Books on the ethics of food production and consumption
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The Philosophy of Food by This book explores food from a philosophical perspective, bringing together sixteen leading philosophers to consider the most basic questions about food: What is it exactly? What should we eat? How do we know it is safe? How should food be distributed? What is good food? David M. Kaplan's erudite and informative introduction grounds the discussion, showing how philosophers since Plato have taken up questions about food, diet, agriculture, and animals. However, until recently, few have considered food a standard subject for serious philosophical debate. Each of the essays in this book brings in-depth analysis to many contemporary debates in food studies--Slow Food, sustainability, food safety, and politics--and addresses such issues as "happy meat," aquaculture, veganism, and table manners. The result is an extraordinary resource that guides readers to think more clearly and responsibly about what we consume and how we provide for ourselves, and illuminates the reasons why we act as we do.Call Number: TX357 .P53 2012ISBN: 9780520269347Publication Date: 2012-02-01 -
From field to fork : food ethics for everyone by After centuries of neglect, the ethics of food are back with a vengeance. Justice for food workers and small farmers has joined the rising tide of concern over the impact of industrial agriculture on food animals and the broader environment, all while a global epidemic of obesity-relateddiseases threatens to overwhelm modern health systems. An emerging worldwide social movement has turned to local and organic foods, and struggles to exploit widespread concern over the next wave of genetic engineering or nanotechnologies applied to food. Paul B. Thompson's book applies the rigor of philosophy to key topics in the first comprehensive study explore interconnections hidden deep within this welter of issues. Bringing to bear more than thirty years of experience working closely with farmers, agricultural researchers and food systemactivists, he explores the eclipse of food ethics during the rise of nutritional science, and examines the reasons for its sudden re-emergence in the era of diet-based disease. Thompson discusses social injustice in the food systems of developed economies and shows how we have missed the keyinsights for understanding food ethics in the developing world. His discussions of animal production and the environmental impact of agriculture break new ground where most philosophers would least expect it. By emphasizing the integration of these issues, Thompson not only brings a comprehensivephilosophical approach to moral issues in the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food - he introduces a fresh way to think about practical ethics that will have implications in other areas of applied philosophy.Call Number: BJ52.5 .T54 2015ISBN: 9780199391684Publication Date: 2015-06-05 -
Just food : philosophy, justice and food by Who has access, and who is denied access, to food, and why? What are the consequences of food insecurity? What would it take for the food system to be just? Just Food: Philosophy, Justice and Food presents thirteen new philosophical essays that explore the causes and consequences of the inequities of our contemporary food system. It examines why 842 million people globally are unable to meet their dietary needs, and why food insecurity is not simply a matter of insufficient supply. The book looks at how food insecurity tracks other social injustices, covering topics such as race, gender and property, as well as food sovereignty, food deserts, and locavorism. The essays in this volume make an important and timely contribution to the wider philosophical debate around food distribution and justice.Call Number: HD9000.5 .J837 2015ISBN: 9781783483877Publication Date: 2015-11-09
Food, labor, and equality
Websites and online reports
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Color of Food ReportAn exploration of the race, class, and gender of food workers in the United States.
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Food Labor Research CenterBrowse research findings and other publications on the intersection of labor and food from the Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley.
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Reframing Food Hubs: Food Hubs, Racial Equity, and Self-Determination in the SouthA report on work being done by farmers and activists of color to increase racial equity in American food systems.
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Adding Racial Equity to the Menu: An Equity Toolkit for Restaurant EmployersGuidance for restaurant managers on assessing, planning, and implementing steps toward racial equity in their businesses.
Books
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Meatpackers : an oral history of Black packinghouse workers and their struggle for racial and economic equality by The hope of securing gainful employment in America's meatpacking industry fired the dreams and imaginations of southern blacks seeking to escape the limits imposed by rural poverty, sharecropping, and Jim Crow segregation. Despite terrible working conditions, the packinghouse provided jobs in urban centers where other doors remained closed. Using oral history interviews drawn from the massive United Packinghouse Workers of America Oral History Project (underwritten by the National Endowment for the Humanities), Halpern and Horowitz trace the impact of the packinghouse on race relations, the civil rights movement, and African American communities from Chicago to Fort Worth. The interviewees speak for themselves with power, intelligence, and emotion. They reveal the importance of the packinghouse employment to midwestern black communities, and offer insights into the work experience and family relationships of African Americans. They relate the remarkable representation of interracial cooperation within a labor union - the United Packinghouse Workers of America - and the positive role this organization played in the promotion of social change, racial equality, and tolerance.Call Number: HD8039 .P152 U54 1996ISBN: 9780805791204Publication Date: 1996-10-18 -
The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History (E-book) by Call Number: HD5324 .E39 2009 EBISBN: 9781849727129Publication Date: 2010-10-29 -
The tejano diaspora : Mexican Americanism & ethnic politics in Texas and Wisconsin by Each spring during the 1960s and 1970s, a quarter million farm workers left Texas to travel across the nation, from the Midwest to California, to harvest America's agricultural products. During this migration of people, labor, and ideas, Tejanos established settlements in nearly all the places they traveled to for work, influencing concepts of Mexican Americanism in Texas, California, Wisconsin, Michigan, and elsewhere. In The Tejano Diaspora, Marc Simon Rodriguez examines how Chicano political and social movements developed at both ends of the migratory labor network that flowed between Crystal City, Texas, and Wisconsin during this period. Rodriguez argues that translocal Mexican American activism gained ground as young people, activists, and politicians united across the migrant stream. Crystal City, well known as a flash point of 1960s-era Mexican Americanism, was a classic migrant sending community, with over 80 percent of the population migrating each year in pursuit of farm work. Wisconsin, which had a long tradition of progressive labor politics, provided a testing ground for activism and ideas for young movement leaders. By providing a view of the Chicano movement beyond the Southwest, Rodriguez reveals an emergent ethnic identity, discovers an overlooked youth movement, and interrogates the meanings of American citizenship.Call Number: F395 .M5 R57 2011ISBN: 9780807834640Publication Date: 2011-04-18 -
Communities without borders : images and voices from the world of migration by When we finally arrived at my brother's house in the United States, I thought about how far I was from home in Mexico. I looked back, saw the sun setting, and thought about my father and what he might be doing. I thought, 'Why did I come so far, and how am I going to return?' Before I left my father asked me why I wanted to leave. He said he thought we would never see each other again. My brother told him not to worry and that he would return me in a year. . . . He was right, because we never did. Irma Luna recalls her experience of migration, from Communities without BordersIn his stunning work of photojournalism and oral history, David Bacon documents the new reality of migrant experience: the creation of transnational communities. Today's indigenous migrants don't simply move from one point to another but create new communities all along the northern road from Guatemala through Mexico into the United States, connected by common culture and history. Drawing on his experience as a photographer and a journalist and also as a former labor organizer, Bacon portrays the lives of the people who migrate between Guatemala and Mexico and the United States. He takes us inside these communities and illuminates the ties that bind them together, the influence of their working conditions on their families and health, and their struggle for better lives. Bacon portrays in photographs and their own words Mixtec and Triqui migrants in Oaxaca, Baja California, and California; Guatemalan migrants in Huehuetenango and Nebraska; miners and indigenous communities in Sonora and Arizona; and veterans of the bracero program of the 1940s and 1950s. Bacon's interviews with this first wave of guest workers are especially relevant in light of the current political focus on guest-worker programs as a model for reforming immigration, an approach with which Bacon strongly disagrees.Throughout Communities without Borders, Bacon emphasizes the social movements migrants organize to improve their own working conditions and the well-being of their enclaves. U.S. border policy treats undocumented immigrants as an aggregation of individuals, ignoring the social pressures that force whole communities to move and the networks of families and hometowns that sustain them on their journeys. Communities without Borders makes an urgent appeal for understanding the human reality that should inform our national debate over immigration."Call Number: HD8081 .M6 B333 2006ISBN: 9780801444999Publication Date: 2006-10-19 -
The Jungle by "Practically alone among the American writers of his generation," wrote Edmund Wilson, "[Sinclair] put to the American public the fundamental questions raised by capitalism in such a way that they could not escape them." When it was first published in 1906, "The Jungle" exposed the inhumane conditions of Chicago's stockyards and the laborer's struggle against industry and "wage slavery." It was an immediate bestseller and led to new regulations that forever changed workers' rights and the meatpacking industry. A direct descendant of Dickens's "Hard Times," it remains the most influential workingman's novel in American literature.Call Number: PS3537 .I85 J86 1971ISBN: 9780837604008Publication Date: 1971-04-01 -
The Grapes of Wrath by First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads-driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man's fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman's stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. The Grapes of Wrath summed up its era in the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin summed up the years of slavery before the Civil War. Sensitive to fascist and communist criticism, Steinbeck insisted that "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" be printed in its entirety in the first edition of the book--which takes its title from the first verse: "He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck's powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics. "It is Steinbeck's best novel, i.e., his toughest and tenderest, his roughest written and most mellifluous, his most realistic and, in its ending, his most melodramatic, his angriest and most idyllic. It is great in the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin was great. One of the most impassioned and exciting books of the year." --TimeCall Number: PS3537 .T3234 G8 1999ISBN: 9780140281620Publication Date: 1999-02-01 -
From the Farm to the Table by As with other areas of human industry, it has been assumed that technological progress would improve all aspects of agriculture. Technology would increase both efficiency and yield, or so we thought. The directions taken by technology may have worked for a while, but the same technologies that give us an advantage also create disadvantages. It's now a common story in rural America: pesticides, fertilizers, "big iron" combines, and other costly advancements may increase speed but also reduce efficiency, while farmers endure debt, dangerous working conditions, and long hours to pay for the technology. Land, livelihood, and lives are lost in an effort to keep up and break even. There is more to this story that affects both the food we eat and our provisions for the future. Too many Americans eat the food on their plates with little thought to its origin and in blind faith that government regulations will protect them from danger. While many Americans might have grown up in farming families, there are fewer family-owned farms with each passing generation. Americans are becoming disconnected from understanding the sources and content of their food. The farmers interviewed in From the Farm to the Table can help reestablish that connection. Gary Holthaus illuminates the state of American agriculture today, particularly the impact of globalization, through the stories of farmers who balance traditional practices with innovative methods to meet market demands. Holthaus demonstrates how the vitality of America's communities is bound to the successes and failures of its farmers. In From the Farm to the Table, farmers explain how their lives and communities have changed as they work to create healthy soil, healthy animals, and healthy food in a context of often inappropriate federal policy, growing competition from abroad, public misconceptions regarding government subsidies, the dangers of environmental damage and genetically modified crops, and the myths of modern economics. Rather than predicting doom and despair for small American growers, Holthaus shows their hope and the practical solutions they utilize. As these farmers tell their stories, "organic" and "sustainable" farming become real and meaningful. As they share their work and their lives, they reveal how those concepts affect the food we eat and the land on which it's grown, and how vital farming is to the American economy.Call Number: 9780813192260ISBN: 9780813192260Publication Date: 2009-02-06 -
In Dubious Battle by A riveting novel of labor strife and apocalyptic violence, now a major motion picture starring James Franco, Bryan Cranston, Selena Gomez, and Zach Braff At once a relentlessly fast-paced, admirably observed novel of social unrest and the story of a young man's struggle for identity, In Dubious Battle is set in the California apple country, where a strike by migrant workers against rapacious landowners spirals out of control, as a principled defiance metamorphoses into blind fanaticism. Caught in the upheaval is Jim Nolan, a once aimless man who find himself in the course of the strike, briefly becomes its leader, and is ultimately crushed in its service. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.Call Number: PS3537 .T3234 I5 1974ISBN: 0143039636Publication Date: 2006-05-30 -
Career opportunities in agriculture, food, and natural resources by Describes more than 95 jobs in agriculture and agricultural-related fields, including farming, aquaculture and commercial fishing, forest production and management, agriscience, agricultural services, food and beverage, pet and animal services, veterinary medicine, and education and communications.Call Number: S494.5 .A4 E24 2011ISBN: 9780816074563Publication Date: 2010-11-01
Websites on the farm workers movement in California
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Mapping UFW Strikes, Boycotts, and Farm Worker Actions 1965-1975Interactive map and timeline of the birth of the modern farm workers movement led by Cesar Chavez and Larry Itliong.
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Farmworker Movement Documentation ProjectPrimary source materials related to the farmworkers movement led by Cesar Chavez.