"Icons of Mexican cultural identity and America's melting pot ideal, taco trucks have transformed cityscapes from coast to coast. The taco truck radiates Mexican culture within non-Mexican spaces with a presence -- sometimes desired, sometimes resented -- that turns a public street corner into a bustling business. Drawing on interviews with taco truck workers and his own skills as a geographer, Robert Lemon illuminates new truths about foodways, community,...

"National Dish peels back the layers of myth, commercialization, and fetishization around the great world cuisines. In so doing, it brings us to a deep appreciation of how the country makes the food, and the food the country"-- "Anya von Bremzen explores six of the world's most fascinating and iconic culinary cultures -- France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Turkey -- brilliantly weaving cuisine, history, and politics into a work of scintillating...

"From the author of Paris to the Moon -- one man's quest for the meaning of food in a time obsessed with what to eat. Never before have we cared so much about food. It preoccupies our popular culture, our fantasies, even our moralizing -- "You still eat meat?" How could the land of Chef Boyardee have come so far overnight? And where can we possibly go from here? Locating the roots of our foodways in France, Adam Gopnik traces our rapid evolution from...

Here the author tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of the world's great cuisines from the mastery of grain cooking some twenty thousand years ago, to the present. Probing beneath the apparent confusion of dozens of cuisines to reveal the underlying simplicity of the culinary family tree, she shows how periodic seismic shifts in 'culinary philosophy', beliefs about health, the economy, politics, society and the gods, prompted the construction...

"A rollicking exploration of the history and future of our favorite foods When we humans love foods, we love them a lot. In fact, we have often eaten them into extinction, whether it is the megafauna of the Paleolithic world or the passenger pigeon of the last century. In Lost Feast, food expert Lenore Newman sets out to look at the history of the foods we have loved to death and what that means for the culinary paths we choose for the future. Whether...

Television personality Padma Lakshmi examines "her journey from [a humble family kitchen], led by ferocious and unforgettable women, to the judges' table of Top Chef and beyond. It chronicles the fierce devotion of the remarkable people who shaped her along the way, from her headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather -- a brilliant engineer with an irrepressible sweet tooth --...

Women on Food unites the radical, diverging female voices of the food industry in this urgent, moving, and often humorous collection of essays, interviews, questionnaires, illustrations, quotes, and ephemera. Edited by Charlotte Druckman and featuring esteemed food journalists and thinkers, including Soleil Ho, Nigella Lawson, Diana Henry, Carla Hall, Samin Nosrat, Rachael Ray, and many others, this compilation illuminates the notable and varied women...