New Books in Critical Theory

This episode introduces a special issue on food and philosophy. Robert T. Valgenti, of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective, talks with Andrea Borghini about the increasing attention to food within philosophy over the last three decades and shares the inspiration behind their special issue. They discuss how this issue of Gastronomica engages with different disciplines and formats by bringing together short essays and reflections on the field of philosophy from scholars around the world. By attending to ethics, value, and aesthetics through a range of topics that include art, taste, hunger, sustainability, food waste, and bioethics and GLP-1s, the special issue highlights different perspectives on how food can enter philosophical practice.

Gastronomica’s special issue on food and philosophy was published in Fall 2025 (25.3) and is available online here.

Andrea Borghini is an associate professor of philosophy and the director of Culinary Mind, a research center for the philosophy of food, at the University of Milan. Learn more about his work here and about Culinary Mind here.

Robert T. Valgenti is a professor of liberal arts and food studies at The Culinary Institute of America. A philosopher and translator, he works on the philosophy of food, Italian philosophy, and hermeneutics and is a member of the Editorial Collective at Gastronomica.

Listeners can now find the Gastronomica podcast on the New Books Network here. Subscribe to Gastronomica’s podcast feed to stay updated on the newest episodes.
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In the decades before the establishment of a Jewish state in 1948, native and immigrant Jews in Palestine mediated between Jewish and Arab cultures while navigating their evolving identities as settler colonists. Hebrew Orientalism: Jewish Engagement with Arabo-Islamic Culture in Late Ottoman and British Palestine (Princeton UP, 2025) challenges the conventional view that Hebrew thinkers were dismissive of Arabo-Islamic culture, revealing how they both adopted and adapted elements of it that enhanced Zionist aims.Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from Arabic medieval chronicles, travel narratives, and poetry to modern Hebrew geography and botany texts, Mostafa Hussein provides a nuanced understanding of Hebrew orientalism by focusing on the practical activities of Hebrew writers, such as recuperating the Jewish past in the East, constructing Jewish indigeneity, consolidating Jewish ties to Palestine’s landscape, enhancing understanding of the Hebrew Bible, reviving Hebrew language, and undertaking translation projects. Through the lens of a diverse group of Jewish intellectuals—ranging from Palestine-born Sephardi/Oriental and Ashkenazi Jews to Eastern European immigrants—he unveils the complex realities of cultural exchange and knowledge production, highlighting the dual role of these intellectuals in connecting with the East and promoting Zionist aspirations. Hussein offers fresh insights into the role of scholarly practices in advancing new perspectives on the region and its peoples and forging a modern Zionist Hebrew identity.Illuminating the intricate and often contradictory engagement of Hebrew scholars with Arabo-Islamic culture, Hebrew Orientalism informs contemporary discussions of postcolonialism and settler colonialism and enriches our understanding of the historical dynamics between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.

Mostafa Hussein is assistant professor of Jewish-Muslim studies at the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the editor (with Brahim El Guabli) of Remembering Jews in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern Media.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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How can lives and things that are rendered invisible be crucial to identity, politics, and the future? Drawing on experimental ethnographic research in northeastern Estonia, this book offers vivid answers.

The Future of Hiding: Secrecy, Infrastructure, and Ecological Memory in Estonia's Siberia (Cornell UP, 2025) analyzes the territorial dimensions of secrecy and how concealment occurs in relation to energy infrastructure and identity politics in eastern Estonia. It shows that secrets and hiding places are intrinsic to human affairs, while reconsidering the possibilities of relating ethnographically to what appears to be the extraneous. Francisco Martínez highlights how basements, garages, bunkers, holes, and cottages favor alternative forms of sociality, allowing local residents to redesign the terms of their public selves. Shadow spaces in this liminal region, at the border with Russia, are created against the institutional demand to be knowable. People engage in ordinary forms of ambivalence and refusal to negotiate a sense of loss and the consequences of a century of extractive activities. The Future of Hiding invites cross-disciplinary dialogue on topics like mining, transparency, belonging and cultural landscapes, offering insights into infrastructure's reproduction and destruction, recolonizations, and the ecological memory of a sacrificed area.

Francisco Martínez is an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic research. His work is known for its critical insights and experimental style. He was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and currently works as a Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the University of Murcia, Spain. His email address is [email protected].

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.
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In this special student edition of High Theory, Andrew Bennett, Jo Hoffman, Kai North, and Ally Sullivan tell us about Rugged Individualism, a concept they link to Marxist theory. They made this episode for an assignment in Professor John Linstrom’s course on Theory and Criticism at Centenary College of Louisiana. The students provided the show notes below.

The baby theorist pictured in the fetching onesie is John's newest daughter, and not a member of the theory class that produced this episode.

The transcript of the episode lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF.

Show Notes

1. First minute or so is spent in the introduction of each speaker, being Centenary senior Andrew

Bennett and Centenary junior Jordan Hoffman, Andrew starts off with name dropping the podcast name, being High-Theory student version.

2. The discussion is first spent in going over the origins of rough individualism and what encourages it, which is mostly due to monetary stability.

3. Rugged individualism was seen most utilized during American expansionism during the mid to late nineteenth century, as citizens who moved to the frontier had little to no government to assist them and their families. The discussion later follows up into its more referenced era during the economic boom of the 1920’s under President Herbert Hoover and his take on rugged individualism.

4. First question: Socioeconomic status quo

5. Under the modern era, rugged individualism has been viewed as a negatively impacting idea, especially with lower economic citizens. That is not to say that there aren’t examples of individuals succeeding; however, it is not common. It is a system to keep the poor poorer and the rich richer. This shift started to fully come into view within the Reagan and Clinton administrations from the 80’s to the 90’s and even still in the present day.

6. If we were to compare the American lifestyle to other communities that center around having a community life, they would view it as a form of self-destructiveness.

7. Second question: How to utilize rugged individualism and Marxist, feminist theories

8. Rugged individualism can only work in a true meritocracy with definable gender structures, given the eras it could be said rugged individualism was properly utilized, at least before it was subverted by the wealthy's schemes for power.

9. Third question: Understanding Rugged Individualism in saving the world

10. Having the lower classes become aware of the system that holds them from achieving success for the rich.

11. The discussion begins to arrive to its end as the speakers dwell on how the rich scheme away to keep their advantage, as well as comments regarding gender roles that rugged individualism promotes, particularly with masculinity

12. Conclusion with some minor mentions to previous topics and how they correlate to their lives.
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From the author of Work Won't Love You Back, a stirring examination of how collective grief can ignite powerful change. Our era is one of significant and substantial loss, yet we barely have time to acknowledge it. The losses range from the personal grief of a single COVID death to the planetary disaster wrought by climate change, in an age of unraveling hopes and expectations, of dreams curtailed, of aspirations desiccated. This is capitalism's death phase. It has become clear that the cost of wealth creation for a few is enormous destruction for others, for the marginalized and the vulnerable but increasingly for all of us. At the same time, we are denied the means of mourning those futures that are being so brutally curtailed. At such a moment, taking the time to grieve is a political act. Sarah Jaffe shows how the act of public memorialization has become a radical statement, a vibrant response to loss, and a path to imagining a better world. When we are able to grieve well the ones we have lost, the causes they fought for, or the examples they bequeathed us, we are better prepared to fight for a transformed future.

Sarah Jaffe is a journalist and labor reporter who writes about work, inequality, and social movements. Her work has appeared in major publications such as The Nation, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. Jaffe has long reported on labor struggles and worker organizing, including movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Fight for $15 campaign. She is also the author of Necessary Trouble and Work Won't Love you Back. She is co-host of the labor podcast Belabored. Her writing focuses on how economic systems shape everyday life and workers’ experiences.
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