We invite you to a free event with Beer Culture Center Board Member, Theresa McCulla who will discuss her new book, Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans. The book offers a cultural history of New Orleans and its people through the lens of food. Joining her for the conversation will be Chef Paul Fehribach of Big Jones.

Guests must RSVP in order to attend.

ABOUT THE BOOK

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.

Theresa McCulla is Curator at Mars, Incorporated. Previously, she was Curator of the American Brewing History Initiative at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. She has also worked as an Arcadia Fellow for Harvard Library, Food Literacy Project Coordinator at Harvard University Dining Services, and a European media analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. McCulla earned a PhD in American Studies and an MA in History from Harvard University, a Culinary Arts Diploma from the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, and a BA in Romance Languages from Harvard College. Her writing has been awarded by the James Beard Foundation and the North American Guild of Beer Writers. Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans is her first book and was published in May 2024 by the University of Chicago Press. 

Paul Fehribach is a seven-time James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef: Great Lakes, and owner of the critically acclaimed Chicago restaurant, Big Jones. He is the author of The Big Jones Cookbook and Midwestern Food.