Siva Vaidhyanathan

Carolyn de la Peña

This special bound issue of American Quarterly offers a re-reading of the narrative of U.S. technologies as we move beyond celebrations of exceptional tinkerers and a deterministic machine-driven sense of progress to a more complex understanding of the opportunities and responsibilities that befall a nation that interweaves its identities, labors, and creative cultures with its machines.

The Place of Technology in American Studies

Rewiring the "Nation"

Benjamin Lawrance

This book explores the intersection of food and foodways from global and local perspectives. The collection contributes to interdisciplinary debates about the role and movement of commodities in the historical and contemporary world. The expert contributions collectively address a fundamental tension in the emerging scholarly terrain of food studies, namely theorizing the relationship between foodstuff production and cuisine patterns. They explore a wide variety of topics, including curry, bread, sugar, coffee, milk, pulque, Virginia ham, fast-food, obesity, and US ethnic restaurants. Local Foods Meet Global Foodways considers movements in context, and, in doing so, complicates the notions that food 'shapes' culture as it crosses borders or that culture 'adapts' foods to its neo-local or global contexts. By analysing the dynamics of contact between mobile foods and/or people and the specific cultures of consumption they provoke, these case studies reveal the process whereby local foods become global or global foods become local, to be a dynamic, co-creative development jointly facilitated by humans and nature. This volume explores a vast expanse of global regions, such as North and Central America, Europe, China, East Asia and the Pacific, India, sub-Saharan Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, and the USSR/Russia. It includes a foreword by the eminent food scholar Carole Counihan, and an afterword by noted theorist of cuisine Rachel Laudan, and will be of great interest to students and researchers of history, anthropology, geography, cultural studies and American studies. This book is based on a special issue of Food and Foodways.

Tasting History

Local Foods Meet Global Foodways

Sugar substitutes have been a part of American life since saccharin was introduced at the 1893 World's Fair. In Empty Pleasures, the first history of artificial sweeteners in the United States, Carolyn de la Pena blends popular culture with business and women's history, examining the invention, production, marketing, regulation, and consumption of sugar substitutes such as saccharin, Sucaryl, NutraSweet, and Splenda. She describes how saccharin, an accidental laboratory by-product, was transformed from a perceived adulterant into a healthy ingredient. As food producers and pharmaceutical companies worked together to create diet products, savvy women's magazine writers and editors promoted artificially sweetened foods as ideal, modern weight-loss aids, and early diet-plan entrepreneurs built menus and fortunes around pleasurable dieting made possible by artificial sweeteners. NutraSweet, Splenda, and their predecessors have enjoyed enormous success by promising that Americans, especially women, can "have their cake and eat it too," but Empty Pleasures argues that these "sweet cheats" have fostered troubling and unsustainable eating habits and that the promises of artificial sweeteners are ultimately too good to be true.

Carolyn de la Peña

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