The Edible and the Endangered

John Levi Barnard is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

"Practicing Fredric Jameson's 'utopia as method, ' John Levi Barnard investigates possibilities for transformative change in the food systems of the United States, finding modest hope even in the fast-food chain. His deft close readings across media, his historical analyses and incisive organizational scheme make The Edible and the Endangered an elegantly rendered intervention into ongoing critiques of extraction as well as a beacon toward better worlds."--Stephanie LeMenager, author of, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century "At the level of the sentence, paragraph, section, and chapter, this book is a marvel of coherence. An enormous pleasure to read, it is beautifully researched and a brilliant, powerfully persuasive argument about the biopolitical contradictions required by the American Empire. This is a model for how Environmental Humanities scholarship should proceed."--Stephanie Foote, author of, The Parvenu's Plot: Gender, Culture, and Class in the Age of Realism