Global Appetites
American Power and the Literature of Food

This literary study explores how agribusiness, industrial agriculture and countercultural food movements underpin modern American conceptions of global power.

Allison Carruth (Author)

9781107032828, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 May 2013

260 pages, 12 b/w illus.
23.1 x 15.7 x 2.8 cm, 0.51 kg

Global Appetites explores how industrial agriculture and countercultural food movements underpin US conceptions of global power in the century since the First World War. Allison Carruth's study centers on what she terms 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 American texts ranging from Willa Cather's novel O Pioneers! (1913) to Novella Carpenter's non-fiction 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 scholars of American literature and culture as well as those working in the fields of food studies, food policy, agriculture history, social justice and the environmental humanities.

1. Introduction: the power of food
2. Rural modernity: Willa Cather and the rise of agribusiness
3. 'Luxury feeding' and war rations: food writing at mid-century
4. Supermarkets and exotic foods: Toni Morrison's 'chocolate eater'
5. Post-industrial pastoral: Ruth Ozeki and the new muckrakers
6. Conclusion: food writing in the age of information
Bibliography
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literary theory [DSA]