Thinking Through the Tomato Harvester

Carolyn de la Peña, executive editor of Boom, is professor of American Studies and the director of the Davis Humanities Institute at the University of California, Davis. Her most recent book, Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweetener from Saccharin to Splenda (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), examines the rapid proliferation of sugar substitutes in twentieth-century America with particular attention to the food-pharmaceutical collaborations, gendered invention and marketing, and consumer imperatives that enabled this dramatic change in cultural meaning of “good sweet.”