Book review: Marco Santoro, Mafia Politics

Abstract

in the US Department of Agriculture, focused upon food adulteration and unsafe additives in his research. He called for national regulation to insure food purity and safety standards. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle also raised the issue for meat processing. The result was the adoption of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Meat Inspection Act. Nutrition science influenced the government’s new regulations insuring food’s safety and freedom from contaminants and adulteration. The role of middle-class white women was also important in this era as women were represented as keepers of the home and regenerators of the nation. They were also activists in consumer organizations calling for the regulation of milk purity and food labeling standards. In the final case, Haydu focuses upon the 1960s and 1970s of the organic food movement and highlights Robert Rodale’s challenge to the conventional food system. Robert Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming advocated organic living and natural lifestyles in the early 1970s and valued healthy soil, pure water, and clean air and a nonmaterialistic rural way of life. Rodale Press published numerous titles about organic farming, gardening, and simpler life styles eschewing processed foods and overconsumption of material goods. Gardeners and small farmers were a part of this movement as were students and parents with children who were anxious about the adulteration of milk and other foods by hormones and pesticide residues. Echoing the Grahamites’ dedication to good food, organic food activists also brought environmental and social sustainability into the discussions and responses to industrial food systems. There was a push to democratize science to serve people and communities, not just corporations. Growing good food as well as consuming good food became an important part of this movement which encompassed well-being and resisted the globalization of agriculture and food through an alignment with the anti-globalization movement. As in the previous eras, this was largely a white middle-class movement. Questions of agrarian change, class, race, sexism, privilege, inequity, exclusion, and dispossession are raised and examined in food studies research over the last 20 years. These extensions of the politics of food to broader political and social issues moves beyond consumer food politics to questions about capitalist development, colonialism, and neoliberal policy and politics. Haydu makes this point as well in the book’s conclusion, by noting that a focus upon white middle-class food consumption is narrow and vulnerable to co-optation by the conventional agro-food system. More recent national and international food movements have focused upon a plurality of socio-political questions involving equity and justice and ecology, while taking into account questions of hunger, food access, and power. I recommend this book to readers interested in the history of urban white middle-class food consumption politics in the United States and in understanding the roles of consumer social movements and their relationships in food regimes within American history.