In My Inbox

The Soybean Family Driving Madam Cow into the Museum. Postcard Issued by the China Nutritional Aid Council. Hoover Institution Archives. Reproduced in Fu, The Other Milk.

Life is going to be a bit busy for the next few weeks, so some quick postings of articles and books in my in box.  One favorite food journal, one astounding self-fashioning, one radical exclusion, and three centering on non-western foods, republicanism, citizenship, and masculinity.

• My heart always leaps when Petits Propos Culinaires turns up in the mail. Tom Jaine‘s informed, ironic comments on the food scene, the incisive book reviews that include volumes I’d not otherwise come across, and many of the articles make it a joy to read.

• The “illegitimate child from the back streets of London’s East End–a single mother herself, who worked as a domestic servant before her marriage,” Mrs. Marshall went on to popularize ice cream in Britain, found a cooking school for the well-to-do, and publish cookbooks. In the late nineteenth century she was more famous than Mrs. Beeton.  Terry Jenkins in the recent PPC. Jenkins himself has a fascinating career as engineer, principal tenor of the English National Opera, and author of scholarly works on 18th century England.

• “Comparing the Duncan Hines’ popular Adventures in Good Eating guide book of the late 1940s with a Green Book of roughly the same time reveals that there is no overlap whatsoever in their listings of Los Angeles restaurants. Not one of the 37 LA restaurants recommended by Hines is to be found in the Green Book.”  Jan Whittaker’s blog on the restaurants in the Green Books that guided African Americans to welcoming places from the late 1930s to the late 1960s.

• [Chinese] Republican efforts to to espouse the wonders of soybean nutrition to the Chinese people represented a project of self-invention in which modern ying-yang refashioned the soybean as both Chinese and modern. It was a project that relied heavily upon a conception of the Chinese diet as inadequate to the needs of the modern world yet amenable to engineering.” Jia-Chen Fu, The Other Milk: Reinventing Soy in Republican China (University of Washington Press, 2018), 189.

• “Tropes of ‘effeminized’ masculinity have long been bound up with a plant-based diet, dating back to the ‘effeminate rice eater’ stereotype used to justify 19th-century colonialism in Asia to the altright’s use of the term ‘soy boy’ on Twitter and other social media today to call out men they perceive to be weak, effeminate, and politically correct”  Gambert and Linné, From Rice Eaters to Soy Boys: Race, Gender, and Tropes of ‘Plant Food Masculinity,'” Animal Studies Journal 7 (2018). 

• “Three food programs–the production of a “patriotic” bread [maize mixed with wheat to raise the purportedly poor indigenous diet], the program of “pubic and common” meals, and the “regime of hard digestion” founded upon [purportedly] ideal indigenous food habits–shape one of the first republican discourses in Mexico.”  Sarah Bak-Geller Corona, “Wheat vs. Maize: Civilizing Dietary Strategies and Early Mexican Republicanism, Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas, 4 (2015), 1-25.

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