labor Archives - Food, Fatness and Fitness

Chocolate is political. Critical awareness of where cocoa beans come from, who works for the pleasurable consumption of chocolate products, and of the ethics and sustainability of food production is not confined to foodies discourse. Debates about fair trade and workers’ rights and child labor are nothing new, either, yet they reveal an uncanny resemblance to (neo-)colonial trading systems. In 1920, W.E.B. Du Bois perceptively described the contradictions underlying the United States’ appetite for colonial commodities. In “The Souls of White Folks,” he writes: “Rubber, ivory, and palm-oil; tea, coffee, and cocoa; bananas, oranges, and other fruit; cotton, gold, and copper—they, and hundred other things which dark and sweating bodies hand up to the white world from their pits of…

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In 1928, the Dole Hawaiian Pineapple Company published an advertisement of a pineapple cannery that declared in bold, black letters: “The Perfect Servant Lives in Honolulu.” This advertisement was not referring to a perfect factory worker, but the perfect canning machine: the groundbreaking Ginaca invented by engineer Henry Gabriel Ginaca, which profoundly advanced the pineapple canning process in the early twentieth century. The 1928 advertisement showed an aerial view of the Ginaca machines, with pineapples descending down long, slender conveyor belts. Inside the Ginacas were tubular slicing knives that could cut and can as many as 100,000 pineapples a day. Eventually, the Ginaca not only cored, peeled, and sliced the fruit into neat squares, but also sized it to fit…

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While the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program in which low-income men constructed trails and lodges in parks, built public roads, and otherwise improved the American environment, lasted just under a decade, it has remained an incredibly popular agency in American consciousness. Organizations push its memory, the National Park Service celebrates its past, and Americans write a surprising number of editorials about how we should revive the program. This is an unusual amount of love for a social welfare program, most of which are loathed and stigmatized in the U.S. Why are so many welfare programs villainized, even when they include a work component, while the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) invokes such pride and nostalgia? There are several reasons…

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Installation view: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby. Photo: Jason Wyche, Artwork © 2014 Kara Walker, full photo credits here

A massive, brilliantly white, sugar-coated sphinx commanded visitors’ attention at the Kara Walker exhibition at the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, New York last spring: At the behest of Creative Time Kara E. Walker has confected: A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. Referring to her artwork as a subtlety in the tradition of medieval and early modern confectionary sculptures, Walker highlights its character as a culinary political allegory: similar to the elaborate animal figurines and grandiose sugar buildings gracing the aristocratic tables of…

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Food, Fatness and Fitness

Critical Perspectives

Tag labor:

The Chocolate Myth

“The Perfect Servant”: Race, Hygiene, and Canning Machinery at the Dole Hawaiian Pineapple Company

Body Building as Social Welfare: How the Language of Weight Justified the Civilian Conservation Corps

The Taste for Whiteness: Kara Walker’s Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014)