Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization on the Tomato Trail - Softcover

Barndt, Deborah

9781551930428: Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization on the Tomato Trail

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551930420 ISBN 13: 9781551930428

Publisher: Garamond Press, 2002

Where does our food come from? And what impact does its production have on the earth, on the women workers who move it from field to table, and on all who eat it? Tangled Routes follows a corporate—commodified and chemicalized—tomato from a Mexican field through the United States to a Canadian table, examining in its wake the dynamic relationship between production and consumption, work and technology, health and environment, biodiversity and cultural diversity.

After tracing the tomato's journey through space and time (routes and roots), three case studies—a Mexican agribusiness, a Canadian supermarket, and a U.S.-owned fast-food restaurant—offer a view of globalization from above (corporate profiles), globalization from below (stories of women who plant, pick, pack, scan, slice, and sell tomatoes), and 'the other globalization' (acts of resistance and alternatives to the corporate model).

Tangled Routes grew out of a unique six-year collaborative project involving feminist academics, activists, and popular educators from Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Written in an accessible style and illustrated with more than 100 photographs, this critical introduction to complex issues ends with signs of hope—creative responses by local and global movements for social justice and environmental sustainability.

FOR COPYRIGHT REASONS, THIS TITLE IS ONLY AVAILABLE IN CANADA

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Deborah Barndt is a mother, popular educator, and photographer who teaches in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. For over 25 years, she has worked with social justice movements in Canada, the United States, and Central America.

Review:

With Tangled Routes, Deborah Barndt pioneers a method for demystifying the technologies of globalization with an extraordinarily well-crafted and lively ethnography of the transnational tomato chain. Along the way, we encounter not only the women working in the fields, factories and fast food outlets but also the variety of survival practices and resistances that constitute 'globalization from below.' These compelling stories counterpoint the spatial and social abstractions of the genetically engineered corporate tomato, its neoliberal trade regime, and its flexible workplaces. Barndt's coherent framing of a series of situational accounts models an understanding of the underside of globalization that is instructive, empowering, and richly textured.

(Philip McMichael, Cornell University)

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.