Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food

Global Appetites explores how industrial agriculture and countercultural food movements underpin U.S. conceptions of global power in the century since the First World War. Allison Carruth's study centers on what she terms 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 American writers ranging from Willa Cather, Lorine Niedecker and Samuel Beckett to Toni Morrison, Ruth Ozeki and Novella Carpenter, 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 scholars of American literature and culture as well as those working in the fields of food studies, food policy, agriculture history, social justice and the environmental humanities.