Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans (University of Chicago Press, May 2024) is a cultural history of New Orleans and its people through the lens of food.
Tracking the city’s economy from nineteenth-century chattel slavery to twentieth-century tourism, Insatiable City argues that the sensory pleasures of eating and drinking in New Orleans were rooted in—and reveled in—social, cultural, economic, and political systems of great violence. Furthermore, the charming, easy, pleasant nature of these experiences worked to soften and obscure that violence, empowering its persistence.
At the same time, even if food and food work were often wielded as means of subjugation, Black New Orleanians of every era used the same tools to build autonomy, freedom, belonging, and pleasure for themselves, their families, and their communities.
Food opens the door to these intimate, challenging histories of people, place, and identity.
A story of pain and pleasure, labor and leisure, Insatiable City goes far beyond the task of tracing New Orleans’s culinary history to show how food suffuses culture and our understandings and constructions of race and power.
Praise:
"Historian McCulla debuts with a fascinating dissection of the tangled links between consumption, food, and race in a city long known for its excesses. . . . McCulla’s excellent archival research dredges up vivid personal histories that energize her fine-grained analysis. . . . The result is a top-notch scholarly study of the complex relationships between entertainment, consumption, and Black life in the American South." ― Publishers Weekly
“In Insatiable City, McCulla captivates the reader with an adept parsing of the complexities of the food of New Orleans. From the ‘consumption’ of the enslaved as agricultural laborers and food service workers of the antebellum period to the civil rights struggles of the twentieth century, she ably investigates and untangles the nuanced web of race and class that underpins the food of the Crescent City.” ― Jessica B. Harris, author of High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America
“A deep dive into the history of food culture in the Crescent City and the ties—generational, racial, and political—that have made the city’s distinct cuisine one of the most acclaimed in the world. . . . Insatiable City is a book all Orleanians, as well as the city’s millions of visitors, could benefit from reading, if only as a cogent reminder of the blood and tears mixed into that savory dish they’re about to enjoy.” ― Food and Environment Reporting Network
“McCulla’s debut book chronicles two-and-a-half centuries of New Orleans history . . . . Her stellar archival research at its most valuable unearths simple stories about complicated lives . . . . McCulla seeks to piece together the ‘faint, fragmentary traces’ of their lives with great care.” ― The Advocate
“McCulla masterfully ties images to newspaper excerpts and individual stories, dipping you into an earlier time in New Orleans.” ― Civil Eats
“Mining the material culture of food in a city known for the same, McCulla manages to tell a larger tale about culture, race, power, and status.” ― Harvard Magazine
“McCulla’s Insatiable City begins amid rice and people on the Aurore, a slave ship traveling from Benin to Louisiana, and ends in present day New Orleans. Along the way she demonstrates time and time and time again that the celebrated food of New Orleans owes much of its greatness to the presence of African people, African intellect, and African ingredients. This is a scholarly work of the first rank.” ― Lolis Eric Elie, author of Treme: Stories and Recipes from the Heart of New Orleans
“With precision and care, McCulla considers how New Orleans’s culinary and racial histories have simmered together for centuries. Insatiable City offers a necessary reappraisal of the city’s beauty and its cruelty.” ― Andy Horowitz, author of Katrina: A History, 1915–2015
“Insatiable City is a comprehensive story of the ‘black hand in the pot’ in New Orleans. McCulla rightfully grounds Black chefs and cooks in the making of New Orleans greatest legacy, Creole cuisine. From the nineteenth-century marchandes who sold sweet calas fritters in Congo Square to civil rights activist Rudy Joseph Lombard who documented some of the greatest executive Black chefs in his groundbreaking cookbook Creole Feast, McCulla amplifies the culinary geniuses of Belle New Orleans.” ― Zella Palmer, author of Recipes and Remembrances of Fair Dillard, 1869–2019