Spotlight on New Resources: Food & Culture
November 1, 2023
As the year draws to a close, and the holiday season approaches, we are reminded of our rich cultural heritage through food. This month, the Drexel Libraries is pleased to feature a list of recently purchased resources related to food, cooking, and culture.
You will find educational (and fun!) e-books, food studies, cookbooks, and more, to help enrich your understanding of the intersection of food and culture.
If you or someone you know is experiencing food insecurity, help is available through several organizations, including Food Resources for Pennsylvanians and Drexel’s Feed a Dragon program.
Cookbooks
By Freddie Bitsoie, James O. Fraioli, Quentin Bacon, & Gabriella Trujillo
Accompanied by original artwork by Gabriella Trujillo and offering delicious dishes like Cherrystone Clam Soup from the Northeastern Wampanoag and Spice-Rubbed Pork Tenderloin from the Pueblo peoples, New Native Kitchen showcases the variety of flavor and culinary history on offer from coast to coast, providing modern interpretations of 100 recipes that have long fed this country.
By Uyen Luu
In Vietnamese, Uyen Luu demonstrates that Vietnamese food is just as easy to whip up as a bowl of pasta – all you need is a good bottle of fish sauce and a little enthusiasm! Recipes include noodle soups, salads, family-style sharing plates, one-pot wonders and dinner-party showstoppers, which are all easy to prepare, adapt and enjoy.
By Andrea Lynn
Make delicious meals with your favorite Trader Joe's® products all from the comfort of your dorm room with this college cookbook packed with recipes for low-carb lunches, easy-to-make dinners, late-night snacks, and more. Even if you’ve never cooked before, this book shows how quick and easy it is to turn Trader Joe’s tasty and affordable groceries into delicious dishes.
By The Culinary Institute of America
The Professional Chef provides an introduction to the culinary profession, examines the tools and ingredients of a professional kitchen, discusses world cuisines, describes techniques for cooking stocks, sauces, soups, meats, poultry, fish, vegetables, pasta, breakfast foods, and baked goods, and includes basic recipes.
Childrens’ Books
Written by Winsome Bingham; Illustrated by C. G. Esperanza
Granny teaches her grandson to cook the family meal in this loving celebration of food, traditions, and gathering together at the table. At Granny’s, Sunday isn’t Sunday without a big family gathering over a lovingly prepared meal. Old enough now, our narrator is finally invited to help cook the dishes for the first time: he joins Granny in grating the cheese, cleaning the greens, and priming the meat for Roscoe Ray’s grill.
E-Books
Edited by Phillip Joy & Megan Aston
This book presents the experiences of LGBTQ+ people relating to food, bodies, nutrition, health, wellbeing, and being queer through critical writing and creative art. The chapters bring LGBTQ+ voices into the spotlight through arts-based scholarship and contribute to experiential learning, allowing for more understanding of the lives of LGBTQ+ people within the dietetic profession.
By Psyche A. Williams-Forson
In Eating While Black illuminates how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating. Williams-Forson shows how mass media, nutrition science, economics, and public policy drive entrenched opinions among both Black and non-Black Americans about what is healthful and right to eat. Sustainable culture—what keeps a community alive and thriving—is essential to Black peoples' fight for access and equity, and food is central to this fight.
By Michelle Jurkovich
In Feeding the Hungry, Michelle Jurkovich examines the social and normative environments in which international anti-hunger organizations are working and argues that despite international law ascribing responsibility to national governments to ensure the right to food of their citizens, there is no shared social consensus on who ought to do what to solve the hunger problem.
By Rafia Zafar
Food studies, once trendy, have settled into the public arena. In the academy, scholarship on food and literary culture constitutes a growing river within literary and cultural studies, but writing on African American food and dining remains a tributary. Recipes for Respect bridges this gap, illuminating the role of foodways in African American culture as well as the contributions of Black cooks and chefs to what has been considered the mainstream.
By Pascale Joassart-Marcelli
The $16 Taco illustrates how food can both emplace and displace immigrants, shedding light on the larger process of gentrification and the emotional, cultural, economic, and physical displacement it produces. It also highlights the contested food geographies of immigrants and people of color by documenting their contributions to the cultural food economy and everyday struggles to reclaim ethnic foodscapes and lead flourishing and hunger-free lives.
By Toni Tipton-Martin
In The Jemima Code, Tipton-Martin looks at black cookbooks that range from a rare 1827 house servant's manual, the first book published by an African American in the trade, to modern classics. These cookbooks offer firsthand evidence that African Americans cooked creative masterpieces from meager provisions, educated young chefs, operated food businesses, and nourished the African American community through the long struggle for human rights.
By David Boarder Giles
A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People explores the ways in which capitalism simultaneously manufactures waste and scarcity. Illustrating how communities of marginalized people and discarded things gather and cultivate political possibilities, Giles documents the work of Food Not Bombs (FNB), a global movement of grassroots soup kitchens that recover wasted grocery surpluses and redistribute them to those in need.
By Mark Lawrence & Sharon Friel
Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems examines what constitutes a food system, with chapters on production, manufacturing, distribution, and retail, among others. The text explores health and sustainable diets, including discussions about the politics, policy, personal behaviors, and advocacy behind creating healthy and sustainable food systems.