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The Laziness Myth: Narratives of Work and the Good Life in South Africa

promoted organic food as not only good for the environment and one’s health but also as food that tasted better, which was distinct from the Grahamite and Kellogg eras’ definition of good food that compromised taste for nutrition. Consumers of this era put their faith in decentralized and localized agricultural decision-making, no longer trusting the government’s regulatory power and intervention capacity. Haydu notes, ‘‘while the consumer strategy of basing trust on personal ties—know your famer, know your food—would endure, this solution for problems of trust in other respects was short-lived’’ (p. 122), and the subsequent co-optation and corporatization of the organic movement shows this skepticism was not unfounded. Upsetting Food makes several notable contributions to the fields of social movement theories and food studies, and the final chapter highlights the ‘‘layering of movement causation—system dynamics, piggybacking, reform legacies’’ (p. 133) in food protest. Haydu argues that food protest has been uniquely interactive with other movements across time and political issues, resulting in themes that persisted across more than a century, even as the protest of each era was informed more directly by other movements of the time. Another major contribution of the study calls into question our tendency in contemporary food studies to attribute the prominence of marketdriven, consumer-oriented solutions to ‘‘neoliberalism’’ and treat this attribution as a new phenomenon. Historical precedents indicate that this trend has existed from the beginning of food protest in the United States, at least among middle-class (white) consumers, which compels food scholars to exercise caution in unpacking why marketand consumer-focused framing of food issues resonates more readily with certain consumers today. Throughout the book, Haydu addresses explicit class and gender boundaries that motivated food protest participants to project their social concerns onto food consumption. One issue that I wished the book leaned into more extensively is how race intersected with class and gender in each era of food protest. To be clear, the author makes note of the cases of overt racism, such as Kellogg’s turn to eugenics during the progressive era, and more covert cases, such as the 1960s organic movement embracing ‘‘brown food’’ while uncritically operating in a very white space. Yet the political and cultural climates that these food protest participants were occupying appear to be homogeneous and undeniably white. For example, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which famously involved food-related protests such as lunch counter sit-ins and the Black Panthers’ breakfast programs, seemed to have had little impact on white, middle-class organic movements. And perhaps that is precisely the point—that these movements were not reflecting all facets of American experiences of the time. Given the current political climate and the public reckoning with the historical silencing of marginalized voices, the three food protests’ persistent insularity depicted in the book may have become even more relevant in the aftermath of the racial justice discourse of 2020 than when the author concluded the work. To those observing and studying the new era of food protest that is on the rise, this book offers a jumping-off point to understand what has come before and how distinct (or not) the new iteration of the food movement will be.