Episodes

  • Making Microbes Explicit

    Making Microbes Explicit
    Jul 3 2026
    This episode takes listeners into the latest issues of Gastronomica, with a special feature on microbes. Sarah Elton and Maya Hey talk with Dan Bender of the Gastronomica Editorial Collective about their special section on microbes and food. In a conversation that spans food systems, environment, health, dietetics, and culture, they explore human microbial relationships from the soil to the processing plant, at the grocery store, in home kitchens, and beyond. Sarah and Maya share how they each came to the study of microbes, discuss what microbes are and what it means to center microbes in food studies research, and reflect on some of the policy implications. Their two-part special section in the Spring and Summer 2026 issues of Gastronomica brings together 11 articles on microbes in food and food systems from researchers around the world. Listeners can find "Making Microbes Explicit: Introduction to Microbes, Food, and Food Systems" by Maya Hey and Sarah Elton, and their co-written follow-up piece, "Finding the Microbes in Food Studies” in Gastronomica (issues 26.1 and 26.2). Sarah Elton is an assistant professor and Eakin Chair in Critical Qualitative Health Research Methodology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. She has published widely, with her research appearing most recently in journals such as Nature Cities, Social & Cultural Geography, Qualitative Inquiry and Gastronomica. She is also the author of Locavore (HarperCollins Canada 2010) and Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Maya Hey is based in Stockholm at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where she is a postdoctoral researcher with the Environmental Humanities Laboratory. Her interdisciplinary work on microbes draws on her background in food studies, dietetics, and communication. Her new book, Singing with Invisible Worlds: Fermenting Sake on Microbial Time will be published later this year by the University of Minnesota Press. Daniel E. Bender is a professor of food studies, environmental studies, and history at the University of Toronto, the President of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS), and Co-Chair of the Editorial Collective at Gastronomica. Listeners can now find the Gastronomica podcast on the New Books Network here. Subscribe to Gastronomica’s podcast feed to stay updated on the newest episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    41 mins
  • Chiara Formichi, "Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia" (Stanford UP, 2025)

    Chiara Formichi, "Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia" (Stanford UP, 2025)
    Jun 30 2026
    In her most recent publication, Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia (Stanford UP, 2025), Chiara Formichi argues that Muslim women in Java and Sumatra, from the late 1910s to the 1950s, were central to Indonesia's progress as guardians and promoters of health and piety through gendered activities of care work. While sidelined in the Dutch colonial project of hygienic modernity, women's labor of social reproduction became increasingly visible during the Japanese Occupation and early years of independence. Women from all walks of life were called upon to fulfill domestic and motherly roles for the production and socialization of laborers, soldiers, and citizens. The medicalization of cleanliness, intersecting with multiple patriarchal orders, marginalized women's traditional influence and knowledge. However, leveraging the critical importance of infant care, cleanliness, and nutrition, women pushed against the boundaries imposed on them by the colonial and postcolonial state. Largely absent from government archives, their words and acts are evident in vernacular magazines and visual sources drawn from official outreach, news and lifestyle media, and advertisements. Women writers rearticulated scientific mothering, nationalist maternalism, and Islamic ideals of motherhood to create a public voice through gendered care work. The framework of Domestic Nationalism proposes that as the modern Indonesian nation-state took shape capitalizing on the public function of mothering, so did homemaking become a crossroads of national and international approaches to development, blurring nonaligned self-reliance and global capitalist interests. In this episode Dr. Chiara Formichi (Cornell University) and Leah Cargin (University of Oklahoma and Journal of Women’s History) discuss Domestic Nationalism. We converse about feminist theory and tensions between Indonesian women and colonial establishments. We talk about food, food choices, food preparation and nutrition to reveal an intersection of hygiene, nutrition, and imperialism. And last, we discuss how imperial and colonial invocation of novel hygiene practices was a global phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • Robert W. Snyder, "When the City Stopped: Stories from New York's Essential Workers" (Cornell UP, 2026)

    Robert W. Snyder, "When the City Stopped: Stories from New York's Essential Workers" (Cornell UP, 2026)
    Jun 6 2026
    The COVID-19 pandemic delivered its first and most devastating strike in the United States in New York City in the Spring of 2020. Closely connected to the world by air travel, with a virus able to circle the globe in a single flight, and with a population always living life largely in public spaces, sickness swept through the city, with the daily death toll reaching, at its worst point in April 2020, almost 800 persons per day. In When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers (Cornell UP, 2026) author Robert W. Snyder offers readers the voices of 45 New Yorkers, recorded in real time during the pandemic, people whose names we would likely not know or recognize. Snyder centers the “oral histories” of these 45 -- transit workers, ambulance drivers, grocery store clerks, firefighters, police officers, “deliveristas” of take-out food, nurses, and doctors. These 45 also speak for thousands of others, the people we came to know as “essential workers.” They could not work from home. They showed up to do their jobs every day during the most dangerous weeks of early Spring 2020, and beyond. Their dedication cost some of them their lives, but their courage, perseverance, and endurance ensured that the city and its people would be saved, in the author’s words, “from the bottom up.” This interview was conducted by James Melchiorre, a journalist, documentary producer, and teacher of English as a Second Language. Melchiorre lives in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    41 mins
  • Christos Lynteris, "How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026)

    Christos Lynteris, "How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026)
    May 30 2026
    Today, rats are nearly synonymous with plague, but this association is surprisingly recent. For centuries, plague devastated populations without being linked to animals. So how did the rat become the symbol of one of history's deadliest diseases? In How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Professor Christos Lynteris unravels this story by focusing on the Third Plague Pandemic, a global outbreak that began in China in the 1850s and claimed an estimated 15 million lives by the mid-twentieth century. This was the first major pandemic recognized by scientists as zoonotic—spread from animals to humans—and it marked a turning point in both medical science and global health. Through a gripping historical investigation, Professor Lynteris explores how rats entered the medical imagination of the time. He reveals how scientific thinking about disease vectors evolved in tandem with colonial power structures as plague responses unfolded across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. From laboratory discoveries to imperial interventions, the rat became central not just to understanding plague, but to shaping new forms of epidemiological reasoning. This provocative book shows how zoonosis emerged as a politically charged concept in the context of empire and pandemic crisis. It is a powerful history of how science, society, and colonialism converged around a creature now inseparable from the story of epidemic disease. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    49 mins
  • Matthew L. Reznicek, "Tales of Health: Illness, Disability, and Citizenship in the Romantic National Tale" (Liverpool UP, 2026)

    Matthew L. Reznicek, "Tales of Health: Illness, Disability, and Citizenship in the Romantic National Tale" (Liverpool UP, 2026)
    May 21 2026
    Tales of Health: Illness, Disability, and Citizenship in the Romantic National Tale (Liverpool UP, 2026) is about the way the Romantic National Tale exercises power and defines the boundaries of citizenship through the categories of health, illness, and disability. When we see these categories at work in these novels, we understand how socio-political belonging is premised on the conception of the healthy body, to the exclusion of bodies deemed otherwise. Employing the medical humanities and, especially, the social determinants of health, this book shows that the National Tale achieves its consolidation of the nation through its enforcement of a rigorous politics of health that polices its characters' and citizens' bodies. Focusing on novels from Sydney Owenson, Maria Edgeworth, Germaine de Staël, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen allows this argument to show that the imbricated concerns of health and citizenship extend well beyond the immediate anxiety roused by the implementation of the 1800 Act of Union. This book argues that, by prioritizing the categories of health, illness, and disability, we better understand how power and citizenship function in this widely influential early nineteenth-century genre of Romantic fiction and, thus, how we continue to envision citizenship as an extension of bodily characteristics. Matthew L. Reznicek is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Minnesota Medical School, where he uses eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and Irish literature to explore the impact of social, historical, and cultural factors in the experience of medicine and health. Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th- and 21st-century Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 16 mins
  • Kira Ganga Kieffer, "Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America" (Princeton UP, 2026)

    Kira Ganga Kieffer, "Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America" (Princeton UP, 2026)
    May 13 2026
    Kira Ganga Kieffer (Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Wesleyan University; PhD, Boston University, 2023) studies contemporary American spiritualities, health, gender, and marketing. Her first book, a history of religion and vaccine skepticism, Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America (Princeton UP, 2026), is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. She is the author of “Smelling Things: Essential Oils and Essentialism in Contemporary American Spirituality,” in Religion & American Culture (2021) and “Manifesting Millions: How Women’s Spiritual Entrepreneurship Genders Capitalism,” in Nova Religio (2020), which received the Thomas Robbins Award for Article of the Year. She has written for Religion & Politics, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Religion for Breakfast. Kieffer uses textual analysis of spiritual marketing materials to discover how consumer culture creates religious concepts within a secular context. Focused on spiritual items and practices that are marketed to women, Kieffer compares the usage of essential oils by three very different groups of spiritual practitioners: contemporary yogis, evangelical Christians, and witches. Although the usage of essential oils is consumerized, Kieffer argues, the beliefs and practices created by “oilers” are nonetheless meaningful responses to the spiritual yearning. Essential oil practices blur the lines between religious traditions, sharpen individual spirituality, and work to create new collective identities. Order "Unvaccinated Under God" here: here Visit Sacred Writes here: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    43 mins
  • Benjamin Robert Siegel, "Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    Benjamin Robert Siegel, "Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers" (Oxford UP, 2026)
    May 12 2026
    Markets of Pain offers a sweeping history of the business of licit opium--following cultivators, merchants, scientists, and policymakers--and shows how this potent crop reshaped global trade, medicine, and geopolitics. For centuries, opium has been a source of both profit and peril, its legacy entangled with addiction, imperialism, and the complex interplay of global trade and national development. While the illicit opium trade is infamous, the history of licit opium--how it was farmed, refined, and used to build modern medicine and shape state power--has remained largely untold.Drawing on archival sources from Asia, Europe, and the United States, Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers (Oxford UP, 2026) traces the global arc of licit opium from poppy fields and processing plants in India, Turkey, and Australia to the clinics and laboratories of modern medicine. It shows how both the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic treated the opium poppy as a national resource and a means of securing global stature. In postcolonial India, by contrast, nationalist leaders initially rejected opium's imperial legacy before embracing its strategic value amid the shifting currents of the Cold War. At the heart of this story are the cultivators, scientists, bureaucrats, and policymakers who shaped the licit opium trade and grappled with its far-reaching consequences. Their work and visions demonstrate how colonial empires and postcolonial states helped forge the global pharmaceutical industry as it struggled to govern a drug it could not abandon.Markets of Pain reveals how a seemingly marginal crop became an unlikely engine of modernization, a tool of Cold War geopolitics, and a harbinger of today's global opioid crisis. Blending vivid scenes from opium's fields and factories with incisive analysis of scientific and diplomatic archives, Benjamin Robert Siegel recovers a buried history with urgent relevance for global supply chains, international power, and public health. Markets of Pain offers an account of the global drug trade in the twentieth century, focusing on the transformation of opium from a colonial commodity into a modern resource for the American and European pharmaceutical industries. Challenging simplistic ideas of licit and illicit drugs in the twentieth century, it reveals how the modern global drug regime was formed by India and Turkey's navigation of the international anti-opium movement, the rise of the pharmaceutical industry, and the complex relationship between agriculture, medicine, and global capitalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    37 mins
  • Peter S. Soppelsa, "Paris After Haussmann: Living with Infrastructure in the City of Light, 1870–1914" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2026)

    Peter S. Soppelsa, "Paris After Haussmann: Living with Infrastructure in the City of Light, 1870–1914" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2026)
    May 10 2026
    Modern Paris is often hailed as a capital of urban infrastructure. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in 1853–1870, branded “Haussmannization,” helped define urban modernity for cities worldwide. But even as infrastructures expanded and modernized, some Parisians were left behind: as late as 1928, 18 percent of houses still lacked direct sewerage. Haussmannization often hid infrastructures behind walls and floors, under streets, or in peripheral districts. In the forty years after 1870, a period that Dr. Peter Soppelsa calls “secondary Haussmannization,” Parisians inverted them—revealed their hidden components to scrutinize their workings and costs for society, environment, and health—and in turn politicized them. Drawing on French government archives, engineers’ maps, the illustrated press, and a collection of over 100 photographic postcards, in Paris After Haussmann: Living with Infrastructure in the City of Light, 1870–1914 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2026) Dr. Soppelsa charts the diverse embodied, emotional, and everyday experiences of living with expanding urban infrastructures—streets, housing, tramways, subways, the water supply, sewers, and rivers—in Paris from 1870 to 1914. Parisians learned that infrastructures were not simply technical solutions for the social and environmental problems of city life but could also bring about new dangers and dependencies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    52 mins