The first selection of the new year is a relatively new book, released summer 2020, on current food culture. Here’s a brief synopsis of what to expect from Hungry: Avocado Toast, Instagram Influencers, and Our Search for Connection and Meaning*+ by Eve Turow-Paul.
We wait in lines around the block for scoops of cookie dough. We photograph every meal. We visit selfie performance spaces and leave lucrative jobs to become farmers and craft brewers.
Why? What are we really hungry for?
In Hungry, Eve Turow-Paul provides a guided tour through the stranger corners of today’s global food and lifestyle culture. How are 21st-century innovations and pressures are redefining people’s needs and desires? How does “foodie” culture, along with other lifestyle trends, provide an answer to our rising rates of stress, loneliness, anxiety, and depression?
Weaving together evolutionary psychology and sociology with captivating investigative reporting from around the world, Turow-Paul reveals the modern hungers—physical, spiritual, and emotional—that are driving today’s top trends:
- The connection between the “death” of the cereal industry and access to work email on our smartphones
- How posting images of our dinners on social media both fulfills and feeds our hunger for human connection in an increasingly isolated world
- The ways “diet tribes” and boutique fitness gyms substitute for organized religion
- How access to round-the-clock news relates to the blowback against GMO foods
- Wellness retreats, astrology, plant parenthood, and other methods of easing modern anxiety
- Why “eating local” might be the key to solving not just climate change, but our current global sense of disconnection
From gluten-free and Paleo diets to meal kit subscriptions, and from mukbang broadcast jockeys to craft beer, Hungry deepens our understanding of why we do what we do, and helps us find greater purpose and joy in today’s technology-altered world.
Click here to order the book or download the Kindle version. Order through our link and AgBookClub gets a little somethin’-somethin’ back from Amazon to help keep this website running. 🙂
Here’s what you need to do this month:
Get the book. Buy it, borrow it, download and listen to it, read it over your neighbor’s shoulder — we don’t care. But don’t steal the book. 😉
Read the book.
- Week 1: Introduction and Chapters 1 – 2 [pages 1 – 88] (Twitter chat on 1/6)
- Week 2: Chapters 3 – 5 [pages 89 – 156] (Twitter chat on 1/13)
- Week 3: Chapters 6 – 8 [pages 157 – 224] (Twitter chat on 1/20)
- Week 4: Chapter 9 & Conclusion [pages 225 – 270] (Twitter chat on 1/27)
Join the chat (#AgBookClub) on Wednesdays at 8:00pm Central on Twitter. Learn how to participate in a Twitter chat here. While we hope you can participate in our discussion every week, we know that everyone has busy schedules. We always include general questions following the topic(s) of the book that can be answered by anyone, so please don’t hesitate to jump in the Twitter chat if you didn’t have a chance to read the section we’re discussing. We welcome any and all to join the discussion!
Happy reading!
AgBookClub 