Food Culture

Yakisoba is a noodle dish created by frying steamed Chinese noodles with meat and vegetables.

Like soba noodles, udon noodles are a well known type of Japanese noodles. Made from flour, they are distinctively thick and white.

Pork cutlet is made by coating a thick slice of pork in flour, beaten egg, and breadcrumbs, and then deep frying it.

Currently, okonomiyaki can be broadly divided into Kansai and Hiroshima styles.

In Kyoto, everyday side dishes made from on-hand ingredients are called "obanzai".

This teppanyaki style of cooking involves cooking meat, vegetables, seafoods, and the like on top of an iron hot plate called a "teppan".

Ochazuke is a quick and easy dish made simply by pouring Japanese tea over rice.

The onigiri (rice ball) is a simple dish consisting of a compacted ball of rice with some ingredients placed inside.

Sukiyaki is a dish made from beef, tofu, spring onions, and other vegetables simmered in a sweet and salty sauce made with sugar and soy sauce as a base.

Sashimi is raw seafood served in thin slices. It is also called otsukuri.

Like udon, soba noodles, made from buckwheat flour, are the typical Japanese noodles.

Yakiniku is a type of Japanese barbecue. In the US(United States), this type of cooking is sometimes called "Korean barbecue".

Dumplings can be fried, steamed, or boiled, but in Japan fried dumplings are the most common.

Oden is a dish made by simmering daikon, chikuwa, konnyaku, and a variety of other ingredients in a pot with soup.

Basic tempura is fish, shellfish and vegetables fried in a batter made from eggs, water, and flour.

America is more than just a fast food nation. Food Americana is the inside story of how generations of Americans have formed a national cuisine with tastes from all over the world. Fried chicken was a distinctly Southern dish - now it's the Sunday night special at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood. A Utah restaurant won Maine's annual Best Lobster Roll competition. And perhaps the ultimate all-American dish, pizza, is served up in 30 different styles, a total of three billion pies a year, an average of 23 pounds for each of us.

Charles E. Hires and the Drink That Wowed a Nation chronicles the humble origin and meteoric business success of this extraordinary entrepreneur. Author Bill Double uses published interviews, correspondence, newspaper reports, magazine articles, financial data, and a small family archive to tell this story of native ingenuity. Here, the rough-hewn capitalism of the gilded age, the evolution of the neighborhood drugstore, the rise of advertising in creating mass markets, and the emerging temperance movement all come together in a biography that fizzes with entrepreneurial spirit.

The definition of 'healthy eating' has been chewed up, spat out and re-digested enough times to make Joe Public give up and seek out their nearest branch of McDonald's. Our mindless obsession with eating 'right' is such that we're now more concerned about what our Instagram followers think of a poorly lit picture of our dinner than we are of its effect on our own palate. Or, indeed, our happiness. We seem to be living in a time where we no longer eat with our hearts, emotions or heritage - but with what our waistlines (and followers) in mind.

Devouring Cultures brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines including media studies, rhetoric, gender studies, philosophy, anthropology, literary criticism, film criticism, race theory, history, and linguistics to examine the ways food signifies both culture and identity. The essays in Devouring Cultures show how our choices about what we eat, where we eat, and with whom we eat are linked to identity and meaning.

While America's new reality appears to be a deeply divided body politic, many are wondering how we can or should move forward from here. Can political or social divisiveness be healed? Is empathy among people with very little ideological common ground possible? In A Decent Meal, Michael Carolan finds answers to these fundamental questions in a series of unexpected places: around our dinner tables, along the aisles of our supermarkets, and in the fields growing our fruits and vegetables. What is more common, after all, than the simple fact that we all need to eat?