Food Empire

In The Taste of Empire, acclaimed historian Lizzie Collingham tells the story of how the British Empire's quest for food shaped the modern world. Told through 20 meals over the course of 450 years, from the Far East to the New World, Collingham explains how Africans taught Americans how to grow rice, how the East India Company turned opium into tea, and how Americans became the best-fed people in the world.

Unraveling the many myths and misconceptions surrounding America's most iconic spirit, Bourbon Empire traces a history that spans frontier rebellion, Gilded Age corruption, and the magic of Madison Avenue. Whiskey has profoundly influenced America's political, economic, and cultural destiny, just as those same factors have inspired the evolution and unique flavor of the whiskey itself.

J. G. Boswell was the biggest farmer in America. He built a secret empire while thumbing his nose at nature, politicians, labor unions, and every journalist who ever tried to lift the veil on the ultimate "factory in the fields". The King of California is the previously untold account of how a Georgia slave-owning family migrated to California in the early 1920s, drained one of America 's biggest lakes in an act of incredible hubris and carved out the richest cotton empire in the world.

From Darjeeling to Lapsang Souchon, from India to Japan-a fresh, concise, world-encompassing exploration of the way tea has shaped politics, culture, and the environment throughout history. From the fourth century BC in China, where it was used as an aid in Buddhist meditation, to the Boston Tea Party in 1773, to its present-day role as the most consumed substance on the planet, the humble Camellia plant has had profound effects on civilization.

Empire of Vines details the ways would-be gentlemen farmers, ambitious speculators, horticulturalists, and writers of all kinds deployed the animating myths of American wine culture, including the classical myth of Bacchus, the cult of terroir, and the fantasy of pastoral republicanism. Promoted by figures as varied as horticulturalist Andrew Jackson Downing, novelist Charles Chesnutt, railroad baron Leland Stanford, and Cincinnati land speculator Nicholas Longworth.

The first book in J Stephen Sadler’s Quest for the Best series explores how chance encounters can change your life if you are paying attention. He also shares how he overcame numerous challenges while building a brand based on the smallest detail to champion his unique family jewel: a crumb cake. This audiobook takes you on a magical journey to find out how he went from scratch to triumph, one cake at a time. Foodies and nonfoodies alike will celebrate, as they share in the adventure of one family’s artisan recipe that took on a life far beyond its humble roots.

Sugar is found in virtually every food in the modern Western diet, and this is not by accident. There is a hugely powerful and destructive move afoot by the corporate food giants to increase sales by using science to increase consumption in both volume and frequency. Research shows this is best accomplished by producing sweet, desirable foods. But this reckless approach is killing thousands upon thousands of people each year and leading to never-before-seen levels of diseases such as diabetes.