Writing the History of Food Activism

Professor Povitz has recently published her book Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice. These are some of her thoughts about her subject and the process of writing history.

What made you choose to write about urban food activism?

I wrote the book that I wanted to read. I’m very excited about food being a means to a much broader vision of political change. There’s a lot of work out there on New York City social history and political history, and people have approached that in a million different ways. But strangely food has been left out of that.

Have you always been interested in this subject?

In college I was very interested in Soviet history, but then I realized I didn’t want to do field work in the former Soviet Union. I wrote about women’s experiences of pregnancy and sex in the Gulag. Then I wrote a master’s thesis on “the countercuisine,” the way that food was used as a political tool within the 1960s counterculture. I realized I wanted to do a PhD in history, so I started to do some reading—you have to do a ton of reading before you decide what you want to spend the next six to seven years writing about. I discovered a lot of scholarship on “food and identity,” or “food and inequality,” but always approached from the top-down: what government was funding or not funding, the corruption of agribusiness. But there was nothing about ordinary people fighting to make things better for themselves and for their communities.

I was also living in New York and getting politicized myself at that time. I was paying attention to the social movements around me in New York and their histories. And that got me interested in the materiality of actually organizing—what does it take to build an alternative institution, or actually achieve change at the level of local government? I wanted focus on these issues, and avoid top-down scholarship.

So, how does your book strike the balance of highlighting the stories of individuals while also accounting for the broader food activism movement?

I think that paying attention to individual biographies is a really helpful way of getting people to understand social change over a long period of time. At the same time, I also emphasize that these activists had an impact only insofar as they were able to get along with other people and build something with them. So it was still a collective enterprise, even if I’m zeroing in on their lives and their characters for the sake of narrative. After all, it’s much more fun to read a book that has characters in it.

Also, historians have to try and be as precise as possible. It’s often not historically accurate to make generalizations. Different people have different experiences—that’s why you need to parse out the contingencies and specificities of people’s experiences. Even if they share experiences, there’s always shades within that that are important to look at and talk about.

What are the joys and challenges of studying late 20th century and 21st century history?

Oral histories can be pretty juicy. I got to move beyond the focus on “what happened” to explore the meaning that events held for people, what people thought or felt about them. It’s not that you can’t find that information about the more distant past, but it’s much more accessible when you’re dealing with living subjects.

But there are challenges as well. First of all, you have lots of people around to tell you that you’re wrong. So someone might read an account of something you wrote and say, if it strikes them, “this is not how it happened, let me tell you how it really was.” You learn to deal with the methodological difficulty of competing narratives in a whole new way, and you learn both how to listen and be open, and to explain and defend your interpretation to someone who might always feel like they know better. Second, writing recent history requires you to be either a fast reader or an efficient reader, because there the potential source base for evidence can be endless. I am a very slow reader. So I’ve gotten pretty good at trying to read for what is new.