Using a transnational and comparative cultural studies approach, this essay investigates how yogurt, perceived as a strange and foreign food in the early to mid-twentieth-century United States, became localized through intersectional processes of feminization and de-exoticization. In the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s, the dairy industry adopted a postfeminist ethos, which co-opted the hippie and feminist self-care movements that had made yogurt a staple health food outside the purview of the medical-industrial complex and on the margins of the market economy. Increasingly, yogurt was marketed to the prototypical (white middle class) dieting female, expected to discipline her body by consuming pre-proportioned approximations of dessert. The rising popularity of “Greek yogurt” in the early twenty-first century has modified this cultural neutralization by foregrounding a nonthreatening “white” ethnicity—while furthering the feminization of yogurt consumption and obscuring connections to the food cultures of the Middle East.

This article traces a transnational history of turtle soup through the flow of species, tastes, culinary techniques, and food technology across three continents over more than three centuries. It shows how the species, nested in the Caribbean, turned from a source of flesh for transatlantic seamen in the seventeenth century to a status dish for upper-class Europeans in the eighteenth century. The pleasure of eating turtle soup was underpinned by exotic references to “the West India Way” and national labels such as “the English fashion.” Such notions circulated via printed media across a variety of genres, constructing tastes that only a minority could afford; the less privileged consumed “mock turtle soup,” made with calf's head at best. Around the same time, turtle soup in “the English fashion” was reproduced in Asia along with the trading activities and colonial endeavors of the British Empire. Into the second half of the nineteenth century, with the invention of canned food, the once upper-class dish became widely popularized in the United States. The disastrous result was that the sea turtle hunt evolved from occasional seizure to outright massacre, which did not come to a halt until the 1970s, when the practices were outlawed.

In recent years, raw milk has emerged as one of the most contentious food commodities, considered a serious health risk by public health officials and a source of healing and nourishment by raw milk proponents. The purpose of this article is to explore the ways in which consumers construct and experience trust in food that is often procured in informal markets. Because the image of an overreaching, exploitative government features prominently in popular narratives surrounding raw milk consumption, this article is explicitly concerned with the role of the state in public food debates. Drawing on two complementary empirical cases of raw milk consumption in the United States and postsocialist Lithuania, I argue that there are two competing projects that underlie the struggles surrounding raw milk provisioning in both sites: the politics of recognition and the politics of sovereignty. As similarly argued by Charles Taylor, the politics of recognition emphasizes the efforts of raw milk consumers to be accepted, supported, and recognized by the larger polity, including its public health institutions, legislative bodies, and welfare state. On the other hand, raw milk proponents call for sovereignty, postulating that food choices and intake should lie outside of state prerogatives. More broadly, this study reveals how trust in a food product is tied to the ongoing legitimacy crisis of the modern state, and in particular how a renewed value of locavorism becomes anchored in a fundamental distrust of the postindustrial, postwelfare state and its institutions.

In ““Bodies Made of Bread”” I theorize eating as an intimate site through which power, in particular, the power that upheld the nineteenth-century United States' investment in imperial rhetoric and action, was both instantiated and undermined. Using the dietetic writings of nineteenth-century reformer and anti-masturbation campaigner Sylvester Graham, I assess the body politics that lurk behind the highly socialized but insistently naturalized act of eating. Eating in Graham's work is a quotidian act through which fictions of racial and gendered embodiment are upheld; through comparison to South Pacific islanders and other European colonists, Graham imagines an ideal American-ness which is founded upon the imperial fantasy of Euro-American indigeneity and regulated through the daily consumption of wheat and other ““farinaceous”” foods.