Insatiable City
Food and Race in New Orleans
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- $31.99
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
A 2025 James Beard Foundation Book Award Nominee in Reference, History, and Scholarship and a Smithsonian Best Book of 2024
A history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor.
In Insatiable City, Theresa McCulla probes 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. Tracking the city’s economy from nineteenth-century chattel slavery to twentieth-century tourism, McCulla 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. The consumption of food and people, she shows, was mutually reinforced and deeply intertwined. Yet she also details 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. A story of pain and pleasure, labor and leisure, 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian McCulla debuts with a fascinating dissection of the tangled links between consumption, food, and race in a city long known for its excesses. She contends that "plenitude grew out of the labors of people in bondage" in 19th-century New Orleans, both in the form of food harvested by enslaved people, and "slave auctions" held in coffeehouses, taverns, and hotels, where the combined "entertainment" of food, drink, and enslaved bodies were served to locals and tourists. With the rise of photography in the 20th century, images of Black Louisianans on sugarcane plantations fueled "nostalgia for the antebellum past" while promoting tourism to white visitors. McCulla also highlights how some 19th-century Black Louisianans—both free and enslaved—worked as street vendors or market sellers, though the work was not without its moral challenges, as it often depended indirectly on slave labor. McCulla's excellent archival research dredges up vivid personal histories that energize her fine-grained analysis. For example, she recounts how Marie Francoise Borga was enslaved to a New Orleans grocer, freed in 1817, and later became a street seller of calas, a fried food she'd learned to cook in Congo, where she was born. The result is a top-notch scholarly study of the complex relationships between entertainment, consumption, and Black life in the American South.
