Our 2024 Food and Farming Holiday Book Gift Guide

Expanding on Driver’s award-winning Civil Eats investigation, the book reveals how Tyson’s meatpacking industry is structured to conceal injuries. Workers are directed to on-site nurses and company-approved doctors, all part of a vertically integrated healthcare system that downplays and ignores injuries—and even punishes workers for seeking medical help. There is an eviscerating quality to Driver’s prose as she renders in exacting detail the workers’ repetitive motions and neglected injuries. 

But this is not just the story of a corporation’s harrowing disregard for life; it is also about what Driver describes as the “the moral beauty of the immigrants who process our nation’s meat,” like the women workers who joined together to teach each other how to stand up for their rights. Driver takes us inside the homes of workers, witnessing their daily rituals of survival and grief. In one especially haunting scene, a former Tyson worker leaves a “cup covered in red hearts full of fresh coffee for Plácido”—an offering to her husband who died of Covid-19 early in the pandemic. He was likely predisposed to the virus because his lungs had been engulfed in ammonia after a chloride spill at Tyson. Life and Death of the American Worker is essential reading for anyone who cares about the U.S. food system and the immigrant workers who sacrifice their health to make it possible. —Grey Moran

Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of My Garden
By Maria Rodale

Grass, mosquitos, vultures, and paper wasps are some of the 26 more-than-human kin with whom Maria Rodale converses in her Pennsylvania garden in Love, Nature, Magic. Head of the Rodale Institute and Rodale, Inc. publishing group, which specializes in works about nature, Rodale provides a 101-level glimpse of the shamanic journeying process, which traditionally involves interacting with the spirit world and other realms of consciousness to unlock power or information for healing or reunification. Unlike some practitioners, her version of journeying does not involve ingesting anything; rather, Rodale facilitates these experiences using sound—specifically a drum or rattle—as her shamanic guide. (Still other practitioners may use ecstatic dance as a method of transport.)

This tome, a peek into animism and pantheism, relates a series of essay-like journal entries from April 2021 to May 2022 that detail Rodale’s visits with the insects, plants, fauna, and fungi in her garden. Her journals expound upon the dialogues she carries out with her more-than-human kin, and the lessons she absorbs from  observing the ways they conduct their lives. Love, Nature, Magic is suited to readers who yearn for nature amid urban life, seeking to connect with the wildness that is already within them. Ultimately, this book answers the question: How can we co-exist more peaceably with nature by understanding the ways of nature? —Sarahlynn Pablo

The Memory of Taste: Vietnamese American Recipes from Phú Quoc, Oakland, and the Spaces Between 
By Tu David Phu and Soleil Ho 

Tu David Phu’s new cookbook is an homage to immigrant families—and mothers, in particular. The Top Chef alum, raised in Oakland, California, focuses on stories and recipes from Phú Quoc, an island in the Southwest of Vietnam where his parents are from.

The son of refugees, Phu grew up with his father, a fishmonger, and his mother, a seamstress. Several essays throughout the cookbook serve as a guide to his upbringing and ethos. For example, an essay on seafood sustainability covers not only where fish are caught, but also how using all parts of a fish is the way his family sustained themselves, like the many generations before them. The book was written with Soleil Ho, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist and the paper’s former food critic, and edited by Bryant Terry (Black Food, Vegan Soul Kitchen).  

In these pages, you will find recipes for Vietnamese hotpot soup made with salmon, a brined herring salad, and classics like pho ga, a chicken noodle soup. Tu shares Vietnamese staples, including a pickle of julienned daikon and carrots that pairs well with many dishes, and a simple lime and fresh-cracked pepper dipping sauce for seafood such as steamed crab that opens up the palate. Filled with colorful photos, the book will be a welcome addition for food lovers who want to expand their repertoire of Vietnamese dishes, from traditional recipes to “authentically inauthentic” chef creations. —Momo Chang

The Mighty Red
By Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Mighty Red, takes place in a fictional town in North Dakota’s Red River Valley, a region famous for growing sugar beets. Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, previously wrote about the rise of that crop as a commodity  and the bittersweet ways it changed life in the valley, in her 1986 novel The Beet Queen.

The Mighty Red takes place between 2008 and 2024, with a different cast of characters and in a new era of commodity agriculture. Where beet-growing once brought population growth and chain stores, now trucking, chemicals, and climate change surround the industry. The novel centers on a mixed-race character named Kismet, following both her love triangle with Gary, the son of an established farming family, and Hugo, a dropout autodidact, and the financial and relationship troubles of her beet-truck driver mother and theater-teacher father. Yet the valley and its ecosystem, especially its birds, drive the motion of the novel as much as its characters. Erdrich’s well-hewn skill for writing multigenerational dramas about the Native, European-descended, and mixed-race people of the upper Midwest, mixed with detailed and poignant ecological themes, makes for a layered, urgent, human story. —Caroline Tracey

My Regenerative Kitchen: Plant-Based Recipes and Sustainable Practices to Nourish Ourselves and the Planet
By Camilla Marcus

At a time when achieving systemic change in the food system can feel next to impossible, Camilla Marcus invites readers to focus on the good they can do within their own homes. In My Regenerative Kitchen, the chef and restaurateur draws on her experience as the founder of west~bourne, New York City’s first certified zero-waste eatery, to present a bevy of dishes that support sustainable farming through delicious cooking. Now living in California, Marcus curates an eclectic menu that integrates her home state’s produce (think avocado oil and Espelette chili peppers) with world influences, particularly Japanese, Middle Eastern, and Italian cuisines. 

For her, “regenerative” reflects agriculture that improves soil health, protects water and biodiversity, and minimizes both waste and chemical inputs. In keeping with that philosophy, her recipes are all plant-based, often feature cover crops like sorghum and buckwheat, and are designed to maximize the use of every ingredient. I especially appreciated the zero-waste “pro tips” sprinkled throughout the text, such as saving the boiled kombu seaweed from Japanese dashi broth to transform into furikake seasoning. Marcus’ earnest writing style, combined with Ben Rosser’s airy film photography, lend the book a certain West Coast utopian vibe, and it’s clear she believes in the potential of individuals to shift food culture. “Together we can regenerate for the next generation,” she urges. “So, in our home kitchens, let’s be radicals, naturally.” —Daniel Walton

Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet
By Patrick Dixon

Few foods are more quintessentially American than the chicken nugget. In his debut book, Nuggets of Gold, historian Patrick Dixon offers a primer on the history of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), the poultry industry, and the chicken nugget.

In 1923, a Delaware farmer accidentally received 10 times as many chickens as she ordered. Instead of returning the chickens, the farmer decided to expand her operation, figuring she might be able to return a decent profit. And she could. By 1926, she had 10,000 birds. Swiftly, an era of CAFOs began in poultry production, which still reigns today. In the post-World War II era, concerns about global food shortages and population booms made “ending hunger” a key focus of U.S. agricultural and foreign policy. The chicken nugget was born during this time—a solution to using parts of a chicken typically wasted in processing and an ideal consumerist option in a growing convenience-oriented economy. Made of “further processed chicken,” nugget production involves the “reclamation of meat that took place once the most popular cuts—breasts, wings, and legs—had been removed from the carcass,” Dixon explains. Increased nugget demand, driven by McDonald’s and other fast-food chains, meant increased demand for cheap chickens. Through the rise of chicken production and consumption, Dixon masterfully illustrates 20th and 21st century U.S. food history—and the evolution of extractive capitalism.

In Nuggets of Gold, which provides a multi-layered narrative through the analysis of historical documents, Dixon argues that the workers on farms, within processing plants, and on the meatpacking floor should be at the core of the poultry industry story. In the epilogue, he writes: “As a thousand poultry lines spun on into the future, nearly two hundred birds per minute hurtling along on a fast track from a cage to a cardboard box in a truck, the human damage that was the untold price of these journeys remained unaccounted for.” —Nina Elkadi

Our South: Black Food Through My Lens
By Ashleigh Shanti

The past few years have seen a handful of cookbook authors try to change perceptions of Black cuisine, rejecting old stereotypes that reduce the flavors of an entire diaspora to a few Southern dishes. Top Chef alum Ashleigh Shanti is the latest to add her voice to this conversation with her debut cookbook, Our South: Black Food Through My Lens.

A Black, queer, Southern chef raised in Virginia and now based in Asheville, North Carolina, Shanti takes readers on a journey through five southern microregions—Backcountry, Lowcountry, Midlands, Lowlands, and Homeland—showcasing their distinct food traditions. Each section honors a woman in her family whose unique cooking style shaped Shanti’s palate and culinary career. Classic recipes like stewed tomatoes, cornbread, Leather Britches (dried green beans), and potlikker meet more personal takes like Spicy Beet Chow Chow, Vinegar-Cured Trout and Sour Apples, and savory Cabbage and Mushroom Pancakes. 

With 125 recipes and stunning photography by Johnny Autry, Our South is both a traditional cookbook and coffee table book, making it a perfect centerpiece for any kitchen or living space. Whether you’re a seasoned cook or a culinary novice, Shanti’s book offers something for everyone, combining small bites and big meals with heartfelt anecdotes that all celebrate the rich cultural tapestry of the South. —Nicole J. Caruth