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4 books match the query 'Convenience foods'

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 No Small Potatoes: How a Family Potato Salad Recipe is Fast Becoming a Billion Dollar Business

No Small Potatoes

How a Family Potato Salad Recipe is Fast Becoming a Billion Dollar Business

Al Reser

Oregon State University Press, 2010

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cover of Supersizing Urban America: How Inner Cities Got Fast Food with Government Help

Supersizing Urban America

How Inner Cities Got Fast Food with Government Help

Chin Jou

University of Chicago Press, 2017

More than one-third of adults in the United States are obese. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that there are over 112,000 obesity-related deaths annually, and for many years, the government has waged a very public war on the problem. Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona warned in 2006 that “obesity is the terror within,” going so far as to call it a threat that will “dwarf 9/11.”
 
What doesn’t get mentioned in all this? The fact that the federal government helped create the obesity crisis in the first place—especially where it is strikingly acute, among urban African-American communities. Supersizing Urban America reveals the little-known story of how the U.S. government got into the business of encouraging fast food in inner cities, with unforeseen consequences we are only beginning to understand. Chin Jou begins her story in the late­ 1960s, when predominantly African-American neighborhoods went from having no fast food chain restaurants to being littered with them. She uncovers the federal policies that have helped to subsidize that expansion, including loan guarantees to fast food franchisees, programs intended to promote minority entrepreneurship, and urban revitalization initiatives. During this time, fast food companies also began to relentlessly market to urban African-American consumers. An unintended consequence of these developments was that low-income minority communities were disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic.

​In the first book about the U.S. government’s problematic role in promoting fast food in inner-city America, Jou tells a riveting story of the food industry, obesity, and race relations in America that is essential to understanding health and obesity in contemporary urban America.
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cover of White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation

White Burgers, Black Cash

Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation

Naa Oyo A. Kwate

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

The long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community

  • James Beard Foundation: James Beard Media Award for Reference, History, and Scholarship — Winner
  • Urban Affairs Association Best Book in Urban Affairs — Winner
  • Association for Humanist Sociology Betty and McClung Lee Book Award — Winner
  • Black Caucus of the American Library Association — Honor, Nonfiction category
  • Museum of African American History Stone Book Award — Shortlist
  • Business History Conference: Hagley Prize — Finalist
  • Association for the Study of Food and Society: ASFS Book Award — Winner
  • Society for the Study of Social Problems: Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award — Winner
  • Foreword: INDIES — Silver winner, History category

Today, fast food is disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods and marketed to Black Americans through trgeted advertising. But throughout much of the twentieth century, fast food was developed specifically for White urban and suburban customers, purposefully avoiding Black spaces. In White Burgers, Black Cash, Naa Oyo A. Kwate traces the evolution in fast food from the early 1900s to the present, from its long history of racist exclusion to its current damaging embrace of urban Black communities.

Fast food has historically been tied to the country’s self-image as the land of opportunity and is marketed as one of life’s simple pleasures, but a more insidious history lies at the industry’s core. White Burgers, Black Cash investigates the complex trajectory of restaurant locations from a decided commitment to Whiteness to the disproportionate densities that characterize Black communities today. Kwate expansively charts fast food’s racial and spatial transformation and centers the cities of Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C., in a national examination of the biggest brands of today, including White Castle, KFC, Burger King, McDonald’s, and more.

Deeply researched, compellingly told, and brimming with surprising details, White Burgers, Black Cash reveals the inequalities embedded in America’s popular national food tradition.

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