Romina Delmonte reviews Jean Pierre Poulain’s “The Sociology of Food: Eating and the Place of Food in Society,” as translated by Augusta Dörr, which reads as a theoretical essay and an introductory guide to sociologies of food.

Jeffrey Rowe reviews Alison Hope Alkon and Julie Guthman’s edited volume “The New Food Activism: Opposition, Cooperation, and Collective Action,” which he reads as a call to action.

Erica Zurawski reviews Emma-Jayne Abbots’s “The Agency of Eating: Mediation, Food and the Body,” which unites the eater, food, and knowledge to demonstrate the entanglement of matter and meaning-making.

Catherine Price reviews John T. Lang’s “What’s So Controversial about Genetically Modified Food?” She suggests that the book uses GM debates as an entry point to examine the whole of the food system.

Jessica Carbone reviews Henry Notaker’s “A History of Cookbooks: From Kitchen to Page over Seven Centuries,” a book which she argues is a biography of the cookbook genre.