240 books match the query 'Agriculture & Food Policy' and 8 start with l

cover of Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950

Labor and Community

Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950

Gilbert G. González

University of Illinois Press, 1994

The emergence, maturity, and decline of the southern California citrus industry is seen here through the network of citrus worker villages that dotted part of the state's landscape from 1910 to 1960.  Labor and Community shows how Mexican immigrants shaped a partially independent existence within a fiercely hierarchical framework of economic and political relationships. González relies on a variety of published sources and interviews with longtime residents to detail the education of village children; the Americanization of village adults; unionization and strikes; and the decline of the citrus picker village and rise of the urban barrio. His insightful study of the rural dimensions of Mexican-American life prior to World War II adds balance to a long-standing urban bias in Chicano historiography.
 
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cover of Land for the People: The State and Agrarian Conflict in Indonesia

Land for the People

The State and Agrarian Conflict in Indonesia

Anton Lucas

Ohio University Press, 2013

Half of Indonesia’s massive population still lives on farms, and for these tens of millions of people the revolutionary promise of land reform remains largely unfulfilled. The Basic Agrarian Law, enacted in the wake of the Indonesian revolution, was supposed to provide access to land and equitable returns for peasant farmers. But fifty years later, the law’s objectives of social justice have not been achieved.

Land for the People provides a comprehensive look at land conflict and agrarian reform throughout Indonesia’s recent history, from the roots of land conflicts in the prerevolutionary period and the Sukarno and Suharto regimes, to the present day, in which democratization is creating new contexts for people’s claims to the land. Drawing on studies from across Indonesia’s diverse landscape, the contributors examine some of the most significant issues and events affecting land rights, including shifts in policy from the early postrevolutionary period to the New Order; the Land Administration Project that formed the core of land policy during the late New Order period; a long-running and representative dispute over a golf course in West Java that pitted numerous local farmers against the government and local elites; Suharto’s notorious “million hectare” project that resulted in loss of access to land and resources for numerous indigenous farmers in Kalimantan; and the struggle by Bandung’s urban poor to be treated equitably in the context of commercial land development. Together, these essays provide a critical resource for understanding one of Indonesia’s most pressing and most influential issues.

Contributors: Afrizal, Dianto Bachriadi, Anton Lucas, John McCarthy, John Mansford Prior, Gustaaf Reerink, Carol Warren, and Gunawan Wiradi.

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cover of Landscapes Of Bacchus: The Vine in Portugal

Landscapes Of Bacchus

The Vine in Portugal

By Dan Stanislawski

University of Texas Press, 1970

In a country of disparate parts and of long, unbroken historical experience, there may be one dominant feature, a clue to the character of its regions. In Portugal the vine serves as this clue.

The vine has been an important aspect of the Iberian landscape since prehistoric times, and farmers still use Roman methods of cultivation that have been adapted to regional physical conditions and to socioeconomic structure. Southern Portugal today is almost vineless, but in the north three areas can be distinguished by their vine forms and their products. Dan Stanislawski examines these areas in detail.

High tree-vines surround plots of grain in the Minho Province. The grains and the slightly acid Green Wines provide subsistence and cash for the densely settled area of owner-operated small farms.

In the hanging garden terrace of the Douro, vines grown on tawny, baked schist slopes yield world-famous Port Wine, a product that must conform to strict quantity and quality controls supervised by the central government.

Mature table wines are produced in the Dão, an isolated cul-de-sac where cordons of vines are planted on small, individually owned plots. Control of wine-making is exercised by a central governing group and by producers’ cooperatives.

Various wines originate in central Portugal. The lesser demarcated zones of Setubal, Colares, Carcavelos, and Bucelas yield fine wines. In other parts of the central region several wine types are produced in bulk. Some are used for blending and some for aging into quality table wines, but none is distinguished as a wine whose character is derived from its geographical location.

Dan Stanislawski demonstrates that vine form differences—and differences in the resulting product, wine—mirror the Portuguese historical experience and indicate regional distinctions in Portuguese life styles.

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cover of Latin@s' Presence in the Food Industry: Changing How We Think about Food

Latin@s' Presence in the Food Industry

Changing How We Think about Food

Meredith E. Abarca

University of Arkansas Press, 2016

Latin@s' Presence in the Food Industry takes the holistic culinary approach of bringing together multidisciplinary criticism to explore the diverse, and not always readily apparent, ways that Latin@s relate to food and the food industry.

The networks Latin@s create, the types of identities they fashion through food, and their relationship to the US food industry are analyzed to understand Latin@s as active creators of food-based communities, as distinctive cultural representations, and as professionals. This vibrant new collection acknowledges issues of labor conditions, economic politics, and immigration laws—structural vulnerabilities that certainly cannot be ignored—and strives to understand more fully the active and conscious ways that Latina@s create spaces to maneuver global and local food systems.
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cover of Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity

Let Them Eat Junk

How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity

Robert Albritton

Pluto Press, 2009

Respected economist Robert Albritton argues that the capitalist system, far from delivering on the promise of cheap, nutritious food for all, has created a world where 25% of the world population are over-fed and 25% are hungry. This malnourishment of 50% of the world's population is explained systematically, a refreshing change from accounts that focus on cultural factors and individual greed. Albritton details the economic relations and connections that have put us in a situation of simultaneous oversupply and undersupply of food.

This explosive book provides yet more evidence that the human cost of capitalism is much bigger than those in power will admit.

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cover of Live Stock and Dead Things: The Archaeology of Zoopolitics between Domestication and Modernity

Live Stock and Dead Things

The Archaeology of Zoopolitics between Domestication and Modernity

Hannah Chazin

University of Chicago Press, 2024

Reconceptualizes human-animal relationships and their political significance in ancient and modern societies.
 
In Live Stock and Dead Things, Hannah Chazin combines zooarchaeology and anthropology to challenge familiar narratives about the role of nonhuman animals in the rise of modern societies. Conventional views of this process tend to see a mostly linear development from hunter-gatherer societies, to horticultural and pastoral ones, to large-scale agricultural ones, and then industrial ones. Along the way, traditional accounts argue that owning livestock as property, along with land and other valuable commodities, introduced social inequality and stratification. Against this, Chazin raises a provocative question: What if domestication wasn’t the origin of instrumentalizing nonhuman animals after all?
 
Chazin argues that these conventional narratives are inherited from conjectural histories and ignore the archaeological data. In her view, the category of “domestication” flattens the more complex dimensions of humans’ relationship to herd animals. In the book’s first half, Chazin offers a new understanding of the political possibilities of pastoralism, one that recognizes the powerful role herd animals have played in shaping human notions of power and authority. In the second half, she takes readers into her archaeological fieldwork in the South Caucasus, which sheds further light on herd animals’ transformative effect on the economy, social life, and ritual. Appealing to anthropologists and archaeologists alike, this daring book offers a reconceptualization of human-animal relationships and their political significance.
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cover of Local Organic: Food Rhetorics and Community Writing for Impact

Local Organic

Food Rhetorics and Community Writing for Impact

Veronica House

Utah State University Press, 2025

In Local Organic, Veronica House explores ways to collaboratively build resilient local food systems and coalitions across disciplines and communities. Framed by a study of language, power, and food both nationally and in Boulder, Colorado, the book offers teachers, organizers, activists, and scholars ideas and examples for building interdisciplinary and intercommunity coalitional ecologies through writing in a methodology for engagement that the author calls ecological community writing. Based on more than a decade of research, teaching, writing, and project-building with undergraduate writing students and project partners, House theorizes how work to encourage local community-based writing becomes an ecological thread connecting things, ideas, and people. Local Organic is a book about collaboratively building community-derived definitions for resilient local food systems and how faculty and students can work to ethically partner with local communities using distributed definition building.

Local Organic offers writing and rhetoric faculty and graduate students an ecological methodology to produce, teach, and theorize writing to help communities engage with a wide array of social issues and to work toward individual and community-level impacts.
 
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cover of Local Vino: The Winery Boom in the Heartland

Local Vino

The Winery Boom in the Heartland

James R. Pennell

University of Illinois Press, 2016

The art and craft of winemaking has put down roots in Middle America, where enterprising vintners coax reds and whites from the prairie earth while their businesses stand at the hub of a new tradition of community and conviviality.

In Local Vino, James R. Pennell tracks among the hardy vines and heartland terroir of wineries across Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio. Blending history and observation, Pennell gives us a top-down view of the business from cuttings and cultivation to sales and marketing. He also invites entrepreneurs to share stories of their ambitions, hard work, and strategies. Together, author and subjects trace the hows and whys of progress toward that noblest of goals: a great vintage that puts their winery on the map.

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