Introduction

While agriculture has been the subject of study for many years—the Morrill Act of 1862 instituted the first land-grant universities—the proliferation of ways of thinking about food have recently been corralled into the category of food studies research and curricula. The lexicon of food has proliferated from the well-known terms of agribusiness, industrial versus organic, and sustainable agriculture to a continually multiplying set of concepts—some new, others incorporated from a range of disciplines: food justice, foodways, cultural food traditions, locavore, ethnobotany, food systems, fat studies, urban farming, local foods, foodshed, farmworker justice, and slow food. The environmental humanities, as the reviews in this volume indicate, offer crucial insights into the meanings of food—its hidden or celebrated production; the classed, gendered, and racialized dimensions of both production and consumption; and the intersection of environmental and climate justice across national boundaries. Catherine Keyser places Global Appetites by Allison Carruth in the discourses of global and diasporic studies as well as the cultural histories of food and science in the United States. Zachary Nowak illuminates the way that scholar Adriana Prevat, in Sowing Change, delineates the “discursive and physical construction” of horticultural spaces in Cuba as a locus of forces including citizens, well-meaning international ngos, and the imagination of the state. Sarah Wald not only examines Seth Holmes’s Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies in the context of trans-national American studies, but also draws out the implications of this study for the way ethnicity is inscribed on the body, a “somatic” revealing of the intersection between environmental, farmworker, and climate justice. Together, these reviews sketch the emerging discourse of food studies and offer insightful readings of three critical texts in the field.