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New Books in Food

New Books in Food

By: Marshall Poe
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 This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/foodNew Books Network Art Cooking Food & Wine Literary History & Criticism World
Episodes
  • Hanna Garth, "Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement" (U California Press, 2026)

    Hanna Garth, "Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement" (U California Press, 2026)
    Feb 14 2026
    Food justice activists have worked to increase access to healthy food in low-income communities of color across the United States. Yet despite their best intentions, they often perpetuate food access inequalities and racial stereotypes. Hanna Garth shows how the movement has been affected by misconceptions and assumptions about residents, as well as by unclear definitions of justice and what it means to be healthy. Focusing on broad structures and microlevel processes, Garth reveals how power dynamics shape social justice movements in particular ways.Drawing on twelve years of ethnographic research, Garth examines what motivates people from more affluent, majority-white areas of the city to intervene in South Central Los Angeles. She argues that the concepts of "food justice" and "healthy food" operate as racially coded language, reinforcing the idea that health problems in low-income Black and Brown communities can be solved through individual behavior rather than structural change. Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement (U California Press, 2026) explores the stakes of social justice and the possibility of multiracial coalitions working toward a better future. Hanna Garth is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, author of Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal, and coeditor of Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food
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    46 mins
  • Digestive Belonging, Trans-Species Sensing & Care in America’s Dairyland

    Digestive Belonging, Trans-Species Sensing & Care in America’s Dairyland
    Feb 13 2026
    In this episode, we speak with Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, Katy Overstreet. Katy is coordinator for the Landscapes, Senses, and Ecological Research Cluster as well as a core-member of the Centre for Sustainable Futures – both located at the University of Copenhagen. Katy’s core fields of research include multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, feminist STS, and agrarian political economy, and she has written on themes such as farm animal welfare, foodways, bioindustrialisation, technoscience, trans-species sensory worlds, and care. Her main ethnographic fieldsites include the midwestern dairy worlds of the United States, and various sites in Denmark including pig farms, an insect farm, and a former brown coal mine. Across these sites, Katy has worked with a lot of different co-species social formations and technoscientifically modulated ways of living and dying in agriculture, and in today’s episode, she will speak to some of these, focusing on the relations between microbes, cows, and humans in raw milk consumption, production, and politics. The basis for our conversation is a talk that Katy gave on the day before we recorded the podcast as part of the BSAS seminar series. Her talk was titled ‘Digestive belonging: a microbial ethnography of raw milk in America’s Dairyland’. In the podcast, Katy unravels the notion of ‘digestive belonging’ in this ethnographic context, connecting it to farmlife, microbes, social landscapes, pasteurization politics, and rural nostalgia among other things. We further discuss different modes of care in animal farming practices, the cultivation of trans-species sensing, and the idea of ‘positive animal welfare’. The podcast was recorded in October 2025 when Katy was in Bergen to give a presentation as part of the Bergen Social Anthropology Seminar series. Resources: Katy Overstreet’s research profile Articles mentioned, authored by Katy: Digestive Belonging: A Microbial Ethnography of Raw Milk in America’s Dairyland (2026) Be the boar: sex, sows, and courtship on a Danish pig farm (2022) How to Taste Like a Cow: Cultivating Shared Sense in Wisconsin Dairy Worlds (2021) EU funded Cost Action project LIFT aimed at ‘Lifting farm animal lives’ that Katy participates in: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food
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    58 mins
  • Bridget Salmon and Andrew Godley, "The Making of the Modern Supermarket: Self-Service Adoption in British Food Retailing, 1950-1975" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    Bridget Salmon and Andrew Godley, "The Making of the Modern Supermarket: Self-Service Adoption in British Food Retailing, 1950-1975" (Oxford UP, 2025)
    Feb 12 2026
    What seems mundane today—walking into a supermarket, picking up goods, and paying at a checkout—was once a radical experiment. In our latest New Books Network episode, I speak with Andrew Godley about The Making of the Modern Supermarkett: Self-Service Adoption in British Food Retailing, 1950-1975 (Oxford UP, 2025), co-authored with Bridget Salmon, former archivist at J. Sainsbury plc. This is a book about far more than shopping. It is a history of technology, management, urban planning, consumer behaviour, and how everyday routines were quietly transformed in post-war Britain. Drawing on rare corporate archives, Godley and Salmon reveal how supermarkets were not inevitable but carefully designed organisations shaped by strategic choices, technological constraints, and shifting consumer expectations. In the conversation, we explore how self-service reshaped labour and productivity, why Sainsbury’s distinctive commitment to fresh meat helped define the one-stop supermarket, and how planning initiatives such as the New Towns and Abercrombie’s vision for London influenced retail geography. We also discuss early experiments with computerised ordering, the limits of technological modernisation, and what Sainsbury’s story can—and cannot—tell us about the wider evolution of retailing in Britain and Europe. Finally, Andrew reflects on the surprises hidden in corporate archives and what the history of supermarkets can teach us about today’s transformations—from online grocery shopping to automated checkouts. If you have ever wondered how the modern supermarket came to be—and what it reveals about capitalism, technology, and everyday life—this episode is for you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food
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    1 hr and 1 min
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