Book Projects
Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food
Edited with Benjamin R. Cohen and Anna Zeide
How modern food helped make modern society between 1870 and 1930: stories of power and food, from bananas and beer to bread and fake meat.
“Food culture is too often limited by an obsessive focus on the new and now. The essays in this excellent, rigorous collection are a pointed reminder that the past is very much the present, and the future, too.”
Helen Rosner, staff writer, The New Yorker
“An endlessly fascinating collection of stories about the invention and popularization of modern food. A constant thread traces the idea of nutritional reform through science and its sinister relationship with scientific racism, as well as efforts to challenge white supremacy in the global food system.”
Paul Freedman, Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Yale University
“These lively, wide-ranging essays about the surprising forces that shaped American eating habits make a stellar contribution to food scholarship.”
Laura Shapiro, author of Perfection Salad
Fresh from the Factory: Natural Food and the Roots of the Industrial Food Supply (Under contract with Oxford University Press)
Growing out of my Bancroft award-winning dissertation, this book explores the industrialization of the modern food supply—and why so many found the shift to packaged food natural.
(The Natural Food Co., Niagara Falls, NY. The Book-Keeper, July 1902, p. 108. Public Domain, Science, Industry & Business Library, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
Articles and Reviews
“Anti-Intellectualism and Natural Food: The Shared Language of Industry and Activists in America since 1830,” Gastronomica 18, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 44–54.
Review of Diet and the Disease of Civilization by Adrienne Rose Bitar, Agricultural History 93, no. 4 (Fall 2019): 776–778
Review of The Kelloggs: Battling Brothers of Battle Creek by Howard Markel, Business History Review 92, no. 3 (November 2018): 580–582.
Review of Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness by April Merleaux, Business History Review 90, no. 4 (January 2017): 798-801.
“Natural Food to Eat When Changing the World,” with Travis Weisse and Melissa Charenko, Edge Effects, November 17, 2016
Review of John Harvey Kellogg and the Religion of Biologic Living by Brian C. Wilson, Business History Review 89, no. 3 (September 2015): 609-612 (as Mookie Kideckel)
“The Nationalisms of the World Series,” Tropics of Meta, April 15, 2013
“Why We Have to Stop Talking about Nature,” Tropics of Meta, January 22, 2013