Labor And The Locavore

Labor and the Locavore focuses on one of the most vibrant local food economies in the country, the Hudson Valley that supplies New York restaurants and farmers markets. Based on more than a decade's in-depth interviews with workers, farmers, and others, Gray clearly documents how the romance of small family farms serves to mask the predicament of their migrant workforce. She also explores the historical roots of farmworkers' substandard conditions and examines the region's shift from black to Latino workers.--Publisher description.

A new generation of food activists has come to believe that “sustainable farming” and “eating local” are the way to solve a host of perceived problems with our modern food supply system. By combining healthy eating and a high standard of environmental stewardship, these locavores think, we can also deliver important economic benefits and increase food security within local economies. But after a thorough review of the evidence, economic geographer Pierre Desrochers and policy analyst Hiroko Shimizu have concluded these claims are mistaken. In The Locavore’s Dilemma, they explain the history, science, and economics of food supply to reveal what locavores miss or misunderstand: the real environmental impacts of agricultural production; the drudgery of subsistence farming; and the essential role large-scale, industrial producers play in making food more available, varied, affordable, and nutritionally rich than ever before in history. At best, they show, locavorism is a well-meaning marketing fad among the world’s most privileged consumers. At worst, it constitutes a dangerous distraction from solving serious global food issues. Deliberately provocative, but based on scrupulous research and incontrovertible scientific evidence, The Locavore’s Dilemma proves that: • Our modern food-supply chain is a superior alternative that has evolved through constant competition and ever-more-rigorous efficiency. • A world food chain characterized by free trade and the absence of agricultural subsidies would deliver lower prices and more variety in a manner that is both economically and environmentally more sustainable. • There is no need to feel guilty for not joining the locavores on their crusade. Eating globally, not only locally, is the way to save the planet.

The California farmlands have long served as a popular symbol of America�s natural abundance and endless opportunity. Yet, from John Steinbeck�s The Grapes of Wrath and Carlos Bulosan�s America Is in the Heart to Helena Maria Viramontes�s Under the Feet of Jesus, many novels, plays, movies, and songs have dramatized the brutality and hardships of working in the California fields. Little scholarship has focused on what these cultural productions tell us about who belongs in America, and in what ways they are allowed to belong. In The Nature of California, Sarah Wald analyzes this legacy and its consequences by examining the paradoxical representations of California farmers and farmworkers from the Dust Bowl migration to present-day movements for food justice and immigrant rights. Analyzing fiction, nonfiction, news coverage, activist literature, memoirs, and more, Wald gives us a new way of thinking through questions of national belonging by probing the relationships among race, labor, and landownership. Bringing together ecocriticism and critical race theory, she pays special attention to marginalized groups, examining how Japanese American journalists, Filipino workers, United Farm Workers members, and contemporary immigrants-rights activists, among others, pushed back against the standard narratives of landownership and citizenship.

Known as “The Salad Bowl of the World,” California’s Salinas Valley became an agricultural empire due to the toil of diverse farmworkers, including Latinos. A sweeping critical history of how Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants organized for their rights in the decades leading up to the seminal strikes led by Cesar Chavez, this important work also looks closely at how different groups of Mexicans—U.S. born, bracero, and undocumented—confronted and interacted with one another during this period. An incisive study of labor, migration, race, gender, citizenship, and class, Lori Flores’s first book offers crucial insights for today’s ever-growing U.S. Latino demographic, the farmworker rights movement, and future immigration policy.

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Food Issues explores the topic of food across multiple disciplines within the social sciences and related areas including business, consumerism, marketing, and environmentalism. In contrast to the existing reference works on the topic of food that tend to fall into the categories of cultural perspectives, this carefully balanced academic encyclopedia focuses on social and policy aspects of food production, safety, regulation, labeling, marketing, distribution, and consumption. A sampling of general topic areas covered includes Agriculture, Labor, Food Processing, Marketing and Advertising, Trade and Distribution, Retail and Shopping, Consumption, Food Ideologies, Food in Popular Media, Food Safety, Environment, Health, Government Policy, and Hunger and Poverty. This encyclopedia introduces students to the fascinating, and at times contentious, and ever-so-vital field involving food issues. Key Features: Contains approximately 500 signed entries concluding with cross-references and suggestions for further readings Organized A-to-Z with a thematic “Reader’s Guide” in the front matter grouping related entries by general topic area Provides a Resource Guide and a detailed and comprehensive Index along with robust search-and-browse functionality in the electronic edition This three-volume reference work will serve as a general, non-technical resource for students and researchers who seek to better understand the topic of food and the issues surrounding it.

Knowledge, Class, and Economics: Marxism without Guarantees surveys the "Amherst School" of non-determinist Marxist political economy, 40 years on: its core concepts, intellectual origins, diverse pathways, and enduring tensions. The volume’s 30 original essays reflect the range of perspectives and projects that comprise the Amherst School—the interdisciplinary community of scholars that has enriched and extended, while never ceasing to interrogate and recast, the anti-economistic Marxism first formulated in the mid-1970s by Stephen Resnick, Richard Wolff, and their economics Ph.D. students at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The title captures the defining ideas of the Amherst School: an open-system framework that presupposes the complexity and contingency of social-historical events and the parallel "overdetermination" of the relationship between subjects and objects of inquiry, along with a novel conception of class as a process of performing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor. In a collection of 30 original essays, chapters confront readers with the core concepts of overdetermination and class in the context of economic theory, postcolonial theory, cultural studies, continental philosophy, economic geography, economic anthropology, psychoanalysis, and literary theory/studies. Though Resnick and Wolff’s writings serve as a focal point for this collection, their works are ultimately decentered—contested, historicized, reformulated. The topics explored will be of interest to proponents and critics of the post-structuralist/postmodern turn in Marxian theory and to students of economics as social theory across the disciplines (economics, geography, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, among others).

Strawberries are big business in California. They are the sixth‐highest‐grossing crop in the state, which produces 88 percent of the nation’s favorite berry. Yet the industry is often criticized for its backbreaking labor conditions and dependence on highly toxic soil fumigants used to control fungal pathogens and other soilborne pests. In Wilted, Julie Guthman tells the story of how the strawberry industry came to rely on soil fumigants, and how that reliance reverberated throughout the rest of the fruit’s production system. The particular conditions of plants, soils, chemicals, climate, and laboring bodies that once made strawberry production so lucrative in the Golden State have now changed and become a set of related threats that jeopardize the future of the industry.

Food ethics, as an academic pursuit, is vast, incorporating work from philosophy as well as anthropology, economics, environmental sciences and other natural sciences, geography, law, and sociology. This Handbook provides a sample of recent philosophical work in food ethics. This philosophical work addresses ethical issues with agricultural production, the structure of the global food system, the ethics of personal food consumption, the ethics of food policy, and cultural understandings of food and eating, among other issues. The work in this Handbook draws on multiple literatures within philosophy, including practical ethics, normative ethics, and political philosophy, as well as drawing on non-philosophical work.