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GeoHumanities
ISSN: 2373-566X (Print) 2373-5678 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rgeo20
The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins
Lisa Jordan Powell & Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt
To cite this article: Lisa Jordan Powell & Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt (2015): The Perilous
Whiteness of Pumpkins, GeoHumanities, DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2015.1099421
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2015.1099421
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The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins
Lisa Jordan Powell
University of British Columbia and University of the Fraser Valley
Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
This article examines the symbolic whiteness associated with pumpkins in the contemporary United
States. Starbucks’pumpkin spice latte, a widely circulated essay in McSweeney’son “Decorative
Gourd Season,”pumpkins in aspirational lifestyle magazines, and the reality television show Punkin
Chunkin provide entry points into whiteness–pumpkin connections. Such analysis illuminates how
class, gender, place, and especially race are employed in popular media and marketing of food and
flavor; it suggests complicated interplay among food, leisure, labor, nostalgia, and race. Pumpkins in
popular culture also reveal contemporary racial and class coding of rural versus urban places.
Accumulation of critical, relational, and contextual analyses, including things seemingly as innoc-
uous as pumpkins, points the way to a food studies of humanities and geography. When considered
vis-à-vis violence and activism that incorporated pumpkins, these analyses point toward the perils of
equating pumpkins and whiteness. Key Words: food, gender, popular media, race and place,
whiteness.
In Fall 2014, a crowd rioted in a U.S. community that rarely made national headlines. The riot
involved hundreds of citizens, officers from two towns’police forces, and state police special
operations units. Police on the scene reported “losing control”of the crowds; a militarized
response barely held the line as rioters overturned and set cars on fire, shattered plate glass
windows, and shocked neighborhoods. The event resulted in significant property damage, thirty
people treated for injuries, at least eighty arrests, and 170 students disciplined by their college
(Pearce 2014; Pierce 2014; Thadani 2014).
We speak not of the political protests and violence in Ferguson, Missouri, in the aftermath of
Michael Brown’s killing.
Instead, this riot occurred in the rural community of Keene, New Hampshire. Dubbed the
Pumpkin Riot because it began at an annual Pumpkin Festival, the violence proved an irresistible
target for media commentators seeking to illustrate differences in experience and treatment
between largely white and largely African American communities in the contemporary United
States.
1
For the Pumpkin Riot, indeed, pitted mostly middle-class, white college students (and,
although numbers are harder to find, likely more men than women) against a police force
surprised by such an outbreak in what Internet sources repeatedly called “the whitest festival
GeoHumanities, 00(00) 2015, 1–19 Copyright © 2015 by Association of American Geographers.
Initial submission, August 2015; final acceptance, September 2015.
Published by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
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imaginable”(Kaufman 2014; Kleeman 2014). New Hampshire police and residents did not
blame the breakdown of community, young men’s“thuggish”behavior, or lack of respect for
law and order. They generally dismissed the events as mischievous college students acting out.
Participating students, interviewed afterward, indicated confidence that personal consequences
from the riot would be minimal. Meanwhile, activists in Ferguson noticed the discrepancy
between police responses. They brought pumpkins to the St. Louis County Justice Center.
Activists wrote RACISM, WHITE PRIVILEGE, HATE, and POLICE BRUTALITY on pumpkins,
which they carried or hauled in a red wagon. According to Derek Laney, with Missourians
Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, Keene State students were called “unruly, drunken
revelers, causing a ruckus.”Ferguson activists, however, were called “rioters”and “thugs.”He
continued, “We are going to smash [pumpkins] symbolically at the foot of someone who can
bring [the Brown] case to justice. . . . We’re using that as a jumping off point to insist on justice
for Mike Brown”(Giegerich 2014). Other activists penned signs contrasting unequal treatment
of rioters. Lost to none of the protesters were the deadly stakes of being judged the “wrong”kind
of rioter.
As scholars of geography and American studies, we are horrified by the wave of violence
sweeping the United States targeting black and brown bodies. The continuation of structural
inequalities in terms of education, prison, and citizenship is haunting, systemic, and historically
rooted (Baptist 2014; Fasching-Varner et al. 2014; Coates 2015). As food and rural studies
scholars, we notice the equation of pumpkins with whiteness—a surprisingly recent cultural
phenomenon. Here, we examine pumpkins’symbolic whiteness. Doing so connects underground
veins of class, gender, and especially race in media and marketing of food and flavor; it suggests
complicated interplay among food, leisure, labor, nostalgia, and race; and it makes visible
today’s version of racial and class coding of rural versus urban places.
To explore race, culture, and food, we turn to three recent moments in the narrative of
pumpkins’whiteness: the pumpkin spice flavor industry and rhetoric connecting particular mid-
dle- or upper-class female whiteness to pumpkin spice lattes; the Internet phenomenon,
“Decorative Gourd Season,”and lifestyle magazines’fall embrace of class-aspirational pumpkins;
and the working-class reality television Punkin Chunkin contests. Along the way, we briefly
examine agricultural pumpkin production and pumpkins in U.S. history. Finally, we return to the
Pumpkin Riot to consider how a deeper understanding of urban–rural divides in current U.S.
cultures reveals what is so perilous about the equation of pumpkins and whiteness. Our aim is to
make more legible the consequences of ruptures among food, race, class, gender, and place.
FOOD, GEOGRAPHY, AND WHITENESS
An interdisciplinary project, this article draws on several bodies of literature: most heavily on
food studies, particularly that in American studies and cultural history; media studies; critical
race studies; and geography’s studies of whiteness and place. The racial politics of pumpkins are
most visible through such an interdisciplinary lens.
Food studies has developed a robust literature on race and food systems, including
especially labor, consumption, and markets (Carney 2002;Alkon2012;Metcalfe2012;
McCutcheon 2014). Mintz’s(1986)Sugar and Power remains the progenitor of most such
projects. Recent work by scholars such as Wazana Tompkins (2012) analyzes racial violence
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encoded in U.S.-based food discussions. In Tompkins’s words, “critical eating studies theo-
rizes a flexible and circular relation between the self and the social world in order to . . .
recognize our bodies as vulnerable to each other in ways that are terrible—that is, full of
terror—and, at other times, politically productive”(3). American Studies and cultural history
scholars such as Ferris (2014)inThe Edible South,Sharpless(2013)inCooking in Other
Women’s Kitchens, Belasco (2006)inMeals to Come,andTurner(2014)inHow the Other
Half Ate, among others, demonstrate the intersections of food with race, class, gender, and
power in U.S. cultures.
Often, writing in food studies focuses on a single food item, much in the form of nonfiction
for general readership. Kurlansky’s(1998)Cod is perhaps the quintessential example, but other
books include McPhee’s(1975)Oranges, Edge’s(2004a)Apple Pie and (2004b)Fried Chicken,
Fussell’s(1992)Story of Corn, and recently Essig’s(2015)Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail
History of the Humble Pig. With the exception of short epilogues that bring the story into the
present, a veil of years often hangs between the foods explored and readers. At times, their
orientation toward a popular audience can mean tough questions are framed as relevant to the
historical past but not necessarily readers’own lives and practices.
Relatively fewer books have critically linked race to individual foods as cultural symbols.
Williams Forson’s(2006)Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs on fried chicken and black
women and DuPuis’s(2002)Nature’s Perfect Food on ethnicity and milk in northern urban
spaces are exceptions, teaching us a single food item can be “an embodiment of the politics of
American identity”(8), in particular cultural moments and spaces. Although not the sole focus of
their works, scholars such as Miller (2013) on red drink, Lewis (1989) on Maine lobsters, and
Wallach (2015) and Engelhardt (2011) on cornmeal versus white flour point the way as we
develop an approach to the racial politics of pumpkins.
2
Media studies, when it has turned to food, has focused well on television networks, multi-
platform celebrities, and crowd-sourced Web sites propelling food into mass cultures.
Understanding “foodies,”taste-makers, and cult-like adoration of chefs occupies scholars in
communications and media studies (Johnston and Baumann 2009; Haupt 2012; Rousseau 2012;
Sax 2014). We benefit from their approaches to Twitter, memes, and fast-changing internet
reporting, but to our knowledge few works have addressed the circulation of particular foods in
media culture.
Scholarship specifically analyzing the history, construction, and functioning of whiteness
flourished in the 1990s. Although some scholarship has been criticized for oversimplifying
critical race studies’insights, the body of work on whiteness and place in geography, particularly
as led by Kobayashi (Kobayashi and Peake 2000), and including the work of Hoelscher (2003)
on Natchez, Mississippi; Vanderbeck (2006) on Vermont, and Inwood and Martin (2008) on the
University of Georgia, informs our thinking. Kobayashi and Peake (2000) argued whiteness
“occurs as the normative, ordinary power to enjoy social privilege by controlling dominant
values and institutions and, in particular, by occupying space within a segregated social land-
scape”(393). Spaces where actual pumpkins reside differ from spaces in which metaphorical
pumpkins are segregated in the social landscape of modern U.S. cultures. Here, we advocate an
intersectional approach that does not try to separate race from the workings of other vectors of
social power, including class, gender, and region.
Therefore, not only does this article stand as an investigation of the politics of pumpkins, but
also it explores the possibilities and potential of interdisciplinary methodologies wedding
THE PERILOUS WHITENESS OF PUMPKINS 3
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geography and the humanities. Interdisciplinary pumpkin analyses, however, need to begin with
pumpkins in fields and national food chains.
PUMPKINS IN THE FIELD
The relationship between the pumpkin’s position in contemporary U.S. culture and its role as an
edible crop is complicated. Nevertheless, pumpkins are real, material food plants in addition to
being cultural symbols. Ott (2012), author of Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American
Icon, produced the most rigorous scholarly treatment of pumpkins. She asked why the pumpkin
has traced a path out of step with most fruits and vegetables in the United States. Whereas
strawberries, oranges, and tomatoes, for instance, have moved from being distinctly seasonal
(with relatively short seasons at that) to year-round availability, pumpkins have done the
opposite. Pumpkin sales not only spike but also are only significant around Halloween and
Thanksgiving—days or weekends, shorter even than seasons. This stands in sharp contrast to
“most people around the world, who eat pumpkin unceremoniously throughout the year”and to
people in the historical past of the United States for whom pumpkins were key to survival and
basic sustenance (Ott 2012,3–5). This article builds on Ott’s frame, but we explore territory to
the side of her analysis. We focus on cultural moments that have emerged since Ott published
her book in 2012, namely, contemporary racial coding of pumpkins.
Although pumpkin production has long been recorded in the vegetable and melon data
collection and tables of the U.S. Census of Agriculture, what pumpkin data are collected has
changed in recent decades. Through 1997, the Census reported only the total number of
pumpkin producing farms and total acres harvested. Beginning in 2002, the Census listed
separately the acres harvested specifically for processing and the number of farms growing
pumpkins for processing. In 2007, Census data tables added columns for pumpkins harvested for
fresh market; however, this number generally equals the number of total acres minus the number
of acres used for processing. Although it is a new presentation of data, it represents information
implicitly available before. Nevertheless, as the Census adapts its collection and presentation of
data over time to reflect both changing production trends and changing information needs, we
can infer something about pumpkins was evolving (National Agricultural Statistics Service
[NASS] 1998,2000,2001,2002,2003,2004b,2005,2006,2008).
Total national pumpkin acres harvested has fluctuated but generally grown over the past
several Census of Agriculture data collections (79,707 in 1997; 97,408 in 2002; 92,955 in 2007;
90,165 in 2012). The total number of operations harvesting pumpkins, however, has grown
steadily (11,723 in 1997; 14,073 in 2002; 15,088 in 2007; 15,840 in 2012). The number of acres
dedicated to pumpkins for processing is consistently small compared to total acres harvested,
comprising roughly 15 percent. The state of Illinois has long led in total acres harvested. Illinois
is both dominated by and dominates U.S. production of pumpkins for processing; other states
routinely cited as major pumpkin producers include California, New York, Michigan, Ohio, and
Pennsylvania. Nonetheless, although production for processing is more limited in scope, com-
mercial pumpkin production exists in all fifty states (NASS 1999,2004a,2009,2014).
Although people in the U.S. pumpkin-picking and pumpkin-processing labor force should not
be lumped into one homogeneous group, labor guidelines and commentary on labor issues
indicate many are migrant workers and many are of Mexican descent. In 2007, for example,
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pumpkin growers in Colorado despaired after a state “crackdown”on undocumented immigrants
disrupted their fall pumpkin harvest labor force (Rodriguez 2007). Labor controversies in other
states, including Texas and North Carolina, suggest seasonal laborers primarily of Mexican
descent pick their pumpkin fields (Lutton and Einhorn 2006; Henneberger 2008; Shaffer 2013).
The Illinois Department of Employment Security identifies the migrant and seasonal worker
needs of state pumpkin farms, and articles in Mother Jones and other magazines have indicated
that the seasonal processing labor force at the Libby’s canned pumpkin plant in Morton, Illinois,
is largely from Mexico (Lee 2011; Illinois Department of Employment Security 2014). Although
an intensive academic study of the pumpkin labor force in the United States is beyond our scope,
what is important is that pumpkins are a crop that requires significant human handling. The U.S.
agricultural system’s structure means that workers of many races have likely touched the
pumpkin you celebrate—whether you purchase it from Walmart, your local church, the pumpkin
farm itself, or in a can off your grocery store shelf.
As we move into discussions of pumpkin in popular culture, acres of actual pumpkin farms
are never that far away from the locations of computer screens, smartphones, and magazines
from which most of the following primary sources emerge. It is easy to forget the pumpkins, the
hands of their harvesters, and the systems of profit, distribution, and marketing that sustain them.
But each deeply needs the other. Actual pumpkins and the ideas of pumpkins intersect; both stay
on the page for the remainder of this article.
PUMPKIN SPICE LATTES
With actual pumpkins in our sights, we can move to the most virtual and unplaced pumpkins in
contemporary mainstream culture. Starbucks introduced the pumpkin spice latte (PSL) in 2003.
The company claimed sales of more than 200 million by the start of PSL’s tenth season, noting
that fans had established it as “the company’s most popular seasonal beverage of all time”
(Starbucks 2013).
3
Although the PSL was celebrated as a company and cultural success in 2013,
one year later it was firmly hitched to discussions of white female identity and consumerism as
both a dismissive, racially coded slur and a rallying counterpoint.
In October 2014, Buzzfeed published an article by media studies scholar and cultural critic
Anne Helen Petersen (2014) titled “‘Basic’Is Just Another Word for Class Anxiety.”Next to the
title was a photograph of a fair, smiling white woman, half-buried in fall leaves, with four
smaller images forming a halo around her: a sugar pie pumpkin, an orange candle (presumably
pumpkin-spice scented), a Starbucks PSL, and a pair of UGG boots. The article’s header
announced, “breaking down why we are dismissive of all things pumpkin spice.”To that end,
Petersen described the PSL as “the ultimate signifier of basicness.”Acknowledging a longer
trajectory for the term, Petersen positioned “basic”in the current cultural moment as a stereotype
wielded to convey distance from predictably consuming and behaving white women. A woman
called basic thus “cherishes uninspired brands,”“lives a banal existence,”and talks about both in
bland ways (Petersen’s examples are the hashtags #blessed and #thankful on Facebook and
Pinterest). Petersen turned a keen eye on the gendered nature of such stereotypes. Here, a
particular feminized consumerism makes others anxious to separate themselves as better and
different while still consuming, living, and using social media. She concluded, rather than
analyzing or criticizing economic and social systems, “basic”functions as “casual misogyny.”
THE PERILOUS WHITENESS OF PUMPKINS 5
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To Petersen, “that’s a behavior far more troubling—and regressive—than taking pleasure in all
things pumpkin spice”(Petersen 2014).
4
In analyses like Petersen’s, whiteness of people is
conflated with whiteness of pumpkins.
Petersen’s article was one of several on “basic”published that fall. Appearing in media
outlets such as NY Magazine, Bustle, and The Guardian, all illustrate their arguments with
pumpkins (Buchanan 2014; Malone 2014; Moss 2014). The articles by Petersen and Malone
(2014) especially came under fire, particularly from black feminists. Although Petersen discussed
in some detail the African American vernacular culture and hip-hop origins of “basic,”some critics
wanted that acknowledgment more firmly stated and the earlier usage positioned as more germane
and important. Others worried that normalizing behaviors of middle- and upper class white women
would further marginalize women of color. They predicted, and events bore them out, that
stereotyping “basic”(i.e., white females with disposable income for PSLs and UGGs) failed to
acknowledge the privilege such women and their (also white, consuming differently) detractors all
actually hold (Brown 2014; Ureno-Ravelo 2014).
5
Given the state of discussions of privilege and identity in U.S. culture today, it is perhaps not
surprising that PSL-loving “basic bitches”responded by embracing the term, pushing back
against its implications, and making the precarious argument that they were answering their
oppressors. “Basic”women penned editorials about their right to “like what they like”and not
be ridiculed. In the process, African American uses of the term and of its analysis fell further out
of the conversation (Levy-McLaughlin 2014; Petri 2014; Rickling 2015). Trying to keep the
focus on attitude, black femininity, and hip-hop definitions of class, Brown (2014) noted,
“Rihanna could become the official spokesperson for Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes and
nobody would think of her as basic.”It was largely a futile effort, though. Images and voices
of white women clutching their symbolically even whiter PSLs dominated.
But why did PSLs become the symbol of basic white girlness? Why did they stick even more
than UGGs, yoga pants, or scented candles? The context and composition of the PSL might be
revealing. Prior to fall 2015, PSLs did not actually contain pumpkin. Luxury items, they cost far
more than plain cups of coffee, yet do not provide tangible extra nutrition other than that in milk.
Actual pumpkins, in contrast, contribute vitamin A, beta-carotenoids, fiber, and potassium
(Savoie and Hedstrom 2008). Similar to how UGGs have been removed from their original
function as practical Australian and New Zealand footwear, PSLs take an evocative word,
pumpkin, and attach it to something with none of the practicalities of the original. Ott (2012),
in Pumpkin, calls this the symbolic pumpkin; detached from history, it triggers nostalgia for
home, harvest, and rural idyllic life (87). PSLs are one step further from actual pumpkins. Their
fluffiness, lack of substance, and triviality, regardless of attempts to dismiss them as “basic,”
make them ultimate luxuries and hence markers of distinction and white privilege (Bourdieu and
Nice 1987).
Rather than starting with the pumpkin (not) in PSLs, we might begin with the latte: sugar,
milkfat, and cream. Coming at the question of why PSLs attained cultural currency from a
different direction, we look to Simon’s(2009)Everything But the Coffee. He argued, “In our
postneed world where shopping has become a form of entertainment, self-expression, and
identity making and where other institutions are receding, it shouldn’t be surprising that many
people seek individual comfort and solace in consumption.”More specifically, Simon found for
some women consumers, “Starbucks has become a way to broadcast their self-worth and self-
possession, and, in some cases, to deliver a muted feminist critique of the hectoring and
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finger-wagging advice coming at them all the time from supermarket magazines and cable
station commenters”(Simon 2009, 124–29). He analyzes women’s magazine column pressure,
including personal betterment and good consumer purchases for one’s family. Extending
Simon’s frame to pumpkins and race, the excesses of calories, profligate sweetness, whipped
cream, and heady aroma position them solidly as luxury items. PSLs are quintessential “post-
need”uses of pumpkin. We no longer need to consume pumpkins for caloric subsistence.
Instead, we demonstrate consumer savvy and gleeful excess by choosing the particular comforts
of status-demonstrating Starbucks PSLs. In fact, had they significant actual pumpkin, had they
strong associations with healthy vegetables or vitamins, PSLs would fail these consumers. In
August 2015, after consumer and employee questions about the lack of pumpkin in PSLs,
Starbucks decided to incorporate some pumpkin puree into its “pumpkin spice flavored sauce,”
which retains sugar and condensed milk as its leading ingredients (Dukes 2015). “The Official
Twitter for Fall’s Official Beverage,”@TheRealPSL, used language that nonetheless continues
associations with privileged white girl basicness in its announcement of the change, stating, “In
between a yoga retreat and a vision quest, I made a decision to use real pumpkin. My dad is so
proud”(TheRealPSL 2015).
The status symbol is not any over-the-top caloric, sweet drink, nor does it come from just any
place. Starbucks PSLs are products of coffee shop culture, with its gendered and racial codes.
European historians such as Ellis (2004)inCoffee House, find coffee shop culture’s roots in the
British Empire of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Deeply masculine spaces, coffee shops
witnessed political debates, rebellion planning, and religious foment. Not until the 1950s’
reemergence of coffee houses as Italian espresso bars did they “represent a place where people
of all kinds could socialise together: richer with poorer, migrants with metropoles, women with
men, creating a space that seemed to reject the values of official discourse on class, gender and
race”(245). Concurrent with women’s entrance were milky, sweet drinks; Ellis called them
together the “lactification of the coffee-house.”His odd phrase nonetheless makes visible
underlying feminizing and whitening of drinks, spaces, and practices of coffee shops. Ellis
concluded, “The sociability of the chain coffee bar has cut its links with the vengeful, transgres-
sive crowd, on the verge of insurrection. It is not simply that the mob has been excluded by the
anodyne luxury of the corporate coffee shop, but that these places cultivate a sociability
designed to reform the mob into a more tranquil, even docile, crowd of consumers”(258).
6
Ellis’s prescience was demonstrated as 200 million lactified, docile consumers ordered their
PSLs.
Lest we rest too comfortably on the female gendering of pumpkins, the 2014 Super Bowl
advertising cycle took a broad swing at men enjoying pumpkin-related flavor. Anheuser-Busch
trumpeted Budweiser as a “macrobrew”and contrasted good, simple Bud with fussy micro- and
craft brews. Paired with images of stereotyped mustachioed, hipster men sniffing and swirling
deep glasses of dark ales or stouts, the shorthand appears on screen: “Let them sip their pumpkin
peach ale, we’ll be brewing us some golden suds”(Vorel 2015).
7
Women are not explicitly
excluded, but the male narrator repeatedly asserts a simple “we”with listeners and positions that
“we”against a subset of masculinity that embraces pumpkins. Presumably pumpkin lovers
consuming pumpkin-flavored beers are not mainstream U.S. consumers. Despite the ad’s allu-
sions, pumpkin beers are neither new nor rare. Early colonists put pumpkins to wise use in
brewing; providing a sugar substitute to catch needed wild yeasts, pumpkin in beer appears in
early recipes from around the colonies (“To Make Pumpkin Yeast”1788). Unsurprisingly,
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colonial pumpkin beers tasted different from today’s brews with a little pumpkin and a lot of
pumpkin spice, because, as historian Gregg Smith argued, “As opposed to modern pumpkin
beer, in which the pumpkin only adds flavor, for colonials the pumpkin was a source of
fermentable sugar. Pumpkin ale of the colonial era, as a result, was said to have a noticeable
‘tang’unless aged for a few years”(Bland 2013; Harbster 2014).
8
Still, pumpkins have
reassumed their role in the microbrews since the 1980s. Regardless of corporate U.S. beer
producers’broad stereotyping, fall brings pumpkin beers just as surely as PSLs to willing U.S.
consumers.
Beers, with their historical links to pumpkins, make some intuitive sense. PSLs, which share
milkiness and creaminess with pumpkin pies, also are reasonably logical. Yet, pumpkin spice as
a flavor and scent has expanded far beyond either. Chef Erica Wides follows political satirist
Stephen Colbert and his term “truthiness”to discuss “foodiness.”To Wides, the U.S. food
system offers six degrees of foodiness, as foods (grown in fields, wandering forests or plains, or
swimming in waters) are modified, adjusted, and changed. Her sixth degree no longer contains
the original food at all—whether “apple flavor”(her example) or pumpkin spice flavor (ours;
Wides 2015).
9
This is slippery because semantically pumpkin spice never promised to be
pumpkin, merely to add spices such as nutmeg, cinnamon, and ginger to pumpkin pie.
Ultimately, pumpkin spice does not concern savory pumpkin recipes. Its hidden ingredient is
sugar, whether white cane, high-fructose corn syrup, or noncaloric sweetening. Food scholars
like Levenstein (2003) and southern studies scholars like Hale (1999) have long argued that U.S.
culture’s growing preference for white foods—sugar, flour, bread, or eggs—parallels the tigh-
tening of Jim Crow laws after Reconstruction. Conversations about “pure foods,”“hygiene,”and
“sanitation”were racial codes broadly understood to privilege not just white foods, lab coats,
and factories, but also white people over immigrant, ethnic, African American, and Latino and
Latina Americans (see also Gabaccia 2000; Wallach 2012). Deeply sublimated today, historical
context haunts the “foodiness”(à la Wides) of pumpkin spices.
The adjective pumpkin spice is rigorously paired with images of pumpkins. Cultural con-
versations slip between squash and spices. We are far away from the fast-growing gourd that
helped people survive in the early national period; PSLs and pumpkin-flavored foods, however,
tell us much about national fantasies in today’s United States. Even when we move away from
ephemeral flavors of pumpkin and pumpkin spice, whiteness and cultural symbols cluster
around visual images of pumpkins. Aspirational lifestyle magazines, social media pumpkins,
and reality television competitions come together in a veritable pumpkin entertainment complex,
whose multiple manifestations continue the entanglements of pumpkins, social capital, race,
and place.
DECORATIVE GOURD SEASON AND LIFESTYLE MAGAZINES
Every fall on social media, one link pops into shared feeds. “It’s Decorative Gourd Season,
Motherfuckers”is a McSweeney’spiece that spears the ubiquity of display pumpkins and their
kin in an era of lifestyle magazines and aspirational consumption (Nissan 2009). Users on
Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit have shared the essay more than 400,000 times; you can purchase
mugs with the title phrase, send e-cards emblazoned with quotes from it, and view multiple
video performances of it.
10
Combining explicit language with descriptions of table and holiday
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decorating, Nissan satirized purchasing and arranging pumpkins and gourds designed only for
visual use. Simultaneously, unironic images of pumpkins land in mailboxes on magazine covers,
on Web site newsfeeds, and in search terms for fall decorating, pinning, and recipe-hunting.
Lifestyle magazines and Web sites promise that peace, serenity, and happiness result from
sincerely embracing decorative gourd season.
Less obviously racialized than the PSL consumers, imagined gourd decorators parodied
by Nissan nonetheless manifest intersections of class, race, gender, and place in today’s
pumpkins. Standard October and November cover images for magazines such as Martha
Stewart Living, O Magazine, Real Simple,andSouthern Living feature increasingly stylized
pumpkin-scapes. Gone are days when a kitchen knife making triangle eyes, nose, and an
uneven grin sufficed for pumpkin carving. Stencils, paint, specialty gourds, and dedicated
battery-powered or leather-encased artisanal carving tools combine with multilevel displays,
electric lights, or expensive candles to mark the season. Even when people are absent, labor
(of self or paid others), leisure, and aspiration are implied. We move from a pumpkin-spiced
world where race was (over)stated to one of allusions, implications, elisions, and obfuscations
of race, class, and imagined rurality.
“Decorative Gourd Season”captivates because it presents contradictions. Genteel, white,
upper class, rural or suburban pumpkins coexist with a gritty, expletive-filled diatribe of excess.
Drugs, violence, confrontations, and even molestation are part of its monologue celebrating fall
pumpkin decorating.
11
Pumpkins and people who love pumpkins live in big cities, suburbs, rural
spaces, towns, rich neighborhoods, middle-class ones, and struggling ones. People of different
races and ethnicities live in all those places. People say “motherfucker”everywhere as well;
wealth, social location, race, or class position does not absolutely dictate one’s language.
Nonetheless, as controversies over Thug Kitchen’s similar juxtapositions of expletives and
luscious foodie-endorsed ingredients suggest, deep associations of race, class, and language
make the humor here. In other words, in ironic, satiric McSweeney’s,“Decorative Gourd
Season”’s expletives about pumpkins convey contradictions. It captivates those sharing it on
social media by the perceived sharpness of its juxtapositions. Decorative gourds—pumpkins—
are not typically associated with situations and places with frequent “f-word”drops.
Place is key here. Actual pumpkin fields are multiracial spaces of labor, but romantic,
imagined pumpkin patches reside in idyllic, rural dream spaces of wholesomeness, happiness,
cleanliness, and comfortable race relations. Searching Google images for people in pumpkin
patches returns pages of overwhelmingly white, smiling pumpkin customers. People of color
appear only rarely, largely in mixed-race groups (Google 2015). Dominant pumpkin patch
images make it hard to imagine “Decorative Gourd Season”recited in such idyllic rurality.
12
Today, ideas for displaying decorative gourds fill blogs and Pinterest, but lifestyle magazines
have ongoing track records for spreading pumpkin imagery. Preeminent among them, and now
on multiple media platforms, is Martha Stewart Living. Its aesthetics and content have widely
influenced print and digital media. Stewart’s homes, gardens, and properties create backdrops for
the projects and displays. American studies scholars M. G. Hyland (2001) and Thompson-
Hajdik (2011) noted Stewart’s residences, despite their suburban locations, evoke rural, bucolic
landscapes. Stewart explicitly created a rural idyll divorced from the realities of working farms
by converting a six-acre onion farm into the Turkey Hill estate, replete with orderly flower
gardens, a manicured grassy area specifically for lawn games, and an elaborate chicken coop
named the Palais de Poulet (M. G. Hyland 2001, 103).
THE PERILOUS WHITENESS OF PUMPKINS 9
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The language describing and locations of Nissan’s(2009) decorative gourds make them
seemingly incompatible with Martha Stewart’s privileged and comfortable environment that is,
if not actually rural, based on bucolic ideals. In Stewart’s world, you might carve a longer gourd
“into a perfect replica of the Mayflower as a shout-out to our Pilgrim forefathers,”as Nissan said
(linking gourds to the über-WASP colonists and further removing them from their history as a
crop indigenous to the Americas); however, after carving the Mayflower gourd, you would be
unlikely to do Nissan’s next suggestion: “do lines of blow off its hull with a hooker,”an activity
that is gritty in the urban imaginary at best, and criminal and dangerous at worst.
Martha Stewart and similar lifestyle magazine environments are spaces of whiteness. Bentley
(2001) used food as a lens into the whiteness of the Stewart brand, arguing, “Martha Stewart
food is the embodiment of whiteness. . .. From the tiniest hors d’oeuvres to the catered weddings
for two hundred, Martha Stewart food is whiteness with a high-church, White Anglo-Saxon
Protestant (WASP) gloss”(90). Bentley positioned Martha Stewart’s food in opposition to
“white trash food,”which although “‘white,’and no doubt more widely produced and consumed
than Martha Stewart food,”is seen in popular culture as inferior. Bentley noted that, “by virtue
of its class sensibility Martha’s food embodies the ideal qualities of whiteness that Americans
consider more deserving”(92). We suggest the veneer of class and whiteness extends beyond
food to Stewart’s larger output, including her decorative gourd arrangements and crafts, and, by
extension, to competing magazines and blogs.
Ironically, being associated with pumpkins during the nineteenth century, especially if you
were Southern or African American, was decidedly common and negative. Ott (2012)traced
early jack-o-lantern images through diverse American folkways, including African American
and Irish folk tales. “Pumpkinhead!”and “Pumpkin Eater!”became slurs, especially, Ott said,
for southern African Americans who still ate pumpkins to survive.
13
Middle-class, largely
white, Northeastern communities with time for leisure in the late nineteenth century first
embraced scary jack-o-lanterns to blend Irish trickster and rural ghost stories and to socialize
while emphasizing their own sophistication. Today, lifestyle magazines and aspirational social
media sites compete to create ever more complicated decorative pumpkin practices instead.
Perhaps the quintessential mark of changes in pumpkins is the newly popular white pumpkin.
Much like moving away from homemade, mixed color, or red and green Christmas decorat-
ing and into color-coordinated trees of blue, gold, or silver, for certain Americans pumpkin-
colored pumpkins are amateur and déclassé. Cultural studies lends purchase on this latest
evolution.
Even more than PSLs, pumpkins of decorative gourd season and lifestyle magazines signal
privilege—class privilege certainly, but also white privilege—encompassing power, lack of
worry, and leisure. Like lattes’power, this privilege needs work. As Bell, Bell, and Hollows
(2005), the authors of Ordinary Lifestyles, explained it, “Wider conceptions of lifestyle often
presume that lifestyles, and the consumer goods, services and practices through which they are
constructed, are freely chosen by individuals.”One’s childhood pumpkin carving or last year’s
pumpkin-scape, however, is vulnerable to “aesthetic obsolescence.”In other words, “an increas-
ing number of commodities are distinguished only by aesthetic differences, and . . . things are
increasingly disposed of because they are ‘out of fashion’rather than being used up, worn out or
broken”(Bell, Bell, and Hollows 2005,2–4). To compete, one must “choose”wisely from a
narrow range of pumpkins, making sure they are notably different from last year’s choices. Thus,
the outré, faux-competitiveness of “Decorative Gourd Season”and the gentle, glossy, pumpkin
10 POWELL AND ENGELHARDT
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magazine covers, Pinterest pages, and Web tutorials, rather than coming from different impulses,
are motivated by the same conflation of pumpkins, class, racial privilege, and lifestyle.
In addition to performative consumerism, images of the idyllic rural pumpkin are the
normative foil for Nissan’s(2009) piece and lifestyle magazines’aspirational promises. Rural
scenes in both of pumpkin patches, styled pumpkin soups, pies, and tureens, are all set up as
possible, easy to evoke, and, ultimately, real. But not too real. Bell, Bell, and Hollows (2005),
looking at the British magazine Country Living, asked follow-up questions: “How, then, does
Country Living deal with realities that contravene its own versions of rural life?”and “What
should it do, in short, about processes that depart from the text of its aspirational rurality and
threaten to make such rural lifestyle shot through with conflict, or even ordinary?”(163).
For pumpkins, the processes include migrant farmworker labor, shipping and distribution
systems, and issues of economic survival for workers, farm owners, banking, and agricultural
suppliers. What Bell, Bell, and Hollows concluded for Country Living holds for social media
pumpkins, too:
The simple answer to this question is, in one sense, “ignore them”: ignore the ordinariness of country
life with all its habitual and evolving dilemmas. Such is the way articles on, say, growing food
organically, or leaving life in the fast lane, or refurbishing and restoring an outhouse, must be
understood. They function as strategies without problems, ideas without conflicts, practices without
contradictions. (Bell, Bell, and Hollows 2005, 163)
Images of pumpkins, lifestyle-media-approved experiences with pumpkins, and pumpkin con-
sumer items are all practices without contradictions and strategies without problems.
Much like the elusive pumpkin spice, the pumpkin display is usefully vague, divorced from
regional foodways and places, and performs class with whiteness ever nearby. “Decorative
Gourd Season”and lifestyle magazine spreads work precisely because problems, conflicts,
and contradictions are unnamed or dismissed as mere humorous exaggeration. When we move
to spaces in which pumpkins are destroyed, rather than styled, away from labs that produce
flavors and entranceways and tablescapes on which gourds are displayed, we find persistent
whiteness in representations of rural pumpkins continuing to displace pumpkins from people.
PUNKIN CHUNKIN’S PUMPKIN ENTERTAINMENT COMPLEX
The language of war, destruction, competition, and violence circles around the pumpkin in
another eddy of the pumpkin entertainment complex. It illuminates one more aspect of the racial
politics of contemporary pumpkins. In 2002, Discovery television aired a special that soon
became a series about launching and destroying pumpkins, Punkin Chunkin. The show’sWeb
site offers video games, video clips, and even cross-promotions with other reality television casts
(for instance, a team from Moonshiners visits in “Making Pumpkin Moonshine”).
14
A world
championship competition takes place yearly in Delaware, although teams hail from around the
country. Sanctioned competitions feature awards for distance and accuracy of pumpkin hurling.
Classes of competition vary by mechanism: air cannons, trebuchets, human-powered contrap-
tions, centrifugal, torsion, and catapults.
Redden (2010), taking Punkin Chunkin (mostly) seriously in Gastronomica, wrote, “Punkin
Chunkin began, however, as just a backyard game, as a challenge among four men who came to
THE PERILOUS WHITENESS OF PUMPKINS 11
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be known as ‘Renaissance Rednecks.’The event has retained the three qualities such a founding
narrative would suggest: its masculinity, its creative ingenuity, its celebration of rurality”(22).
Trying to answer why people get involved, an interviewee suggested: “Both my co-captain and I
are engineers, so we have this nerdy streak in us for building things, and trying to apply the
principles of science and engineering to a hobby”(Redden 2010, 24). Articles in publications
like the scientific journal Aerospace America agree that engineers (whether amateur or profes-
sional) might be drawn to the challenge (D. Hyland 2015). As Onion (2016) argues in her study
of science education, children, and twentieth-century U.S. culture, contests like rocket building
created enthusiasm for later science careers, especially for boys. Punkin Chunkin, in this
sense, is a descendent of those rockets, egg-drop contests, and general tinkering culture. With
pumpkins, rural “redneck”culture blurs with college-educated tech culture. The common
denominator, in many cases, is the (largely white) masculinity wrapped up in the mix. Women
participate in Punkin Chunkin competitions, but the culture, and particularly Discovery’s
version, foregrounds male bonding, ritual, and competition.
That Punkin Chunkin is a pumpkin-centered activity outside mainstream U.S. culture makes it
television-worthy. Its placement in an otherwise “average”and safe landscape normalizes the
pumpkins and the people. Scenes alternate between nondescript open but dormant crop fields
under blue skies and suburban yards, driveways, and garages where pumpkin launchers are built.
Rural and suburban settings of the show are idyllic; they work together to lessen the wildness or
contradictions of the outdoors. Similarly, participants’behavior might be quirky, but its nod to
the glory days of Baby Boomer U.S. engineers keeps any possible reality-television deviance at
bay. Often that deviance takes the form of either working-class or Southern voyeurism. Shows
such as Moonshiners, Buckwild, and Swamp People, where location or cast can be wild, dirty,
unfamiliar, or uncouth, assure viewers that the cast and situations are firmly “other”from that of
the viewers (even us who identify as Southern or working class or rural), able to be visited or
viewed, but not fully shared. When rural reality shows feature working-class residents in the
South, itself an othered place symbolizing in shorthand fraught race relations, viewers can be
twice-distant voyeurs. Portraying the behavior of characters in such shows as not only atypical,
but also located in dark and scary versions of rural landscapes, reality television can trade on
shame and fascination (Stewart 1996; D. Bell 1997; McPherson 2003; Romine 2014). But the
nonthreatening, idealized, and normalized settings of Punkin Chunkin and its pumpkins position
both viewers and competitors as safe, fun, and, as with PSLs and decorative gourds, predomi-
nantly white.
CONCLUSION: BACK TO RIOTS
The year 2014 was not the first with an unsettled Keene Pumpkin Festival. Reports of smashed
pumpkins following the “big night”of the festival dogged past events. “Rowdiness”was enough
of a problem in 2010 that organizers launched campaigns to change before the 2011 fest.
According to the local newspaper, “bad behavior”at the 2010 festival included public drunken-
ness, fights, out-of-control parties, and pumpkin throwing and smashing. A Keene police officer
reported pumpkins thrown at cars and through store windows. Ahead of the 2011 fest, event
managers and college students organized an event called the “FACE OFF Forum,”where young
adults could talk with police officers and emergency room doctors at a local pub. Attendees
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received free Pumpkin Festival shirts and “party bags”from police. Bags included snack food
recipes and advice for throwing safe parties. Festival planners sponsored a “7 Deadly Sins”
campaign, warning against the most common behaviors that resulted in arrests in 2010.
Commands such as “Thou shall not smash pumpkins,”“Thou shall not pee in public,”and
“Thou shall not assault thy neighbor”were printed on fliers and shirts for the festival (Braccio
2011).
Not only did the campaigns fail to prevent the 2014 riot, but they also reflected and shored up
the race and class privilege felt by rioters. Voluntarily attending an event at a pub with local
police, sitting down to talk to officers, young people clearly felt a certain level of comfort with
the pub and police. Youth from communities with histories of violent police encounters might
hesitate before entering such an environment. It is also telling that police provided the oppor-
tunity for dialogue. Potential pumpkin rioters, were, in essence, given the privilege of a voice in
decision making and a say in police procedures, privileges many would argue are frequently
white (Alexander 2010; Gabrielson, Grochowski, and Sagara 2014).
The Keene riots, despite featuring similar behaviors to the Ferguson riots, were essentially
safe and comfortable spaces for the predominantly white participants. They acted out of pleasure
and leisure (rather than in reaction to the tragic killing of a community member), and those
involved expected and experienced cordial treatment from law enforcement, even in a riot
dispersal and arrest situation. Before Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown, tensions between
the majority black population and overwhelmingly white police force in Ferguson simmered
(Logan and Hennessy-Fiske 2014). The historical tensions marked everyday life in the St. Louis
suburb; police officers there did not regularly invite young, black residents to casual chats in
pubs.
Cultural contexts of pumpkins, including PSLs, decorative gourd season, and Punkin
Chunkin, link jarring events like riots to seemingly calm, everyday experiences portrayed as
normal, right, and worthy of aspiration. Whiteness associated with pumpkins marks who resides
where on the spectrum of U.S. social power. The entrenchment of such associations in daily
lives and the spaces and places in which they are lived create the environments of Keene versus
Ferguson—specific perils of today’s pumpkins. Accumulation of critical, relational, and con-
textual analyses, including things seemingly as innocuous as pumpkins, points the way to a food
studies of humanities and geography, that helps make visible the racial, gendered, classed, and
placed politics of contemporary life in the United States.
When Ferguson activists wrote RACISM and WHITE PRIVILEGE on pumpkins, they desta-
bilized the whiteness of pumpkins and the comfort and normalization accompanying it. Bringing
pumpkins into the demonstration, and then smashing them on the ground to show outrage at
injustice (as opposed to the “holiday mischief”generally ascribed to pumpkin smashing),
activists brought pumpkins into a space where racial inequality and instability could not be
ignored or glossed over. Their actions made the white privilege encoded in pumpkins explicit
and challenged its future.
NOTES
1 Between swimming pool parties in McKinney, Texas, playgrounds in Detroit, Skittles and hoodies in Florida, and
prayer groups in Charleston, the annus horribilis of 2014 blended into 2015 as violence against communities of
color continued and people searched for language to express the systemic racism.
THE PERILOUS WHITENESS OF PUMPKINS 13
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2 Wazana Tompkins (2012, 2) warned against the “unending stream of single-commodity histories”that are
unreflective of politics, a warning we have taken to heart.
3 Sax (2014) did not explicitly discuss the pumpkin spice phenomenon, but it bears all the characteristics of what he
called “food trends”shaped by “tastemakers.”He argued that “Food became a fashion item, a status symbol, and a
means of exerting power”in the distant past, but that we live in a cultural moment in which “trends are springing
up quicker and growing faster than they ever did before”(xiii–xiv). At their best, he concluded, food trends are
democratic; at their worst, “They may start out as individual expressions of imagination, but ultimately they
become victims of a herd mentality”(282).
4 Also, it is curious that both the Pumpkin Riot and this kerfuffle over basicness happened not just in the same
season or same month, but over the same three days.
5Privilege might well earn the title of the most contentious word of the year; one of the classic takes on it is
McIntosh (1988).
6 Although Ellis focused mostly on European and U.S. coffee shop cultures, the demonstrations of whiteness
encapsulated by Starbucks patronage might extend to other countries and continents as well. For instance,
Spracklen (2013), in his Whiteness and Leisure, argued, “In late modernity, drinking a latte has become a marker
of whiteness, Westernization, and bourgeois sophistication. In developing countries such as South Africa and
Kenya, local drinking practices have been swapped by the new elites in those countries for the taste of
Americanized coffee. The new black economic elites in South Africa and Kenya have adopted white, Western,
middle-class styles—through going to Starbucks they are becoming white in the same way the black political elites
have adopted golf clubs in Kenya”(143).
7 In an additional ironic twist, the days that followed brought journalists pointing out that the statement was untrue.
Despite the assertion of Budweiser VP Brian Perkins that “This is not an attack on craft beer, this is not an attack
on competition . .. The only other beer that we reference in the spot is a fabricated, ludicrous flavor combination of
pumpkin peach ale,”in fact Anheuser-Busch had recently acquired Elysian Brewery, a Seattle craft brewery that
features a pumpkin peach ale called “Gourdia on our Mind”(Schultz 2015).
8 Agreeing with Smith, Rogue Ales planted its own pumpkin farm in Independence, Oregon, for the brewing of its
Pumpkin Patch Ale. The brewery Web site emphasizes the farm connections and actual pumpkin content of the
beer: “We pick our pumpkins fresh from the patch, load them on our truck and drive them 77 miles to our
Newport, Oregon brewery, roast and then pitch them into the brew kettle. From patch to batch, Rogue grows
pumpkin patch beer”(Rogue 2014).
9 For examples of unexpected products with pumpkin spice flavor, see Huang (2015). In addition, a viral Internet
joke, believed by many, about pumpkin-flavored condoms worked precisely because of the proliferation of such
products (see Mullins 2014).
10 Data about shares come from statistics on the original post; the mug is no longer for sale at McSweeney’sbut
images of it are available (Complex 2012). Searching for “decorative gourd season”on YouTube in Summer 2015
yielded fifteen videos with a combined viewership of more than 11,000, including one video of “outtakes”from
filming the essay (YouTube 2015).
11 “Thug”language in food exploded in controversies in 2014, when the authors of the popular vegan blog,
thugkitchen.com, published a cookbook and started doing bookstore appearances, at which point the public
realized they were a white Hollywood couple (see Anonymous 2014; Francis 2014; Merwin 2014).
12 As noted by numerous rural geographers, ideas and images surrounding the rural idyll are largely constructed in
opposition to the rural. Regardless of the blurring of distinctions between rural and urban over the past half-
century, these ideas and images of the idyllic countryside have remained pervasive in U.S. and British popular
culture (see, e.g., Bunce 1994; D. Bell 2006; Cloke 2006). Scholars have worked with the problematic racial
coding and power structures attached to different types of idyllic rural landscapes, for example Finney’s(2014)
work on African Americans and the “Great Outdoors”and Daniel’s(2013) work on African American farmers and
the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
13 Although today “Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater”is a harmless nursery rhyme, Ott (2012) showed it began as an
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slur, meant to embarrass people too poor to eat a wider range of foods and
thus dependent on the humble pumpkin (74). Without delving as deeply into the race and class associations of the
decorative gourd as it now functions in popular media as we are here, Ott specifically discussed the jack-o-lantern
and the “long history of employing the vegetable to critique human behavior”(6).
14 The show has at various times aired on Discovery and the Science Channel. As the latter is owned by the former,
the sensibility has remained the same. See Science Channel (n.d.-a) for today’s version and Science Channel
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(n.d.-b) for the game. There is no standardized terminology for these competitions. Some refer to it as chunking,
others chucking; at times they drop the g; pumpkin or punkin variously appear. Pumpkin moonshine, by the way, is
not a food, but is merely a game made by aiming propelled pumpkins at a still.
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LISA JORDAN POWELL is a postdoctoral fellow appointed jointly in the Institute for Resources, Environment, and
Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada; and the Department of
Geography at the University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, BC, V2S 7M7, Canada. E-mail: lisa.powell@ubc.ca.
Her research interests include agriculture, food, resource extraction, and agriburbia, particularly in the contexts of
landscape, rural studies, and environmental history.
ELIZABETH S. D. ENGELHARDT is the John Shelton Reed Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies in the
Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599–3520.
E-mail: e.engelhardt@unc.edu. Her interdisciplinary research interests include Southern cultures, gender, food studies in
the humanities, feminist theories, Appalachian studies, public humanities, oral history practices, and the intersections of
race, class, and gender in American literature and society.
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