A01=Theresa McCulla
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Theresa McCulla
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HB
Category=JBFA
Category=JBSL1
Category=NHK
Category=WB
Category=WQH
commodities
consumption
cooking
COP=United States
Creole
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
dining
drink
eq_bestseller
eq_food-drink
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
food
Language_English
New Orleans
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
race
slavery
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9780226833828
- Weight: 481g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 10 May 2024
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
A 2025 James Beard Foundation Book Award Nominee in Reference, History, and Scholarship and a Smithsonian Best Book of 2024
A history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor.
In Insatiable City, Theresa McCulla probes the overt and covert ways that the production of food and the discourse about it both created and reinforced many strains of inequality in New Orleans, a city significantly defined by its foodways. Tracking the city’s economy from nineteenth-century chattel slavery to twentieth-century tourism, McCulla uses menus, cookbooks, newspapers, postcards, photography, and other material culture to limn the interplay among the production and reception of food, the inscription and reiteration of racial hierarchies, and the constant diminishment and exploitation of working-class people. The consumption of food and people, she shows, was mutually reinforced and deeply intertwined. Yet she also details how enslaved and free people of color in New Orleans used food and drink to carve paths of mobility, stability, autonomy, freedom, profit, and joy. A story of pain and pleasure, labor and leisure, Insatiable City goes far beyond the task of tracing New Orleans's culinary history to focus on how food suffuses culture and our understandings and constructions of race and power.
A history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor.
In Insatiable City, Theresa McCulla probes the overt and covert ways that the production of food and the discourse about it both created and reinforced many strains of inequality in New Orleans, a city significantly defined by its foodways. Tracking the city’s economy from nineteenth-century chattel slavery to twentieth-century tourism, McCulla uses menus, cookbooks, newspapers, postcards, photography, and other material culture to limn the interplay among the production and reception of food, the inscription and reiteration of racial hierarchies, and the constant diminishment and exploitation of working-class people. The consumption of food and people, she shows, was mutually reinforced and deeply intertwined. Yet she also details how enslaved and free people of color in New Orleans used food and drink to carve paths of mobility, stability, autonomy, freedom, profit, and joy. A story of pain and pleasure, labor and leisure, Insatiable City goes far beyond the task of tracing New Orleans's culinary history to focus on how food suffuses culture and our understandings and constructions of race and power.
Theresa McCulla is a curator and historian, and the former curator of the American Brewing History Initiative at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.
