Episode 57: Professor Gabriel Rosenberg

Gabriel Rosenberg analyzes the American food system with a focus on gender, race, sexuality and power. From debunking family farm mythology to shining a spotlight on social engineering and eugenics, this episode turns a critical eye to the inequities and violence built into American agrarianism.

Professor Gabriel N. Rosenberg is a historian of the modern United States. He writes about how race, gender, and sexuality have shaped the history of food, agriculture, and the environment. Rosenberg is currently an Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and History at Duke University, as well as the Duke Endowment Fellow of the National Humanities Center and a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His first book, The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), is a gendered history of the USDA’s iconic rural youth clubs. Rosenberg is hard at work on his next book, Purebred: Making Meat and Eugenics in the Modern United States, which explores the institutional and intellectual ties between industrial livestock breeding and human race science at the turn of the twentieth century. He also tweets as Bearistotle and regularly publishes a Substack Newsletter, “The Strong Paw of Reason.” He is an unabashed partisan of blueberries, minimal techno, kettlebells, and water ovens.

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Episode #57 Notes

1:00 - How did you get interested in food systems research?

6:15 - What were the conditions of homesteaders and settlers in the frontier in the 19th century?

10:15 - On the myth of the idyllic small family farm.

18:30 - How 4H social engineered of the rural frontier.

28:30 - On how 4H deepened racial divides and inequities.

35:00 - On 4H and the history of eugenics.

44:15 - How to overcome the myth of the ‘independent farmer’ and iconism.

49:00 - How to create a just, fair, resilient food system.

53:30 - Book recommendations!

Capitalism and the Web of Life - Jason Moore

Porkopolis - Alex Blanchette