Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans

by Theresa McCulla

Overview

A 2025 James Beard Foundation Book Award Nominee in Reference, History, and Scholarship and a Smithsonian Best Book of 2024

A history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor.
 
In Insatiable City, Theresa McCulla probes the overt and covert ways that the production of food and the discourse about it both created and reinforced many strains of inequality in New Orleans, a city significantly defined by its foodways. Tracking the city’s economy from nineteenth-century chattel slavery to twentieth-century tourism, McCulla uses menus, cookbooks, newspapers, postcards, photography, and other material culture to limn the interplay among the production and reception of food, the inscription and reiteration of racial hierarchies, and the constant diminishment and exploitation of working-class people. The consumption of food and people, she shows, was mutually reinforced and deeply intertwined. Yet she also details how enslaved and free people of color in New Orleans used food and drink to carve paths of mobility, stability, autonomy, freedom, profit, and joy. A story of pain and pleasure, labor and leisure, Insatiable City goes far beyond the task of tracing New Orleans's culinary history to focus on how food suffuses culture and our understandings and constructions of race and power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226833828
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	05/10/2024
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Theresa McCulla is a curator and historian, and the former curator of the American Brewing History Initiative at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: Block and Table: Buying and Selling People and Food in Antebellum New Orleans
Chapter 2: Apples and Oranges, Food and Freedom: Food Workers in Antebellum New Orleans
Chapter 3: Field and Levee, through the Lens: Looking at Louisiana Sugar after the Civil War
Chapter 4: Mother Market: Bulbancha, Babel, New Deal
Chapter 5: The Creole Table and “the Black Hand in the Pot”
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

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

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

[Insatiable City] adds a different angle of analysis to the history of racial injustice and violence in New Orleans, which has generally been told in broad strokes. Deeply researched and beautifully written, this book will make readers think twice about the famous dishes they feast on when visiting New Orleans and the unspoken and complex history behind each bite.

History

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

McCulla’s Insatiable City covers 200 years of New Orleans history to show linkages between production and reception of race, power, social status, and labor in a city famous for its food culture. The book draws on menus, cookbooks, newspapers, postcards, photography, and other media to show how the production and reception of food shapes, and is shaped by these social forces.”

Foodtank: “25 Books Guiding Us Toward More Regenerative Food Systems”

McCulla masterfully ties images to newspaper excerpts and individual stories, dipping you into an earlier time in New Orleans.

Civil Eats

The book’s extensive use of primary materials, from visual sources and tourist pamphlets to architectural designs and oral histories, and its wonderfully accessible and engaging writing style, means that it not only will resonate with food historians and scholars of race in modern America but will also appeal to a broader readership that wishes to learn more about how the food we eat on a daily basis can reveal racial prejudices, systemic and enduring political and economic injustices, and important avenues for cultural renewal and revitalization.” 

Social History

In a new book, Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans, McCulla gives voice to Louisiana’s black food industry workers whose stories were muted and marginalized by three hundred years of racial injustice. McCulla uses her extraordinary skills as an historian and curator to reveal how the enslaved, free people of color, and Black Americans created, shaped, and influenced Creole cuisine.

LouisianaHistory.info

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 Insatiable City is a vital contribution to food studies, critical race studies, and New Orleans scholarship. By interrogating the intersections of race, labor, and food systems, the book challenges romanticized portrayals of Southern cuisine, revealing how histories of exploitation shape the city’s celebrated food culture. For scholars studying food justice, restaurant labor, and the commodification of cultural cuisines, Insatiable City provides an essential historical foundation. . . . McCulla’s meticulous research and compelling storytelling push readers to see New Orleans’ food culture not just as a source of pleasure, but as a landscape shaped by histories of violence, survival, and resistance.

Gastronomica

"Historian McCulla debuts with a fascinating dissection of the tangled links between consumption, food, and race in a city long known for its excesses. She contends that 'plenitude grew out of the labors of people in bondage' in 19th-century New Orleans, both in the form of food harvested by enslaved people, and 'slave auctions' held in coffeehouses, taverns, and hotels, where the combined 'entertainment' of food, drink, and enslaved bodies were served to locals and tourists. . . . The result is a top-notch scholarly study of the complex relationships between entertainment, consumption, and Black life in the American South."

Publishers Weekly

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

Covering some 200 years of New Orleans’ history, McCulla convincingly demonstrates how the sensory pleasures of food consumption have been inextricably linked to commodification and violence, resulting from the complicated relations among the area’s Black, White, Creole and Indigenous populations. The book explores the tensions among auction blocks, dining tables, street vendors, sugar plantations, food markets, cookbooks, tourism and much more. McCulla opens our eyes to some of the unexpected ways in which New Orleans has long been an insatiable city.

Smithsonian

[McCulla’s] stellar archival research at its most valuable unearths simple stories about complicated lives.

The Advocate

McCulla has written a wonderful book, a tour de force in fact. . . . Insatiable City is cross-disciplinary, demonstrating a masterful intersection of many historical fields, including food, business, capitalism, urbanism, labor, slavery, class, race, gender, and tourism. . . . The journey McCulla takes readers on is a curatorial sensation.

Journal of Southern History

"Theresa McCulla’s Insatiable City covers 200 years of New Orleans history to show linkages between production and reception of race, power, social status, and labor in a city famous for its food culture. The book draws on menus, cookbooks, newspapers, postcards, photography, and other media to show how the production and reception of food shapes, and is shaped by these social forces."

Foodtank: "25 Books Guiding Us Toward More Regenerative Food Systems"