Duke University Press Log

Radical Foodways

Today’s New York Times features an article about a school district in Greely, Colorado that is a forerunner in the back-to-scratch food movement.  Most of the school’s lunches will be prepared from scratch this year, rather than relying on packaged or frozen foods, in an effort to combat obesity and poor nutrition.

The back-to-scratch movement is just a small part of the growing “Good Food Revolution” that Americans have embraced. “Radical Foodways,” the most recent issue of Radical History Review examines this “revolution” (evidenced by best-selling books, popular movies and TV shows, local and organic agriculture initiatives, even a vegetable garden at the White House). It also looks at the foundations of the problems in our food supply, including the historical structures of colonialism, labor, regulation, memory, racial and gender inequality that persist in every bite we eat. 

Read the introduction for free here.

Pittburgh Reporter Searches for Paris's Best Baguette

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Bob Hoover recently traveled to Paris in search of the perfect baguette. He took along Steven A. Kaplan's 2006 classic Good Bread is Back as his inspiration and guidebook. Kaplan, he writes, is known as "the world's authority on the social history of bread in Paris," but his critics sometimes refer to him as an "ayatollah." Hoover visits some of the bakeries Kaplan recommends and encounters "bread factionalism."

Kaplan on Bread in ZagatBuzz LA

Steven Laurence Kaplan, author of Good Bread is Back, is interviewed in ZagatBuzz LA. Kaplan recently did a tasting event at Los Angeles's famous Breadbar bakery. Am ong other questions, reporter Merrill Shindler asks Kaplan, "If a meal without wine is like a day without sunshine, what is a meal without bread?" to which he replies, "A meal without bread is very much in the same idiomatic relation of necessity that your aphorism describes. It is more than a mere complement. It opens a whole organoleptic front. It enriches and delights."

Steven Kaplan on The Splendid Table

Steven Laurence Kaplan, author of Good Bread is Back, appeared on NPR's The Splendid Table with Lynn Rosetto Kasper yesterday.

Steven Laurence Kaplan in the Financial Times

Steven Laurence Kaplan, author of Good Bread is Back and The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, is featured in a nice piece by Michael Steinberger in the Financial Times (free registration is required to read the article). Steinberger writes, “[Kaplan is] not just the leading authority on French bread but the conscience of French baking – a conscience that does not hesitate to tug. . . . Good Bread is Back [is] a punchy, compendious account of how French baking returned to its artisanal roots and sparked a revival in quality crusts.”