Week 5 Will men do the canning? Gender and local food

Week 5  Feb. 28-March 1

Will men do the canning? Gender and local food

Deutsch, Tracey. 2011. Memories of mothers in the kitchen: local foods, history and women’s work. Radical History Review. 110: 167-177

Kingsolver, Barbara. 2007. Animal, vegetable, miracle. New York, Harper Collins. Ch. 1 Called Home, pp. 1-22, Ch. 9, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Late June pp. 124-147
Check out this website Farmer Jane

In the local food movement, one subject even more rarely addressed than race is gender. With all this growing, canning, preparing and cooking, not to mention all the shopping from different spots for the freshest and most local, it is fair to ask, who will do it?  These days many women work the double shift--one shift at home and another in an office or factory. Children are ferried here and there to greater extent and women still do the majority of housework. This workload is made lighter by the wonders of prepared food and microwaves. But if cooking needs to shift to 'properly, with love from scratch', women will need another few hours in their day. Or men will need to pick up the slack. But that assumes a nuclear family with 9-5 jobs and significant wealth and flexibility. Most don't have this. After this reading, we will have considered critiques of local food's gender politics, its whiteness and class privilege, the emphasis on obesity as well as the relationship of these efforts to capitalism and neoliberalism.

Barbara Kingsolver is best known as the novelist who's written acclaimed fiction such as The Poisonwood Bible and Pigs in Heaven. After living for many years in the Arizona desert, she decided this was no longer sustainable. She and her family moved to a location in Kentucky near Huntington West Virginia (the site of Jamie Oliver’s first food revolution) where they tried to live by eating what they raised and what they could buy locally. The book has been an enormous success coming at a time when the US public is increasingly interested in (obsessed with) local food. While we can admire Kingsolver and marvel at her experience, we can also critique her perspective. Tracey Deutsch is an historian at UMN whose book Building a Housewife's Paradise covers the gender, class and race politics of the rise of supermarkets. 


Focus your attention on the paper by Tracey Deutsch. Look at the Farmer Jane website and read Kingsolver critically to see if you can tell what Deutsch is talking about. Outline Tracey's big points and make connections between this reading, others from the course, your research project, material from other classes and/or your experience. As always, on the blog or in your notes, indicate what was confusing so we can go over it.

Week 5 Eating too much?

Guthman, Julie. 2011. Weighing in. Berkeley, University of California Press. Ch. 5 Does eating (too much) make you fat?


As I read this chapter, I thought of a novel I'd recommend called, My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki. In it the main character makes links between DES, a hormone the reading mentions, premature development and cancer.  Here's the blurb from Amazon: "When documentarian Jane Takagi-Little finally lands a job producing a Japanese television show that just happens to be sponsored by the American meat-exporting industry, she begins to uncover some unsavory truths about love, fertility, and a very dangerous hormone called DES." Also relatedly, I listened to a podcast from the Commonwealth Club by the director of the Environmental Working Group. They tested blood from 10 umbilical cords for 400 chemicals. Though neither of these sources makes reference to obesity, they do discuss the known unknowns about our chemical load. (Neither is required listening/reading).

Outline what you've learned from reading this chapter. What's the take home message? What makes sense? Pose questions from your disciplinary background. You'll see reference to Bourdieu (of Distinction fame). Show me you remember and understand.