UC Press Blog

Why has Silicon Valley become the model for addressing today's myriad social and ecological crises? With this book, Julie Guthman digs into the impoverished solutions for food and agriculture currently emerging from Silicon Valley, urging us to stop trying to fix our broken food system through finit

Jennifer Robin TerryThis year's Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Article Prize was awarded to Jennifer Robin Terry for her article, "Niños por la causa: Child Activists and the United Farm Workers Movement, 1965–1975," published in Pacific Historical Review. Drawing on a wide variety of

In Seeding Empire, Aaron Eddens rewrites an enduring story about the past—and future—of global agriculture. Eddens connects today's efforts to cultivate a "Green Revolution in Africa" to a history of American projects that introduced capitalist agriculture across the Global South. Expansive in scope

Wurgaft and White—son and mother—make delightful company as they guide us through everything from the birth of agriculture to the lamination in a croissant in modern-day Tokyo.From the origins of agriculture to contemporary debates over culinary authenticity, Ways of Eating introduces readers to

The Tropical Turn chronicles the earliest histories of familiar tropical Asian crops in the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean, from rice and cotton to citruses and cucumbers. Drawing on archaeological materials and textual sources in over seven ancient languages, The Tropical Turn unravels t

By Helen Anne Curry, author of Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of ExtinctionThis post was originally published on The Conversation.Last summer I grew three varieties of corn in my tiny garden. I knew from the start that my harvest, if any, would be meagre. The plants

Adam M. Romero is Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.The toxicity of pesticides to the environment and humans is often framed as an unfortunate effect of their benefits to agricultural production. In Economic Poisoning

This year's JustFood21 conference, organized by ASFS, AFHVS, CAFS, and SAFN, centers on the theme of food justice, highlighting how food is ensconced in systems of exclusion, oppression, and power. We reached out to several of our recently published authors in this field to ask: What does food justi

excerpted from Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry by Julie GuthmanThe appearance of Fusarium and Macrophomina in California’s strawberry fields, where they had supposedly never been before, returns me to questions about how these fungi came into