J Guthman
Biographic Data
| ID | 50276 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Guthman |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Guthman |
| SIGNATURE | GUTHMAN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5529-0805 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1594 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Embedded Pesticide Use: Exploring the Pesticide‐Land Nexus
Since the turn of the century, global land grabs, farmland financialization and land‐based food sovereignty movements have returned the land question to the heart of agrarian studies. Meanwhile, abiding interest in pesticides has been reanimated in the face of changes in production, regulation and knowledge of toxicity. Yet the nexus of pesticides and land remains underappreciated—and under‐researched. This paper thus argues for more attention to…
Decoupling From Land or Extending the View: Divergent Spatial Imaginaries of Agri-Food Tech
Beginning around 2013, an agri-food tech sector coalesced, proffering countless technologies that promise a more sustainable food future. Yet exactly what that future looks like varies dramatically within the sector. Based on an intensive study of this sector, we examine two paradigmatic areas of innovation-alternative protein and digital agriculture-showing how the environmental promises of each translate into very different ideal uses of space.…
Speculating on collapse: Unrealized socioecological fixes of agri-food tech
Circa 2023, after receiving much hype and investment, two agri-food technologies touted for their world-changing potential, bioengineered animal protein substitutes and vertical (indoor) farms, began to falter economically. Tech sector observers attributed the fall to typical hype cycle dynamics; this paper provides a deeper read. Based on research involving over ninety interviews with agri-food tech sector actors and observation at nearly 100 in…
Agri-food tech’s building block: Narrating protein, agnostic of source, in the face of crisis
Inventive producers in Silicon Valley and other innovations sectors are going beyond the simulated animal products of plant-based proteins and cellular technologies to produce a third generation of protein products, making protein the leading edge of high tech food innovation. Since innovators draw on sources not generally recognized as food these products are speculative as both foods and investments. Building on scholarship that examines edibil…
Contested agri-food futures: Introduction to the Special Issue
Over recent decades, influential agri-food tech actors, institutions, policymakers and others have fostered dominant techno-optimistic, future visions of food and agriculture that are having profound material impacts in present agri-food worlds. Analyzing such realities has become paramount for scholars working across the fields of science and technology studies (STS) and critical agri-food studies, many of whom contribute to STSFAN—the Science a…
Cultivating intellectual community in academia: Reflections from the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network (STSFAN)
Scholarship flourishes in inclusive environments where open deliberations and generative feedback expand both individual and collective thinking. Many researchers, however, have limited access to such settings, and most conventional academic conferences fall short of promises to provide them. We have written this Field Report to share our methods for cultivating a vibrant intellectual community within the Science and Technology Studies Food and A…
Fixing food with a limited menu: On (digital) solutionism in the agri-food tech sector
Social science – STEM collaborations in agriculture, food and beyond: An STSFAN manifesto
Interdisciplinary research needs innovation. As an action-oriented intervention, this Manifesto begins from the authors' experiences as social scientists working within interdisciplinary science and technology collaborations in agriculture and food. We draw from these experiences to: 1) explain what social scientists contribute to interdisciplinary agri-food tech collaborations; (2) describe barriers to substantive and meaningful collaboration; a…
Conscious, Complacent, Fearful: Agri-Food Tech’s Market-Making Public Imaginaries
While the tech sector has seized upon the food system as an area in which it can have a major impact, innovators within the agri-food tech domain are dogged by concerns about public acceptance of technologies that may be controversial or simply not of interest. At the same time, because they operate within an investor-dependent political economy, they must demonstrate that the public will consume the products they are creating. To both secure mar…
Farming Inside Invisible Worlds: Modernist Agriculture and its Consequences
In 2015, I was visiting Aotearoa New Zealand for the annual Australasian Agrifood Research Network conference. As one of the conference organizers, Hugh Campbell led a field trip that took the grou
Agri-food tech discovers silver linings in the pandemic
(En)gendering exposure: Pregnant Farmworkers and the Inadequacy of Pesticide Notification
In 2015, the EPA (USA) announced its intention to strengthen farmworker protections against pesticide exposure to include information on the hazards of pesticide exposure during pregnancy and how to reduce take-home exposure. While the new Worker Protection Standard is a laudable and long-overdue effort to enhance farmworker safety, we argue that an informational approach is inadequate, particularly for the women farmworkers who are the focus of …
Lives Versus Livelihoods? Deepening the Regulatory Debates on Soil Fumigants in California's Strawberry Industry: Lives Versus Livelihoods
Soil fumigants have been critical to the California strawberry industry's success, but they are also highly toxic to farmworkers and nearby residents. This article traces recent regulatory debates over restrictions on their use which were cast as a contest of lives and livelihoods: activists emphasized the danger of the chemicals while industry emphasized their necessity. Activists’ claims were typical of environmental justice battles that focus …
Life itself under contract: Rent-seeking and biopolitical devolution through partnerships in California's strawberry industry
Following the legal demise of sharecropping in California's strawberry industry, shippers and other intermediaries began to forge contractual 'partnerships' with former farmworkers and ranch managers, providing financing and market access, while giving these new growers responsibility for hiring labor and paying other expenses. Within an array of contracting arrangements, these operate in the worst of all worlds with many expenses returning to th…
Going both ways: More chemicals, more organics, and the significance of land in post-methyl bromide fumigation decisions for California's strawberry industry
Strawberry fields: Politics, class, and work in California agriculture, by Miriam Wells
When I was approached by the editors of JPS to write a retrospective review of a ‘modern classic’ in agrarian studies, Strawberry fields was the obvious choice. Few books were as influential on my
Whose Life Counts: Biopolitics and the “Bright Line” of Chloropicrin Mitigation in California’s Strawberry Industry
In the context of the mandated phaseout of methyl bromide, California's strawberry industry has increased its use of chloropicrin, another soil fumigant that has long been on the market. However, due to its 2010 designation as a toxic air contaminant, the US Environmental Protection Agency and California's Department of Pesticide Regulation have developed enhanced application protocols to mitigate exposures of the chemical to bystanders, nearby r…
I will never eat another strawberry again: The biopolitics of consumer-citizenship in the fight against methyl iodide in California
Binging and purging: Agrofood Capitalism and the Body as Socioecological Fix
Theorizations of the spatial fix classically look to geographical expansion as the fix for capitalism's perennial crises of overaccumulation. Recent scholarship, evident in this theme issue, extends this thinking to the socioecological, recognizing that many 'fixes' these days involve appropriating or reconfiguring nature anew. This paper extends this yet further, by considering the body as a site of socioecological fixes. In recognition of Harve…
Epigenetic life: Biological Plasticity, Abnormality, and New Configurations of Race and Reproduction
Environmental epigenetics is a 'hot' new field of post-genomic science investigating mechanisms that influence how genes are expressed. It offers a dynamic and non-dualistic understanding of the relationship between environments, genes, bodies, and health. We ask how this new science of biological plasticity is changing existing concepts of normality and abnormality. We find that epigenetics is contributing to a new biological (yet non-determinis…
Doing Justice to Bodies? Reflections on Food Justice, Race, and Biology
The food justice concept takes disproportionate prevalence of obesity and type 2 diabetes among people of color as evidence of injustice. Yet several measurements of obesity are based on norms derived from white bodies, which can also be a source of injustice. Part of the conceptual problem lies with reticence to discuss questions of material bodily difference as it relates to race given the legacy of racial science. Noting the distinction betwee…
Doing Justice to Bodies? Reflections on Food Justice, Race, and Biology
The food justice concept takes disproportionate prevalence of obesity and type 2 diabetes among people of color as evidence of injustice. Yet several measurements of obesity are based on norms derived from white bodies, which can also be a source of injustice. Part of the conceptual problem lies with reticence to discuss questions of material bodily difference as it relates to race given the legacy of racial science. Noting the distinction betwee…
Fatuous measures: The artifactual construction of the obesity epidemic
Scholars in science studies have coined the concept ‘artifactual constructivism’ to denote the techniques, laboratory practices, conventions, observational methods, instrumentation and measurements that produce scientific facts. Applying artifactual constructivism to biophysical phenomena is not to deny that a particular phenomenon materially exists, but to highlight that it can only be known through the specific tools and techniques of measureme…
Too Much Food and Too Little Sidewalk? Problematizing the Obesogenic Environment Thesis
The obesogenic environment thesis is that increased prevalence of obesity is because people are surrounded by cheap, fast, nutritionally inferior food and a built environment that discourages physical activity. This thesis has animated various planning, advocacy, and educational interventions to address these obesogenic qualities. However, studies designed to test the thesis have generated inconclusive or marginal results, and the more robust fin…
The implications of environmental epigenetics: A new direction for geographic inquiry on health, space, and nature-society relations
The emergent field of environmental epigenetics, which studies health effects of ‘xenobiotic’ chemicals, fundamentally challenges standard models of the biochemical pathways that shape bodies and human health. This article explores the implications of these discoveries for geographic knowledge in the nature-society and spatial traditions of human health, both of which have tended to black-box the material, biochemical body and treat the environme…
Bringing good food to others: Investigating the Subjects of Alternative Food Practice
Under the banner of food justice, the last few years has seen a profusion of projects focused on selling, donating, bringing or growing fresh fruits and vegetables in neighborhoods inhabited by African Americans - often at below market prices - or educating them to the quality of locally grown, seasonal, and organic food. The focus of this article is the subjects of such projects - those who enroll in such projects `to bring good food to others,'…
Embodying Neoliberalism: Economy, Culture, and the Politics of Fat
The purpose of this paper is to recast the politics of obesity in the United States in light of the unsatisfactory nature of the current, popular debates on this problem. The paper begins by taking stock of contemporary discussions about obesity through a review and analysis of the popular and academic literature on the topic. We show how discussions of obesity that rely on unidimensional structural, biological, and political causes are not only …
Fast food/organic food: Reflexive tastes and the making of 'yuppie chow
Organic food consumption is one of several new trends in eating read as active opposition to industrialized food provision. While fast food consumption is characterized by compulsive gluttony, manifest in fat bodies, alternative consumption practices are seen to be driven by conscious reflexivity, such that consumers monitor, reflect upon and adapt their personal conduct in light of its perceived consequences. The purpose of this paper is two-fol…
The implications of environmental epigenetics: A new direction for geographic inquiry on health, space, and nature-society relations
The emergent field of environmental epigenetics, which studies health effects of ‘xenobiotic’ chemicals, fundamentally challenges standard models of the biochemical pathways that shape bodies and human health. This article explores the implications of these discoveries for geographic knowledge in the nature-society and spatial traditions of human health, both of which have tended to black-box the material, biochemical body and treat the environme…
The Polanyian Way? Voluntary Food Labels as Neoliberal Governance
Voluntary food labels that express ecological, social, and/or place‐based values have been posed as an important form of resistance to neoliberalization in the Polanyian sense of protecting land, other natural resources, and labor from the ravages of the market. At the same time, these labels are in some respects analogs to the very things they are purported to resist, namely property rights that allow these ascribed commodities to be traded in a…
Epigenetic life: Biological Plasticity, Abnormality, and New Configurations of Race and Reproduction
Environmental epigenetics is a 'hot' new field of post-genomic science investigating mechanisms that influence how genes are expressed. It offers a dynamic and non-dualistic understanding of the relationship between environments, genes, bodies, and health. We ask how this new science of biological plasticity is changing existing concepts of normality and abnormality. We find that epigenetics is contributing to a new biological (yet non-determinis…
From Farm to Table: The Organic Vegetable Commodity Chain of Northern California
The Trouble with 'Organic Lite' in California: A Rejoinder to the 'Conventionalisation' Debate
Based on a comprehensive study of the California organic sector, this article responds to the conventionalization debate on organic farming that surfaced after the publication of Buck et al. in 1997 in this journal. First, it addresses the place of California within the international organic sector, justifying its importance as a case study. As an empirical point, it documents the form and extent of agribusiness involvement in California's organi…
From “old school” to “farm-to-school”: Neoliberalization from the ground up
Farm-to-school (FTS) programs have garnered the attentions and energies of people in a diverse array of social locations in the food system and are serving as a sort of touchstone for many in the alternative agrifood movement. Yet, unlike other alternative agrifood initiatives, FTS programs intersect directly with the long-established institution of the welfare state, including its vestiges of New Deal farm programs and public entitlement. This p…
Squaring Farm Security and Food Security in Two Types of Alternative Food Institutions
Even though both farmers' markets and community supported agriculture were first developed to provide markets for farmers, recently the goals of food security have been attached to these market-based alternative food institutions, based on their potential to be 'win-win' economic solutions for both small-scale farmers and low-income consumers. This article reports on survey and interview research conducted in California during 2004-2005 designed …
Food Deserts, Oases, or Mirages: Small Markets and Community Food Security in the San Francisco Bay Area
In light of claims that many low-income urban neighborhoods are “food deserts,” this article reports on pilot research to assess whether and how small, full-service food retailers contribute to urban food security. It demonstrates that such stores meet many of the criteria for community food security by providing a wide variety of relatively low-cost foods. At the same time, their geographic unevenness, tendency to target particular ethnic client…
Binging and purging: Agrofood Capitalism and the Body as Socioecological Fix
Theorizations of the spatial fix classically look to geographical expansion as the fix for capitalism's perennial crises of overaccumulation. Recent scholarship, evident in this theme issue, extends this thinking to the socioecological, recognizing that many 'fixes' these days involve appropriating or reconfiguring nature anew. This paper extends this yet further, by considering the body as a site of socioecological fixes. In recognition of Harve…
Regulating Meaning, Appropriating Nature: The Codification of California Organic Agriculture
In California, conventional agro‐food firms are beginning to appropriate the most lucrative aspects of organic food provision and to abandon the agronomic and marketing practices associated with organic agriculture's oppositional origins. Echoing the uneasy and complex dialectic between nature and capital in the American West, organic farming is becoming more akin to farming off of nature's image, as the idiom of a “purer” nature is deployed to s…
Commodified Meanings, Meaningful Commodities: Re-thinking Production-Consumption Links through the Organic System of Provision
Agro-food researchers have yet to systematically theorize how the social life of food intersects with a political economy of food production. Yet without such understanding, activists are unlikely to affect the politics of production in intended ways. It is crucial to understand how the meanings that animate the politics of consumption are translated and distributed as surplus value and rent, and, for that matter, how surplus value and rent value…
Back to the Land: The Paradox of Organic Food Standards
This paper examines how the rent-creating conventions that regulate organic food production undermine growers' abilities to farm in a less intensive manner. The paper builds on a growing literature on food governance which points to the unintended consequences of standardization and their verification. The argument is based in theories of rent, with specific attention to how the constructed scarcity of organic food creates rents that are competed…
Raising organic: An agro-ecological assessment of grower practices in California
Teaching the Politics of Obesity: Insights into Neoliberal Embodiment and Contemporary Biopolitics
This article reflects on the author's experiences teaching an undergraduate lecture course on the politics of obesity. The course involved a critical examination of the construction and representation of the so‐called epidemic of obesity and the major causal explanations for the rise in obesity. Students were unusually discomfited by the course and invoked pedagogical concerns and instructor embodiments in expressing their reactions. Student resp…
Geographies of food: Afters
This third and final 'Geographies of food' review is based on an online blog conversation provoked by the first and second reviews in the series (Cook et al., 2006; 2008a). Authors of the work featured in these reviews - plus others whose work was not but should have been featured - were invited to respond to them, to talk about their own and other people's work, and to enter into conversations about - and in the process review - other/new work w…
Whose Life Counts: Biopolitics and the “Bright Line” of Chloropicrin Mitigation in California’s Strawberry Industry
In the context of the mandated phaseout of methyl bromide, California's strawberry industry has increased its use of chloropicrin, another soil fumigant that has long been on the market. However, due to its 2010 designation as a toxic air contaminant, the US Environmental Protection Agency and California's Department of Pesticide Regulation have developed enhanced application protocols to mitigate exposures of the chemical to bystanders, nearby r…
Commentary on teaching food: Why I am fed up with Michael Pollan et al
Life itself under contract: Rent-seeking and biopolitical devolution through partnerships in California's strawberry industry
Following the legal demise of sharecropping in California's strawberry industry, shippers and other intermediaries began to forge contractual 'partnerships' with former farmworkers and ranch managers, providing financing and market access, while giving these new growers responsibility for hiring labor and paying other expenses. Within an array of contracting arrangements, these operate in the worst of all worlds with many expenses returning to th…
Too Much Food and Too Little Sidewalk? Problematizing the Obesogenic Environment Thesis
The obesogenic environment thesis is that increased prevalence of obesity is because people are surrounded by cheap, fast, nutritionally inferior food and a built environment that discourages physical activity. This thesis has animated various planning, advocacy, and educational interventions to address these obesogenic qualities. However, studies designed to test the thesis have generated inconclusive or marginal results, and the more robust fin…
I will never eat another strawberry again: The biopolitics of consumer-citizenship in the fight against methyl iodide in California
Fixing food with a limited menu: On (digital) solutionism in the agri-food tech sector
Contested agri-food futures: Introduction to the Special Issue
Over recent decades, influential agri-food tech actors, institutions, policymakers and others have fostered dominant techno-optimistic, future visions of food and agriculture that are having profound material impacts in present agri-food worlds. Analyzing such realities has become paramount for scholars working across the fields of science and technology studies (STS) and critical agri-food studies, many of whom contribute to STSFAN—the Science a…
Changing state laws regulating health manpower
Changing state laws regulating health manpower. S Mosow, E Z Fifer, and J GuthmanCopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.63.1.37 Published Online: October 07, 2011
From Farm to Table: The Organic Vegetable Commodity Chain of Northern California
Regulating Meaning, Appropriating Nature: The Codification of California Organic Agriculture
In California, conventional agro‐food firms are beginning to appropriate the most lucrative aspects of organic food provision and to abandon the agronomic and marketing practices associated with organic agriculture's oppositional origins. Echoing the uneasy and complex dialectic between nature and capital in the American West, organic farming is becoming more akin to farming off of nature's image, as the idiom of a “purer” nature is deployed to s…
Raising organic: An agro-ecological assessment of grower practices in California
Commodified Meanings, Meaningful Commodities: Re-thinking Production-Consumption Links through the Organic System of Provision
Agro-food researchers have yet to systematically theorize how the social life of food intersects with a political economy of food production. Yet without such understanding, activists are unlikely to affect the politics of production in intended ways. It is crucial to understand how the meanings that animate the politics of consumption are translated and distributed as surplus value and rent, and, for that matter, how surplus value and rent value…
Fast food/organic food: Reflexive tastes and the making of 'yuppie chow
Organic food consumption is one of several new trends in eating read as active opposition to industrialized food provision. While fast food consumption is characterized by compulsive gluttony, manifest in fat bodies, alternative consumption practices are seen to be driven by conscious reflexivity, such that consumers monitor, reflect upon and adapt their personal conduct in light of its perceived consequences. The purpose of this paper is two-fol…
Back to the Land: The Paradox of Organic Food Standards
This paper examines how the rent-creating conventions that regulate organic food production undermine growers' abilities to farm in a less intensive manner. The paper builds on a growing literature on food governance which points to the unintended consequences of standardization and their verification. The argument is based in theories of rent, with specific attention to how the constructed scarcity of organic food creates rents that are competed…
The Trouble with 'Organic Lite' in California: A Rejoinder to the 'Conventionalisation' Debate
Based on a comprehensive study of the California organic sector, this article responds to the conventionalization debate on organic farming that surfaced after the publication of Buck et al. in 1997 in this journal. First, it addresses the place of California within the international organic sector, justifying its importance as a case study. As an empirical point, it documents the form and extent of agribusiness involvement in California's organi…
From “old school” to “farm-to-school”: Neoliberalization from the ground up
Farm-to-school (FTS) programs have garnered the attentions and energies of people in a diverse array of social locations in the food system and are serving as a sort of touchstone for many in the alternative agrifood movement. Yet, unlike other alternative agrifood initiatives, FTS programs intersect directly with the long-established institution of the welfare state, including its vestiges of New Deal farm programs and public entitlement. This p…
Embodying Neoliberalism: Economy, Culture, and the Politics of Fat
The purpose of this paper is to recast the politics of obesity in the United States in light of the unsatisfactory nature of the current, popular debates on this problem. The paper begins by taking stock of contemporary discussions about obesity through a review and analysis of the popular and academic literature on the topic. We show how discussions of obesity that rely on unidimensional structural, biological, and political causes are not only …
Squaring Farm Security and Food Security in Two Types of Alternative Food Institutions
Even though both farmers' markets and community supported agriculture were first developed to provide markets for farmers, recently the goals of food security have been attached to these market-based alternative food institutions, based on their potential to be 'win-win' economic solutions for both small-scale farmers and low-income consumers. This article reports on survey and interview research conducted in California during 2004-2005 designed …
Commentary on teaching food: Why I am fed up with Michael Pollan et al
Food Deserts, Oases, or Mirages: Small Markets and Community Food Security in the San Francisco Bay Area
In light of claims that many low-income urban neighborhoods are “food deserts,” this article reports on pilot research to assess whether and how small, full-service food retailers contribute to urban food security. It demonstrates that such stores meet many of the criteria for community food security by providing a wide variety of relatively low-cost foods. At the same time, their geographic unevenness, tendency to target particular ethnic client…
The Polanyian Way? Voluntary Food Labels as Neoliberal Governance
Voluntary food labels that express ecological, social, and/or place‐based values have been posed as an important form of resistance to neoliberalization in the Polanyian sense of protecting land, other natural resources, and labor from the ravages of the market. At the same time, these labels are in some respects analogs to the very things they are purported to resist, namely property rights that allow these ascribed commodities to be traded in a…
“If They Only Knew”: Color Blindness and Universalism in California Alternative Food Institutions
This article takes on the cultural politics of “if they only knew” as it relates to alternative food practice. It draws on surveys and interviews of managers of two kinds of alternative food institutions—farmers' markets and community-supported agriculture—to illustrate the color-blind mentalities and universalizing impulses of alternative food discourse. The ways in which these discourses instantiate whiteness may have a chilling effect on peopl…
Bringing good food to others: Investigating the Subjects of Alternative Food Practice
Under the banner of food justice, the last few years has seen a profusion of projects focused on selling, donating, bringing or growing fresh fruits and vegetables in neighborhoods inhabited by African Americans - often at below market prices - or educating them to the quality of locally grown, seasonal, and organic food. The focus of this article is the subjects of such projects - those who enroll in such projects `to bring good food to others,'…
Teaching the Politics of Obesity: Insights into Neoliberal Embodiment and Contemporary Biopolitics
This article reflects on the author's experiences teaching an undergraduate lecture course on the politics of obesity. The course involved a critical examination of the construction and representation of the so‐called epidemic of obesity and the major causal explanations for the rise in obesity. Students were unusually discomfited by the course and invoked pedagogical concerns and instructor embodiments in expressing their reactions. Student resp…
Geographies of food: Afters
This third and final 'Geographies of food' review is based on an online blog conversation provoked by the first and second reviews in the series (Cook et al., 2006; 2008a). Authors of the work featured in these reviews - plus others whose work was not but should have been featured - were invited to respond to them, to talk about their own and other people's work, and to enter into conversations about - and in the process review - other/new work w…
Bodies and Accumulation: Revisiting Labour in the ‘Production of Nature’
This commentary on Neil Smith's Uneven Development revisits his production of nature thesis and uses it as a jumping off point to explore how human bodies matter in contemporary capitalism. It argues that human bodies are increasingly subsumed within capitalism in ways that go beyond the roles of humans as labourers and purchasers of goods and services in a system of commodities producing commodities. Bodies are also treated as property, transpor…
The implications of environmental epigenetics: A new direction for geographic inquiry on health, space, and nature-society relations
The emergent field of environmental epigenetics, which studies health effects of ‘xenobiotic’ chemicals, fundamentally challenges standard models of the biochemical pathways that shape bodies and human health. This article explores the implications of these discoveries for geographic knowledge in the nature-society and spatial traditions of human health, both of which have tended to black-box the material, biochemical body and treat the environme…
Fatuous measures: The artifactual construction of the obesity epidemic
Scholars in science studies have coined the concept ‘artifactual constructivism’ to denote the techniques, laboratory practices, conventions, observational methods, instrumentation and measurements that produce scientific facts. Applying artifactual constructivism to biophysical phenomena is not to deny that a particular phenomenon materially exists, but to highlight that it can only be known through the specific tools and techniques of measureme…
Too Much Food and Too Little Sidewalk? Problematizing the Obesogenic Environment Thesis
The obesogenic environment thesis is that increased prevalence of obesity is because people are surrounded by cheap, fast, nutritionally inferior food and a built environment that discourages physical activity. This thesis has animated various planning, advocacy, and educational interventions to address these obesogenic qualities. However, studies designed to test the thesis have generated inconclusive or marginal results, and the more robust fin…
Doing Justice to Bodies? Reflections on Food Justice, Race, and Biology
The food justice concept takes disproportionate prevalence of obesity and type 2 diabetes among people of color as evidence of injustice. Yet several measurements of obesity are based on norms derived from white bodies, which can also be a source of injustice. Part of the conceptual problem lies with reticence to discuss questions of material bodily difference as it relates to race given the legacy of racial science. Noting the distinction betwee…
Doing Justice to Bodies? Reflections on Food Justice, Race, and Biology
The food justice concept takes disproportionate prevalence of obesity and type 2 diabetes among people of color as evidence of injustice. Yet several measurements of obesity are based on norms derived from white bodies, which can also be a source of injustice. Part of the conceptual problem lies with reticence to discuss questions of material bodily difference as it relates to race given the legacy of racial science. Noting the distinction betwee…
I will never eat another strawberry again: The biopolitics of consumer-citizenship in the fight against methyl iodide in California
Political science (32 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Organic Food and Agriculture (26 works) · Economics (22 works) · Law (22 works) · Business (18 works) · Agriculture (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (15 works) · Politics (15 works)