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Wholesome: An agroecology professor called on me to describe the primary contradiction of capitalism
(hexbear.net)
And then after class said that she would like to teach another one where the question is "should we even have a livestock industry at all?". I told her that I'd love to teach one where I just make the students repeatedly read The Jungle and Grapes of Wrath until they start burning shit down and she replied that it already seems like we're heading that way.
My only good professor.
I like it as a graphic social history that centres on otherwise invisible workers. We were discussing the JBS slaughterhouse strike where almost nothing has changed except for the nationalities of the workers. Across all of my agriculture classes, the labour conditions only ever got a passing mention without ever being connected to that larger primary contradiction. They never draw the links between commodification, industrialisation and market consolidation, and the externalities of production as one unified feedback loop resulting in those students becoming the most wretched of commodities. The Jungle really explicitly links everything together and shows it in prose as horrifying as a Chuck Palahniuk novel.
Grapes of Wrath didn't make a dent in public consciousness either, but it's a socioecological history linking dysfunctional food systems to graphic human suffering. If the eponymous quote doesn't enrage someone they're ontologically stupid. One of my course plans is just using that quote as a foundation for a critical geography study of one of our regional commodities, tracking all of the alienation involved in its production and consumption/waste. Learning the cost of a 10 cent banana should make someone a communist.
grapes has a few banger passages but overall i found it incredibly tedious, even at a time in my life when i was a voracious reader of nonfiction. considering how even more addled everyone's brains are these days i'd expect you'd have more success assigning the excerpts rather than the whole text.
That's what it would be. The Okie dialect alone is a hard thing to read through and I assume everyone is going to be cheating with AI summaries now. I'd want to highlight the broad themes of land use, population displacement, commodification, and the demographic dimensions to apply them as the leading question in a discussion elective where the only real grade is participation/a brief presentation.