IAH 206 WHFS

WRITING ASSIGNMENT #4: The “How America’s Food Giants Swallowed the Family Farms” article and how it connects with other of our themes

Insert in the drop box for Writing Assignment #4 on D2L.

As noted on the syllabus: 300-400 words

Instructions: 

The story in “How America’s Food Giants Swallowed the Family Farms” has connections to various of our readings, which is not surprising in that various of the claims, thesis, ideas that we are exploring in this course have interconnections.  Sometimes these are causal connections, and sometime they are conceptual connections; in any case, it is useful to think about them together.

Write an essay in which you explain how the story laid out in the Guardian article

can be analyzed in terms of, or otherwise connected to, at least two of the following:

(1) the analysis given by Holt-Gimenez and Patel in Food Rebellions

(2) the analysis of “sustainability” discussed by Paul Thompson

(3) the ideas of “locality” discussed in Thompson and DeLind

(4) ideas about food sovereignty as discussed in the Wittman, et al. article

Note that you get to choose the theme or theses to be discussed here, but you should be sure to choose these in a way that shows an understanding of what’s important about all this.

You get to choose which other themes [(1)-(4)] to make use of in your analysis (and hence what other readings to make use of), but don’t assume that it will work out equally well with any two of them. Give some thought first to which ones you think provide interesting insight or really connect to what you want to say.

It is not required that you do an objection and reply. The reason for this is that I want you to focus on the task of identifying connections and fleshing them out so that they are clear and significant. (It’s possible that you’ll find that an objection-reply strategy will in fact help you do this, but again, it is not required.)

As before: Citations are required; quotations are not. Quotations, if you have them, should not be long, and they don’t count toward the word count. (See general description of the writing assignments on the syllabus.) I wouldn’t expect you to use any sources outside of the class readings. Of course you do have to cite the Guardian article and the readings you use to follow the above instructions. The style for doing the citations? You can just cite the page number in the following way: (Thompson, p. X).