Featured Podcast
- Sifting through LAC’s Cookbook Collection (Library and Archives Canada) In this episode, we sit down with Erika Reinhardt, archivist at Library and Archives Canada, to discuss LAC’s cookbook collection. We discuss how culture and technology have shaped these books and recipes over time, and the impact they have had on our relationship with food and cooking throughout our history.
Film & Oral History Databases & Radio Broadcast Resources
- Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window Academic Video Online delivers more than 67,000 titles spanning a range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more. It includes documentaries, films, demonstrations, and other content types. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume I-II: Foundational Films This link opens in a new window Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. I-II: Foundational Films contains classic and contemporary ethnographies, documentaries and shorts from every continent, providing teachers visual support to introduce and contextualize hundreds of cultural groups and practices around the world.
- HistoryMakers: African American Video Oral History Collection This link opens in a new window HistoryMakers is a collection of video oral history interviews with historically significant African Americans. Topics include African American foodways. Transcripts are included.
- Heritage Radio Network HRN is the world’s pioneer food radio station. The studio broadcasts live from two recycled shipping containers inside Roberta’s Pizza, an innovative restaurant at the epicenter of Brooklyn’s culinary renaissance.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume IV: Festivals and Archives This link opens in a new window Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. IV: Festivals and Archives contains award-winning titles from contemporary ethnographic film festivals. The collection also includes field recordings and edited films by students and faculty from universities and institutions around the world, including Berkeley Media and Manchester's Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology.
- Southern Foodways Alliance Film SFA films document the lives of foodways practitioners, including cooks, farmers, waiters, and a wide range of other folk.
Featured Films
- The History of American Cuisine (streaming, Academic Video Online) 500 years of history in 20 minutes! This video is a look at the rich heritage and distinct qualities that typify the food we eat. Viewers will learn how American Cuisine began and what has influenced it to become so varied. A narrator, executive chef, and historian weave a story of food history from 1519 until today.
- Gather (streaming, Kanopy) An intimate portrait of the growing movement amongst Native Americans to reclaim their spiritual, political and cultural identities through food sovereignty, while battling the trauma of centuries of genocide. Gather follows Nephi Craig, a chef from the White Mountain Apache Nation (Arizona), opening an indigenous café as a nutritional recovery clinic; Elsie Dubray, a young scientist from the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation (South Dakota), conducting landmark studies on bison; and the Ancestral Guard, a group of environmental activists from the Yurok Nation (Northern California), trying to save the Klamath river.
- City of Gold (Swank) Profiling Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold as he explores Los Angeles in search of great eats. His tour of the city highlights how L.A.'s immigrant communities have given rise to a tremendous amount of culinary diversity.
- Heinz: The Ketchup Kings (streaming, Academic VideoOnline) Profiles the Heinz family and their rise to prominence in the business world through the manufacture of ketchup, pickles and other products.
- The Kellogg Brothers: Corn Flake Kings (streaming: Academic Video Online) From the first corn flake to their 10-year legal battle, THE KELLOGG BROTHERS: CORN FLAKE KINGS presents the tumultuous story of the men who revolutionized America's breakfast.
- Milton Hershey: The Chocolate King (streaming, Academic Video Online) Join BIOGRAPHY for the inspiring life story of the man who dared to offer his employees dignity and prosperity, and made himself wildly rich in the process.
- The Famous Wally Amos: Cookie King (streaming, Academic Video Online) Wally Amos is "Famous" for his chocolate chip cookies. But before he cooked up that recipe, he had already tasted success in a totally different field; Wally was the first black talent agent at the William Morris Agency representing the likes of Simon and Garfunkel and The Supremes.
- The Perdue Family (streaming, Academic Video Online) As a railway express agent, Arthur W. Perdue noticed that the poultry men loading their eggs and chickens onto the train seemed to be financially successful. In 1917, Arthur decided he was going to make poultry his business as well, and a Chicken Empire was born. From a backyard table-egg business that supported one family in the 1920s, Perdue has now grown into a multi-billion dollar business providing poultry and agricultural products on five continents.
- Colonel Sanders: America's Chicken King (streaming, Academic Video Online) Here's your chance to know the real Colonel Harlan Sanders. He spent most of his life bouncing from job to job and collected his first Social Security check before becoming a success. He also never made it past private in the Army. But his chicken recipe hit it big after he was 65.
- The Coors Family (streaming, Academic Video Online) From the vision of a German immigrant to the world's largest single brewery, here is the saga of four generations of steady success and constant controversy. In the heart of the Colorado Rockies, a remarkable family has pursued a single vision for generations.
- Makolet: A Middle Eastern Grocery in Brooklyn (streaming, Academic Video Online) This upbeat documentary depicts the social space of a kosher Middle Eastern grocery store in the traditionally Sephardic section of Brooklyn. Serving the local Syrian Jewish clientele, it has now also become a kind of social headquarters for expatriate Israelis as well as other Middle Eastern customers.
- The Great American recipe series (streaming, Academic Video Online) Home cooks from different regions of the U.S. showcase their signature dishes and compete to win the national search for "The Great American Recipe."
Podcasts
- Setting the Table Hosted by Deb Freeman, Setting the Table is a podcast that explores the stories and histories of African American cuisine and foodways.
- Let's Talk About Food podcast Hi, I’m Louisa Kasdon, founder of Let’s Talk About Food, and your host as we introduce our first set of Let’s Talk About Food podcasts, a podcast series devoted to first-person storytelling where food plays a pivotal—if not a starring role.
- The Racist Sandwich Podcast The Racist Sandwich podcast serves up a perspective that you don’t hear often: that both food and the ways we consume, create, and interpret it can be political. From discussions about racism in food photography to interviews with chefs of color about their experiences in the restaurant world, hosts Soleil Ho and Zahir Janmohamed hash out a diverse range of topics with special guests on each episode.
- Forklore Forklore is equal parts hunger-inducing cooking show and thought-provoking interview that entrenches you in the sounds of the kitchen while exploring the rich stories behind those sizzles. Host Shaun Chavis is a James Beard Award-winning cookbook editor and food writer, and the founder of Saltshaker Marketing & Media.
- El Paso Food Voices El Paso Food Voices is a collection of food stories gathered from home cooks, professional chefs, restaurant owners, community educators, and others from across El Paso, Texas. These stories bring to life the area’s mosaic flavors of its culinary landscape. People’s stories are filled with history, culture, and politics that challenge us to re-think our relationships with food.
- Toasted Sister Podcast After contact, Indigenous foodways and knowledge were devastated, destroyed and replaced with foods that are far from the people. So today, I’m talking to Native chefs and foodies about what Indigenous cuisine is, where it comes from, where it’s headed and how it’s used to connect them and their people to their origins and traditions.
- The Social Breakdown: Inequality at Bon Appétit In June 2020, it was revealed that there is shocking inequality in Bon Appetit: white chefs appearing in videos were being paid for their time, while chefs of color were not, and leadership was engaging in other racist practices. So, we had to get together for a breakaway and talk about this drama, and how the culinary industry is rife with inequality.
- Shailee Koranne on Racial Food Stereotypes, Cultural Identity, and David Chang's "Ugly Delicious" (AnthroDish) This week on AnthroDish, I am interviewing freelancer writer and journalist, Shailee Koranne. On today’s episode, we discuss how food stereotypes inform and maintain historically racist attitudes and biases, particularly for Asians in North America, as well as the role that food plays in everyday racial microaggressions.
- Sidedoor Season 5: Ep. 8 | Lena Richard: America's Unknown Celebrity Chef When Lena Richard cooked her first chicken on television, she beat Julia Child to the screen by over a decade. At a time when most African American women cooks worked behind swinging kitchen doors, Richard claimed her place as a culinary authority, broadcasting in the living rooms of New Orleans’s elite white families. She was an entrepreneur, educator, author, and an icon—and her legacy lives on in her recipes.
- Point of Origin: Farming While Black On matters of African Americans and farming, many narratives have centered the ways in which enslavement, and an assumed progress “off the plantation” have contributed to the apathy or absence of black folks on the land. In this episode we hear from Black farmers and scholars who are challenging those narratives, instead centering resilience, survival and activism at the core of historical narratives around African Americans and agriculture.
- Black Culinary History Black Culinary History is a place for reverent examination of our culinary past while supporting the work that will build our culinary future.
