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I will never eat another strawberry again: the biopolitics of consumer-citizenship in the fight against methyl iodide in California

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Abstract

In March of 2012, following a robust activist campaign, Arysta LifeScience withdrew the soil fumigant methyl iodide from the US market, just a little over a year after it had finally been registered for use in California. As a major part of the campaign against registration of the chemical, over 53,000 people, ostensibly acting as citizens rather than consumers, wrote public comments contesting the use of the chemical for its high toxicity. Although these comments had marginal impact on the outcome of the case, these comments are of interest for what they say about public action at a time when efforts to address food and agricultural issues have been dominated by “voting with your fork.” Based on a qualitative textual analysis of approximately 3500 representative comments made available to us, we show that many of those taking action did not abandon consumer subjectivities associated with neoliberal governmentality. By threatening “personal boycotts,” some were acting in their capacity as individual consumers; in invoking their own and their children’s health many more were also acting on behalf of consumers, despite that the chemical in question is applied before strawberries are planted and thus leaves no residues. The emphasis that letter writers gave to their own bodies reinforces the idea that some bodies count more than others and thus reveals a biopolitical sorting. Having consumer lives matter is consequential in light of evidence that consumer concern about pesticides has historically led to formulations and regulations more protective of consumers than workers and neighbors.

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Notes

  1. This is not to say that neoliberal governmentality is not present in this latter aspect, as neoliberal governmentality is also about care of the self. But that is not the primary reason that voting with your fork has been accused of being neoliberal.

  2. This critique has generated a counter-critique. Following in the footsteps of Gibson-Graham (2006), some argue that voting with your dollar and others acts of consumer agency must be “read for difference.” By this, they mean that the neoliberalism critique is totalizing and self-fulfilling in ways that foreclose possibilities of transforming food systems (Harris 2009).

  3. While NVivo was highly useful to identify and compile exemplary content, we found it unsuitable for quantitative analysis given the format of the data provided. All comments, that is, were provided to us in one 3700 page PDF file, making several of NVivo’s functions virtually unusable on an ordinary laptop, especially for tabulating individual comments. Therefore, except for the word frequency count, the quantitative analysis was done ex post facto using an Excel spreadsheet to tabulate the occurrence of key themes in relation to individual comments. For these purposes, we sampled approximately one-half of the individual comments. We report this analysis with percentages rather than numbers in recognition that numbers give an impression of exactitude that is not generally possible when interpreting textual data.

Abbreviations

CEQA:

California Environmental Quality Act

CUE:

Critical use exemption

DPR:

California Department of Pesticide Regulation

USEPA:

United States Environmental Protection Agency

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Acknowledgments

Funding for the research contained herein was provided by the National Science Foundation, Award #s 1228478 and 1262064. We are grateful for the research assistance of Zoe Chertov and Savannah Coker, as well as the generative comments of three anonymous reviewers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Social Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz, Community Studies Mail Stop, 1156 High St., Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, USA

    Julie Guthman

  2. Department of Public Affairs, College of Arts and Sciences, University of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco, CA, 94117, USA

    Sandy Brown

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  1. Julie Guthman
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Correspondence to Julie Guthman.

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Guthman, J., Brown, S. I will never eat another strawberry again: the biopolitics of consumer-citizenship in the fight against methyl iodide in California. Agric Hum Values 33, 575–585 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-015-9626-7

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