Feeding The People

Almost no one knew what a potato was in 1500. Today they are the world's fourth most important food. How did this happen?

Cities Feeding People examines urban agriculture in East Africa and proves that it is a safe, clean, and secure method to feed the world's struggling urban residents. It also collapses the myth that urban agriculture is practiced only by the poor and unemployed. Cities Feeding People provides the hard facts needed to convince governments that urban agriculture should have a larger role in feeding the urban population.

While the Western world adheres to a beauty ideal that says women can never be too thin, the semi-nomadic Moors of the Sahara desert have for centuries cherished a feminine ideal of extreme fatness. Voluptuous immobility is thought to beautify girls' bodies, hasten the onset of puberty, heighten their sexuality and ripen them for marriage. From the time of the loss of their first milk teeth, girls are directed to eat huge bowls of milk and porridge in one of the world's few examples of active female fattening. Based on fieldwork in an Arab village in Niger, Feeding Desire analyses the meanings of women's fatness as constituted by desire, kinship, concepts of health, Islam, and the crucial social need to manage sexuality. By demonstrating how a particular beauty ideal can only be understood within wider social structures and cultural logics, the book also implicitly provides a new way of thinking about the ideal of slimness in late Western capitalism. Offering a reminder that an estimated eighty per cent of the world's societies prefer plump women, this gracefully written book is both a fascinating exploration of the nature of bodily ideals and a highly readable ethnography of a Saharan people.

Almost no one knew what a potato was in 1500. Today they are the world's fourth most important food crop. Feeding the People traces the global journey of this popular foodstuff from the Andes to everywhere. The potato's global history makes visible the ways in which our ideas about eating are entangled with the emergence of capitalism and its celebration of the free market. The potato's story also reminds us that ordinary people make history in ways that continue to shape our lives. Potatoes, in short, are a good way of rethinking the origins of our modern world. Feeding the People tells the story of how eating became part of statecraft, and provides a new account of the global spread of one of the world's most important foods.

Based on Sammy Moniz's popular Instagram page, Feeding the Frasers is a book that any CrossFit aficionado—or just someone curious about how to cook with whole foods without sacrificing the world—will want to get their hands on. Filled with 100 terrific recipes of high quality delicious food that promote balance, togetherness, indulgence, and athletic recovery. Sammy Moniz is well known in the CrossFit community as an activist, and she is also the wife of five time champion Mat Fraser, the winningest athlete in CrossFit history and one of the most beloved. This is her cookbook where she shares the secrets behind feeding the greatest champion of the sport.

How food pantries stigmatize their clients through a discourse that emphasizes hard work, self help, and economic productivity rather than food justice and equity. The United States has one of the highest rates of hunger and food insecurity in the industrialized world, with poor households, single parents, and communities of color disproportionately affected. Food pantries—run by charitable and faith-based organizations—rather than legal entitlements have become a cornerstone of the government's efforts to end hunger. In Feeding the Other, Rebecca de Souza argues that food pantries stigmatize their clients through a discourse that emphasizes hard work, self help, and economic productivity rather than food justice and equity. De Souza describes this “framing, blaming, and shaming” as “neoliberal stigma” that recasts the structural issue of hunger as a problem for the individual hungry person. De Souza shows how neoliberal stigma plays out in practice through a comparative case analysis of two food pantries in Duluth, Minnesota. Doing so, she documents the seldom-acknowledged voices, experiences, and realities of people living with hunger. She describes the failure of public institutions to protect citizens from poverty and hunger; the white privilege of pantry volunteers caught between neoliberal narratives and social justice concerns; the evangelical conviction that food assistance should be “a hand up, not a handout”; the culture of suspicion in food pantry spaces; and the constraints on food choice. It is only by rejecting the neoliberal narrative and giving voice to the hungry rather than the privileged, de Souza argues, that food pantries can become agents of food justice.

Identity crises, consumerism, and star-crossed teenage love in a futuristic society where people connect to the Internet via feeds implanted in their brains. Winner of the LA Times Book Prize. For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon - a chance to party during spring break and play around with some stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who knows something about what it’s like to live without the feed-and about resisting its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires. Following in the footsteps of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., M. T. Anderson has created a brave new world - and a hilarious new lingo - sure to appeal to anyone who appreciates smart satire, futuristic fiction laced with humor, or any story featuring skin lesions as a fashion statement.

While the history of food on the home front in wartime Britain has mostly focused on rationing, this book reveals the importance and scale of nation-wide communal dining schemes during this era. Welcomed by some as a symbol of a progressive future in which 'wasteful' home dining would disappear, and derided by others for threatening the social order, these sites of food and eating attracted great political and cultural debate. Using extensive primary source material, Feeding the People in Wartime Britain examines the cuisine served in these communal restaurants and the people who used them. It challenges the notion that communal eating played a marginal role in wartime food policy and reveals the impact they had in advancing nutritional understanding and new food technologies. Comparing them to similar ventures in mainland Europe and understanding the role of propaganda from the Ministry of Food in their success, Evans unearths this neglected history of emergency public feeding and relates it to contemporary debates around food policy in times of crisis.