Food Across Borders:
Production, Consumption, and Boundary Crossing in North America
Food Across Borders seeks to examine this world in which boundaries create exclusions and dialogs, coercions and collaborations. In our examination we hope to uncover both the ways that boundaries represent true divides in terms of rights and power, and also create and reify false categories of “inside” and “outside” that often do not fit the realities of our current food system.
PURCHASE FROM:
“A ‘Taco Truck on Every Corner’? Well organized and well written, Food Across Borders takes a broad inter-ethnic, transnational, and transhemispheric approach to its subject. The book is a welcome reminder and fresh interpretation of the central role that food plays in American politics and society at every level from production to consumption.”
–José M. Alamillo “author of Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town “
DESCRIPTION
The act of eating defines and redefines borders. What constitutes “American” in our cuisine has always depended on a liberal crossing of borders, from “the line in the sand” that separates Mexico and the United States, to the grassland boundary with Canada, to the imagined divide in our collective minds between “our” food and “their” food. Immigrant workers have introduced new cuisines and ways of cooking that force the nation to question the boundaries between “us” and “them.”
The stories told in Food Across Borders highlight the contiguity between the intimate decisions we make as individuals concerning what we eat and the social and geopolitical processes we enact to secure nourishment, territory, and belonging.
Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University..
REVIEWS
“This important volume reminds us that eating necessarily involves the movement of foodstuffs, meanings, and bodies across borders, both intimate and geopolitical, and that ‘building a wall’ is no solution.”
–Julie Guthman “author of Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California “
“Essays on such topics as negotiating nostalgia in family-owned and small-scale Mexican restaurants in the United States.”
–Chronicle
A Conversation with Food Across Borders editors Matt Garcia, E. Melanie DuPuis, and Don Mitchell
–Meant to be Eaten
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