‘The Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans’ by Theresa McCulla

“The Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans” by Theresa McCulla c.2024, The University of Chicago Press $32.50 345 pages Author Theresa McCulla (Photo/Marion Meakem) You’ve spent a lot of time scouring the internet in search of menus. Will you try this dish, or that one? Sample two entrees, or three? Can you understand the people in a city without tasting their best dishes? You’ll know soon enough because you’ve chosen the restaurants for your dining experiment but remember: as in the new book “Insatiable City” by Theresa McCulla, the taste of the truth may be bitter. In the early summer of 1719, the slave ship the Aurora, “the first ship bearing enslaved people to arrive in Louisiana from Africa” dropped anchor just off the French territory of Basse-Louisiana, near the city of New Orleans. Once the ship was emptied, her human cargo was fed and then immediately taken and sold on a large auction block at a market inside a “luxurious hotel” while white buyers ate and drank their fill at a nearby bar. This one act forever tied New Orleans’ famous cuisine with its racial history McCalla says that enslaved women who were known to be “good...