Picnics and Porcupines

You'll want to settle onto a picnic blanket to read this thoughtful, well-written consideration of food, place, and people in American history. Goucher invites you to consider this treasured pastime with terrific photographs and revealing recipes, offering insights into the picnic adventures of German settlers in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She finds meaning in the history of family, community, and the celebrations of eating outdoors as she considers travel and transportation in the context of Indigenous people and colonialism and an emerging American culture. It's a terrific book—a really successful personal narration layered with well-researched, insightful history and physical context.

~Katherine Parkin, professor of history, Monmouth University, and author of Food Is Love

Candice Goucher combines her extraordinary knowledge of world history with a deeply intimate, local history of foodways in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Picnics and Porcupines offers rich insights and recipes that are valuable not only to scholars but to all lovers of food, history, and eating outdoors.

~Urmi Engineer Willoughby, associate professor of history, Pitzer College