Showing up in food, cosmetics, fuel, medicine—and, by consequence, in much of the air we breathe—corn has become one of the most ubiquitous presences in our lives. ...

From movie theaters to the North American Free Trade Agreement, we look at how this crop travels through our contemporary food system in surprising and sometimes devastating ways. “We produce more corn than anybody ever wanted, and then we have to come up with all these Frankensteinian methods for getting rid of it,” explains our second guest, cultural anthropologist Alyshia Gálvez.

Article co-authored with Lizbeth Bravo, Edith Carrasco; Kathryn Chuber; Daisy Flores and published in Teaching and Learning Anthropology .

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In this article we argue for a slow, methodical, and collaborative approach to difficult texts. This article is the story of how, thanks to the efforts of the students and professor, a book that rewards diligent effort, and some creative pedagogical strategies borne of desperation, the experience of reading Alex E. Chávez’s Sounds of Crossing became a highlight of our college experience. 

Vital Topics Forum edited by Alyshia Gálvez, Megan Carney, and Emily Yates-Doerr and the Nutrire CoLab

Chronic metabolic conditions disproportionately cohere along lines of race, gender, class, and citizenship. Despite overwhelming evidence that racism, gendered violence, so-cial and economic disparities, trade regulations, lack of food sovereignty, and land and livelihood dispossession play the biggest roles in chronic disease, the biomedical explanations given for why people become sick are often firmly rooted in personal behavior or “lifestyle.”

In early May 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Mexican tomatoes, pushed at least in part by Florida tomato farmers who couldn’t compete with Mexican growers. The current North American tomato market is a product of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in which Mexico turned toward large-scale industrialized fruit and vegetable export agriculture and free trade was imagined to level the playing field. Why would tariffs, the antithesis of free trade, be proposed as a solution to a free trade produced problem? First, we have to see what NAFTA intended to do and what it has actually done...Read more...

On Memorial Day, a few blocks from where I live, a white woman illegally walking her dog off-leash called the police on a black man birdwatching. She screeched, her hands trembling as she dialed 911 and concocted a story directly contradicted by video evidence tweeted by the man’s sister. Even though she soon apologized, many on Twitter found it empty, and accused the white woman of weaponizing her white privilege.

She did not do so in a neutral place. Read more...

MOLD’s series on Degrowth explores how activists, farmers, and scholars have sought to create more resilient communities and food systems in rejection of the drive for infinite economic growth.