The Politics of the Pantry: Stories, Food, and Social Change

Mikulak, a postdoctoral fellow at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, provides a critical analysis of the sociological and political rhetoric surrounding food production and its relationship to sustainability, obesity, economics, and even climate change. His analysis, while quite scholarly, will also appeal to the general reader. In the first two chapters, the author covers the history of environmentalism and its relationship with agriculture. He also tackles texts that try to expose our modern food systems and what he calls "food stories," or writings about food or agriculture, thoroughly dissecting contemporary works such as Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. In the last chapter, Mikulak gets personal, describing how he experimented with eating locally and producing as much of his own food as possible.