About the Book

Global Appetites explores how industrial agriculture and countercultural food movements underpin U.S. 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 nonfiction 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.

• Opens a channel between literary criticism and food studies, showing that a wide range of writers have addressed issues of food politics and agribusiness
• Covers nearly a century of realist and postmodern fiction, poetry, drama, culinary writing, food memoir, visual propaganda, art and advertising
• Integrates globalization studies with textual analysis to address the histories of agribusiness, industrial agriculture and countercultural food movements

Author: Allison Carruth

Cambridge University Press

260 pages (Paperback)