Food Across Borders

by Matt Garcia (Contributor), E. Melanie DuPuis (Editor), Don Mitchell (Editor)

The act of eating defines and redefines borders. What constitutes “American” in our cuisine has always depended on a liberal crossing of borders, from “the line in the sand” that separates Mexico and the United States, to the grassland boundary with Canada, to the imagined divide in our collective minds between “our” food and “their” food. Immigrant workers have introduced new cuisines and ways of cooking that force the nation to question the boundaries between “us” and “them.”  

The stories told in Food Across Borders highlight the contiguity between the intimate decisions we make as individuals concerning what we eat and the social and geopolitical processes we enact to secure nourishment, territory, and belonging.   

Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.
 

290 pages, Paperback

Published October 17, 2017

Reviews

[Indah Threez Lestari · Rating 3 out of 5]

501 - 2019

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was assigned for a graduate history class. Sometimes collected essays don't work well for class discussion, but the students were engaged and had lots to say. I personally enjoyed the book, and found much to think about.

[sdw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Often times edited collections are uneven. This is not the case with Food Across Borders. It is clear that a lot of thought went into selecting and ordering the essays. The introduction is particularly strong with a insightful overview of food studies. I admire scholars who can synthesize the state of the field with such skill.

I was particularly excited by two essays on the importance of food procurement strategies. In these essays, Tanachai Mark Padoongpatt looks at the role of the discourse and regulatory regime around food safety and diseases that shaped access to Thai food in Los Angeles while Teresa M. Mares, Naomi Wolcott-MacCausland, and Jessie Mazar's look at the strategies and barriers facing Latinx workers in Rural Vermont in seeking ingredients ingredients they wish.

I plan to assign this excellent collection in my next graduate food studies course. I plan to assign excerpts from it to my undergraduate classes. If assigned the right course, I can see teaching the full collection to undergraduate students. Kathleen Sexsmith's essay on undocumented dairy workers in New York complements Margaret Gray's Labor and the Locavore. I plan to teach Katherine Massoth's "'Mexican Cookery That Belongs to the United States': Evolving Boundaries of Whiteness in New Mexican Kitchens" alongside excerpts from Kyla Wazana Tompkins's Racial Indigestion. Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern's article on Latino Immigrant Farmers is a needed contribution to work on race and the American farmer.

I also appreciate the range of disciplinary approaches used by the authors.