Publication Cover

Food and Foodways

Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment
Volume 24, 2016 - Issue 1-2: Food, Memory, Narrative
631
Views
3
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Original Articles

Agrarian dreams and neoliberal futures in life writing of the alternative food movement

Pages 9-29
Published online: 12 May 2016

ABSTRACT

Autobiographical narratives have been central to the rise of the alternative food movement—the set of activists and organizations advocating what they characterize as sustainable, local, organic, and even beyond organic food. Life writing has been a primary site for subjects and critics to explore relationships between food, memory, and narrative; as a literary form and a critical rubric, alternative food life narrative puts productive pressure on understandings of those relationships. This essay considers Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma as paradigmatic of this emerging literary form in mobilizing narrative and memory to redefine the consumer as a political identity. Omnivore invokes a pastoral agrarian imaginary to diagnose a gastronomically disordered present and visualize a more ethically and aesthetically pleasing food future. The book engages a selective cultural memory to promote market-driven solutions to industrial food production through flexible, ethical consumerism. Form shapes and articulates with food politics to advance these core ideologies of neoliberalism. Reconstructing an agrarian past that never was, Omnivore forges a path toward an alternative food future that threatens to reproduce the very structural problems it purports to address.

Log in via your institution

Log in to Taylor & Francis Online

PDF download + Online access

  • 48 hours access to article PDF & online version
  • Article PDF can be downloaded
  • Article PDF can be printed
USD 45.00 Add to cart

* Local tax will be added as applicable
 

Related research

People also read lists articles that other readers of this article have read.

Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine.

Cited by lists all citing articles based on Crossref citations.
Articles with the Crossref icon will open in a new tab.