Edible Imperialisms: Food, Capitalism, and Late-Stage American Empire?

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Food is both a fundamental necessity and a powerful vehicle of imperial control. From industrialized agriculture to the globalization of processed foods, the expansion of American hegemony is deeply entangled with the production, distribution, and consumption of food. This panel, "Edible Imperialisms," brings together five papers that look to food to interrogate the political, economic, and environmental structures sustaining and contesting American empire. In response to the conference theme, "Late-Stage American Empire?," these scholars explore how food—its production, regulation, and circulation—illuminates the ongoing entrenchment of imperial logics and the possibilities for resistance.

These papers collectively examine how food production and trade reinforce American imperialism. Jennie Jiang explores the entanglement of ultra-processed foods with settler colonialism. Maggie Mang investigates agricultural research as an imperial mechanism through the history of the Beltsville Experimental Farm. Ellie Palazzolo analyzes sugar’s role in shaping racial and economic hierarchies in the late 19th century. Katie Rawson traces the grapefruit’s transformation into a global commodity through U.S. agricultural and biochemical interventions. Sasha Gora examines salt cod’s colonial trade routes and its role in structuring American empire.

Taken together, these papers illustrate how food remains a crucial terrain in the history and present of American empire. By interrogating food’s role in sustaining systems of power, "Edible Imperialisms" challenges us to rethink the political stakes of consumption, production, and resistance in a world shaped by imperial histories and their enduring legacies.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Scaling Ultra-Processed Foods: Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the U.S. - Jennie Jiang, Rutgers University

• Uncle Sam’s Proving Grounds: The Beltsville National Farm, Scientized Agriculture, and Experimentation as Logics of American Empire - Maggie Mang, California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo; Ella R Colby, California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo

• Selling Sweetness: Retailing Empire in the American Sugar Bowl - Ellie Palazzolo, University of Mississippi

• Import, Export, Extract: American Capitalism and the Grapefruit - Katie Rawson, University of Pennsylvania

• Colonial Codscapes Between Puerto Rico, New England, and Atlantic Canada - L. Sasha Gora

Chair

• Claire Bunschoten

Biographical Information

Jennie Jiang (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and SexualityStudies at Rutgers University. She holds a B.S. in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology from Emory University, where her undergraduate thesis focused on interrogating the epistemological roots of biomedical models of mental illness in scientific and popular imagination. Her current research interests include taking a feminist science studies and political ecological approach to understanding endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), a subset of environmental toxins that affect sex and reproductive systems in human and nonhuman animals, with a particular focus on EDCs in ultra-processed foods. She is broadly interested in how food production and consumption and uneven geographies of toxicity are shaped by settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Jennie is a recipient of the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship and is currently serving as a Visiting Researcher at the Technoscience Research Unit (TRU) at the University of Toronto. At TRU, she assists with running the annual Technoscience Salon, whose theme for the 2024-25 academic year is “What is a Chemical?”. She also serves as the Graduate Project Manager of Insurgent Intersections: Combating Global Anti-Blackness, a multi-year project hosted by the Department of Africana Studies at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. In her spare time, you can find her cooking, sewing, reading fiction, and tending to her houseplants and garden.


Maggie Mang received her PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her dissertation research was on American experimental mass feeding projects in the 20th century. Her project exposed how metabolism became instrumental for nation and population building programs, such as nutritional accounting in prisons, wartime nutritional engineering agendas, and the legacies of the USDA’s experimental farm in Beltsville, Maryland. Her research and teaching interests are in feminist histories of science, health and environment; critical health, food, and disability studies; and critical science and technology studies (STS). She is an Assistant Professor at California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo in the Interdisciplinary Studies in Liberal Arts (ISLA) department with a concentration in health and society.


Ellie Palazzolo is a PhD candidate in History at Johns Hopkins University and holds a B.A. with honors in History and French from the University of Richmond. She is currently completing a dissertation entitled "Modern Fare: Workers, Consumers, and the Rise of the United States Food System, 1886-1906." The project examines shifting labor politics alongside ideologies of urban, middle-class consumers in Chicago between the Haymarket Affair and the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, with the 1893 World's Fair as a narrative throughline. In centering essential workers in nineteenth-century food history, the manuscript resituates the origins of the American food system and contemporary reform efforts in nineteenth-century debates about the "labor question"—the feasibility of democracy in an industrial society—or, in more contemporary terms, who does what type of work under what conditions. This work has been supported by Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library and the departments of History and Anthropology at Johns Hopkins. Palazzolo is also a student and practitioner of the digital humanities interested in critical, post-colonial, and Black DH applied to textual editing, sustainable design (minimal computing), and pedagogy, with work appearing in the Journal of Scholarly Editing.


Dr. Katie Rawson is the Senior Director of Library Services and Operations and the Co-Director of Media and Information Technology at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds at PhD from the Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University, where her dissertation focused on how people tell stories about food to pursue social and economic change. Previously, she was the managing editor of Southern Spaces and the Director of Learning Innovation at Penn Libraries. She co-authored Dining Out: A Global History of Restaurants with Elliott Shore. She has also published on food in Faulkner, inclusion at Waffle House, information in menus, data curation in the humanities, and collaboration in the academy.


L. Sasha Gora is a writer and cultural historian with a focus on food studies, contemporary art, and the environmental humanities. She earned a PhD in North American cultural history from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen. In 2023 she joined the University of Augsburg where she is the project director and principal investigator of the “Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment” research group. Her research focuses on restaurant politics and cultural representation, the connections between cuisine and ecology, and all things watery (and often salty). Her first book, titled Culinary Claims and about Indigenous restaurants in the lands now known as Canada, will be published in March 2025 by the University of Toronto Press.