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Abstract
The Jeffersonian narratives about food and farming that dominate the food movement in the United States too often obscure immigrants' crucial role in US food production. This paper examines the narrative strategies that reveal and obscure immigrant workers' connections to food by analyzing two popular texts about food and farming: Michael Pollan's non-fictional The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006) and Helena María Viramontes's novel Under the Feet of Jesus (1995). Pollan's focus on the relationship between farm and fork often erases workers' visibility in the systems he describes. Viramontes's novel offers a useful corrective as the text imagines the lives of farm workers, emphasizing the workers' humanity to oppose the criminalization of farm workers. Reading the two works side-by-side suggests the limitations of a contemporary food movement oriented too heavily towards the consumer and asserts the possibilities of a food justice movement emphasizing workers' and immigrants' rights.
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Sarah D. Wald
Sarah D. Wald is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Studies & Sustainability and English at Drew University. She is currently completing a book entitled The Nature of Citizenship: Race, Labor, and Nature in Representations of Californian Agricultural Labor. The book is based on her dissertation, which Brown University honored with the Joukowsky Family Foundation Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2009. Wald is also the author of “‘We ain't foreign': Constructing the Joads' White Citizenship” in The Grapes of Wrath: A Reconsideration (Rodopi, 2009). Department of English, Drew University, 36 Madison Avenue, Madison, NJ 07940, USA ([email protected]).
