Eat Prairie Lobster”
The limitations of agrarian revival as a strategy of producing insect edibility and constructing future food imaginaries in the American Midwest
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12150910 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Paolina Lu (0009-0001-2244-2964, University of California, Davis, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2026-02-10 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Agriculture and Human Values (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0889-048X • E-ISSN: 1572-8366 |
| Publisher | Springer Nature (Netherlands) (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s10460-026-10854-0 |
| OpenAlex | W7128526313 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 42 |
This article brings together the literature on producing “edibility” with scholarship that has investigated and critiqued the role of agrarianism and agrarian imaginaries in alternative food movements to theorize revival as a strategy of producing edibility and in turn constructing future food imaginaries. Based primarily on fieldwork conducted in central Iowa from 2021 to 2023, it looks at how elements of a mythic agrarian past were revived and mobilized in central Iowa, to help produce and promote insects as a “food of the future,” using the story of one business, Gym-N-Eat Crickets, and its proprietor, Shelby Smith, as a case study in alternative food movements, and in how people respond to crises of the present by leveraging elements of the past towards imagining and trying to build towards better futures. I argue that revival was a discursive and material strategy of producing edibility gained traction and helped give form to a future food imaginary built around a selectively mobilized white mythic agrarian past, and that in this way, it by-passed immigrants and their traditions, functioning as a form of nativism that foreclosed the possibility of new alliances and markets. Ultimately, I suggest that this case study reveals the limitations of reviving a mythic white agrarian imaginary as a resource for envisioning and building towards alternative food futures, and gesture towards other food imaginaries through which more sustainable and desirable futures might be dreamed and born
Agrarian society · Agrarianism · Food sovereignty · Food systems · Psychological nativism · Scholarship · The Imaginary · White (mutation · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Insect Utilization and Effects · Organic Food and Agriculture
Eating beside Ourselves
Labor and the Locavore
Dangerous Crossings
The Invention of Tradition
The Yeoman Myth
“Leave No Stone Unturned”
Making Meat, Better
After Nature
Agri-food tech’s building block
Consumers’ Acceptability and Perception of Edible Insects as an Emerging Protein Source
Approaching Insect Death
Contested agri-food futures
Constructing agri-food for finance
Race in the study of food
Consumer acceptance of insect-based foods in the Netherlands
Cute Enough to Eat
The Elusive Inclusive
Whiteness and Farmers Markets
On Interpreting Something as Food
Meat Planet
Alternative Proteins and the (Non)Stuff of “Meat
The world in a box? Food security, edible insects, and “One World, One Health” collaboration
The populistisation of green politics and the greening of populism
Eating for the post-Anthropocene
Magical disruption? Alternative protein and the promise of de-materialization
Things Becoming Food and the Embodied, Material Practices of an Organic Food Consumer
Insects are not 'the new sushi
Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene
Running Out
Modes of Eating and Phased Routinisation
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |