A Blogger Heads to the Smithsonian

I'll be headed to D.C. next week to start a research Fellowship at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (above). This is a signal of transitions in several senses. Not only has the semester ended here (with graduation this Sunday and so far only two students protesting their grades), but I am officially finished with the major research project of the last many years and into the next major one. This last project culminates in my book, Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside, on shelves this September. The new project, "The Moral Landscape of Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Early Age of Industrialized Food," has been underway for the past year or so, but now finally feels like it's indeed the new major project. In no small part, getting a chance to use the Smithsonian's archives helps solidify the reality of it.

The Smithsonian work will help me examine how cultural concepts of "nature" and "natural" were challenged by the introduction of new agricultural and food-making practices. At the highest level, it's a study of the origins of modern environmental thought; at the mid-level, it's a study of scientific analysis, technological production, and public debate about the problems of adulterated food that new global industrial practices called attention to. At the more mundane level, what I'm after is an understanding of how and why citizens policed the boundaries between adulterated and pure. Toward that end, and in D.C., I'm looking into cultural ephemera from the later 19th c. dealing with food and adulteration debates--in the form of advertisements, packaging, product descriptions, trade catalogs, cookbooks, landscape portraits, and more. I'll work back from those to get a better sense of what assumptions were being challenged and what images provided culturally acceptable views of land, food, and nature.

Not that I've ever been a regularly scheduled blogger, but this summer could go one of two ways: I'll either not be here at all for the next three months, or I'll see how this goes and post comments about my days at the museum. And if I see Ben Stiller at night. Or Fonzie's jacket.