Books in the California Studies in Food and Culture series

Spaghetti, gnocchi, tagliatellea, ravioli, vincisgrassi, strascinati-pasta in its myriad forms has been a staple of the Mediterranean diet longer than bread. This beautiful volume is the first book to provide a complete history of pasta in Italy, telling its long story via the extravagant variety of shapes it takes and the even greater abundance of names by which it is known. Food scholar Oretta Zanini De Vita traveled to every corner of her native Italy, recording oral histories, delving into long-forgotten family cookbooks, and searching obscure archives to produce this rich and uniquely personal compendium of historical and geographical information. For each entry she includes the primary ingredients, preparation techniques, variant names, and the locality where it is made and eaten. Along the way, Zanini De Vita debunks such culinary myths as Marco Polo's supposed role in pasta's story even as she serves up a feast of new information. Encyclopedia of Pasta, illustrated throughout with original drawings by Luciana Marini, will be the standard reference on one of the world's favorite foods for many years to come, engaging and delighting both general readers and food professionals.

Becoming Salmon is the first ethnographic account of salmon aquaculture, the most recent turn in the human history of animal domestication. In this careful and nuanced study, Marianne Elisabeth Lien explores how the growth of marine domestication has blurred traditional distinctions between fish and animals, recasting farmed fish as sentient beings, capable of feeling pain and subject to animal-welfare legislation. Drawing on fieldwork on and off salmon farms, Lien follows farmed Atlantic salmon through contemporary industrial husbandry, exposing how salmon are bred to be hungry, globally mobile, and "e;alien"e; in their watersheds of origin. Attentive to both the economic context of industrial food production and the materiality of human-animal relations, this book highlights the fragile and contingent relational practices that constitute salmon aquaculture and the multiple ways of "e;becoming salmon"e; that emerge as a result.

Part ethnography, part memoir, this book traces Japan's vibrant cafe society over one hundred and thirty years. It also traces Japan's coffee craze from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan helped to launch the Brazilian coffee industry, to the present day, as uniquely Japanese ways with coffee surface in Europe and America.

We all witness, in advertising and on supermarket shelves, the fierce competition for our food dollars. In this engrossing expose, Marion Nestle goes behind the scenes to reveal how the competition really works and how it affects our health. The abundance of food in the United States--enough calories to meet the needs of every man, woman, and child twice over--has a downside. Our over-efficient food industry must do everything possible to persuade people to eat more--more food, more often, and in larger portions--no matter what it does to waistlines or well-being. Like manufacturing cigarettes or building weapons, making food is big business. Food companies in 2000 generated nearly $900 billion in sales. They have stakeholders to please, shareholders to satisfy, and government regulations to deal with. It is nevertheless shocking to learn precisely how food companies lobby officials, co-opt experts, and expand sales by marketing to children, members of minority groups, and people in developing countries. We learn that the food industry plays politics as well as or better than other industries, not least because so much of its activity takes place outside the public view. Editor of the 1988 Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health, Nestle is uniquely qualified to lead us through the maze of food industry interests and influences. She vividly illustrates food politics in action: watered-down government dietary advice, schools pushing soft drinks, diet supplements promoted as if they were First Amendment rights. When it comes to the mass production and consumption of food, strategic decisions are driven by economics--not science, not common sense, and certainly not health. No wonder most of us are thoroughly confused about what to eat to stay healthy.An accessible and balanced account, Food Politics will forever change the way we respond to food industry marketing practices. By explaining how much the food industry influences government nutrition policies and how cleverly it links its interests to those of nutrition experts, this path-breaking book helps us understand more clearly than ever before what we eat and why.

Nestled in the Himalayan foothills of Northeast India, Darjeeling is synonymous with some of the finest and most expensive tea in the world. It is also home to a violent movement for regional autonomy that, like the tea industry, dates back to the days of colonial rule. In this nuanced ethnography, Sarah Besky narrates the lives of tea workers in Darjeeling. She explores how notions of fairness, value, and justice shifted with the rise of fair-trade practices and postcolonial separatist politics in the region. This is the first book to explore how fair-trade operates in the context of large-scale plantations. Readers in a variety of disciplines-anthropology, sociology, geography, environmental studies, and food studies-will gain a critical perspective on how plantation life is changing as Darjeeling struggles to reinvent its signature commodity for twenty-first-century consumers. The Darjeeling Distinction challenges fair-trade policy and practice, exposing how trade initiatives often fail to consider the larger environmental, historical, and sociopolitical forces that shape the lives of the people they intended to support.

Offers analysis on contemporary debates in food studies such as slow food, sustainability, food safety, and politics. This title guides readers to think more clearly and responsibly about what we consume and how we provide for ourselves, and illuminates the reasons why we act as we do.

Gary Paul Nabhan takes the reader on a vivid and far-ranging journey across time and space in this fascinating look at the relationship between the spice trade and culinary imperialism. Drawing on his own family's history as spice traders, as well as travel narratives, historical accounts, and his expertise as an ethnobotanist, Nabhan describes the critical roles that Semitic peoples and desert floras had in setting the stage for globalized spice trade. Traveling along four prominent trade routes-the Silk Road, the Frankincense Trail, the Spice Route, and the Camino Real (for chiles and chocolate)-Nabhan follows the caravans of itinerant spice merchants from the frankincense-gathering grounds and ancient harbors of the Arabian Peninsula to the port of Zayton on the China Sea to Santa Fe in the southwest United States. His stories, recipes, and linguistic analyses of cultural diffusion routes reveal the extent to which aromatics such as cumin, cinnamon, saffron, and peppers became adopted worldwide as signature ingredients of diverse cuisines. Cumin, Camels, and Caravans demonstrates that two particular desert cultures often depicted in constant conflict-Arabs and Jews-have spent much of their history collaborating in the spice trade and suggests how a more virtuous multicultural globalized society may be achieved in the future.

Offers analysis on contemporary debates in food studies such as slow food, sustainability, food safety, and politics. This title guides readers to think more clearly and responsibly about what we consume and how we provide for ourselves, and illuminates the reasons why we act as we do.

In this study Harvey Levenstein tells of the remarkable transformation in how Americans ate that took place from 1880 to 1930. It devotes special attention to the deliberate attempts of various groups, notably nutritionists and large food processors, to change popular eating habits.

Camembert, despite now being mass-produced internationally, still remains a national symbol for France, emblematic of its cultural identity. This text weaves together culinary and social history in a tale about the changing nature of food with implications for every modern consumer.

A Geography of Digestion is a highly original exploration of the legacy of the Kellogg Company, one of America's most enduring and storied food enterprises. In the late nineteenth century, company founder John H. Kellogg was experimenting with state-of-the-art advances in nutritional and medical science at his Battle Creek Sanitarium. Believing that good health depended on digesting the right foods in the right way, Kellogg thought that proper digestion could not happen without improved technologies, including innovations in food-processing machinery, urban sewer infrastructure, and agricultural production that changed the way Americans consumed and assimilated food. Asking his readers to think about mapping the processes and locations of digestion, Nicholas Bauch moves outward from the stomach to the sanitarium and through the landscape, clarifying the relationship between food, body, and environment at a crucial moment in the emergence of American health food sensibilities.

Maestro Martino of Como has been called the first celebrity chef, and his extraordinary treatise on Renaissance cookery, The Art of Cooking, is the first known culinary guide to specify ingredients, cooking times and techniques, utensils, and amounts. This vibrant document is also essential to understanding the forms of conviviality developed in Central Italy during the Renaissance, as well as their sociopolitical implications. In addition to the original text, this first complete English translation of the work includes a historical essay by Luigi Ballerini and fifty modernized recipes by acclaimed Italian chef Stefania Barzini. The Art of Cooking, unlike the culinary manuals of the time, is a true gastronomic lexicon, surprisingly like a modern cookbook in identifying the quantity and kinds of ingredients in each dish, the proper procedure for cooking them, and the time required, as well as including many of the secrets of a culinary expert. In his lively introduction, Luigi Ballerini places Maestro Martino in the complicated context of his time and place and guides the reader through the complexities of Italian and papal politics. Stefania Barzini's modernized recipes that follow the text bring the tastes of the original dishes into line with modern tastes. Her knowledgeable explanations of how she has adapted the recipes to the contemporary palate are models of their kind and will inspire readers to recreate these classic dishes in their own kitchens. Jeremy Parzen's translation is the first to gather the entire corpus of Martino's legacy.

A sweeping social history of food and eating in America, exploring the economic, political and cultural factors that have shaped the American diet from 1930 to the present.

The contents of your pint glass have a much richer history than you could have imagined. Through the story of the hop, this book connects twenty-first century beer drinkers to lands and histories that have been forgotten in an era of industrial food production.

Eating Apes is an eloquent book about a disturbing secret: the looming extinction of humanity's closest relatives, the African great apes-chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas. Dale Peterson's impassioned expose details how, with the unprecedented opening of African forests by European and Asian logging companies, the traditional consumption of wild animal meat in Central Africa has suddenly exploded in scope and impact, moving from what was recently a subsistence activity to an enormous and completely unsustainable commercial enterprise. Although the three African great apes account for only about one percent of the commercial bush meat trade, today's rate of slaughter could bring about their extinction in the next few decades. Supported by compelling color photographs by award-winning photographer Karl Ammann, Eating Apes documents the when, where, how, and why of this rapidly accelerating disaster. Eating Apes persuasively argues that the American conservation media have failed to report the ongoing collapse of the ape population. In bringing the facts of this crisis and these impending extinctions into a single, accessible book, Peterson takes us one step closer to averting one of the most disturbing threats to our closest relatives.

Located only blocks from Tokyo's glittering Ginza, Tsukiji-the world's largest marketplace for seafood-is a prominent landmark, well known but little understood by most Tokyoites: a supplier for countless fishmongers and sushi chefs, and a popular and fascinating destination for foreign tourists. Early every morning, the worlds of hi-tech and pre-tech trade noisily converge as tens of thousands of tons of seafood from every ocean of the world quickly change hands in Tsukiji's auctions and in the marketplace's hundreds of tiny stalls. In this absorbing firsthand study, Theodore C. Bestor-who has spent a dozen years doing fieldwork at fish markets and fishing ports in Japan, North America, Korea, and Europe-explains the complex social institutions that organize Tsukiji's auctions and the supply lines leading to and from them and illuminates trends of Japan's economic growth, changes in distribution and consumption, and the increasing globalization of the seafood trade. As he brings to life the sights and sounds of the marketplace, he reveals Tsukiji's rich internal culture, its place in Japanese cuisine, and the mercantile traditions that have shaped the marketplace since the early seventeenth century.

The United States is facing a health crisis of epidemic proportions: children are gaining weight younger and faster than ever before. With the prospect of becoming the most obese generation of adults in history, they are already turning up with an alarming assortment of "e;grown-up"e; maladies, from type 2 diabetes to high blood pressure. This book takes a clear-eyed look at what's behind the statistics and diagnoses, and what can be done about the major health crisis among American children. Sharron Dalton begins with the basics: what obesity is, what causes it, and why it matters. Integrating information from scientific and popular sources, she reviews past remedies and their results and compares specific strategies and programs for children. When a third of our children are overweight or likely to become so, it's everyone's problem-and this book argues for a united approach, promoting the role of parents, health professionals, and school and community leaders. For each group, Dalton outlines actions to combat the epidemic. She suggests ways for parents to respond to their children in interactions centered on food and physical activities. And she illuminates a number of issues raised by childhood obesity, from the pain of fat discrimination to the economic, social, and political ramifications of an epidemic of obesity among the young. At once authoritative and nontechnical, no-nonsense and compassionate, Our Overweight Children is a clear call to action-a prescription for treating the most dire problem threatening our children's health and our nation's future. Our Overweight Children includes* A discussion of what obesity is, what causes it, and why it matters* A review of various remedies and their results* A comparison of specific strategies and programs for children* A plan for parents, health professionals, and school and community leaders to work together to confront childhood obesity

Looks at humanity's deep-rooted anxiety about the future of food. This book explores an array of material ranging over two hundred years - from futuristic novels and films to world's fairs, Disney amusement parks, supermarket and restaurant architecture, organic farmers' markets, debates over genetic engineering, and more.

A nutritional whodunit that takes readers from Greenland to Africa to Israel, The Queen of Fats gives a fascinating account of how we have become deficient in a nutrient that is essential for good health: the fatty acids known as omega-3s. Writing with intelligence and passion, Susan Allport tells the story of these vital fats, which are abundant in greens and fish, among other foods. She describes how scientists came to understand the role of omega-3s in our diet, why commercial processing has removed them from the food we eat, and what the tremendous consequences have been for our health. In many Western countries, epidemics of inflammatory diseases and metabolic disorders have been traced to omega-3 deficiencies. The Queen of Fats provides information for every consumer who wants to reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and obesity and to improve brain function and overall health. This important and compelling investigation into the discovery, science, and politics of omega-3s will transform our thinking about what we should be eating.* Includes steps you can take to add omega-3s to your diet* Shows why eating fish is not the only way, or even the best way, to increase omega-3s.* Provides a new way to understand the complex advice about the role and importance of fats in the body* Explains how and why the food industry has created a deadly imbalance of fats in our foods* Shows how omega-3s can be reintroduced to our diet through food enrichment and changes in the feeding of livestock