Editor's introduction -- 1. Radicalizing the history of food -- 2. Food, medicine, and the state: Nutritional Governmentality: food and the politics of health in late imperial and republican China; Nutrition and modernity: milk consumption in 1940s and 1950s Mexico -- 3. Empires of food: Colonial beef and the Blackfeet Reservation Slaughterhouse, 1879-1895; Too hot to handle: food, empire, and race in Thai Los Angeles -- 4. Taste/race/ethnicity: "Chili Queens" and checkered tablecloths: public dining cultures of Italians in New York City and Mexicans in San Antonio, Texas, 1870s-1940s; "Partaking of choice poultry cooked a la southern style": taste and race in the New Deal Sensory Economy -- 5. Reviews: Digging down to the roots: on the radical potential of documentary food films; "You say tomato, I say tomahto": applying the tools of food history to the food movement dialogue -- 6. Reflections: Memories of mothers in the kitchen: local foods, history, and women's work; "Properly, with love, from scratch": Jamie Oliver's food revolution; Radical taste: what is our future? -- 7. Teaching radical history: Eating in class: gastronomy, taste, nutrition, and teaching food history -- Notes to contributors
Summary:
The current and worsening international food crisis has placed food and hunger at the center of pitched debates about energy, international trade, aid and development, and cultural autonomy in a homogenizing global economy. The contemporary food crisis, manifested in spiraling commodity prices, restrictions on food exports and imports, famine, drought, and environmental degradation, is cast as a new phenomenon and a problem for the future. The lack of historical perspective in current debates obscures the roots of contemporary problems in forms of production and consumption grounded in the earliest transnational food exchanges and the policies and politics of empire. Contemporary fears of shortages, as well as of an obesity epidemic, are linked to historical practices: the rise of plantation economies, industrial foodways, gendered divisions of consumption and production, the accumulation of calories by the imperial and post-colonial North, and changing representations of the healthy body.
