Carolyn de la Peña

Artificial sweetener as a historical window to culturally situated health

This article employs the history of artificial sweetener consumption in the United States as a window onto the ways in which American women defined health as a physical and cultural construct in the mid‐20th century. It uses, as an evidentiary basis, two consumer case studies: the initial adoption of saccharin and cyclamates in the 1950s, and the defense of saccharin in the wake of pending FDA restrictions in 1977. These instances suggest that individuals have historically based their assessment of healthy food products on both their understanding of the products’ physical impact and their set of held values, attitudes, and beliefs particular to a historical moment. They also suggest that gender, class, and geographic location are formative influences on how those values, attitudes, and beliefs are constructed. The history of artificial sweetener consumption points to the importance of considering health from a physical and cultural point of view in attempts to shape nutrition practice and policy in the United States.

Ready‐to‐Wear Globalism:

The Prada Soho store allows shoppers to confirm their status as privileged consumers within the global marketplace, a processs I term “GPS.” This occurs through their interactions with “mediating materials”—objects in the store that provide a context in which bodies and items for sale are understood. Scholars of interior design and architecture have previously overlooked this message by viewing the space through the eyes of its designer, Rem Koolhaas. Exploring the space as viewed by shoppers reveals that technological materials within the store place shopping within a globalized context. They allow individuals to safely confront the homogenizing and destabilizing elements of globalized production and consumption and to leave assured that they remain precious, elite, and individualized through their association with the brand.The Prada Soho store allows shoppers to confirm their status as privileged consumers within the global marketplace, a processs I term “GPS.” This occurs through their interactions with “mediating materials”—objects in the store that provide a context in which bodies and items for sale are understood. Scholars of interior design and architecture have previously overlooked this message by viewing the space through the eyes of its designer, Rem Koolhaas. Exploring the space as viewed by shoppers reveals that technological materials within the store place shopping within a globalized context. They allow individuals to safely confront the homogenizing and destabilizing elements of globalized production and consumption and to leave assured that they remain precious, elite, and individualized through their association with the brand.

The frontiers of food studies

From the First Lady’s organic garden to policy proposals that would tax soda consumption to Julia Robert’s meal-based healing on the big screen, food is a site of American political, social and popular fixation. This, then, is a cultural moment when food studies scholars have an opportunity to stretch beyond the archive, the text, or the performance and say something about food issues. A recent panel at the Association for the Study of Food and Society drew several food studies scholars together to consider

Good to Think with: Another Look at the Mechanized Tomato

AbstractThis article focuses on the relationships between individuals along the innovation chain that made the rapid mechanization of the tomato harvest possible in 1960s California. Based on oral histories, extension documents, trade journal stories and advertising materials, it argues that two factors enabled the rapid shift from hand to machine labor. First, the Bracero Programs political fragility combined with the economic importance of Californias tomato crops to produce an imagined future shortage of labor, motivating the University of California and regional growers to prioritize research on tomato mechanization. Second, mechanizing tomatoes enabled men from different backgrounds to think in ways that were highly desirable given the eras emphasis on managerial and scientific systems. These factors worked in tandem to produce a machine that could harvest tomatoes, and a desire on the part of those who made significant investments to purchase and implement those machines, before the end of Bracer...Abstract This article focuses on the relationships between individuals along the innovation chain that made the rapid mechanization of the tomato harvest possible in 1960s California. Based on oral histories, extension documents, trade journal stories and advertising materials, it argues that two factors enabled the rapid shift from hand to machine labor. First, the Bracero Programs political fragility combined with the economic importance of Californias tomato crops to produce an imagined future shortage of labor, motivating the University of California and regional growers to prioritize research on tomato mechanization. Second, mechanizing tomatoes enabled men from different backgrounds to think in ways that were highly desirable given the eras emphasis on managerial and scientific systems. These factors worked in tandem to produce a machine that could harvest tomatoes, and a desire on the part of those who made significant investments to purchase and implement those machines, before the end of Bracero labor in 1964 crystallized the economic and socio-political rewards that would follow. By emphasizing the second set of factors, the article illuminates the importance of personal rewards in the mechanization process along the innovation chain from design, development and dissemination to implementation.

Introduction: Traversing the Local/Global and Food/Culture Divides

This interdisciplinary collection contributes to debates about the role and movement of commodities in the historical and contemporary world. The seven articles and Afterword by noted theorist of cuisine Rachel Laudan collectively address a fundamental tension in the emerging scholarly terrain of food studies, namely theorizing the relationship between foodstuff production and cuisine patterns. Originally drafted as contributions to a conference entitled “Tasting Histories: Food and Drink Cultures Through the Ages,” convened to celebrate the 2009 opening of the Robert Mondavi Institute of Food and Wine Sciences at the University of California, Davis, the seven articles appearing here were selected from approximately fifty papers presented, from over one hundred and thirty submissions. 1 Our conference explored critical issues in food and drink production and consumption, and we encouraged participants to deploy a world-historical lens. We found particularly compelling papers that explored the ways in which food and people interact when one or the other is in motion. In some cases, it is the foods that move, traveling between points of origin and points of consumption on their way to becoming “global” cuisines. In others, it is people who move, creating new meanings for “local” products, sometimes but not always in anticipation of external markets. These papers, now expanded into essays, consider such movements in context, and, in so doing, complicate notions that food “shapes” culture as it crosses borders or that culture “adapts” foods to its neo-local or global contexts. By studying closely the dynamics of contact between mobile foods and/or people and the specific communities of consumption they create, these authors reveal the process whereby local foods become global or global foods become local to be a dynamic, co-creative one jointly facilitated by humans and nature.

Thinking Through the Tomato Harvester

This essay discusses the development of the tomato harvester by Lorenzen and Hanna and its advertising campaign, which turned the machine9s frequent breakdowns into a selling point.

The Garlic Capital of the World: Gilroy, Garlic, and the Making of a Festive Foodscape by Pauline Adema

Pauline Adema defines a festive foodscape as a place with two views: the view looking in by outsiders wherein a locality becomes known “primarily for a festive performance of its food-centered identity,” and the view of insiders where “foodthemed, place-specific communal identities” are formed (p. 5). Her study of the ongoing Gilroy (California) Garlic Festival and short-lived PigFest in Coppell (Texas) is the first scholarly analysis to focus specifically on food-themed spaces of communal identity and, as such, it has much to offer the reader interested in food and culture, urban and rural community studies, and regional marketing and branding. Garlic Capital of the World is divided into seven chapters. The first three combine theoretical perspectives on geography, landscape study and foodways, with an analysis of the place of garlic in Gilroy’s history and the decision to make it the official object of celebration and community affiliation in the late 1970s. Two subsequent chapters offer case studies on the place of labor within the festival and the process and practice of event marketing. Adema’s analysis of event marketing is particularly useful for scholars interested in what motivates town planners and chambers of commerce to highlight particular civic pasts over others. The Economic Development Corporation of Gilroy, formed twelve years after the festival began, reveals the depth to which the festival as a practice and profit generator has been embedded in the life of Gilroy. While the festival experience, for outsiders, is one of lighthearted fun, the event is in fact a very serious foundation for the continued economic viability of the community. The final two chapters offer a short case study of Coppell’s PigFest and summarize the concepts Adema finds most important in analyzing these sorts of landscapes as a result of her research. Adema’s focus on histories, community participation, and boosterism in both Gilroy and Coppell enables the reader to compare, across sites, the factors that facilitated one’s success and another’s failure. Although the former receives a much more in-depth analysis than the latter, it is clear that their distinct fates are no accident. Gilroy’s choice of garlic reflected both its immigration and industrial histories. The switch from primarily producing garlic (along with prunes) to celebrating garlic was, in fact, a risk taken by entrepreneurial boosters in the late 1970s, given that Gilroy was a small town off Interstate 5 and not well-known as a destination to people outside the community. But it was a minor risk compared to the one taken in Coppell where a “regional food” was resurrected from a history long past and little connected to its contemporary suburban residents. Gilroy, as Adema presents it, illustrates the importance of celebrating foods with actual connections to contemporary residents. Food histories can be stretched but not invented. It also suggests that festive foodscapes succeed when planned and implemented by people

The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World's Most Troubled Drug Culture (review)

668 try. The book includes detailed accounts of the shifting political winds that buffeted the scientific community during the late 1960s. Yet the various stories, at least for this reader, fail to make a convincing case for Vettel’s theme. There certainly were significant protests, both in Washington, D.C., and in the San Francisco Bay region, against the scientific establishment of the early 1960s. It also seems clear that generational shifts were under way among scientists at that time. But Vettel has difficulty showing how this social upheaval gave the world genetic engineering and the biotechnology industry. Somehow, it still seems more like a coincidence.