Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans

Insatiable City is a history of food in New Orleans that explores race, power, social status, and labor, using menus, cookbooks, newspapers, postcards, photography, and other material culture to show how food and people were mutually reinforced and intertwined. It also details how enslaved and free people of color used food and drink to carve paths of mobility, stability, autonomy, freedom, profit, and joy.

Format: Hardback
Length: 352 pages
Publication date: 10 May 2024
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Insatiable City: A History of Food in the Crescent City is a 2025 James Beard Foundation Book Award Nominee in Reference, History, and Scholarship and a Smithsonian Best Book of 2024. It explores 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.

Theresa McCulla, the author, 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. She shows 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.

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. It is a story of pain and pleasure, labor and leisure, and how food shapes our lives.

Weight: 594g
Dimension: 229 x 152 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780226833804