Sax has done his homework—and probably put on a few pounds. A solid overview of trendsetting foods brought to life with...
How does an obscure flavor featured one day in a trendy, high-end cocktail become a leading component of grocery-store barbecue sauce the next year?
Food trends inevitably shape what we eat on a daily basis. James Beard Award winner Sax (Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen, 2009) explores how food trends start, why they matter, and how they grow and move through our culture. He breaks down four types of trends: cultural, agriculture-based, chef-driven and health-based, with anecdotes and examples of cupcakes, china black rice, chia seeds and Greek yogurt. “Trends are the process of a feedback loop,” writes the author, “of competition between talents, and they are a balance between following the herd, pleasing customers, and letting creativity flow.” Sax also describes how trends take off in our culture through food events and awards, trend forecasting and marketing efforts. “[T]he increased competitiveness of the grocery business coupled with the rapid spread of foodie culture has sent the big grocers deeper into the world of specialty foods,” he writes, accelerating the trajectory of food trends. So why do food trends even matter? Sax argues they “can deepen and expand our culture beyond the plate.” The rise of food trucks in Washington, D.C., illustrates how trends have the “ability to change laws and behaviors by the sheer nature of their popularity.” By taking undervalued products, such as pork belly and bacon, and raising their value, food trends represent capitalism at its finest. Sax notes that, due to food media and an increasingly popular foodie culture, “food trends are springing up quicker and moving faster than they ever did before.” He also examines the impact of such trendsetters as Momofuku, Whole Foods and Magnolia Bakery.
Sax has done his homework—and probably put on a few pounds. A solid overview of trendsetting foods brought to life with colorful examples.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-315-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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