‘Velvet-red meat patterned with seams of fat like the finest Dali marble. Time has done its work.’ Zhang Mei has always cherished the ham from her native province of Yunnan, China. Growing up in Dali on the banks of the Xi’er River, Mei relished the morsels of ham her father would toss into a dish of spicy green peppers and onions. Over time she learned that the true magic of Yunnan ham lies not just in its salty-sweet taste, produced by an intricate curing process, but also in its ability to bring people together and carry on a time-honoured way of life. Now a successful entrepreneur, Mei returns to her childhood home, finds a leg of ham and travels with it through the cultural and culinary cradle of Dali. Her edible companion becomes a calling card that takes her into the history and traditions of the region and unveils the unique stories and recipes of those who call it home.

A whimsically illustrated yet authoritative guide to the "taxonomy" of dim sum, based on a popular Lucky Peach story. Author and illustrator Carolyn Phillips demystifies the rich, nuanced culinary institution of teahouse snacks in The Dim Sum Field Guide, a pocket-size, definitive resource featuring 80 hand-drawn illustrations. With entries for all the dim sum classics--including siu mai, xiaolongbao, char siu, roast duck, and even sweets like milk tarts and black sesame rolls--this handy reference is perfect for bringing on-the-go to your next dim sum outing. Armchair travelers and Asian food enthusiasts alike will be delighted by this detailed yet accessible look at the distinctly Chinese art of eating well. — NPR's Best Books of 2016

Twenty-four of the country's minority groups call Yunnan home, each retaining their own traditions. Stretching from the Himalayan plateau down to the subtropics, Yunnan encompasses extremes from alpine meadows to rainforest. It is the most diverse region in China culturally, biologically, and meteorologically. On a culinary level, this means Yunnan is one of the most delicious places on earth. The region is famous for its mushrooms, hams, pickles, edible flowers, its use of potatoes, and its love of chillies and Sichuan peppercorns. Yunnan's food is exciting and unfamiliar, but much of it is actually quite easy to make, using simple techniques already familiar to Western cooks. Each chapter covers a different area featuring its cardinal recipes such as Tibetan momo dumplings, Dai cucumber salad with peanuts, the famed "crossingthe- bridge" noodles of Kunming, Eastern-style fried rice with ham, potatoes, and peas, and roasted eggplant salad from near the Burmese border. Complete with profiles of local cooks, artisans, and farmers, as well as breathtaking on-location photography, Cooking South of the Clouds takes readers on an unforgettable journey through the land of Shangri-La and introduces a new world of flavours.

Traveling with Sugar reframes the rising diabetes epidemic as part of a five-hundred-year-old global history of sweetness and power. Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction “sugar”—or, as some say in Belize, “traveling with sugar.” A decade in the making, this book unfolds as a series of crónicas—a word meaning both slow-moving story and slow-moving disease. It profiles the careful work of those “still fighting it” as they grapple with unequal material infrastructures and unsettling dilemmas. Facing a new incarnation of blood sugar, these individuals speak back to science and policy misrecognitions that have prematurely cast their lost limbs and deaths as normal. Their families’ arts of maintenance and repair illuminate ongoing struggles to survive and remake larger systems of food, land, technology, and medicine.

Praise for Sun Yung Shin: Finalist for the Believer Poetry Award "[her] work reads like redactions, offering fragments to be explored, investigated and interrogated, making her reader equal partner in the creation of meaning."—Star Tribune Sun Yung Shin moves ideas—of identity (Korean, American, adoptee, mother, Catholic, Buddhist) and interest (mythology, science fiction, Sophocles)— around like building blocks, forming and reforming new constructions of what it means to be at home. What is a cyborg but a hybrid creature of excess? A thing that exceeds the sum of its parts. A thing that has extended its powers, enhanced, even superpowered.

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A witty history of the state that's always in the news, for everything from alligator attacks to zany crimes. There's an old clip of Bugs Bunny sawing the entire state of Florida off the continent—and every single time a news story springs up about some shenanigans in Florida, someone on the internet posts it in response. Why are we so ready to wave goodbye to the Sunshine State? In A Florida State of Mind: An Unnatural History of Our Weirdest State, James D. Wright makes the case that there are plenty of reasons to be scandalized by the land and its sometimes-kooky, sometimes-terrifying denizens, but there's also plenty of room for hilarity. Florida didn't just become weird; it's built that way. Uncharted swampland doesn't easily give way to sprawling suburbia. It took violent colonization, land scams to trick non-Floridians into buying undeveloped property, and the development of railroads to benefit one man's hotel empire. Even the most natural parts of Florida are unnatural. Florida citrus? Not from here, but from China. Gators? Oh, they're from Florida all right, but that doesn't make having 1 per every 20 humans normal. Animals...in the form of roadkill? Only Florida allows you to keep anything you kill on the road (and anything you find). Yet everyone loves Florida: tourists come in droves, and people relocate to Florida constantly (only 36% of residents were born there). Crammed with unforgettable stories and facts, Florida will show readers exactly why.