Sweet Potato Fries x Food Imperialism
Material Girls
Rehak Hannah
4.8 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2024
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Remember about fifteen years ago when we all went a little nuts for sweet potato fries? What was going on there? Well it turns out, that beloved appetizer was more than a tasty treat circa 2007. In this episode, Marcelle leads Hannah through research about the “orange-flesh sweetpotato” and its relationship to GMOs, cash crops, fat phobia and food imperialism. She pulls on the work of Joe Kobuthi for an analysis of food systems that informs her understanding of the sweet potato's zeitgeist-y moment.and she ends with a thesis that's got quite a bite to it.
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Material Girls is a show that aims to make sense of the zeitgeist through materialist critique* and critical theory! Each episode looks at a unique object of study (something popular now or from back in the day) and over the course of three distinct segments, Hannah and Marcelle apply their academic expertise to the topic at hand.
*Materialist Critique is, at its simplest possible level, a form of cultural critique – that is, scholarly engagement with a cultural text of some kind – that is interested in modes of production, moments of reception, and the historical and ideological contexts for both. Materialist critique is really interested in the question of why a particular cultural work or practice emerged at a particular moment.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Oh I need a new brain I want to take a new mind I need a new brain I want to take a ride on a mini train |
| 0:21.4 | You can have it all |
| 0:25.0 | at the chafe. |
| 0:27.0 | Hello and welcome to Material Girls, a pop culture podcast that uses critical theory to understand the zeitgeist. |
| 0:38.0 | I'm Marcel Kossman. |
| 0:39.0 | And I'm Hannah McGregor and today we are talking about a side dish food fad that took the world by storm |
| 0:47.8 | Sweet potato fries Marcell I love when you come up with the topics. |
| 0:53.0 | Hannah, do you remember when sweet potato fries became like the biggest thing ever? |
| 0:58.0 | Marcel, here is the thing about having been a fat person my entire life. |
| 1:04.4 | I remember every single diet trend. |
| 1:06.4 | Oh, man. |
| 1:07.4 | The thing that I think people who have been thin for most of their lives |
| 1:12.0 | maybe don't know is that fat people have exhaustive |
| 1:16.0 | knowledge of diet trends. |
| 1:18.0 | Jesus Christ, I can tell you all about the supposed glycemic index and the way in which different |
| 1:26.4 | carbohydrates are apparently digested by your body in different ways and why |
| 1:31.0 | regular potatoes are basically the same as eating sugar. |
| 1:35.0 | Okay. But sweet potatoes, no no. |
| 1:39.0 | Oh boy, have I got an episode for you Hannah? Oh man. Oh man. I do more generally love the way that |
| 1:50.1 | vegetables enter and exit the zeitgeist and like you know the moment like the |
| 1:56.3 | bristle sprouts moment of the early 2010s when we all really decided we were back into Brussels sprouts, which by the way |
| 2:05.8 | we're not doing an episode about this but that is because they re-engineered Brussels |
... |
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