ABSTRACT
The contemporary sustainable food movement often romanticizes an American agrarian tradition. Writers from Wendell Berry to Michael Pollan propose a return to the small family farm as one solution to the industrialization of agriculture. Small family farms, in such works, restore ecological integrity to the land, treat animals humanely, enrich the heteronormative nuclear family, and reduce the exploitation of labor. These visions too often fail to grapple with the racialized relationship to land ownership in the United States. They embrace and naturalize the subject position of the white male farmer and often overlook the subject positions of non-white farmers and farm workers. This chapter suggests the consequences of the contemporary food movement's privileging of whiteness and land ownership through a consideration of Japanese American author Hisaye Yamamoto as a radical agrarian. Yamamoto's nuanced reflections on racialized and gendered labor and property relations reveal the impossibility of contemporary pastoral fantasies to offer equitable food solutions while illustrating the need for an intersectional approach to U.S. racial histories within the sustainable food movement.
