There’s nothing more vital to survival than water. “Water water everywhere, and not a drop to drink!”, said the Ancient Mariner, in the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Besides widespread water shortage, too much of America’s water is undrinkable. From big cities and suburbs to the rural heartland, chemicals linked to cancer, heart disease, obesity, birth defects, and lowered IQ routinely spill from our taps. The tragedy is that existing technologies could launch a new age of clean, healthy, and safe tap water for only a few dollars a week per person. Scrupulously researched, Troubled Water: What's Wrong with What We Drink (Thomas Dunne, 2020) is full of shocking stories about contaminated water found throughout the U.S. and about the everyday heroes who have successfully forced changes in the quality and safety of our drinking water. Contamination is not the only critical water issue.  The U.S. government predicts that forty of our fifty states-and 60 percent of the earth's land surface-will soon face alarming gaps between available water and the growing demand for it. Without action, food prices will rise, economic growth will slow, and political instability is likely to follow. Let There Be Water illustrates how Israel can serve as a model for the United States and countries everywhere by showing how to blunt the worst of the coming water calamities. Even with 60 percent of its country made of desert, Israel has not only solved its water problem; it also had an abundance of water. Israel even supplies water to its neighbors-the Palestinians and the Kingdom of Jordan-every day. Based on meticulous research and hundreds of interviews, Let There Be Water reveals the methods and techniques of the often-offbeat inventors who enabled Israel to lead the world in cutting-edge water technology. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

New Books in Food

Seth M. Siegel, "Troubled Water: What's Wrong with What We Drink" (Thomas Dunne, 2020)

Robert Hellyer’s Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups (Columbia UP, 2021) is a tale of American and Japanese teaways, skillfully weaving together stories of Midwesterners drinking green tea (with milk and sugar, to be sure), the recent and complex origins of Japan's love of now-ubiquitous sencha, Ceylon tea merchants exploiting American racism, Chinese tea production expertise, and the author’s own family history in the Japan-America tea trade going back to the nineteenth century. Transnational histories and commodities histories are notoriously delicate dances, but Hellyer has produced a very readable and eye-opening look at the modern history and culture of tea. Green with Milk and Sugar will be of interest to a diverse group of historians—scholars of North America, East Asia, commerce and trade, food, etc.—but also to a general audience who will be pulled in by the author’s personal connections as well as the delightfully jargon-free narrative. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Robert Hellyer, "Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups" (Columbia UP, 2021)

In September-October 2021, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts exploring the role that research plays in understanding and advocating for human rights in Southeast Asia. For the final episode in the series, Dr Thushara Dibley is joined by Emeritus Professor Peter Windsor who brings to light how research improving animal health and production is intrinsically linked to human rights issues. Reflecting on his extensive field-based research on transboundary livestock disease in the Greater Mekong Region, he argues that through training on biosecurity practices, animal vaccination programs and nutritional interventions, rural households were able to prevent disease transmission and increase their livestock productivity, making farm production more sustainable. With higher income levels, local families’ livelihoods were improved. This enables better access to human rights, such as access to safe housing, access to healthcare, and access to knowledge and education, amongst others. About Peter Windsor: Peter Windsor is Professor Emeritus in the University of Sydney’s School of Veterinary Science since 2014. Peter worked extensively for NSW Agriculture in several roles including diagnostic pathology and livestock disease research and management. In 1998, he undertook a 19-month appointment to the Food Agriculture Organisation in Naga City, in the Bicol region of the Philippines, that eventually led to the successful eradication of Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD). Peter joined the University of Sydney in 2002, where he had a diverse range of teaching, research and administrative roles. His current research portfolio includes applied field-based projects on ruminant health and production problems in Southeast Asia that aim to assist FMD control. He continues his field studies on improving food security in developing countries and animal welfare in production systems, as well as reproductive, congenital, neurological and genetic disease research. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

From Animal Rights to Human Rights: Supporting Sustainable Farming Practices to Improve Livelihoods

Potatoes are the world's fourth most important food crop, yet they were unknown to most of humanity before 1500. Rebecca Earle, Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato (Cambridge UP, 2020) traces the global journey of this popular foodstuff from the Andes to everywhere. The potato's global history reveals the ways in which our ideas about eating are entangled with the emergence of capitalism and its celebration of the free market. It also reminds us that ordinary people make history in ways that continue to shape our lives. 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 successful foods. Daniela Gutierrez Flores is a PhD candidate in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the University of Chicago Romance Languages and Literatures department. Follow her on Twitter @danielagtz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Rebecca Earle, "Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Though trained as a medical doctor, chemist Harvey Wiley spent most of his professional life advocating for "pure food"—food free of both adulterants and preservatives. A strong proponent of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, still the basis of food safety legislation in the United States, Wiley gained fame for what became known as the Poison Squad experiments—a series of tests in which, to learn more about the effects of various chemicals on the human body, Wiley's own employees at the Department of Agriculture agreed to consume food mixed with significant amounts of various additives, including borax, saltpeter, copper sulfate, sulfuric acid, and formaldehyde. One hundred years later, Wiley's influence lives on in many of our current popular ideas about food: that the wrong food can kill you; that the right food can extend your life; that additives are unnatural; and that unnatural food is unhealthy food. Eating—the process of taking something external in the world and putting it inside of you—has always been an intimate act, but it was Harvey Wiley who first turned it into a matter of life or death. In The Chemistry of Fear: Harvey Wiley's Fight for Pure Food (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Jonathan Rees examines Wiley's many—and varied—conflicts and clashes over food safety, including the adulteration of honey and the addition of caffeine to Coca-Cola, formaldehyde to milk, and alum to baking powder. Although Wiley is often depicted as an unwavering champion of the consumer's interest, Rees argues that his critics rightfully questioned some of his motivations, as well as the conclusions that he drew from his most important scientific work. And although Wiley's fame and popularity gave him enormous influence, Rees reveals that his impact on what Americans eat depends more upon fear than it does upon the quality of his research. Exploring in detail the battles Wiley picked over the way various foods and drinks were made and marketed, The Chemistry of Fear touches upon every stage of his career as a pure food advocate. From his initial work in Washington researching food adulteration, through the long interval at the end of his life when he worked for Good Housekeeping, Wiley often wrote about the people who prevented him from making the pure food law as effective as he thought it should have been. This engaging book will interest anyone who's curious about the pitfalls that eaters faced at the turn of the twentieth century. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Jonathan Rees, "The Chemistry of Fear: Harvey Wiley's Fight for Pure Food" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

How can farmers adapt to climate changes? How can regenerative farmers have livelihoods that nourish themselves and their communities? How can we break free of the commodity mindset and rethink the US food system? Bob Quinn’s remarkable memoir of his decades living and working on a Montana farm offers unique insights into all of these pressing questions, with creativity, intelligence, and a healthy dash of humor. Quinn is a farmer and sustainable business leader. He founded a regional mill for organic and heritage grains, an organic snack company, a biofuel business, Montana’s first wind farm, and Kamut International. Kamut, an ancient grain Quinn revived from a pint jar of seed found in a neighbor’s basement, is now grown on 100,000 acres of certified organic cropland and made into over 3,500 products worldwide. In Grain by Grain: A Quest to Revive Ancient Wheat, Rural Jobs, and Healthy Food (Island Press, 2019), co-written with Liz Carlisle, he shares the stories of these innovative projects. Through his narrative, Quinn offers readers an insightful ground-level look at the history of the organic food movement, as well as hope for the future. Bob Quinn, PhD is a leading green businessman, with successful ventures in both organic agriculture and renewable energy. Raised on a 2,400 acre wheat and cattle ranch in Montana, Quinn earned a Ph.D. in plant biochemistry at UC Davis before coming home to farm in 1978. He served on the first National Organic Standards Board, which spurred the creation of the USDA’s National Organic Program, and has been recognized with the Montana Organic Association Lifetime of Service Award, The Organic Trade Association Organic Leadership Award, and Rodale Institute’s Organic Pioneer Award. Bob remains active in research, and has co-authored pioneering studies on the nutritional benefits of ancient grain. Susan Grelock Yusem, PhD is an independent researcher trained in depth psychology, with an emphasis on community, liberation, and eco-psychologies. Her work centers around interconnection and encompasses regenerative food systems, the arts and conservation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Bob Quinn and Liz Carlisle, "Grain by Grain: A Quest to Revive Ancient Wheat, Rural Jobs, and Healthy Food" (Island Press, 2019)

Nature, it has been said, invites us to eat by appetite and rewards by flavor. But what exactly are flavors? Why are some so pleasing while others are not? Delicious is a supremely entertaining foray into the heart of such questions. With generous helpings of warmth and wit, Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez offer bold new perspectives on why food is enjoyable and how the pursuit of delicious flavors has guided the course of human history. They consider the role that flavor may have played in the invention of the first tools, the extinction of giant mammals, the evolution of the world’s most delicious and fatty fruits, the creation of beer, and our own sociality. Along the way, you will learn about the taste receptors you didn’t even know you had, the best way to ferment a mastodon, the relationship between Paleolithic art and cheese, and much more. Blending irresistible storytelling with the latest science, Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human (Princeton UP, 2021) is a deep history of flavor that will transform the way you think about human evolution and the gustatory pleasures of the foods we eat. Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests include machine learning, cancer genomics, and the history of human genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez, "Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human" (Princeton UP, 2021)

The Plant-Based Athlete: A Game-Changing Approach to Peak Performance (HarperOne, 2021) by Matt Frazier and Robert Cheeke reveals the incontrovertible proof that the human body does not need meat, eggs, or dairy to be strong. Instead, research shows that a consciously calibrated plant-based diet offers the greatest possible recovery times, cell oxidation, injury prevention, and restorative sleep, and allows athletes to train more effectively, with better results. However, committing to a plant-based diet as an elite athlete, first-time marathoner, or weekend warrior isn't as simple as swapping vegetables for meat. Even the slightest food adjustments can impact performance. That's why Matt Frazier, founder of No Meat Athlete, and Robert Cheeke, founder of Vegan Bodybuilding, wrote this groundbreaking book, to guide those interested in making this important shift in how to do so with the best, most transformative results. The Plant-Based Athlete offers readers: A persuasive body of evidence for adopting a plant-based lifestyle, with key information about how macronutrients, micronutrients, and calories fuel a body running on plant foods An entire chapter devoted to protein - why plant sources of protein are preferable over meat, and how plant protein can be used to increase strength, muscle mass, and power 60+ delicious and nutritious plant-based recipes, including Veggie Burger Patties, Garden Meatballs, Summer Pasta Salad, Vegan Mac & Cheese, French Toast, Acai Bowl, and a High-Energy Smoothie Insights from winning plant-based athletes in nearly every sport including champion ultrarunners Rich Roll and Scott Jurek; former NFL player David Carter; champion boxers Yuri Foreman, Unsal Arik, Cam Awesome, and Vanessa Espinoza; and Olympic-level swimmers, cyclists, figure skaters, sprinters, and more. A Day in the Life of a Plant-Based Athlete - examples of what, when, and how different athletes eat to fuel their varied workouts An instant classic and mainstay on health and fitness shelves everywhere, The Plant-Based Athlete is the ultimate invitation for joining the growing community of athletes who use plants to power their workouts and their every day. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Matt Frazier and Robert Cheeke, "The Plant-Based Athlete: A Game-Changing Approach to Peak Performance" (HarperOne, 2021)

From rocky coves at Mendocino and Monterey to San Diego’s reefs, abalone have held a cherished place in California culture for millennia. Prized for iridescent shells and delectable meat, these unique shellfish inspired indigenous artisans, bohemian writers, California cuisine, and the popular sport of skin diving, but also became a highly coveted commercial commodity. Mistakenly regarded as an inexhaustible seafood, abalone ultimately became vulnerable to overfishing and early impacts of climate change. As the first and only comprehensive history of these once abundant but now tragically imperiled shellfish, Abalone: The Remarkable History and Uncertain Future of California’s Iconic Shellfish (Oregon State University Press, 2020) guides the reader through eras of discovery, exploitation, scientific inquiry, fierce disputes between sport and commercial divers, near-extinction, and determined recovery efforts. Combining rich cultural and culinary history with hard-minded marine science, grassroots activism, and gritty politics, Ann Vileisis chronicles the plight of California’s abalone species and the growing biological awareness that has become crucial to conserve these rare animals into the future. Abalone reveals the challenges of reckoning with past misunderstandings, emerging science, and political intransigence, while underscoring the vulnerability of wild animals to human appetites and environmental change. An important contribution to the emerging field of marine environmental history, this is a must-read for scientists, conservationists, environmental historians, and all who remember abalone fondly. About the author: Ann Vileisis is an award-winning independent scholar. Her books explore our human relationship with nature, food, and the environment through history, providing deeper perspective and insight into pressing modern-day issues. She is author of Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes from and Why We Need to Get It Back and Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America’s Wetlands. Vileisis has spoken about her books to audiences across America. Kathryn B. Carpenter is a doctoral candidate in the history of science at Princeton University. She is currently researching the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the twentieth-century United States. You can reach her on twitter, @katebcarp. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Ann Vileisis, "Abalone: The Remarkable History and Uncertain Future of California's Iconic Shellfish" (Oregon State UP, 2020)

Our current food system has decimated rural communities and confined the choices of urban consumers. Even while America continues to ramp up farm production to astounding levels, net farm income is now lower than at the onset of the Great Depression, and one out of every eight Americans faces hunger. But a healthier and more equitable food system is possible. In Building Community Food Webs (Island Press, 2021), Ken Meter shows how grassroots food and farming leaders across the U.S. are tackling these challenges by constructing civic networks. Overturning extractive economic structures, these inspired leaders are engaging low-income residents, farmers, and local organizations in their quest to build stronger communities.. Ken Meter is one of the most experienced food system analysts in the U.S., holding over 50 years of experience in community capacity building. Meter is co–author of a toolkit for measuring economic impacts of local food development and co-editor of Sustainable Food System Assessment: Lessons from Global Practice. He has taught at the University of Minnesota and the Harvard Kennedy School. Dr. Susan Grelock Yusem is an independent researcher trained in depth psychology, with an emphasis on community, liberation, and eco-psychologies. Her work centers around interconnection and encompasses regenerative food systems, the arts and conservation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Ken Meter, "Building Community Food Webs" (Island Press, 2021)

In Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India (Cambridge UP, 2021), Arnab Dey examines the intersecting role of law, ecology, and agricultural sciences in shaping the history of tea plantations in British Colonial India. He suggests that looking afresh at the legal, environmental, and agro-economic aspects of tea production illuminate covert, expedient, and often illegal administrative and commercial dealings that had an immediate and long-term human and environmental impact on the region. Critiquing this imperial commodity's advertised mandate of agrarian modernization in colonial India, Dey points to numerous tea pests, disease ecologies, felled forests, harsh working conditions, wage manipulation, and political resistance as examples of tea's unseemly legacy in the subcontinent. Dey draws together the plant and the plantation in highlighting the ironies of the tea economy and its consequences for the agrarian history of eastern India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Arnab Dey, "Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Fair trade certified coffee is now commonly found on the supermarket shelves of the Global North, but the connections between the consumer and producer of fair trade coffee are far from simple. Lindsay Naylor’s book, Fair Trade Rebels: Coffee Production and Struggles for Autonomy in Chiapas (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), examines the contested politics of fair trade coffee production in the indigenous highlands of Mexico. Using theoretical approaches based in diverse economies scholarship and decolonial thinking, Naylor highlights the significance of the multiple, diverse economic practices and relations that campesinos/as use in their struggle to form more dignified livelihoods. While she critiques the narratives of economic development and problematic understandings of solidarity that underpin many fair trade discourses, Naylor’s empirically grounded research produces a nuanced analysis of the possibilities and limitations inherent in contemporary fair trade coffee production. Rather than understanding fair trade as a mechanism to address the failures of free trade, Naylor argues that fair trade should be understood as “fair trade in movement” to account for the dynamic processes involved in making trade more fair and for the multiple and fluid ideas, values and identities that constitute these trading relationships. This understanding creates possibilities for new forms of solidarity and being in common that counter universalizing systems of economic exchange. Lindsay Naylor (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography & Spatial Sciences at the University of Delaware in the United States and is the co-facilitator of the Embodiment Lab.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Lindsay Naylor, "Fair Trade Rebels: Coffee Production and Struggles for Autonomy in Chiapas" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)

How can consumers, nations, and international organizations work together to improve food systems before our planet loses its ability to sustain itself and its people? Do we have the right to eat wrongly? As the world's agricultural, environmental, and nutritional needs intersect—and often collide—how can consumers, nations, and international organizations work together to reverse the damage by changing how we make, distribute, and purchase food? Can such changes in practice and policy reverse the trajectories of the biggest global crises impacting our world: the burden of chronic diseases, the consequences of climate change, and the systemic economic and social inequities that exist within and among nations? Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021) is a clarion call for both individual consumers and those who shape our planet's food and environmental policies that: • describes the often destructive path that foods take from farms and seas through their processing, distribution, marketing, purchasing and waste management sites • explores the complex web of factors impacting our ability to simultaneously meet nutritional needs, sustain biodiversity and protect the environment • raises readers' food and environmental literacy through an engaging narrative about Fanzo's research on five continents along with the work of other inspiring global experts who are providing solutions to these crises • empowers readers to contribute to immediate and long-term changes by informing their decisions in restaurants, grocery stores, farmers markets, and kitchens. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Jessica Fanzo, "Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet?" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

Southern Food Historian Rebecca Sharpless discusses a new edition of Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking released in 2021 by University of South Carolina Press. Sharpless added a new critical introduction to the historic cookbook, first published in 1930 from a New York press as a collaboration between Blanche Rhett, Helen Woodward, and Lettie Gay. Woodward had married into a family with South Carolina ties and for a time rented a home that shared a courtyard with Rhett. As Woodward tells the story, she wanted to send some recipes back to her Northern connections, and Rhett suggested she write a book of recipes instead. Gay tested the recipes in a New York kitchen, standardizing measurements and translating them to a wider audience. Sharpless immediately foregrounds the Northern sensibility that informs the rhetorical situation of the book. Published just a few years before Gone With the Wind, the cookbook represented a version of Charleston’s sumptuous antebellum past to an audience with an appetite for consuming moonlight and magnolias. Sharpless’s 2021 introduction asks the question, “What do readers today need to know to put the book in context?” Sharpless uses most of the limited space of the foreword acknowledging the uncredited contributors to the cookbook and offering more information about those named in the book. Sharpless is especially – and rightly – critical of the ways that Two Hundred Years erases the contributions of enslaved people, and when it does offer credit, it is usually demeaning and patronizing in its depictions of African American domestic cooks as “magical” and unscientific. Sharpless reminds today’s readers that “It is a book of white nostalgia, not black.” And the final words of the foreword could not be any clearer: “Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking stands as a double monument: to the rich foodways of the Lowcountry and the efforts of White Charlestonians to put a pretty face on White Supremacy.” With this caveat, Sharpless does acknowledge some extraordinary women from Charleston’s elite classes who make significant contributions to the book and have remarkable stories of their own, still waiting to be told. Sharpless encourages 21st century readers to use the cookbook in their own kitchens; the instructions and ingredients are as accessible today as they would have been in 1930. However, she cautions readers to read the nostalgic textual interludes between recipes with skepticism, and to maintain an attitude of respect for the enslaved and anonymous contributors who made Low Country cuisine into the hot cultural commodity it is today. Rebecca Sharpless is professor of history at Texas Christian University. She is author of Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms and Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960. Her newest book, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South, is forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press in Spring 2022. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Lettie Gay, "Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking" ( U South Carolina Press, 2021)

In this episode for the Economic and Business History channel, I interviewed Dr. Susan V. Spellman, Associate Professor of History at Miami University. She is the author of Cornering the Market Independent Grocers and Innovation in American Small Business (Oxford University Press, 2016). In popular stereotypes, local grocers were avuncular men who spent their days in pickle-barrel conversations and checkers games; they were backward small-town merchants resistant to modernizing impulses. Cornering the Market challenges these conventions to demonstrate that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century grocers were important but unsung innovators of business models and retail technologies that fostered the rise of contemporary retailing. Small grocery owners revolutionized business practices from the bottom by becoming the first retailers to own and operate cash registers, develop new distribution paths, and engage in transforming the grocery trade from local enterprises to a nationwide industry. Drawing on storekeepers' diaries, business ledgers and documents, and the letters of merchants, wholesalers, traveling men, and consumers, Susan V. Spellman details the remarkable achievements of American small businessmen and their major contributions to the making of "modern" enterprise in the United States. The development of mass production, distribution, and marketing, the growth of regional and national markets, and the introduction of new organizational and business methods fundamentally changed the structures of American capitalism. Within the walls of their stores, proprietors confronted these changes by crafting solutions centered on notions of efficiency, scale, and price control. Without abandoning local ties, they turned social concepts of the community into commercial profitability. It was a powerful combination that businesses from chain stores to Walmart continue to exploit today. Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez is a consultant, historian, and digital editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/food

Susan V. Spellman, "Cornering the Market: Independent Grocers and Innovation in American Small Business" (Oxford UP, 2016)

Interviews with Food Writers about their New Books

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New Books in Food

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