Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food

by Allison Carruth

Global Appetites explores the importance of industrial agriculture and countercultural food movements to globalization, and argues that the modern food system is crucial to conceptions of U.S. global power since the First World War. The book centers on the "literature of food" - a body of work that comprises literary realism, late modernism, and magical realism along with culinary writing, food memoir, and advertising. Through analysis of texts ranging from Willa Cather's novel O Pioneers ! (1913) to Novella Carpenter's nonfiction work Farm City (2009), Carruth argues that stories about how the United States cultivates, distributes, and consumes food imbue it with the power to transform social and ecological systems around the world. Lively and accessible, this interdisciplinary study will appeal to readers interested in American literature and culture as well as those interested in food writing, food policy, agriculture history, social justice, and the environmental humanities.

260 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[sdw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Allison Carruth’s Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food exemplifies the possibilities for literary criticism to engage in the field of Food Studies. Carruth contributes to critiques of the agrarian nostalgia in contemporary locavore memoirs by revealing the role of the translocal in the sustainable food movement. She reveals that such literature is indebted to ideas about cultural diversity and sovereignty that circulate in environmental justice and food justice movements. Moreover, locavore movements are themselves global in nature and rely on a translocal network of actors and information. Indeed, U.S. writing about food has never been purely local or even national. Rather, Carruth shows food has been central to U.S. articulations of its relationship to the global from World War I to the present. She starts with an analysis of Willa Cather’s writing about the relationship between U.S. agriculture, railroads, and global food aid in World War I, moves to a discussion of the relationship between food sacrifice and luxury eating in a variety of World War II era texts, incorporates a truly fascinating discussion of Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby as food justice text, and then overs a discussion of Ruth Ozeki’s first two novels as postindustrial pastoral prior to her closing analysis of locavore literature. She tracks here the U.S.’s growing relationship to the export market and places the rise of agribusiness in a global framework that predates the 1950s.

Her book challenges the separation of agricultural history from the field of food studies, suggesting that U.S. literature maps relationships between production and consumption (thus, the need to link the two fields and study the relations between production and consumption politics, particularly in relation to empire). That, is Carruth convincingly challenges the now common knowledge that globalization has separated the spaces of production and consumption by showing the ways they are linked spaces in U.S. literature. Carruth does this in part through mapping the relationship in U.S. literature between the personal experiences (liberal subjecthood) and broader networks/systems of power.

[Erica]

Thesis: "...the literature of food shows us that the endgame of globalization may not be the free market that the United States has underwritten for decades and backed with its military. Rather, it opens up the possibility that the outcome of globalization may be a postacapitalist system defined by interchanges between regional communities and the global networks that not only fulfill appetites for exotic foods but also circulate the knowledge and resources that advance alternative food movements, from organic agriculture to urban farming" (8). Let's hope so!

Prescient work on food studies (food lit, mostly). Thorough and thoughtful analyses of several major works--and some not-so-well-known (but know canonical, due to her Carruth's treatment!) works in American lit. I need to get my hands on Whitman's "Pioneers, O Pioneers" and Morrison's -Tar Baby- pronto!