Vegans and cyclists are often outsiders, negotiating food systems and built environments that tend to prioritize omnivores and motor vehicles by default. Pedaling Resistance: Sympathy, Subversion, and Vegan Cycling examines the relationship between veganism and cycling through the journeys, experiences, and reflections of a dozen vegan cyclists from the United States and beyond.The essays in this collection explore the unity between cycling for health, work, competition, t...

In Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History, Michael D. Wise confronts four common myths about Indigenous food history: that most Native communities did not practice agriculture; that Native people were primarily hunters; that Native people were usually hungry; and that Native people never developed taste or cuisine. Wise argues that colonial expectations of food and agriculture have long structured ways of seeing (and of not seeing) Nati...

The Routledge History of American Foodways provides an important overview of the main themes surrounding the history of food in the Americas from the pre-colonial era to the present day. By broadly incorporating the latest food studies research, the book explores the major advances that have taken place in the past few decades in this crucial field.The volume is composed of four parts. The first part explores the significant developments in US food history in one of five time perio...

A new generation of food activists has come to believe that "sustainable farming" and "eating local" are the way to solve a host of perceived problems with our modern food supply system. By combining healthy eating and a high standard of environmental stewardship, these locavores think, we can also deliver important economic benefits and increase food security within local economies.But after a thorough review of the evidence, economic geographer Pierre Desrochers and policy analys...

The story of how white bread became white trash, this social history shows how our relationship with the love-it-or-hate-it food staple reflects our country’s changing valuesIn the early twentieth century, the factory-baked loaf heralded a bright new future, a world away from the hot, dusty, “dirty” bakeries run by immigrants. Fortified with vitamins, this bread was considered the original “superfood” and even marketed as patriotic—while food reformers painted whit...

We are what we eat, as the saying goes, but we are also how we eat, and when, and where. Our eating habits reveal as much about our society as the food on our plates, and our national identity is written in the eating schedules we follow and the customs we observe at the table and on the go.In Three Squares, food historian Abigail Carroll upends the popular understanding of our most cherished mealtime traditions, revealing that our eating habits have never been stable -- f...

A tour de force of writing and analysis, Down to Earth offers a sweeping history of our nation, one that for the first time places the environment at the very center of our story. Writing with marvelous clarity, historian Ted Steinberg sweeps across the centuries, re-envisioning the story of America as he recounts how the environment has played a key role in virtually every social, economic, and political development. Ranging from the colonists' attempts to impose order on the lan...

Food expert and celebrated food historian Andrew F. Smith recounts-in delicious detail-the creation of contemporary American cuisine. The diet of the modern American wasn't always as corporate, conglomerated, and corn-rich as it is today, and the style of American cooking, along with the ingredients that compose it, has never been fixed. With a cast of characters including bold inventors, savvy restaurateurs, ruthless advertisers, mad scientists, adventurous entrepreneurs, celebrity chefs,...

How the United States underdeveloped AppalachiaAppalachia—among the most storied and yet least understood regions in America—has long been associated with poverty and backwardness. But how did this image arise and what exactly does it mean? In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll launches an original investigation into the history of Appalachia and its place in U.S. history, with a special emphasis on how generations of its inhabitants lived, worked, survived, and dep...

A history of coffee from the sixth century to Starbucks that's "good to the last sentence" ( Las Cruces Sun News).One of Library Journal's "Best Business Books"This updated edition of The Coffee Book is jammed full of facts, figures, cartoons, and commentary covering coffee from its first use in Ethiopia in the sixth century to the rise of Starbucks and the emergence of Fair Trade coffee in the twenty-first. The book explores the ...

Documents how racial and social inequalities are built into our food system, and how communities are creating environmentally sustainable and socially just alternatives.Popularized by such best-selling authors as Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Eric Schlosser, a growing food movement urges us to support sustainable agriculture by eating fresh food produced on local family farms. But many low-income neighborhoods and communities of color have been systematic...

How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture, by food and social historian Jennifer Wallach, sheds a new and interesting light on American history by way of the dinner table. It is, at once, a study of America’s diverse culinary history and a look at the country’s unique and unprecedented journey to the present day. While undeniably a “melting pot” of different cultures and cuisines, America’s food habits have been shaped as much by technological innovations and industrial p...