Eleventh International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

U.S. literature is inseparable from the nation’s history and culture. As the country has developed, so have the stories it has been telling about itself. Farming stories tell us who we are culturally through what we prepare, produce, and consume. In both history and literature, the significance of agriculture has been dominant. The development of the United States and its earliest rationale for expansion involved the concept of Jeffersonian agrarianism, an ideal of small-scale farmers who produced and consumed mostly off their own land. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Thomas Jefferson famously names farmers “the chosen people of God,” adding that other forms of production could even lead to moral corruption (pp. 164–165). From Jefferson’s agrarian dreams, to the monoculture efficiency represented by twenty-first century fast food restaurants, farming stories remain fundamental to an understanding of U.S. culture. I engage with the main theme of agriculture throughout U.S. literature. After contextualizing literature and agriculture the United States, I then briefly model close readings of agricultural themes in four authors from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries: Henry David Thoreau, Charles Chesnutt, Willa Cather, and Robin Wall Kimmerer. This connection between stories and the role of farming and gardening provides readers with a useful way to consider the past, present, and even the future of agriculture in U.S. literature in terms of race, gender, and sustainability.