A tasty sojourn through the landscape of America’s endangered foods, served with a scoop of energy and a dash of hope.
A food historian argues that preserving the richness of what we eat is part of recognizing our cultural legacy.
Good food is one of the great pleasures of life, notes Lohman, and a tragedy of modern times is that the development of agribusiness corporations threatens to reduce the variety on our plates. In her 2016 book, Eight Flavors, the author explored America’s culinary history; here, she comes at the subject from another angle, traveling around the country to investigate traditional foods that are returning from the edge of extinction. As her guide, she uses an online catalog called the Ark of Taste, produced by an organization called Slow Food International, which is dedicated to preserving food diversity. She finds plenty of optimistic stories, such as the orchardists keeping apple types alive and the breeders of longhorn cattle, which have gone out of fashion with beef producers. Many of the foods that interest Lohman have roots in Indigenous cultures, and the story of the displacement of traditional Hawaiian culture to grow sugar cane has a tragic aspect. The author is willing to go deep into the rituals of traditional food preparation; for example, she happily gutted salmon caught by Native American methods on the Pacific coast and helped butcher a Navajo-Churro lamb. Along the way, she looks at the legacy of wild rice, the origin of peanut farming, and the resurgence of the Buckeye chicken. At the end of each chapter, Lohman includes recipes of the foods featured, and they all sound delicious. The result is a package that is enjoyable, entertaining, and meaningful. The author encourages readers to begin their own journey of culinary discovery: “The secret of the Ark is that you don’t have to travel very far at all….There’s probably a rare food practically in your backyard.”
A tasty sojourn through the landscape of America’s endangered foods, served with a scoop of energy and a dash of hope.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781324004660
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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