Just like any good chef, a vegan chef needs to be equipped with the right tools: fresh plant-based ingredients, a sharp knife, and -- of course -- a few good books. Over the course of rabble.ca's vegan challenge, the book lounge will provide a sampling of some recently published books available for vegans and aspiring vegans.

This is the second of a two-part series. Read the first part here!

Just like any good chef, a vegan chef needs to be equipped with the right tools: fresh plant-based ingredients, a sharp knife, and -- of course -- a few good books. Over the course of rabble.ca's vegan challenge, the book lounge will provide a sampling of some recently published books available for vegans and aspiring vegans. Here is part two....

I have a confession. I don't consider myself a "foodie." In my blog, Folks Gotta Eat, I curate and filter a lot of information related to food, but I'm more concerned with the politics and policies of food security than I am with the latest hip eatery, or even reports of undeniably good pie at some truck stop out on the 401. I do not know the names of acclaimed chefs -- unless they are food security activists -- and I never watch the Food Network (I don't even own a television). I was talking with a food security activist the other day, and she revealed that she wears a button on her clothes, usually tucked out of sight, that says, "F@#K Foodies!"

There's a kind of book that many antiquarian book dealers put in the category Social History simply for want of a better term. I'm thinking here of lineal descendants of such classic works as Hans Zinsser's Rats, Lice and History (1935) or Self-Love, David Cole Gordon's study of masturbation (1968): ones that bring a whole book's worth of research and thought to bear on a subject that might at first seem so small, trivial or self-evident as to be unworthy of such overkill -- at least until one actually reads them. I don't know quite why, but in recent times most of these seem to have been published by university presses. Random examples include Hotel: An American History by A.K.