Theresa McCulla at the GDBS

Author and historian Theresa McCulla will be at The Garden District Book on October 30 to celebrate the release of her first book Insatiable City, a history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor.

Insatiable City is a cultural history of New Orleans and its people through the lens of food. It argues that the sensory pleasures of eating and drinking in New Orleans were rooted in violent histories. At the same time, the book shows how Black New Orleanians of every era used food and food work to build autonomy, belonging, and pleasure for themselves and their families.

The event will begin at 6:00 PM. McCulla will be joined in conversation by The Reading Life’s  Liz Williams. After their chat, they will open up the floor for a Q&A and then McCulla will be available to personalize copies of her book. 

The event is free and open to the public but interested pirates are encouraged to RSVP and reserve their books ahead of time on Eventbrite. 

Insatiable City

In Insatiable City, Theresa McCulla explores how New Orleans's food industry created and reinforced strains of inequality in 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 understand the production and reception of food and the inscription and reiteration of racial hierarchies.

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