Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
Recent books about food and cooking
Here are some of the books that have drifted my way. These in particular are about food and cooking.
Jean-Claude Kaufmann, The Meaning of Cooking, Polity 2010. Kaufmann is professor of sociology at the Sorbonne. Here, he argues that the ordinary acts of creating and consuming food are how we create our most meaningful relationships with lovers, spouses, and offspring.
Alice D. Kamps. What’s Cooking Uncle Sam? The Government’s Effect on the American Diet. Records from the National Archives. This is the terrific catalog of the terrific exhibit now playing at the National Archives in Washington DC until January 3, 2012. The catalog contains most (not all, alas) of the illustrations from the exhibit. These deal with the government’s role in farming, food products, dietary advice, meals for the military and other such matters. For example:
Janet M. Cramer et al, editors. Food as Communication; Communication as Food, Peter Lang 2011. This is a collection of essays on scholarly food discourses, ranging from media coverage of school lunches to local, organic foods. I blurbed this one: “Food as Communiction is a wonderful introduction to the field of food studies research. These authors watched movies and television, examined package labels, visited exotic places, delved in wonderful libraries, and ate great food.”
