The Geopolitics of Food and the Environmental Humanities

A review of Allison Carruth, Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food. New York: Cambridge UP, 2013. Print.

In October 2004, the first Terra Madre conference, an international network of food communities, was held in Turin, Italy, bringing together 5,000 small-scale food producers, chefs, academics, NGOs, and representatives of local societies from 130 countries. This meeting helped to initiate the Slow Food movement around the world by successfully synthesizing national and regional organizations not limited to the global North (e.g. Canada, Ireland, Sweden) but also including the global South (e.g. Brazil, India, Tanzania) and the Asia-Pacific region (e.g. Japan and South Korea). Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva argues that the main purpose of Terra Madre is to “provide an opportunity and platform to articulate another paradigm for food” opposed to the globalized industrial food system that threatens “diversity of species and cultures, small producers, local economics, and indigenous knowledge” (3-4). Similarly, Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement, contends that the production of “good, clean, and fair food” is only possible through the local economy because “food quality depends on consumers who respect agricultural labor and educate their senses” (17-19). What these two environmental activists suggest, then, is that a local food production system rooted in small-scale farming can be a powerful channel to promote sustainable agriculture in order to preserve cultural and biological diversity in an increasingly globalized world. Yet this does not mean that they reject all forms of globalization. Rather, they propose a new model of what Petrini terms “virtuous globalization,” which considers the value and meaning of the local while being critical of one-dimensional economic globalization that reinforces corporate agriculture, monoculture, and genetically modified food all over the planet in the name of “efficiency” (or economic profit).
 
Allison Carruth’s Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food contributes to the call for “a new account of globalization” by using the cultural archives of food  to explain the inseparable connections between “U.S. food power” and the rise of decolonializing movements such as environmental justice (8, 4). Through the lens of environmental literary and cultural studies, she examines how the divide between food production (farming) and consumption (eating) was tied to globalization and U.S. national hegemony throughout the twentieth century. For Carruth, this divide stems from the rapid development of American agribusiness in which food security has become a synonym for national security, that is, a component of the “military-industrial complex” (13). Carruth argues that “literature provides a powerful medium” that illuminates “both the historical continuities and cultural ruptures” in the making of global appetites and American ideology (5). Carruth develops her argument by first scrutinizing food writing in the context of war during the first half of the twentieth century then turning to contemporary food writing (fiction and non-fiction) and its interest in transnational corporations, cosmopolitan consumers, and countercultural food practices in relation to the globalization of agribusiness. Global Appetites offers a panoramic view of interdisciplinary food studies and environmental criticism; Carruth’s examples range from literary modernism, experimental poetry, and postmodern fiction to culinary writing, food memoirs, and bioart (an art practice that incorporates biotechnology into the creative arts).
 
Carruth’s methodological framework draws on theories of globalization (Arjun Appadurai, David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, and Saskia Sassen) as well as structuralist theories of cuisine (Roland Barthes, Mary Douglas, and Claude Lévi-Strauss) and studies of the agricultural (Terry Gifford, Leo Marx, and Raymond Williams). At the same time, we can situate Global Appetites within recent work on what Ursula Heise calls the “transnational turn” in American studies and ecocriticism (381-83). In “Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of U.S. Environmental Imagination on a Planetary Scale,” Lawrence Buell argues that environmental criticism often tends to focus exclusively on U.S. literary studies and so risks reinforcing the national imaginary despite the field’s commitment to a holistic view of nature because “the value traditionally set on ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’” served as “definers of US cultural-geographical distinctiveness” (229). Although Carruth’s book revolves around U.S. literature, she is well aware of the limitations of North American environmentalism and its former and perhaps ongoing fidelity to the nation-state; and her use of a transnational context for each chapter as a narrative strategy to bridge the gap between the local and the global suggests that rethinking this body of literature in connection to the world is possible. In this sense, the book strongly resonates with works such as Buell’s The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2005), Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008), Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley’s Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (2011), Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), and Karen Thornber’s Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (2012), all of which attempt to expand the boundaries of ecocriticism beyond the US by adopting a more nuanced global and comparative perspective.
 
In Global Appetites’ cultural historiography of food, Carruth begins with Willa Cather’s Nebraska novels—O Pioneers! (1913), My Ántonia (1918), and One of Ours (1922)—which envision what she terms “rural modernity,” a concept that elucidates the relationship between war-related technologies and industrial agriculture in the early twentieth century. Reconsidering Cather’s novels as narratives of “the pioneer-farmer as an agent of industrial capitalism,” Carruth finds in them “the development of national and global food systems that yoke farming to the spheres of engineering, finance, consumer culture, and, finally, world war” (20). She analyzes material related to agricultural history as well as Cather’s novels to show that “rural America was crucial to the war in two ways, then: as a source of soldiers and food surpluses” (44). The chapter compellingly reconceives our understanding of the Midwest from an ideal space of the American pastoral to a frontier of global food production by situating the region centrally in the growth of American national power across the Atlantic during World War I. Carruth observes that if the pastoral is not a mere retreat from modernity, Cather’s fiction opens a door for “a dialectic of food cultivation and agribusiness” that is significant in its account of “the wider history of modernity” (48).
 
Continuing the theme of food politics and the rise of American national power in the transatlantic context, Chapter 3 attends to war rations and cooking in mid-century literature—Lorine Niedecker’s experimental poetry, M.F.K. Fisher’s and Elizabeth David’s cookbooks, and Samuel Beckett’s absurdist theater—shifting the scholarly focus from the farm field to the dining table. By juxtaposing the virtues of war rationing touted by government propaganda and corporate advertising with the literary representation of the individual’s yearning for the freedom to eat what one wants, Carruth claims that cooking and writing about cooking can be revolutionary strategies to survive political oppression (emotional hunger) and food scarcity (bodily hunger). The chapter is strongest at its most experimental where it applies “modernist forms of montage”—in a mixture of different literary genres such as poetry, culinary writing, and plays, as well as visual materials—to develop its academic argument (78). To illustrate a broader account of food politics (namely, American abundance and European austerity) across the Atlantic, she not only relies on American women writers’ portrayal of food rationing and fine dining in contrast to rural famine in America but also extends to European writers’ views on war-time food control and bodily desire for (borrowing from George Orwell) “luxury feeding” (50). While her analysis of David’s cookbook offers fertile ground for understanding the cultural and historical context of British war rationing and imperialism in the food trade in parallel with American food power, the bleak landscape of Beckett’s absurdist play Waiting for Godot (1953) slowly overlaps with Niedecker’s Wisconsin when we consider the aftermath of the war and the uneven progress of capitalism in rural areas. Comparing these seemingly disparate late modernist texts, Carruth concludes that “it was during both world wars that the United States established an ideological and material foundation for becoming the ‘greatest agricultural production plant on earth’ and for, in turn, globalizing the American food system” (89).
 
In the second half of Global Appetites, Carruth stretches toward the Caribbean and the Pacific to explore the intersections between global agribusiness, a byproduct of US imperialism and the neoliberal economy, and the emergence of the environmental justice movement through a close reading of contemporary novels by American multiethnic women writers. Chapter 4 reads Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981), set on fictionalized Caribbean islands and moving between the US and France, as an “environmental justice text” wherein the regional and global food routes are intertwined with colonial history, consumerism, and tourism in the Caribbean (116). Engaging with postcolonial ecocriticism and African-American and Caribbean studies, Carruth contends that the novel shows the correlation between the global chocolate economy and (post)colonial history in the region, on the one hand, and “a vision of local eating that encompasses disparate practices and politics,” on the other (92). In Chapter 5, Carruth turns to the travel of meat along transpacific routes to “chart connections between meat and media in a postindustrial context” (119) focusing on Ruth Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats (1999). If Chapter 4 expands the transnational range of Carruth’s argument as it reveals the dialectic of history and temporality in the context of the Caribbean, Chapter 5 adds another dimension to Global Appetites as it claims how the rise of digital media has radically altered the ways in which we perceive the invisible, destructive impacts of industrial agriculture on the environment, public health, and marginalized communities around the globe. In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon argues, “Writer-activists can help us apprehend [environmental] threats imaginatively that remain imperceptible to the senses” (15). They could be critical interlocutors, he says, capable of producing new cultural forms to “counter the layered invisibility that results from insidious threats, from temporal protractedness, and from the fact that the afflicted are people whose quality of life—and often whose very existence—is of indifferent interest to the corporate media” (16). Carruth further develops Nixon’s claim by weaving analyses of Ozeki’s novel together with emergent cultural forms such as “the locavore memoir” (environmental non-fiction) and “the multimedia practice of bioart,” at the same time as she reads the hybrid form of the novel—realism, metafiction, and sentimentalism—as a mirror of what she terms the “postindustrial pastoral,” a literary genre that oscillates between a desire for the idyllic pastoral life free of the market system and increasing urbanization and an attitude of skepticism toward this mode of life in the age of industrial agriculture (150-52). Here Carruth provides her most convincing account of the utility of literature at the moment of the global environmental crises. “Ozeki’s body of fiction,” she writes, “manifests a kindred concern with transforming the sheer amount of data about American agribusiness into stories – narrative primers on alternative food movements from seed saving to vegetarianism that readers can digest and perhaps put to use,” because a writer can help his/her audience better understand “an abstract and globalized food system via the interpersonal, the intimate, and the everyday” (153).
 
The final chapter of Global Appetites envisions the future of food, and the possibility of alternative global food networks that reconnect food producers and consumers, through a close examination of several best-selling locavore memoirs published in North America. Although Carruth is less optimistic about the recent popularity of locavore memoir as it “elides the histories of empire, territorial war, and slavery that define food in the era before American agribusiness and that … continue to in the era since,” she affirms the positive future of “a ‘reflexive localism’ attentive to power structures and built on ‘shared knowledge’” (159-60, 161). Food critic Eric Schlosser, after observing the significant absence of cultural minorities at the 2008 Slow Food Nation conference in San Francisco, similarly highlights that “the movement for sustainable agriculture has to reckon with the simple fact that it will never be sustainable without these people [the majority of Americans – ordinary working people, the poor, people of color]” (5). So how can we pursue environmental justice for all, one more sensitive to the contradictions of the movement that have focused on the white, urban middle class from its inception? Why might the study of literature be relevant to resolving this issue in today’s food politics? Carruth’s critical point throughout the book is that the literature of food creates an imaginative network that fosters knowledge of the complex systems of food production and consumption on the global horizon while also empowering citizens to act on their knowledge at the local level. The detailed close readings of food writing from the early twentieth century to the present are sure to motivate researchers and teachers seeking to move beyond the conventional boundaries of ecocriticism, including scholars outside literary studies who wish to develop rich opportunities for interdisciplinary studies. By suggesting a new model of the humanities—the Environmental Humanities—in the face of contemporary environmental issues, Global Appetites advances the field of environmental criticism through its active engagement with other disciplines, such as food studies, globalization studies, science and technology studies, agricultural history, and environmental arts. This audacious interdisciplinary work demonstrates that the humanities can contribute to a larger environmental discourse, which has mostly been articulated by scholars in the social and natural sciences. The humanities, too, have begun to cultivate the seeds of environmental consciousness for global communities in the twenty-first century.