Allison Carruth is an Associate Professor in the English Department and Institute of Society and Genetics at UCLA, where she is also affiliated with the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. She is the author of Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (2013).
Allison Carruth
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Writing on Public Books
The Postindustrial Pastoral
Adrienne Su’s accomplished new book of poems Living Quarters invites meditation on the material specificities of too-readily-typecast locales. Recalibrating the geographical and cultural tropes of American nature writing, Living Quarters offers readers a portrait of rural modernity1 rather than pastoral nostalgia—a portrait that unsettles the divisions of agricultural versus industrial and provincial versus cosmopolitan that […]
Michael Pollan’s Dilemma
In the 20th anniversary edition of On Food and Cooking, the celebrated food writer Harold McGee claims that “to understand what’s happening within a food as we cook it, we need to be familiar with the world of invisibly small molecules and their reactions with each other.”1 But why, we might ask? Cooking is cultural as […]
