For a long time New Orleans sold food to the public through public markets, much like those found in Paris at the time. This was in contrast to how food was largely sold elsewhere in the United States. In this week's The Hungry Historians, we explore the New Orleans public markets, considering their strengths and weaknesses, and whether they might represent an alternative way for food purchasing in the future.

We are very pleased to have with us for this discussion Ashley Rose Young. She published on this subject in 2025 with her Oxford University Press book Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in New Orleans. You can find more about Ashley on her website.

This episode is sponsored by ⁠⁠Bloomsbury Food Library⁠⁠, an essential resource for students, researchers, and scholars studying food, offering the widest-ranging existing collection of food studies content.

The rise of indigenous restaurants in Canada since the 1970s has helped to surface the foodways of indigenous peoples but has also helped to highlight the colonial repression of these older foods and cultures. In this week’s The Hungry Historians, we discuss the contrast of settler colonialism and indigenous resistance through the role played by restaurants. L. Sasha Gora wrote on this subject in her 2025 book, Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada, which was published by University of Toronto Press.

Our conversation with Sasha ranges from the politics of colonialism as played out through food to the purpose and symbolism of indigenous restaurants, including just what we really mean by the term indigenous restaurant.

This episode is sponsored by ⁠⁠Bloomsbury Food Library⁠⁠, an essential resource for students, researchers, and scholars studying food, offering the widest-ranging existing collection of food studies content.

Sauces are often important parts of a meal, but a part that we don’t think too much about when studying the history of food. In this week’s episode Kelly A. Spring discusses how sauces define our meals and influence the way we think about ourselves and the food that we eat. This discussion is with Andrew Donnelly, Beth M. Forrest and Deirdre Murphy, authors of an edited collection called From Garum to Mole: Sauces and Identity in the Western World, which was released by the Oxford University Press in 2026.

This episode is sponsored by ⁠⁠Bloomsbury Food Library⁠⁠, an essential resource for students, researchers, and scholars studying food, offering the widest-ranging existing collection of food studies content.