai's home kitchens, metabolic disorder clinics, food companies, markets, and social services, he details the absorption of everything from snack foods and mangoes to insulin, stress, and pollutants. As these substances pass between the city and the body and blur the two domains, the onset and treatment of metabolic illness raise questions about who has the power to decide what goes into bodies and when food means life. Evoking metabolism as a condition of contemporary urban life and a vital political analytic, Solomon illuminates the lived predicaments of obesity and diabetes, and reorients our understanding of chronic illness in India and beyond.
 
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cover of Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements: Decolonial Perspectives

Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements

Decolonial Perspectives

Devon Peña

University of Arkansas Press, 2017

Winner, 2018 ASFS (Association for the Study of Food and Society) Book Award, Edited Volume

This collection of new essays offers groundbreaking perspectives on the ways that food and foodways serve as an element of decolonization in Mexican-origin communities.

The writers here take us from multigenerational acequia farmers, who trace their ancestry to Indigenous families in place well before the Oñate Entrada of 1598, to tomorrow’s transborder travelers who will be negotiating entry into the United States. Throughout, we witness the shifting mosaic of Mexican-origin foods and foodways in the fields, gardens, and kitchen tables from Chiapas to Alaska.

Global food systems are also considered from a critical agroecological perspective, including the ways colonialism affects native biocultural diversity, ecosystem resilience, and equality across species, human groups, and generations.

Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements is a major contribution to the understanding of the ways that Mexican-origin peoples have resisted and transformed food systems. It will animate scholarship on global food studies for years to come.
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cover of Migrant Marketplaces: Food and Italians in North and South America

Migrant Marketplaces

Food and Italians in North and South America

Elizabeth Zanoni

University of Illinois Press, 2018

Italian immigrants to the United States and Argentina hungered for the products of home. Merchants imported Italian cheese, wine, olive oil, and other commodities to meet the demand. The two sides met in migrant marketplaces—urban spaces that linked a mobile people with mobile goods in both real and imagined ways.

Elizabeth Zanoni provides a cutting-edge comparative look at Italian people and products on the move between 1880 and 1940. Concentrating on foodstuffs—a trade dominated by Italian entrepreneurs in New York and Buenos Aires—Zanoni reveals how consumption of these increasingly global imports affected consumer habits and identities and sparked changing and competing connections between gender, nationality, and ethnicity. Women in particular—by tradition tasked with buying and preparing food—had complex interactions that influenced both global trade and their community economies. Zanoni conveys the complicated and often fraught values and meanings that surrounded food, meals, and shopping.

A groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Migrant Marketplaces offers a new perspective on the linkages between migration and trade that helped define globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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cover of Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity

Modern Japanese Cuisine

Food, Power and National Identity

Katarzyna J. Cwiertka

Reaktion Books, 2015

Over the past two decades, the popularity of Japanese food in the West has increased immeasurably—a major contribution to the evolution of Western eating habits. But Japanese cuisine itself has changed significantly since pre-modern times, and the food we eat at trendy Japanese restaurants, from tempura to sashimi, is vastly different from earlier Japanese fare. Modern Japanese Cuisine examines the origins of Japanese food from the late nineteenth century to unabashedly adulterated American favorites like today’s California roll.

Katarzyna J. Cwiertka demonstrates that key shifts in the Japanese diet were, in many cases, a consequence of modern imperialism. Exploring reforms in military catering and home cooking, wartime food management and the rise of urban gastronomy, Cwiertka shows how Japan’s numerous regional cuisines were eventually replaced by a set of foods and practices with which the majority of Japanese today ardently identify.

The result of over a decade of research, Modern Japanese Cuisine is a fascinating look at the historical roots of some of the world’s best cooking and will provide appetizing reading for scholars of Japanese culture and foodies alike.

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cover of Montane Foragers: Asana and the South-Central Andean Archaic

Montane Foragers

Asana and the South-Central Andean Archaic

Mark S. Aldenderfer

University of Iowa Press, 1998

All previous books dealing with prehistoric hunter-gatherers in the high Andes have treated ancient mountain populations from a troglodyte's perspective, as if they were little different from lowlanders who happened to occupy jagged terrain. Early mountain populations have been transformed into generic foragers because the basic nature of high-altitude stress and biological adaptation has not been addressed. In Montane Foragers, Mark Aldenderfer builds a unique and penetrating model of montane foraging that justly shatters this traditional approach to ancient mountain populations.

Aldenderfer's investigation forms a methodological and theoretical tour de force that elucidates elevational stress—what it takes for humans to adjust and survive at high altitudes. In a masterful integration of mountain biology and ecology, he emphasizes the nature of hunter-gatherer adaptations to high-mountain environments. He carefully documents the cultural history of Asana, the first stratified, open-air site discovered in the highlands of the south-central Andes. He establishes a number of major occurrences at this revolutionary site, including the origins of plant and animal domestication and transitions to food production, the growth and packing of forager populations, and the advent of some form of complexity and social hierarchy.

The rich and diversified archaeological record recovered at Asana—which spans from 10,000 to 3,500 years ago—includes the earliest houses as well as public and ceremonial buildings in the central cordillera. Built, used, and abandoned over many millennia, the Asana structures completely transform our understanding of the antiquity and development of native American architecture. Aldenderfer's detailed archaeological case study of high-elevation foraging adaptation, his description of this extreme environment as a viable human habitat, and his theoretical model of montane foraging create a new understanding of the lifeways of foraging peoples worldwide.
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cover of México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality

México Between Feast and Famine

Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality

Enrique C. Ochoa

University of Arizona Press, 2025

As the birthplace of maize and a celebrated culinary destination, Mexico stands at the crossroads of gastronomic richness and stark social disparities. In México Between Feast and Famine Enrique C. Ochoa unveils the historical and contemporary forces behind Mexico’s polarized food systems.

México Between Feast and Famine provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of Mexico’s food systems and how they reflect the contradictions and inequalities at the heart of Mexico. Ochoa examines the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of neoliberal policies that have reshaped food production, distribution, and consumption in Mexico. Ochoa analyzes the histories of Mexico’s mega food companies, including GRUMA, Bimbo, Oxxo, Aurrera/Walmex, and reveals how corporations have captured the food system at the same time that diet-related diseases have soared. The author not only examines the economic and political dimensions of food production but also interrogates the social and cultural impacts.

As debates around food sovereignty, globalization, and sustainable development intensify globally, México Between Feast and Famine provides a timely analysis that counters conventional narratives about Mexican cuisine. Even as it looks back, this work looks to the future, where more equitable and sustainable food systems prioritize social justice and community well-being.

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