Our Food Systems and How We Got Here: A Short Reading List
With the exception of water, there is not a more vital necessity to human existence than food. In its more primal role, food satiates our hunger, and nourishes our bodies, but food carries meanings, connotation, and implications that go beyond their nutritive function. As the nature of food necessitates, the study of the history of food intersects with many other topics including labor, technology, culture, and health.
Over the last decade plus, I have read countless books on food history and food studies that speak to many of those themes. One particular theme that I have found interesting is the relationship between food production and consumption and technology and science. This relationship informs not just taste and preferences but also policy. Science and technology influence institutions and governments, which in turn have the ability to create nutritional standards and practices.
But at the core of the issues and debates about food, and of a good food studies or food history book, is, of course, humans. Labor practices, class, race, are all integral parts of the study of food and the people who make it and consume it. Books where that element is especially compelling tend to be more memorable.
This is a reading list with some books I have particularly enjoyed and that fall somewhere within those themes, sometimes all at once. I’ve listed the books in no particular order.
Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food, by Steve Striffler.
If you have ever wondered how chicken went from a luxury meat and small bird size, to the enormous birds we see and eat today, this is the book for you. Striffler explores the consequences and destructiveness of that processes. Most importantly, this book exposes the realities of modern-day chicken processing plants and of the grimness of the lives of the people, often immigrants, who work there. Those chicken nuggets are cheap, but at what cost?
School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program, by Susan Levine.
Levine traces the trajectory of school lunches from their beginnings in the nutrition science boom of the early twentieth century to their reconceptualization as a poverty relief program in the 1970s and 80s. The book delves into the politics of the program, who decides who gets free lunches, what the kids are served, what is actually characterized as a vegetable, among other topics. Spoiler, lobbies and agricultural subsidies play a big part. And yes, ketchup could really be substituted for vegetables.
Pure and Modern Milk: an Environmental History Since 1900, by Kendra Smith-Howard.
Smith-Howard explores the relationship between the production and consumption of milk and its derivatives with technology and the environment. The author argues that the modern idea of what is pure milk is inextricable from the technological and scientific advancements of the twentieth century. This process of rebranding milk’s image as “pure” and “natural,” despite all of the processing it undergoes and the fact that milk on supermarket shelves is essentially a different product from its true natural state, was driven by the need to differentiate it from the artificial baby formula that began to gain popularity early in the century.
Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet, by Amy Bentley.
For most of human history babies have been fed breast milk until they were ready to eat what we might consider adult food today. But by the 1950s, baby food as we know it, in little jars on their own supermarket shelves, was ubiquitous and emblematic of the post-war world (or at least the United States). Broadly speaking, Bentley traces the correlation between the introduction of solids foods – and which types – to infants’ diets and the modern health issues many Americans experience. She also argues that these industrial baby foods have an outsize impact on people’s food preferences as adults. While previously the debates about feeding babies had largely been about breast or formula, the rise of commercial baby food shifted the conversation to when to introduce solids. The latter became not just a supplement to breast milk or formula, but a substitute, with monumental effects.
Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation, by Roger Horowitz.
Horowitz explains the relationship between technological advances in the meat industry beginning in the late nineteenth century and the dramatic changes in meat consumption in the United States. As he explains, this book is about how we became a meat-eating nation. He explains how this process took place by looking at the history and production of beef, pork, chicken, and hot dogs. The book also tackles issues of rural vs urban differences, class, ethnicity, and so on. The descriptions of New York City while slaughterhouses were still in the city, and sanitation was lacking, are particularly poignant.
Resetting the Table: Straight Talk About the Food We Grow and Eat, by Robert Paarlberg.
Paarlberg, in this book, gives us an overview of the current food systems and how they are different from what we think we know. Through a combination of scientific evidence and extensive research, he tackles head on, and argues against, some of the most deep-seated beliefs about modern food production, like the superiority of local and organic foods, the vilification of GMOs, and other aspects of agriculture and food science. He also talks about what sorts of policy better serve a healthy food production system.
The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket, by Benjamin Lorr.
This is a masterful work of investigative journalism. It’s highly readable and engaging, not to mention eye opening, and heartbreaking at times. Lorr explores different aspects of the food production process and supply chain through several stories that take place around the world. Although the food is the vehicle of research and storytelling, this is really a work about the people in these systems; about the people who make your food, prepare your food, sell your food, and their lived experiences. I consider to this to be a non-fiction modern-day equivalent of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.
Have you read any great food studies or food history books recently? I’d love to hear about them!
What I’ve Been Eating
I recently made myself cacio e pepe for lunch with some leftover homemade malloreddus (ridged cavatelli) I had in the freezer. I used Chef Joe Flamm’s recipe as a guide and for the first time ever was successful in making cacio e pepe. No clumping of the cheese, no broken sauces, just deliciousness.