Reading list

Life and Debt
Stephanie Black (director)

Black’s eye-opening film shows how neocolonial economic coercion determines everything from agriculture to schooling in formerly colonized countries like Jamaica.   –  Lincoln Z. Shlensky, Associate Professor, English

“Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way. Eventually, the slaves were freed, in a kind of way.” (from Jamaica Kincaid’s long essay, A Small Place, that serves as a touchstone text for the film)

Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past
Sidney W. Mintz

Mintz was one of the first anthropologists to point out why food was largely ignored in much academic study: namely, because most of the food work (gathering and preparation) was being done by women and most of the anthropologists were men who were not interested in the real stuff of food practices. This was an essential turning point. Once we acknowledge that, Mintz shows how by examining food in all its dimensions (not just the public facing ones), one can learn a great deal about the human and about power.   – Rachel Brown, Assistant Teaching Professor, Religion, Culture and Society

“Food and eating afford us a remarkable arena in which to watch how the human species invests basic activity with social meaning.”

The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South
Michael W. Twitty

With his autobiographical exploration of his African, European, and Indigenous ancestors’ foodways, Twitty helped me feel the concept of food as culture sparking through every bite of “home cooking”: what we eat is who we are.   – Erin E. Kelly, Director, Academic and Technical Writing Program; Associate Professor, English

"The Old South is a place where people use food to tell themselves who they are, to tell others who they are, and to tell stories about where they’ve been. The Old South is a place of groaning tables across the tracks from want[…]. It is a place in the mind where we dare not talk about which came first, the African cook or the European mistress, the Native American woman or the white woodsman. We just know that somehow the table aches from the ache of so much … that we prop it up with our knees and excuses to keep it from falling."

Femme des fraises
Isabel Cebrián y Álvaro Ortiz

What is the social cost of the food we eat? What kind of exploitation and gender-based violence is hidden in the strawberries that northern and southern Europeans can enjoy at competitive prices in the comfort of their homes? Isabel Cebrián and Álvaro Ortiz’s investigative journalist graphic account “Femmes des fraises” sheds light on the chain of exploitative economic, legal, and migratory politics that reaches our plates. To be read in conjunction with Chadia Arab’s "Dames de fraises" (available in Spanish translation as "Las señoras de la fresa") and Antonello Mangano’s "Lo sfruttamento nel piatto" (Exploitation is Served).   – Marina Bettaglio, Associate Professor, Hispanic and Italian Studies

Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience
Enrique Salmón

This insightful work looks at the ways that food, language, culture, politics, and land are intertwined for Indigenous peoples living along the U.S./Mexico border region. For Salmón, family recipes are forms of storytelling, which changed the way I looked at Indigenous food systems through an intergenerational perspective. Through conversation with Indigenous peoples who are confronting the daily realities of climate change, genetically modified foods, and industrial agriculture, Salmón highlights how Indigenous farmers perpetuate their intimate community food systems and sovereignty through the renewal and revitalization of complex relationships to the lands and waters. He poses an important question to all of us – do we know whose landscapes we’re eating from?   – Jeff Ganohalidoh Corntassel, Professor, Indigenous Studies

Las Odas Elementales
Pablo Neruda

A tomato, an onion, or a fish broth might not seem the most poetic subjects around, but the creative genius of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda manages to poeticize the everyday in ways that still amaze and inspire us. His three books of Odes, written in the 1950s, invite us to savour food (along with places, objects, and emotions—the multifarious universe that constitutes daily life) with fresh eyes and ears.   – Dan Russek, Professor, Hispanic and Italian Studies

My Year of Meats
Ruth Oseki

A detoxification from industry, profit, forceful bad taste, ignorance, toxic food… with some antidotes: identity, love, literature, knowledge.  – Hélène Cazes, Professor, French and Francophone Studies

I would like to think of my “ignorance” less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even. The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement—our collective norm.

Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race
Naben Ruthnum

Naben Ruthnum grew up as a kid from Kelowna with Mauritian roots. At just over 100 pages, "Curry" is a tiny but wonderfully rich book, in which Ruthnum writes about curry as food, about stories that feature curry and/as “Indianness,” and about how food and story influence how we think about race. It made me think differently not just about curry, but about food more broadly, and about British Columbia’s place in the world.  – Richard Pickard, Assistant Teaching Professor, English & Academic and Technical Writing Program

“It had that enlivening taste of a great curry, that primal sting of spice and challenge, with enough uniqueness that you seek the space on your carbonizing tongue where a new flavour has landed, as though you could map the regions on your palate and overlay this with a chart of the country."

“Chapter 5: Body and Soul” of “Travelling Mercies Some Thoughts On Faith”
Anne Lamott

That chapter is about the author’s recovery from a life-threatening eating disorder, and it changed the way I think about food.   – Laurel Bowman, Associate Professor, Greek and Roman Studies

The Sexual Politics of Meat
Carol Adams

Introducing the idea of the absent referent, Adams’ book illustrates connections between industrialized meat production and other kinds of oppression.   – Audrey Yap, Associate Professor, Philosophy

“[George Beard] recommended that when white, civilized, middle-class men became susceptible to nervous exhaustion, they should eat more meat. To him, and for many others, cereals and fruits were lower than meat on the scale of evolution, and thus appropriate foods for the other races and white women, who appeared to be lower on the scale of evolution as well. Racism and sexism together upheld meat as white man’s food.”

Dounia
Marya Zarif

"Dounia" is not a story about food, but it is also not a story about migration and war; rather, it is a story of family and community, of resilience, and of finding a new home after the only one ever known has been destroyed. In "Dounia", the nigella seed not only heightens the taste of jibneh mshallaleh—tresse cheese, it also boosts magical powers: its Arabic name, baraké, means “blessing.”   – Pierre-Luc Landry, Assistant Professor, French and Francophone Studies

« Ma petite lune, nous sommes maintenant comme des oiseaux, lui explique Jeddo, en posant dans sa main une colombe sculptée dans le savon d’Alep. Ils portent leur maison dans leur cœur et vivent dans le ciel, qui est le même pour tous les oiseaux du monde. »

The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book
Alice B. Toklas

When asked to write a book about her life with American modernist author Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas instead wrote a cook book. But her French recipes come with stories about how she came across them and the people she dined with. And we learn about her incredible life with Stein in France. Can a list of ingredients be poetry and a cook book experimental modernist art? I now think so.   – Joel Hawkes, Sessional Lecturer, English

“One day when Picasso was to lunch with us I decorated a fish in a way that I thought would amuse him.”

À ma bouche
Martin Winkler

Une collection de courts textes qui m’ont replongée avec délice dans ma jeunesse et les plaisirs des repas en famille, de la saveur des plats que préparaient ma mère. Casse-croûte, tomate, pâtisseries, omelette, …   – Catherine Caws, Professor, French and Francophone Studies

"Rien ne vaut le plaisir d’une tomate parfaite …"

Memories of Philippine Kitchens: Stories and Recipes from Far and Near
Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan

Filipino cuisine manages to be simultaneously decidedly cosmopolitan and extraordinarily original; this volume documents that richness in gorgeous photographs, while showing you how to make banana heart kinilaw and chicken inasal.   – Matthew Koch, Continuing Sessional Lecturer, History

"What distinguishes Filipino cuisine is the uncanny ability to experience the fusion, while maintaining an awareness of the sources.  The culinary language is one reminder:  panciteria, which refers to a noodle eatery, is a Hispanized version (-eria) of a Filipino word (pancit) for a Chinese dish (noodles)."

The Taste of Mexico
Patricia Quintana

Patricia Quintana trailblazed the presentation of Mexico’s complex and diverse mestizo cuisine in this historically grounded and beautifully illustrated cookbook.   – Beatriz de Alba-Koch, Associate Professor, History

“Chiles en nogada, batter-fried chiles stuffed with assorted fruits, meats, and spices, challenge the stereotypes about Mexican cooking. Chiles en nogada are served cold and are sweet, rather than spicy, and their presentation is a work of patriotic folk art: fresh pomegranate seeds and parsley sprinkled over a white creamy walnut sauce, a culinary version of the Mexican flag.”

Highland Folk Ways
I. F. (Isabel Frances) Grant

This book shifted my research in rural Scottish food history to consider material culture as an expression of Gaelic foodways.   – Theresa Mackay, PhD candidate, History; Sessional Instructor, Academic and Technical Writing Program

“Dairying utensils [such as] the [loinid-bheag] or fro-stick or milk whisk was used to prepare a dish known as broken milk. The [loinid] was a stick about 1 ½ feet long with a cross-piece at the end and round this a circle of twisted cow’s hair. It was rotated between the palms and either cream or the top of the milk was frothed up and a sprinkling of oatmeal might be added. This little stick is found all over the Highlands.”

"The Palestinian Table" and "The Arabesque Table"
Reem Kassis

Kitchen and family stories and sumptuous recipes take us into the heart of a culture and communities we often encounter in the media in gendered and racialized caricatures.   – Elizabeth Vibert, Professor, History

“All it takes is for me to use the word ‘Palestinian’ and anything that I want to talk about … suddenly is political.”

Crying in H Mart
Michelle Zauner

This book tells a story of loss, displacement, and identity through food, a medium of memories   – Sujin Lee, Assistant Professor, Pacific and Asian Studies

“We’re all searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves. We look for a taste of it in the food we order and the ingredients we buy. Then we separate. We bring the haul back to our dorm rooms or our suburban kitchens, and we re-create the dish that couldn’t be made without our journey.”

Salt: A World History
Mark Kurlansky

Who knew salt had such a fascinating impact on development, trade, finance, war, and the rise and fall of empires?   – Martha McGinnis, Associate Professor and Chair, Linguistics

 “In the mid-eleventh century, while King Harold was unsuccessfully defending England from the Normans, the salt producers of Sichuan were developing percussion drilling, the most advanced drilling technique in the world for the next seven or eight centuries.”

Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History
Rachel Laudany

In this fascinating book spanning twenty thousand years of human history, Rachel Laudan traces the "story of the mutual interaction of empires and cuisines, and of how the cuisines of successful states and empires were co-opted or emulated by their neighbors, accounting for their wide dispersion." This book overturns common cultural assumptions about “traditional” cuisines and highlights the centrality of foodways to power.   – Rachel Hope Cleves, Profesor, History