Kitchen Capitalism

Kitchen Capitalism
Author: Margaret Sherrard Sherraden
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0791484661

Businesses come to life as owners are allowed to speak in their own words in this first in-depth examination of self-employment told from the perspectives of low-income microentrepreneurs. The book systematically analyzes a range of issues, including who chooses to open a micro business, and why; what resources do they bring to their business venture; how well will their venture fare; and what contributes to the growth or decline of their business. The authors conclude that most microentrepreneurs believe self-employment offers a range of monetary and nonmonetary benefits and argue it would be more advantageous to view microenterprise as a social and economic development strategy rather than simply as an anti-poverty strategy. Based on this observation, a range of strategies to better promote microenterprise programs among the poor is advanced, with the goal of targeting the most promising approaches.

A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism

A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism
Author: Eric Holt-Giménez
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2017-10-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1583676600

How our capitalist food system came to be -- Food, a special commodity -- Land and property -- Capitalism, food, and agriculture -- Power and privilege in the food system: gender, race and class -- Food, capitalism, crises and solutions

A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism

A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism
Author: Eric Holt-Giménez
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2017-10-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1583676619

Capitalism drives our global food system. Everyone who wants to end hunger, who wants to eat good, clean, healthy food, needs to understand capitalism. This book will help do that. In his latest book, Eric Holt-Giménez takes on the social, environmental, and economic crises of the capitalist mode of food production. Drawing from classical and modern analyses, A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism introduces the reader to the history of our food systemand to the basics of capitalism. In straightforward prose, Holt-Giménez explains the political economics of why—even as local, organic, and gourmet food have spread around the world—billions go hungry in the midst of abundance; why obesity is a global epidemic; and why land-grabbing, global warming, and environmental pollution are increasing. Holt-Giménez offers emblematic accounts—and critiques—of past and present-day struggles to change the food system, from "voting with your fork," to land occupations. We learn about the potential and the pitfalls of organic and community-supported agriculture, certified fair trade, microfinance, land trusts, agrarian reform, cooperatives, and food aid. We also learn about the convergence of growing social movements using the food system to challenge capitalism. How did racism, classism, and patriarchy become structural components of our food system? Why is a rational agriculture incompatible with the global food regime? Can transforming our food system transform capitalism? These are questions that can only be addressed by first understanding how capitalism works.

Subsidizing Capitalism

Subsidizing Capitalism
Author: Tamar Diana Wilson
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2006-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780791465080

Examines the economic activities of self-employed brickmakers and the unpaid family members and others who assist them in Mexico.

Hungry Capital

Hungry Capital
Author: Luigi Russi
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2013-03-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1780997701

Over the past thirty years, the ability of global finance to affect aspects of everyday life has been increasing at an unprecedented rate. The world of food bears vivid testimony to this tendency, through the scars opened by the 2008 world food price crisis, the iron fist of retailing giants that occupy the supply chain and the unsustainable ecological footprint left behind by global production networks. Hungry Capital offers a rigorous analysis of the influence that financial imperatives exert on the food economy at different levels: from the direct use of edible commodities as an object of speculation to the complex food chains set up by manufacturers and supermarkets. It argues that the circular compulsion to build profits upon profits that global finance injects into the world of food restructures the basic nurturing relationship between man and nature into a streamlined process from which value has to be mined. The end result is a monstrous Leviathan that holds together while – at every step – risks to crumble. ,

Capitalism and Disability

Capitalism and Disability
Author: Marta Russell
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2019-08-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1608467163

Spread out over many years and many different publications, the late author and activist Marta Russell wrote a number of groundbreaking and insightful essays on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism. In this volume, Russell’s various essays are brought together in one place in order to provide a useful and expansive resource to those interested in better understanding the ways in which the modern phenomenon of disability is shaped by capitalist economic and social relations. The essays range in analysis from the theoretical to the topical, including but not limited to: the emergence of disability as a “human category” rooted in the rise of industrial capitalism and the transformation of the conditions of work, family, and society corresponding thereto; a critique of the shortcomings of a purely “civil rights approach” to addressing the persistence of disability oppression in the economic sphere, with a particular focus on the legacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; an examination of the changing position of disabled people within the overall system of capitalist production utilizing the Marxist economic concepts of the reserve army of the unemployed, the labor theory of value, and the exploitation of wage-labor; the effects of neoliberal capitalist policies on the living conditions and social position of disabled people as it pertains to welfare, income assistance, health care, and other social security programs; imperialism and war as a factor in the further oppression and immiseration of disabled people within the United States and globally; and the need to build unity against the divisive tendencies which hide the common economic interest shared between disabled people and the often highly-exploited direct care workers who provide services to the former.

Weighing In

Weighing In
Author: Julie Guthman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2011-10-06
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 0520266242

"A bold, compelling challenge to conventional thinking about obesity and its fixes, Weighing In is one of the most important books on food politics to hit the shelves in a long time." —Susanne Freidberg, author of Fresh: A Perishable History "Weighing In is filled with counterintuitive surprises that should make us skeptics of all kinds of food -- whether local, fast, slow, junk or health -- but also gives us the practical tools to effectively scrutinize the stale buffet of popularly-accepted health wisdom before we digest it." —Paul Robbins, professor of Geography and Development, University of Arizona "If you liked Michael Pollan, this should be your next read. Guthman gives us the research behind the questions we should be asking, but, falling all over ourselves in the rush to consensus, we have overlooked. A self-described Berkeley foodie, Guthman takes on the self-satisfaction of the alternative food movement and places it in rich context, drawing on research in health, economics, labor, agriculture, sociology, and politics. This marvelous, surprising book is a true game-changer in our national conversation about food and justice." —Anna Kirkland, author of Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood “This groundbreaking book calls into question the ubiquitous claim that ‘good food’ will solve the social and health dilemmas of today. Combining political economic analysis, cultural critique, and clear explanation of scientific discoveries, the author challenges our deeply held convictions about society, food, bodies, and environments.” —Becky Mansfield, editor of Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature-Society Relations "Step back from that farmer's market -- Guthman shows us that good foods and good eating are not enough. By questioning the fuzzy facts on obesity, the impact of environment, and capitalism's relentless push to consume, Weighing In challenges us to think harder, and better, about what it really takes to be healthy in the modern age." —Carolyn de la Peña, author of Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweetener from Saccharin to Splenda

Through a Vegan Studies Lens

Through a Vegan Studies Lens
Author: Laura Wright
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2019-02-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1948908115

Interest in the vegan studies field continues to grow as veganism has become increasingly visible via celebrity endorsements and universally acknowledged health benefits, and veganism and vegan characters are increasingly present in works of art and literature. Through a Vegan Studies Lens broadens the scope of vegan studies by engaging in the mainstream discourse found in a wide variety of contemporary works of literature, popular cultural representations, advertising, and news media. Veganism is a practice that allows for environmentally responsible consumer choices that are viewed, particularly in the West, as oppositional to an economy that is largely dependent upon big agriculture. This groundbreaking collection exposes this disruption, critiques it, and offers a new roadmap for navigating and reimaging popular culture representations on veganism. These essays engage a wide variety of political, historical, and cultural issues, including contemporary political and social circumstances, emergent veganism in Eastern Europe, climate change, and the Syrian refugee crisis, among other topics. Through a Vegan Studies Lens significantly furthers the conversation of what a vegan studies perspective can be and illustrates why it should be an integral part of cultural studies and critical theory. Vegan studies is inclusive, refusing to ignore the displacement, abuse, and mistreatment of nonhuman animals. It also looks to ignite conversations about cultural oppression.

“All-Electric” Narratives

“All-Electric” Narratives
Author: Rachele Dini
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2021-10-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501367366

Winner of the 2023 Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women's Studies “All-Electric” Narratives is the first in-depth study of time-saving electrical appliances in American literature. It examines the literary depiction of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, oven ranges, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, toasters, blenders, standing and hand-held mixers, and microwave ovens between 1945, when the “all-electric” home came to be associated with the nation's hard-won victory, and 2020, as contemporary writers consider the enduring material and spiritual effects of these objects in the 21st century. The appropriation and subversion of the rhetoric of domestic electrification and time-saving comprises a crucial, but overlooked, element in 20th-century literary forms and genres including Beat literature, Black American literature, second-wave feminist fiction, science fiction, and postmodernist fiction. Through close-readings of dozens of literary texts alongside print and television ads from this period, Dini shows how U.S. writers have unearthed the paradoxes inherent to claims of appliances' capacity to “give back” time to their user, transport them into a technologically-progressive future, or “return” them to some pastoral past. In so doing, she reveals literary appliances' role in raising questions about gender norms and sexuality, racial exclusion and erasure, class anxieties, the ramifications of mechanization, the perils and possibilities of conformity, the limitations of patriotism, and the inevitable fallacy of utopian thinking-while both shaping and radically disrupting the literary forms in which they operated.

The Kitchen Debate and Cold War Consumer Politics

The Kitchen Debate and Cold War Consumer Politics
Author: Sarah T. Phillips
Publisher: Macmillan Higher Education
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2019-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1319328199

With primary sources never before translated into English, Kitchen Debate and Cold War Consumer Politics connects this debate, which profoundly shaped the economic, social, and cultural contours of the Cold War era, to consumer society, gender ideologies, and geopolitics.