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Darra Goldstein.  The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food.  University of California Press, 2022.

Russia is in the news these days (to say the least) and here is food historian Darra Goldstein’s deeply nostalgic account of how Russians managed to create delicious meals under the worst of circumstances, from tsarist to Soviet times.  Some excerpts:

To explain the title and the cover:

At the heart of any traditional Russian meal lies black bread, a loaf of dense sourdough rye….so ingrained was rye in the Russian diet that by the late nineteenth century, 30 to 60 percent of the country’s arable land was annually planted in this crop, leading to a veritable “kingdom of rye.”  The peasants expressed reverence for their rye bread by holding the loaf close to the chest and slicing it horizontally toward the heart. Wasting breadcrumbs was considered a sin, and even into the late twentieth century, entire cookbooks were devoted to using leftover black bread (p. 9).

On dacha gardens in Soviet times:

The only sure way to guarantee the availability of staples like potatoes was to grow them yourself.  Most of the population, including a great many city dwellers, cultivated their own garden plots, which allowed them to endure periods of food shortages.  These private plots…created a significant second economy–one the government came increasingly to rely on, since the collective and state farms never managed to meet the nation’s demand for fresh produce (p. 89).

On the samovar:

The origins of the samovar’s design are murky, and it is unclear whether this vessel arrived in Russia from the East or the West.  The model may have been the Mongolian hot pot or the elaborate Dutch urns that had taps rather than spouts…Whatever its origin, the Russians adapted a foreign receptacle into a useful object that became not only very much their own, but one that epitomizes Russianness (p. 119).

The book is indeed brief, but enlightening.  It made me think of Anya Von Bremen’s Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing (Broadway Books, 2013).  Both are deeply appreciative of Russian cuisine (if that’s the right word), and ability of Russian cooks to take whatever was available and turn it into something edible and memorable.

Brian Kateman.  Meat Me Half-Way: How Changing the Way We Eat Can Improve Our Lives and Save Our Planet.  Prometheus Books, 2022. 

I hadn’t expected this book to be so compelling, but it was and I did a blurb for it.

Meat Me Half-Way is an exceptionally thoughtful and well-argued synthesis of the rationale for the “reducetarian” movement to eat less (but not necessarily zero) meat as a means to improve human and planetary health. I especially like the book’s call to unite vegans, vegetarians, proponents of plant-based and cell-based meats, and advocates for regenerative agriculture in this common cause.  Sign me up!

Kateman says

Ultimately, we all want to see the end of factory farming…we must support, or at least not actively oppose, legal approaches toward that end—even when others’ solutions for chipping away at factory farming are not our preferred ones.  This means plant-based meat and cell-cultured meat advocates not actively opposing better meat—even if they don’t think better meat is the ethical, environmental, or nutritional ideal.  This also of course means better-meat advocates not opposing plant-based and cell-cultured meat for not being “the real thing.  (P. 179)

University of California Press has just issued its fall catalog and Slow Cooked is on pages 12 and 13.

It includes an interview:

Here’s a description of the book.  Its publication date is October 4, but it can be preordered at any of these sites.

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• Bookshop
• IndieBound
• Powell’s
• UC Press

I’m thrilled to announce that information about my forthcoming book—out October 4—is now available on the University of California Press website

Preordering options

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• Bookshop
• IndieBound
• Powell’s
• UC Press

Here’s the official description:

Marion Nestle reflects on her late-in-life career as a world-renowned food politics expert, public health advocate, and a founder of the field of food studies after facing decades of low expectations.

In this engrossing memoir, Marion Nestle reflects on how she achieved late-in-life success as a leading advocate for healthier and more sustainable diets. Slow Cooked recounts of how she built an unparalleled career at a time when few women worked in the sciences, and how she came to recognize and reveal the enormous influence of the food industry on our dietary choices.

By the time Nestle obtained her doctorate in molecular biology, she had been married since the age of nineteen, dropped out of college, worked as a lab technician, divorced, and become a stay-at-home mom with two children. That’s when she got started. Slow Cooked charts her astonishing rise from bench scientist to the pinnacles of academia, as she overcame the barriers and biases facing women of her generation and found her life’s purpose after age fifty. Slow Cooked tells her personal story—one that is deeply relevant to everyone who eats, and anyone who thinks it’s too late to follow a passion.

And here are the amazing back-cover blurbs (for which I am deeply grateful):

• “Marion Nestle is one of my heroes. After reading her riveting memoir, I admire her more than ever. She is one of the most important voices in the food world, and in this book she gets personal for the first time.”—Ruth Reichl, former editor of Gourmet Magazine 
• “Marion Nestle is a national treasure, and now you can learn how she came to be. Just like Nestle herself, this beautiful memoir is thoughtful, generous, unstinting, and deeply committed to learning from the past to build a better world.”—Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System 
• “I have always had such admiration for Marion Nestle: she is one of our nation’s shrewdest thinkers and has transformed the way all of us think about public health, the industrial food industry, nutrition, and the future of food. With this extraordinary book, I see for the first time how she became the clear-eyed, indefatigable warrior that she is. Her radical self-reflection and honesty is deeply moving—and in telling her life’’s story, Marion is forging a path for the next generation of food activists.”—Alice Waters, chef, author, food activist, and founder of Chez Panisse restaurant 
• “Marion Nestle is a brilliant, courageous champion of healthy food, social justice, and scientific integrity. This poignant and inspiring book tells us how she came to be that way.”—Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal 
• “Extraordinary! Nestle’s story moves me, heart and soul. I have long admired her leadership in awakening us to the crisis of our corporate-corrupted food system. In this work, however, she offers hope in the capacity of humans to transform obstacles and denigration into opportunity and dignity. She shares a gripping, very personal story that will help us discover our own courage. Just what’s needed now more than ever.”—Frances Moore Lappé, cofounder of Small Planet Institute

Tamar Haspel.  To Boldly Grow: Finding Joy, Adventure, and Dinner in Your Own Backyard.  GP Putnam’s Sons, 2021.  

I did a blurb for  this book:

In To Boldly Grow, Tamar Haspel gives us a warm, thoughtful, and thoroughly entertaining account of how she and her husband committed to eating and, therefore, growing, gathering, and, yes, hunting “first-hand” food every day.  This is a love story with an inspiring message: if she can raise her own food and have so much fun doing it, you can too.

I copied a few choice quotes, to give you a taste.

On calculating the amount of salt you can get out of seawater:

I shouldn’t have been surprised.  I’m pretty good at math, and this was basic arithmetic.  But that beautiful pile of salt was the next best thing to creating something out of thin air.  You take water out of the ocean, put it on your woodstove, and end up with something people put in froufrou little containers and sell at the same per-pound price as wild-caught salmon.  We were mesmerized by a completely mundane process we could predict with perfect accuracy. (p. 123)

On raising turkeys:

Turkey stupidity is the stuff of legend; they can supposedly drown by looking up in a rainstorm or simply not figuring out they should take their head out of their water dish.  But ours seemed to have something going on in the brains department.  Not the kind of thing that gets you into Yale early admissions, but baseline street smarts.  From the day we brought them home, they were on the lookout for an escape route.  (p. 157)

On eating roadkill wild turkey (Kevin is her husband):

I didn’t know at the time that this bird would set the tone for so much of what we did afterward.  It was the very first time we jumped into a project knowing absolutely nothing, the first time we bumbled through successfully, the first time we made a meal of something we’d gleaned from the world around us.  And it proved we were well matched in this endeavor, because Kevin is the kind of man who brings home roadkill and I’m the kind of woman who wants it.  (p. 169)

Paco Underhill.  How We Eat: The Brave New World of Food and Drink.  Simon & Schuster, 2022.

What to say about this book.

For one thing, Underhill is a supermarket consultant, whose job it is to tell supermarkets how to sell more food.

For another (full disclosure), chapter nine is titled “Shopping with Marion,” and that would be me.

I met Underhill and his collaborator, Bill Tonelli, at the amazing Sunrise Asian supermarket upstairs from the corner of 9^th Street and 3^rd Avenue in Manhattan.  We wandered around the store for a bit, collected another shopper, and went out for coffee.  The result is presented largely in the form of a conversation.  Here’s a sample from page 157 that starts with Underhill explaining why he loves visiting Hollywood (he lives in New York):

“…And going to L.A. is so refreshing.  Partially because I got sick of eating here—I live by eating according to the season, and it’s so easy to do in L.A., but back here I’m like, cabbage and apples and potatoes, again?”

“Carrots,” Marion says.

“Carrots.  ‘Oh look, we have rutabaga.  Yay!’  So yeah, I’m a jerk.  I’m one of those people who want to be completely seasonal and local but can’t hack it everywhere.”

“Ithaca has a rutabaga roll every year just before Christmas,” Marion says.  “It’s a bowling contest at the farmers market.  You bowl with rutabagas.”

This is a chatty book with lots of Underhill’s insights into how supermarkets work, starting with parking lots, and what he thinks stores ought to do to face the retail future.

He also went to farmers’ markets, this time with Nina (Planck) Kaufelt.  That chapter is titled “The citified get countrified (and vice versa.”

It’s a chattier and unreferenced version of my 2006 book, What to Eat—the one I am currently updating—but I did take some notes.

I enjoyed reading it, but I’m not exactly an unbiased critic.

Melissa Fuster.  Caribeños at the Table: How Migration, Health, and Race Intersect in New York City.  University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

My former NYU colleague, Melissa Fuster, now at Tulane, has written a book length report on her research investigating the eating preferences of immigrants to New York from Puerto Rico, the Domincan Republic, and Cuba.

She used qualitative methods—interviews—to come to some reality-based conclusions about immigrant foodways.  She did not find deep longings for traditional Caribbean diets.  Instead, she also identified class, race, and gender as major influences on dietary preferences.

 Hence, with this work I aim to change ongoing scholarly conversations on the immigrant food experience and health outcomes in the United States, which tend to overemphasize the importance of culture when addressing immigrant communities.  This overemphasis on culture dimishes the role of the structural factors (class, race, gender) that intersect to shape the experiences of these communities, overstates the uniqueness of specific cultural groups, and risks blaming culture for the health inequities observed in these communities. (p. 5)

She has interesting things to say about how dietitians view the traditional diets of the Caribbean—as unhealthy and unsophisticated.

These racialized descriptions of comidas, including those made in nutri-speak [talking about foods strictly in terms of nutrient content]…are laden with meanings that reflect the cuisines roots in slavery and colonization—institutions that are built on oppression through racialization.  Despite the stigma attached to foods that emerged out of slave and colonial foodways, these foods traveled with their communities from the Caribbean to the United States.  (p. 96)

And she urges us to think about migrant eating patterns in the broader context of everyone’s eating patterns:

The prevalent focus on culture in the food and migration scholarship minimizes the struggles immigrants face in the home-making process and the political forces surrounding such processes…Moreover, this emphasis often carries an implicit assumption that traditional foods are  important for immigrant or ethnic communities, and that these foods are always healthier than the “new’ American foods.  We must also rethink this dichotomy.  All diets have a range of healthfulness, and in migration contexts, this depends on the interpretation of what traditional comidas are, and how frequently they are consumed.  As found in other studies, migrant communities engage in both healthful and unhealthful dietary practices upon moving.  (p. 128)

Nicolette Hahn Niman.  Defending Beef: The Ecological and Nutritional Case for Meat (revized and expanded second edition). Chelsea Green, 2021. 

This is an updated edition of Hahn Niman’s 2014 book, which I wrote about in October that year.  Then, it was titled Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production.

I did a blurb for the book when it first came out and it still holds for this new edition:

Issues related to the long-term health effects of red meat, saturated fat, sugar, and grains are complex and I see the jury as still out on many of them.  While waiting for the science to be resolved, Hahn Niman’s book is well worth reading for its forceful defense of the role of ruminant animals in sustainable food systems.

In my 2014 post, I said:

The subtitle says it all: “The Manifesto of an Environmental Lawyer and Vegetarian Turned Cattle Rancher.”

Really?

Really.  She’s not kidding.

As [my blurb] might suggest, I have a more cautious interpretation of the science she summarizes, but there are plenty of reasons why eating meat can help improve human nutrition, especially when the animals are raised as humanely and sustainably as possible, which the Nimans most definitely do on their beautiful Bolinas ranch. [Photos are here]

Vegetarians: does she convince you?

Let the debates begin.

Well, 7 years later the new edition focuses much more on arguments about the effects of beef production on climate change and whether plant-based meat alternatives are worth the trouble.

The big news:  Hahn Niman is no longer a vegetarian.

I may once have believed that if I followed a vegetarian diet, nothing would have to die for my meals.  I now see how wrong I was…My primary mission these past two decades has been helping, in whatever ways I can, build a more environmentally sound, nourishing and humane food system.  We have a long way to go.  I don’t urge people to eat meat.  But I certainly don’t urge refraining from it, either.  I encourage omnivorous eaters to seek well-raised meat.  Abandoning meat will not positively affect the food system and may diminish one’s health.  The greatest consumer impact will come from people who eat meat actually buying it from good sources. (p.244)

I am with her on all of that.

That meat has nutritional and ecological benefits is beyond dispute.  This books lays out her point of view about the reasons for these benefits in an especially thoughtful way that carefully considers the counter-arguments.

Whether you agree with her views or not, this is the book to read about these issues.