For our fourth series of podcasts produced in collaboration with Meant to Be Eaten on Heritage Radio Network, we sit down (virtually) with authors who have contributed to our upcoming first issue of 2021, which continues to feature COVID-19 Dispatches, but also original research articles around the themes of the relationship between food, power and politics, cultivating relationships, and sustaining memories.
For this episode, Editorial Collective member Jaclyn Rohel is joined by Alyshia Gálvez, who explores the work of transnational food couriers known as paqueteros and paqueteras in her forthcoming article, “Paqueteros and Paqueteras: Humanizing a Dehumanized Food System.” These informal grassroots entrepreneurs connect people and places across international borders through the delivery of goods, care packages, and specialty and traditional foods. Drawing on ethnographic research of micro-local foodways in Mexico (Puebla) and the United States (New York) and the connections between them, Gálvez discusses how informal food couriers humanize an increasingly industrialized food system in the post-NAFTA landscape.
*Please note that around the 10-min mark, Professor Gálvez mentions having been asked by federal attorneys to serve as an expert witness, while she meant to say that she had been approached by public defenders in that capacity.
