Food Culture

"The Greatest Story Ever ToldDispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war between cousins-the Pandavas and the Kouravas-but the Mahabharata is about conflicts of dharma. These conflicts are immense and various, singular and commonplace. Throughout the epic, characters...

This definitive and magnificent 10-volume unabridged translation is one of the rare English translations in full of the epic. Bibek Debroy makes the Mahabharata marvellously accessible to contemporary readers. Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war...

Much about Nalanda remains shrouded in mystery. When was it founded? Who founded it? Who studied and taught there? What subjects were offered? How many students and teachers were there? Was Nalanda a university in the modern sense? And what ultimately led to its downfall? Nalanda by Abhay K...

Under the Big Black Sun explores the nascent Los Angeles punk rock movement and its evolution to hardcore punk as it’s never been told before. Authors John Doe and Tom DeSavia have woven together an enthralling story of the legendary west coast scene from 1977-1982 by enlisting the voices of...

This book is a thoroughly researched primer on the 108 Upanishads, philosophical treatises that form a part of the Vedas, the revered Hindu texts. These Upanishads contain the most crystallized bits of wisdom gleaned from Hinduism. Roshen Dalal explains the concepts at the core of each Upanishad...

Every country may have different foods, but almost all of them have a dish with noodles. All around the world, kids share their favorite regional pasta dish. What is your favorite sauce and noodle recipe? Do you share the same favorite as other kids from your country?

What’s for breakfast in Nigeria? Snack time in Germany? How about dinner in Vietnam? Travel around the world to learn about the foods and cultural practices that make up mealtime with this fascinating series. Each book includes a simple recipe for a representative dish. This volume includes Meals in Nigeria, Meals in Russia, Meals in Turkey, and Meals in Vietnam.

What’s for breakfast in Nigeria? Snack time in Germany? How about dinner in Vietnam? Travel around the world to learn about the foods and cultural practices that make up mealtime with this fascinating series. Each book includes a simple recipe for a representative dish. This volume includes Meals in China, Meals in Germany, Meals in India, and Meals in Mexico.

For most Americans in the 19th century, it wasn't what you ate, but how much you ate, that mattered. Late in the century, doctors wrote books like How To Be Plumb and the voluptuous woman was the ideal. The famed actress Lillian Russell, considered by many the epitome of beauty, weighed almost 200 pounds. Today, in contrast, Americans seem obsessed with calories, diets and slimness, and with eating healthful amounts of vitamins, minerals, fats, and proteins. What sparked this remarkable revolution in the way we eat.

Wurgaft and White use vivid storytelling to bring food practices to life, weaving stories of Panamanian coffee growers, medieval women beer makers, and Japanese knife forgers. From the Venetian spice trade to the Columbian Exchange, from Roman garum to Vietnamese nuoc cham, Ways of Eating provides an absorbing account of world food history and anthropology. Migration, politics, and the dynamics of group identity all shape what we eat, and we can learn to trace these social forces from the plate to the kitchen, the factory, and the field.

Acclaimed across the world, prescribed in over 100 universities and colleges, and included in part in The Century's Greatest Reportage (Ordfront, 2000), alongside the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Studs Terkel and John Reed, Everybody Loves a Good Drought is the established classic on rural...

On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz makes an unsettling discovery. A history buff since early childhood, expensively educated at university—a history major, no less!—he’s reached middle age with a third-grader’s grasp of early America. In fact, he’s mislaid more than a...

A personal and cultural look at the dark underbelly of Western beauty standards and the lethal culture of disordered eating they've wrought "An authoritative, generous, and persuasive debut that I wish I could go back in time and gift to my teenage self.”—Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood...

A new American cuisine is forming. Animals never before considered or long since forgotten are emerging as delicacies. Parts that used to be for scrap are centerpieces. Ash and hay are fashionable ingredients, and you pay handsomely to breathe flavored air. Going out to a nice dinner now often precipitates a confrontation with a fundamental question: Is that food?

The remarkable untold story of a network of amateur researchers who debunked the Warren Report, raising questions about JFK's assassination that remain unanswered to this day—a riveting history of obsession, heartbreak, and the myth of the great American century from an Atlantic staff writer...

John Perkins has seen the signs of today's economic meltdown before. The subprime mortgage fiascos, the banking industry collapse, the rising tide of unemployment, the shuttering of small businesses across the landscape are all too familiar symptoms of a far greater disease. In his former life...

“Riveting—a delicious odyssey full of history, humor, and jaw-dropping stories. If you want to understand the making of modern Russia, read this book.” —Daniel Stone, bestselling author of The Food Explorer A high-spirited, eye-opening, appetite-whetting culinary travel adventure by an...

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE A clear-eyed warning about the increasingly destructive influence of America’s “shame industrial complex” in the age of social media and hyperpartisan politics—from the New York Times bestselling author of Weapons of Math Destruction “O’Neil...

Uncommon Grounds tells the story of coffee from its discovery on a hill in ancient Abyssinia to the advent of Starbucks. In this updated edition of the classic work, Mark Pendergrast reviews the dramatic changes in coffee culture over the past decade, from the disastrous "Coffee Crisis" that caused global prices to plummet to the rise of the Fair Trade movement and the "third-wave" of quality-obsessed coffee connoisseurs.

Arthashastra' is one of the oldest books with immense historical significance written by Kautilya or Arya Chanakya as he was popularly known. This book is one of the most effective books ever written on the art of statecraft and the science of everyday living. Originally written in Sanskrit...