Tracey Deutsch
Associate Professor History
University of Minnesota

I am applying to the seminar because of questions I encountered in the course of my work on historical food politics, and resulting opportunities to engage directly in contemporary debate.

My recent book, Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century, put me into conversation with a wide range of food studies scholars and policy activists. One result of this was an interdisciplinary research symposium that I co-organized and co-facilitated this past spring. That experience motivates this application. “How to Talk about Feeding the World,” brought together national and local food studies scholars from across the social sciences with scientists who study soil, agriculture, and public health. For two intense days, we shared our motivations for discussing food and also the ways in which the imperative to “feed the world” circulated in our home disciplines, often in unexamined ways. Participants and attendees were excited by the opportunity to speak with each other—but also impatient with differences in political commitments, research interests, and methodological assumptions.

In spite of these challenges several of the participants and attendees expressed interest in continuing the conversation by creating a community based research project around food procurement and food provisioning. We share a sense of the necessity of a more creative and thoughtful approach to thinking how households get food, the politics and meanings of peoples’ strategies, and, how “food insecure” is embedded and made tangible in lived experience. Questions such as the complicated and multiple ways households procure food, how and why food deserts emerged in the first place, how that history is remembered by residents, and how and why lack of access to food (rather than lack of affordability) came into being offer a more capacious perspective on food and its embeddedness. Only this can do justice to the ways people live, rather than the disciplinary and intellectual boundaries within which conversations about food so often happen. To imagine the many possibilities for socially just “food security,” I believe we must develop modes of address and research that reveal the intersections between social politics, policy, and economic systems.

Some background on my own research might be useful. My primary thematic interests lie in the ways that gender and capitalism intersected in the 20th century. I have more recently come to food studies. My first book, Building a Housewife’s Paradise (awarded the 2010 Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Award) investigates the emergence of centrally controlled, streamlined chains of supermarkets in the mid-20th century. It reframes shopping as labor, arguing that consumers’ “choices” were shaped by government regulations, ongoing negotiation of political commitment, familial ties, cultural identity, and financial constraint, and the structures of business firms. A recent essay, “Memories of Mothers in the Kitchen,” brings those themes to the present, exploring the gender ideologies and historical narratives invoked in local foods movement. Finally, my second book-length investigates the ways that food access became a marker of class. Currently entitled “The Julia Child Project,” it examines Julia Child’s celebrity as itself a project and departs from conventional emphases on Child’s personal warmth and energy as causes for her success to contextualize her in themes that are understudied but at the heart of twentieth century transformations—widespread negotiation of reproductive labor, women’s claims for autonomy, visions of empire in the United States, and the emergence of neoliberal cultural politics.

Academic historians do not often have the opportunity to participate as scholars directly in contemporary debates, but my interests in the policies that structure food purchase, the everyday power relations of race, class, gender, ethnicity and religion that consumers sustain, negotiate, and undermine, and my commitment to recapturing the often obscured labor involved in food provisioning provide leverage over contemporary debates. Work on these has opened doors to community groups, artists, policy makers and brought me into the necessary and energizing work around social justice and food. With the help of this symposium, I would like to walk through those doors.