FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas Press has published American Appetites: A Documentary Reader ($24.95 paper), edited by Jennifer Jensen Wallach and Lindsey R. Swindall. The book is the first title in the press’s new Food and Foodways Series, edited by Jennifer Jensen Wallach.

The stories captured in the new collection reveal that U.S. history cannot be understood apart from our relationship to food. Beginning with Native American folktales that document foundational food habits and ending with contemporary discussions about how to obtain adequate, healthful and ethical nutrition, American Appetites shows that the quest for food has always been about more than physical nourishment. It demonstrates how changing attitudes about issues ranging from patriotism and gender to technology and race all affect how we set our table and satisfy our appetites.

The book was funded in part by the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts.

The Food and Foodways Series will explore historical and contemporary issues in global food studies. The series is committed to telling lesser known food stories and to representing a diverse set of voices, especially works in the humanities and social sciences that use food as a lens to examine broader social, cultural, environmental, ethical and economic issues. In addition to scholarly books, the series will publish creative nonfiction that explores the sensory dimensions of consumption and celebrates food as evidence of human creativity and innovation. The second book in the series is scheduled to be published by the press in the fall of 2015.

Wallach is associate professor of history at the University of North Texas and the author of How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture. Swindall is visiting assistant professor of history at Sam Houston State University and the author of The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937–1955.

The University of Arkansas Press, founded in 1980, is an academic publishing house that is part of the University of Arkansas. A member of the Association of American University Presses, it has as its central and continuing mission the publication of books that serve both the broader academic community and Arkansas and the region.