by Marcelo Bucheli From the publisher: For well over a century, the United Fruit Company (UFCO) has been the most vilified multinational corporation operating in Latin America. Criticism of the […]
Tag: food production
Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas
edited by Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg From the publisher: Over the past century, the banana industry has radically transformed Latin America and the Caribbean and become a major site […]
Podcast: American Beef Economy of late 19th century
A 49 minute podcast interview with Joshua Specht, author of Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beed Changed America. Specht describes the entire “beef economy” of the nineteenth […]
Ketchup revolutionized way food is grown, processed and regulated in the U.S.
U.S. companies began mass-producing tomato ketchup in the late 19th century. Food scientists at H.J. Heinz Company in Pittsburgh developed a balance of sweet, sour, and salty flavor that was […]
The chicken experiment that radically changed meat production
On Christmas Day in 1948, 42-year-old biochemist Thomas Jukes came into work to weigh the chickens in his feeding experiment and discovered something unusual. The 25-day chicks fed the highest […]
The passage in “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair that sickened America in 1906
“The Jungle” was a 1906 novel by the American writer Upton Sinclair about a family of immigrants from Bohemia struggling to survive under horrific working and living conditions in Chicago. […]
Political Ecology of Bananas: Contract Farming, Peasants, and Agrarian Change in the Eastern Caribbean
by Lawrence S. Grossman From the publisher: This study of banana contract farming in the Eastern Caribbean explores the forces that shape contract-farming enterprises everywhere–capital, the state, and the environment. Employing […]
Our Daily Poison: From Pesticides to Packaging, How Chemicals Have Contaminated the Food Chain and Are Making Us Sick
by Marie-Monique Robin and translated by Allison Schein and Lara Vergnaud From the publisher: Called “terrifying” by L’Express and “a gripping and urgent book for anyone concerned about democracy, corporate power, […]
Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives
by Bryant Simon From the publisher: For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial […]
Big Chicken: the story of how chicken and antibiotics changed the way we eat
by Maryn McKenna From the publisher: Chicken is the world’s most popular meat, but its path to our plates winds through a dark and fascinating history. BIG CHICKEN: The Incredible Story of […]