This week on The Hungry Historians, Matt Phillpott and Kelly Spring interview Mark A. Johnson about his book American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon. This book has just been released by the University of Georgia Press and focuses on the question of how bacon has overcome centuries of religious prohibition, cultural contempt, and dietary advice to become a popular 21st century meat. In this episode we explore some of that history, asking questions about why bacon is often vilified, and how it has continued to remain a successful food.

Mark teaches at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and has previously written An Irresistible History of Alabama Barbecue and Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacle.

This episode is sponsored by ⁠⁠Bloomsbury Food Library⁠⁠, an essential resource for students, researchers, and scholars studying food, offering the widest-ranging existing collection of food studies content.

In this episode of The Hungry Historians Matt and Kelly interview Ken Albala about the history and use of fermentation based around Ken's 2026 book published with University of California Press, The World Atlas of Fermented Foods and Drinks. We discuss what fermentation is, the many fermented foods that there are across the world, and why fermentation is increasingly seen as something of a lost art.

Ken Albala is an award winning author of thirty books and has taken part in a food-history video series for the Great Courses learning platform. He has previously written Beans: A History which won the IACP Jane Grigson Award in food history, and Three World Cuisines which won the Gourmand Best Foreign Cuisine Book in the World. He is the Tully Knoles Endowed Professor of History at the University of the Pacific. You can learn more about him on his website.

This episode is sponsored by ⁠⁠Bloomsbury Food Library⁠⁠, an essential resource for students, researchers, and scholars studying food, offering the widest-ranging existing collection of food studies content.

How did the original tin can come about and what happened next to make it such an important part of our everyday ingredients? In this week's The Hungry Historians, Matt and Kelly chat with John Coupland, professor of Food Science at Penn State. Earlier this year, he published Containing Nature: The Ongoing Invention of Canned Food with Springer Nature. In our discussion we examine the history of canning, the micro inventions that made the cans that we know today, and challenges around make tin cans safe.

This episode is sponsored by ⁠⁠Bloomsbury Food Library⁠⁠, an essential resource for students, researchers, and scholars studying food, offering the widest-ranging existing collection of food studies content.