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<p>This article brings together the literature on producing “edibility” with scholarship that has investigated and critiqued the role of agrarianism and agrarian imaginaries in alternative food movements to theorize <i>revival as a strategy of producing edibility</i> and in turn constructing future food imaginaries. Based primarily on fieldwork conducted in central Iowa from 2021 to 2023, it looks at how elements of a mythic agrarian past were revived and mobilized in central Iowa, to help produce and promote insects as a “food of the future,” using the story of one business, Gym-N-Eat Crickets, and its proprietor, Shelby Smith, as a case study in alternative food movements, and in how people respond to crises of the present by leveraging elements of the past towards imagining and trying to build towards better futures. I argue that revival was a discursive and material strategy of producing edibility gained traction and helped give form to a future food imaginary built around a selectively mobilized white mythic agrarian past, and that in this way, it by-passed immigrants and their traditions, functioning as a form of nativism that foreclosed the possibility of new alliances and markets. Ultimately, I suggest that this case study reveals the <i>limitations</i> of reviving a mythic white agrarian imaginary as a resource for envisioning and building towards alternative food futures, and gesture towards <i>other food imaginaries</i> through which more sustainable and desirable futures might be dreamed and born.</p>

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“Eat Prairie Lobster”: the limitations of agrarian revival as a strategy of producing insect edibility and constructing future food imaginaries in the American Midwest

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年2月10日

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  • Paolina Lu

摘要

This article brings together the literature on producing “edibility” with scholarship that has investigated and critiqued the role of agrarianism and agrarian imaginaries in alternative food movements to theorize revival as a strategy of producing edibility and in turn constructing future food imaginaries. Based primarily on fieldwork conducted in central Iowa from 2021 to 2023, it looks at how elements of a mythic agrarian past were revived and mobilized in central Iowa, to help produce and promote insects as a “food of the future,” using the story of one business, Gym-N-Eat Crickets, and its proprietor, Shelby Smith, as a case study in alternative food movements, and in how people respond to crises of the present by leveraging elements of the past towards imagining and trying to build towards better futures. I argue that revival was a discursive and material strategy of producing edibility gained traction and helped give form to a future food imaginary built around a selectively mobilized white mythic agrarian past, and that in this way, it by-passed immigrants and their traditions, functioning as a form of nativism that foreclosed the possibility of new alliances and markets. Ultimately, I suggest that this case study reveals the limitations of reviving a mythic white agrarian imaginary as a resource for envisioning and building towards alternative food futures, and gesture towards other food imaginaries through which more sustainable and desirable futures might be dreamed and born.