Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food

Global Appetites explores the importance of industrial agriculture and countercultural food movements to globalization, and argues that the modern food system is crucial to conceptions of U.S. global power since the First World War. The book centers on 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 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 readers interested in American literature and culture as well as those interested in food writing, food policy, agriculture history, social justice, and the environmental humanities.