Guthman, Julie (Julie Harriet Guthman)

views updated

Guthman, Julie (Julie Harriet Guthman)

PERSONAL:

Education: University of California, Santa Cruz, B.A., 1979; University of California, Berkeley, M.B.A., 1988, M.A., 1995; D.P.H., 2000.

ADDRESSES:

Office—1156 High St., 301 Oakes College, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Geographer, sociologist, educator, and writer. Financial management consultant, 1980-1993; Herrick Hospital, Berkeley, CA, and Contra Costa County Hospital, Martinez, CA, temporary staff accountant, 1985-86; University of California, Berkeley, reader in business administration, 1987, graduate student instructor, 1995-96, Graduate Opportunity Program student mentor, 1997, lecturer and research assistant, 1999, lecturer, 2001-03, associate professor, c. 2003—; KQED, San Francisco, CA, television division financial administrator, 1988-1990; Child Care Coordinating Council of San Mateo County, CA, fiscal manager, 1990-92. Work related activities include serving on the organizing staff of the Tax Big Oil campaign, East Bay Organizing Committee, Citizens' Party, 1979-1980, as Northern California director for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, Oakland, CA, 1982-82, and organizer, financial manager, administrative and fundraising director for Voting P.O.W.E.R., Oakland, 1982-85.

MEMBER:

Association of American Geographers, Community Alliance with Family Farmers, Ecological Farming Association, International Sociology Association, Rural Sociological Association, American Federation of Teachers.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Coopers and Lybrand Award, 1988; Ashby Prize, 2005, for the two most innovative papers published in Environment and Planning A during 2004; Fred Buttel Outstanding Scholarly Achievement: Book, Rural Sociological Society, 2007; Beta Gamma Sigma. Recipient of grants, including Kevin Starr Postdoctoral Fellow in California Studies, 2000-01.

WRITINGS:

Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2004.

Contributor to books, including Engineering Trouble: Biotechnology and Its Discontents, edited by R. Schurman and D. Kelso, University of California Press, 2003; Geographies of Commodity Chains, edited by A. Hughes and S. Reimer, Routledge, 2004; Agribusiness and Society, edited by K. Jansen and S. Vellema, Zed Books, 2004; Constructing Alternative Food Geographies: Representation and Practice, edited by D. Maye, L. Holloway, and M. Kneafsy, Elsevier, 2007. Contributor of articles and book reviews to professional journals, including the Professional Geographer, Geoforum, Antipode, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Rural Sociology, Agriculture and Human Values, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Sociologia Ruralis, Journal of Social and Cultural Geography, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Economic Geography, Historical Geography, and Development and Change. Editor, Geoforum, 2007— and Agriculture and Human Values, 2007—.

SIDELIGHTS:

Julie Guthman is a geographer and sociologist whose primary interests include sustainable agriculture and alternative food movements, international political economy of food and agriculture, politics of obesity, political ecology, race and food, and critical human geography. She has contributed to numerous professional journals and is the author of Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California. "If you want to understand what's going on in organic agriculture today, gird yourself for a modicum of academese and read this book," wrote Laura Sayre on the New Farm Web site. "Agrarian Dreams is the most comprehensive and thoughtful analysis to date of the many contradictory forces shaping what some call the organic ‘industry’, others the organic ‘community’—the two terms, of course, reflecting two contrasting understandings of the role of organics vis-à-vis the larger food system."

In her book, Guthman primarily focuses on organic farming in California and, in the process, refutes the popular belief that organic farming is largely a small-scale operation run by family farmers. Instead, Guthman describes how organic farming has become another form of "industrial" agriculture, thus replicating what it initially set out to oppose. The author begins by providing a history of the move to organic farming in the United States with a specific focus on the movement in the northern California counties of Santa Cruz and Yolo. Using data gathered in California from 1994 to 1998, including interviews with approximately 150 organic farmers, the author provides an analysis of how organic farming has succeeded and failed in achieving its initial goals. She also explores how organic farming went from a social movement to an industry via the regulations imposed on this type of farming focusing on an exploration of the development of the local, state, and federal standards that designate food as "organic."

Agrarian Dreams also provides an analysis of the ramifications of various local, state, and federal regulations. "While making it clear that she personally supports organic farming, Guthman concludes that the creation of a federally regulated organic label has nullified the radical potential of organics," noted Sayre in her review on the New Farm Web site. Commenting on this same issue in the Journal of Environmental Quality, Kristin Van Tassel commented that the author points out the relationship between the initial organic farming movement with the 1960s counterculture movement, but that Guthman also points out how modern organic farming fails to reflect a "holistic approach to agriculture." Van Tassel added: "Instead, the label ‘organic’ has come to be defined far more narrowly as a set of allowable inputs for given crops. As a result, much of California's ‘organic’ food industry shares far more with conventional agriculture—in regard to scale, marketing strategies, and labor practices—than most consumers realize." Guthman ends her analysis of organic farming by exploring the potential of organic farming to be the answer to the farming industry in the United States. The book includes an appendix, notes, glossary of key terms, references, and an index.

"Agrarian Dreams does not stop at measuring the common belief against the more complicated dynamics of existing organic farming in California," wrote Greig Tor Guthey in the Geographical Review. "The book leads us to grapple with how something so well intentioned lost its way as it became increasingly more popular and profitable." In a review in Economic Geography, Brian Page wrote: "Agrarian Dreams is a courageous book. Writing from Santa Cruz, the heart of the state's organic movement, Guthman explodes the myth that the growth of organic farming will necessarily lead to a sustainable, just, and healthy food system. She raises difficult (though sympathetic) questions for advocates of organic farming, be they farmers or consumers. It is also an important book."