Food, by Jennifer Clapp (Polity, £12.99)
The "world food economy" is a hard thing to get your head around as an ordinary scoffer of far-flung delicacies, but this admirably clear exposition will help. Professor Clapp describes the rise of a global industrial food market over the past 100 years, and notes gently the self-interest of rich countries' "Food Aid" programmes: they saved money on storing their own food mountains, sowed a taste for their grain in poor nations who might then become customers for it, and even fought the cold war by proxy with victuals. "The US food aid program was renamed 'Food for Peace' in the late 1950s."
Clapp describes the "uneven" rules of international agricultural trade and the concentration of power in "giant agrifood companies", and finally surveys reformist or dissident initiatives ("food sovereignty", "food justice"). She explains illuminatingly the increasing "financialisation" of and speculation in food commodities, which contributed, she suggests, to the price volatility that led to food riots in 2008. Will sub-prime eaters be blamed for some future market crash? It makes you think twice about a second breakfast.
Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, by Kenneth Gross (Chicago, £16)
I for one cannot resist a book whose first chapter is entitled "The Madness of Puppets", with its surely intentional subliminal reference to Metallica. What does a puppet, the English-prof author wonders, know about our world, and why is it keeping quiet about it? Gross pursues the uncanny puppet by talking to puppeteers and puppetmakers and watching puppet shows all over the world, including a German production of King Lear in which everyone except Lear and the Fool was a puppet (clever). He meditates on the puppets of Paul Klee ("They are astonished to find themselves as puppets"), and visits an old Roman puppet gallerist, who "frequently laments the decline of a serious popular puppet theater". (Was our own Spitting Image once a kind of revival?)
The puppet, Gross notes, is political (they were banned in Mussolini's Italy) and demonic. He cites Sesame Street, Cervantes, Kafka, Russell Hoban and Philip Roth, and offers his own morbidly delightful list of "Fables for a Puppet Theatre" ("A mirror walks down a road"; "A crumb explores a table cloth"). As one eventually emerges from this hall of puppets, everything seems charged with potential life. I watched my pencil, uncertainly.
Whitstable Mum in Custard Shortage, edited by Joel Rickett (Viking, £12.99)
The most apparently frivolous news is important to someone: so runs the gently humane implication of this miscellany of silly-sounding stories from British local newspapers. Often, resourceful journalists gamely try to sex up the dossier: "CSI-style tests reveal locksmith killed badger"; "Worthing runaway electric buggy chaos". You can tell the authors of some were having fun: "Nuns in fight against strippers"; or, when girl guides are praised for picking up litter, "Guides delighted with their rubbish award".
Other stories relay tragic micronarratives in a fistful of words: "Tortoise stolen to sell for booze"; "Woman swallows spoon". The most touching headlines simply report a way in which the world has been made slightly nicer: "Camera found", "Runners complete marathon", "Road stays open", and "Welsh bungalow has neat garden". (Or is that last one supposed to be surprising?) Some stories are educational, too: under the headline "Boiled egg explodes", a firefighter is quoted as explaining that an elderly woman "boiled [her egg] dry they just go bang and it blackened the pan." I felt good about having fried mine.
