Wilted by Julie Guthman - Paper - University of California Press

About the Book

Strawberries are big business in California. They are the sixth-highest-grossing crop in the state, which produces 88 percent of the nation’s favorite berry. Yet the industry is often criticized for its backbreaking labor conditions and dependence on highly toxic soil fumigants used to control fungal pathogens and other soilborne pests.

In Wilted, Julie Guthman tells the story of how the strawberry industry came to rely on soil fumigants, and how that reliance reverberated throughout the rest of the fruit’s production system. The particular conditions of plants, soils, chemicals, climate, and laboring bodies that once made strawberry production so lucrative in the Golden State have now changed and become a set of related threats that jeopardize the future of the industry.

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Prologue: The Battle against Methyl Iodide
1 • California Strawberry Assemblages
2 • Emergent Pathogens
3 • Curiously Bred Plants and Proprietary Institutions
4 • Chemical Solutions and Regulatory Pushback
5 • Soiled Advantages and Highly Valued Land
6 • Scarce Labor and Disposable Bodies
7 • Precarious Repairs and Growing Pathologies
8 • Imperfect Alternatives and Tenuous Futures
Conclusion: The Problem with the Solution

Notes
References
Index

Reviews

“This is a specialized but compelling topic, touching on something most consumers don’t think twice about: year-round availability of reasonably priced, high-quality, fresh strawberries in their local stores. Thorough and well researched—appropriate for agricultural and environmental science collections.”
— CHOICE

"A thought-provoking examination of the entangled natures of specific geographic, historic, economic, social, and material conditions that have led to the Californian strawberry industry becoming as fragile as the berry it produces."
— Anthropology Book Forum

"The historical context Guthman outlines is important because she highlights the particular pesticide treadmill created with the longevity and expansion of strawberry cultivation in California."
— Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment: The Journal of Culture & Agriculture

"An engrossing book, rooted in storytelling, yet deeply analytical, challenging critical agrifood scholars and activists alike to rethink their ways of understanding agrarian change. . . . Challenges all scholars and policy makers to think more broadly and ultimately politically, if we are to shift the current bleak trajectory of strawberry production in California."
— Gastronomica

“Wilted is sure to prove a fascinating read for anyone (academic or lay audience) concerned with food and agriculture, and it provides methodological and conceptual insights to human–environment geographers more broadly. Given its accessible style and its effective presentation of complex ideas, it would be particularly valuable in an undergraduate course. Indeed, as a synthesis of Guthman’s path-breaking work in geographies of food and agriculture, Wilted is sure to serve as a resource for scholars interested in pursuing environmental research agendas that are critically grounded, historically informed, and politically relevant.”
— AAG Review of Books

"Remarkable. . . . As Guthman astutely argues, the ramifications of these findings permeate well beyond just strawberry fields and, in fact, demonstrate the fragility of industrial agricultural production in general."
— Food, Culture & Society

"Why is it so difficult to stop using dangerous chemicals to grow strawberries? Wilted explains how fumigating strawberries against fungal pathogens became part of a package with strawberry breeding, university science, land values, powerful distributors, and vulnerable, poorly compensated labor. If you are looking for a critical, multispecies description of the plantation condition today, this is the book to read. You’ll also learn how strawberries have become something quite different than those your grandmother might have savored."––Anna Tsing, coeditor of Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene

"Julie Guthman, in the wake of her pathbreaking book Agrarian Dreams, now runs headlong into the agro-industrial monster of California’s strawberry fields. Wilted brilliantly exposes the deadly intersection of grower capitalism, agricultural expertise in the business of system restoration, and what Guthman calls the nonhuman entities and forces that both collaborate and interrupt the operations of the industry. It is contradictory, turbulent, fragile, and operating at the limits of repair. The strawberry ‘more-than-human’ assemblage stumbles and lurches forward, intransigent, durable, and seemingly unreformable, rushing toward the apocalypse. A tour de force."––Michael J. Watts, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley

"Julie Guthman’s new book elegantly ties together a complex of work, land, capital, ecology, and knowledge to present a rich and gripping analysis of the crisis in California strawberry production, and its possible futures."––Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System

"I couldn’t put this book down. By systematically unpacking the politics (and limits) of repair, Julie Guthman explains why industrial strawberries are both victim and perpetrator of the Anthropocene. I’ll never look at the fruit the same again!"––Michael Carolan, author of The Food Sharing Revolution: How Start-Ups, Pop-Ups, and Co-Ops Are Changing the Way We Eat

Wilted