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ENDANGERED EATING

AMERICA'S VANISHING FOODS

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

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY

From the Pocket Change Collective series

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.

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Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.

The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Penguin Workshop

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020

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