Reading Journal

I will never eat another strawberry again: the biopolitics of consumer-citizenship in the fight against methyl iodide in California

Julie Guthman1 • Sandy Brown2

Accepted: 29 May 2015 / Published online: 11 July 2015

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract In March of 2012, following a robust activist

campaign, Arysta LifeScience withdrew the soil fumigant

methyl iodide from the US market, just a little over a year

after it had finally been registered for use in California. As

a major part of the campaign against registration of the

chemical, over 53,000 people, ostensibly acting as citizens

rather than consumers, wrote public comments contesting

the use of the chemical for its high toxicity. Although these

comments had marginal impact on the outcome of the case,

these comments are of interest for what they say about

public action at a time when efforts to address food and

agricultural issues have been dominated by ‘‘voting with

your fork.’’ Based on a qualitative textual analysis of

approximately 3500 representative comments made avail-

able to us, we show that many of those taking action did

not abandon consumer subjectivities associated with

neoliberal governmentality. By threatening ‘‘personal

boycotts,’’ some were acting in their capacity as individual

consumers; in invoking their own and their children’s

health many more were also acting on behalf of consumers,

despite that the chemical in question is applied before

strawberries are planted and thus leaves no residues. The

emphasis that letter writers gave to their own bodies

reinforces the idea that some bodies count more than others

and thus reveals a biopolitical sorting. Having consumer

lives matter is consequential in light of evidence that

consumer concern about pesticides has historically led to

formulations and regulations more protective of consumers

than workers and neighbors.

Keywords Consumer-citizenship � Strawberry industry � Pesticides � Boycott � Farm labor � Soil fumigants � Neoliberal governmentality � Biopolitics

Abbreviations

CEQA California Environmental Quality Act

CUE Critical use exemption

DPR California Department of Pesticide Regulation

USEPA United States Environmental Protection Agency

Introduction

In March of 2012, Arysta LifeScience withdrew the soil

fumigant methyl iodide from the US market, just a little

over a year after it had finally been registered for use in

California and targeted especially for California’s lucrative

strawberry industry. Methyl iodide had been designed to

replace methyl bromide, an ozone depleting substance that

was being phased-out in accordance with the Montreal

Protocol. But methyl iodide faced robust opposition, owing

to its high toxicity, which would have primarily affected

farmworkers, fumigant applicators, and nearby residents. A

number of environmental, public health, and farmworker

groups joined forces to mount an impressive campaign to

prevent registration of the chemical. When California’s

& Julie Guthman [email protected]

Sandy Brown

[email protected]

1 Division of Social Sciences, University of California, Santa

Cruz, Community Studies Mail Stop, 1156 High St.,

Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA

2 Department of Public Affairs, College of Arts and Sciences,

University of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton Street,

San Francisco, CA 94117, USA

123

Agric Hum Values (2016) 33:575–585

DOI 10.1007/s10460-015-9626-7

Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) registered the

chemical despite the opposition, the campaign only inten-

sified in hopes that a new gubernatorial administration

would reverse the decision to register. While the campaign

was not directly successful in these goals, it did effectively

scare some growers into non-adoption. So did a lawsuit,

which additionally cast further aspersions on the process by

which DPR had registered the chemical. As it became

evident that the judge was likely to rule against the DPR

and Arysta as the real party in interest, Arysta voluntarily

requested to withdraw registration in California and

simultaneously withdrew the chemical from the US market.

In its public statement, Arysta claimed its decision rested

on the chemical’s economic non-viability. Notwithstanding

the suspicious timing of the announcement, legal docu-

ments testified to the serious miscalculations Arysta had

made about the time it would take to get approval for the

chemical, as well as its hubristic expectations that methyl

iodide would be immediately and widely adopted. These

expectations were at least partially dashed by the activist

campaign and lawsuit (see Alkon 2014; Saxton 2015 as

well as Guthman and Brown in press for a full accounting

of this case).

Among several strategies and tactics the activists

employed, one involved generating approximately 53,000

public comments to DPR opposing registration of the

chemical. These were organized through the internet in

what has become a common mode of action: activist

organizations issuing action alerts with suggested language

for a letter which individual recipients can endorse and

send with a simple click of a computer mouse, or, if they

wish, modify the letter before sending to reflect their own

perspectives. Because of the ease by which people can

participate, it is a mode that has been dubbed both

‘‘clicktivism’’ and ‘‘slacktivism’’ (Christensen 2011).

Multiple organizations, including the Sierra Club, Pesticide

Action Network, and the United Farm Workers, ran such

internet campaigns, as did dedicated internet activism

organizations with very large reach, such as CREDO

Action. In addition, individuals wrote articles and blogs

pointing readers to those organizations’ action alerts. As it

turned out, this aspect of the campaign had modest bearing

on the outcome of the case. The comments were largely

disregarded in regulatory review precisely because, as DPR

publicly stated, ‘‘most of the comments received were

similar and generated through social media campaigns.’’ In

addition, ‘‘they provided no evidence that DPR’s stringent

use restrictions will not keep exposures to methyl iodide

within safe levels’’ (Department of Pesticide Regulation

2010a)—an interpretation that speciously suggests that the

only purpose of public comment is to provide scientific

evidence. The comments may have had more bearing on

grower non-adoption, insofar as activists made a big deal in

the media about the unprecedented number of comments,

and the strawberry industry was well-apprised of public

rejection of methyl iodide. Yet, our interviews with

growers suggest that other activist tactics such as picketing

near strawberry fields were much more impactful in regard

to grower adoption. In addition, there were other reasons

growers did not adopt methyl iodide that were unrelated to

activism, such as word of unimpressive field trials.

Despite their marginal impact, we contend that these

public comments are of great interest for what they say

about public action at a time in which efforts to address

food and agricultural issues has been dominated by calls to

use the power of consumption and ‘‘vote with your fork.’’

At least at first glance, the public was acting primarily as

citizens rather than consumers, notwithstanding the ease

with which they could participate. They were therefore

engaging in a form of politics quite different than that

associated with neoliberal governmentality in which mak-

ing individual purchasing choices is the favored way to

assert ethical preferences. To be sure, through an analysis of

the approximately 3500 comments that DPR deemed rep-

resentative and substantive we found that many com-

menters did exercise citizenship in referencing labor, public

health, and broader environmental concerns. Given that

some of those most susceptible to exposure, namely

undocumented farmworkers, have limited political voice in

the matter this is no small thing. And yet, as we will show,

not all of those taking action abandoned their consumer

subjectivities, and many wrote of their future supermarket

choices. Furthermore, a significant number focused on

consumer anxieties, in particular concerns over their own

bodies and those of their children. These concerns were

evident, moreover, despite the fact that soil fumigants dis-

sipate long before plants produce fruit, so that consumers

are at negligible risk of exposure compared to fumigant

applicators, farmworkers and nearby communities.

In our view, the emphasis that a plurality of letter writers

gave to their own bodies is no small thing either, as it

reinforces the idea that some bodies count more than oth-

ers. In other words, these comments reveal a biopolitical

sorting, here referring to Foucault’s theorizations of how

securing the lives of ‘‘the population,’’ those deserving of

protection, has consistently entailed demarcating others as

less worthy who are effectively ‘‘let to die’’ (Foucault

1985, 1997). Such implicit biopolitical sorting has had real

effects for pesticide exposure historically, as many pesti-

cides have been chemically reformulated or mitigated to

protect consumers rather than workers (Harrison 2006;

Wright 2005). Of course there are much broader conse-

quences of the privileging of some bodies over others, as

the recent attention to police and security officers shooting

and killing black people with impunity has made eminently

clear.

576 J. Guthman, S. Brown

123

To theorize the tensions in the content of these letters,

we delve more deeply into the politics of voting with your

fork and enacting what some have referred to as consumer-

citizenship. We find it useful to parse out a distinction

between the public acting in their capacity as consumers

versus on behalf of consumers. Most of the literature on

consumerism and neoliberal governmentality focuses on

the former and is problematized because voting with your

dollars and forks can present a limited politics of the

possible. Here we want to problematize the latter because it

is through acting on behalf of consumers that the biopoli-

tics of their actions came into play. 1 Consumer-citizens’

reading themselves as the population to be protected, that

is, may have helped generate the high number of comments

but at the same time it elided who was most at risk. First,

though, we briefly consider the role of fumigants in the

strawberry industry and recount the events that prompted

this surge of public comment.

Setting the stage

Strawberries are big (agri)business in California, the sixth

highest grossing crop representing US$2.6 billion in annual

revenues to the state’s economy and 88 % of the produc-

tion in the US (California Department of Food and Agri-

culture 2012; California Strawberry Commission n.d.).

Strawberries are also one of the highest value crops grown

in California, one in which growers expect to receive more

than $50,000 in annual revenue per acre, revenues that also

cover the high labor costs of strawberry production (Bolda

et al. 2010). Since agricultural land values are directly

related to crop values, strawberries are grown on some of

the highest priced agricultural land in the state, making

alternatives that compromise yields or increase costs nec-

essarily non-viable. More generally, as Gareau (2008,

p. 108) has pointed out, California’s strawberry production

has been ‘‘built around particular historico-geographically

constituted production conditions that are hard to change.’’

In Miriam Wells’ classic book, Strawberry Fields

(1996), she discusses some of the factors that remade

strawberries from a seasonal delight of late spring and early

summer to a nearly year round profitable commodity. For

one, it involved moving strawberry production to the cooler

coastal regions, where strawberries compete with other

high value crops and, importantly, housing. It also entailed

technological developments in breeding, crop protection

(i.e. pesticides), storage, and distribution, much having

been developed through the state’s research and extension

system. And it relied on continued access to a politically

vulnerable labor force of primarily undocumented workers

to suppress wages. As others have pointed out, political

vulnerability has also ensured the inability to contest pes-

ticide use and other health and safety violations (Getz et al.

2008; Harrison 2011; Mitchell 2007).

Of developments in crop protection, soil fumigants

proved to be particularly important, as they sterilize the soil

and allow growers to plant on the same block year after

year in some regions or rotate with vegetable growers

every other year in others. Fumigants became especially

important for controlling a set of soil pathogens that attack

the root system of strawberry plants causing them to wilt

and die (Gareau 2008). For over half a century methyl

bromide has been the preferred fumigant for strawberry

growers. No other fumigants have proven to be as reliably

effective as methyl bromide, and methyl bromide has also

been widely appreciated for its ability to improve yields for

reasons not well understood. However, in 1991, the Mon-

treal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer,

initially signed in 1987, mandated the phase-out of methyl

bromide. As a signatory to the Montreal Protocol, the U.S.

agreed to stop producing and importing methyl bromide by

2005. This deadline was extended to 2015 when the U.S.

began requesting critical-use exemptions (CUEs) for

growers who claimed that no viable alternative was avail-

able. This claim was enabled by the explicit inclusion of

market considerations in the drafting of the Protocol,

despite that it counters the very goals of environmental

governance (DuPuis and Gareau 2009; Gareau 2008). As of

this writing, the US Environmental Protection Agency

(USEPA) is accepting CUE requests for 2016 although at

substantially lower quantities than ever before (US EPA

n.d.), and inventories for the chemical are low.

The strawberry industry has been slow to develop viable

alternatives (especially non-chemical alternatives) to

methyl bromide. Interviews with extension agents suggest

that the CUE process has contributed to these delays in

innovation (also Gareau 2008). However, when methyl

iodide came along, the industry was optimistic that it

would be a viable replacement. Methyl iodide was devel-

oped by researchers at UC Riverside, and licensed by

Arysta LifeScience under the brand name Midas. It shares

important qualities with methyl bromide in terms of soil

sterilization, but since it is more reactive, it does not make

it into the upper atmosphere to contribute to ozone deple-

tion. These same qualities, however, turned out to make it

less desirable for those who would come in contact with the

chemical—mainly workers and neighbors, as many argued

that it was even more acutely toxic and environmentally

degrading than methyl bromide. DPR’s own Scientific

Review Committee reported methyl iodide to be a known

1 This is not to say that neoliberal governmentality is not present in

this latter aspect, as neoliberal governmentality is also about care of

the self. But that is not the primary reason that voting with your fork

has been accused of being neoliberal.

I will never eat another strawberry again: the biopolitics of consumer-citizenship in the… 577

123

neurotoxin and carcinogen—used to induce cancer in lab-

oratory animals, associated with suppression of thyroid

hormone synthesis, respiratory illness, and lung tumors,

and probably a cause of miscarriages, birth deformities,

and non-normal development (Froines et al. 2013).

Beginning in 2002 Arysta moved aggressively to get

methyl iodide approved for commercial use, first seeking

registration with the USEPA then with the California DPR

in 2005. Emerging controversy, including a September

2007 letter from over 50 scientists, several of them Nobel

Laureates in chemistry, caused the USEPA to deny regis-

tration at first. However, a month later the agency reversed

course, granting a one-year registration that was extended

without time limitations in 2008. In 2009, the USEPA even

gave Arysta and the methyl iodide research team an Ozone

Protection Layer Award.

Things were trickier in California, however, where there

are a number of state environmental laws that go above and

beyond federal standards, including the California Envi-

ronmental Quality Act (CEQA). Scientists working within

DPR were deeply skeptical of the chemical’s safety and in

their final report on its registration, issued in 2010, they

estimated that actual agricultural use of methyl iodide

would expose workers and nearby residents to concentra-

tions of methyl iodide well above recommended target

levels (Lim and Nu-May 2010). The independent scientific

review panel convened by the DPR also argued against

registration (Froines et al. 2013).

Much of the scientific review focused on the adequacy of

mitigation measures that would be employed—measures

which are designed more to protect neighbors than workers.

In a typical soil fumigation, workers place and secure plastic

tarps over the fumigated area to ensure that these chemicals

do their work efficiently and to prevent the chemical from

volatizing and drifting. To mitigate further against drift,

applicators cannot treat fields in a buffer zone between fields

and nearby schools and houses. In addition, certified appli-

cators are required to equip their workers with all manner of

protective gear. However, as noted in a letter transmitted from

the independent review panel based on comments provided

by farmworkers, ‘‘respiratory protection, despite strict regu-

lations on paper, is commonly inappropriate, inadequate, or

inaccessible’’ (Department of Pesticide Regulation 2010b,

p. 2). Moreover, as we learned through interviews and public

testimony on mitigation measures for another fumigant,

chloropicrin, tarps occasionally tear or come loose in the

wind. Workers without protective gear may then shovel dirt to

hold them down or secure ripped tarps with duct tape.

Workers are also subject to off-gassing when they remove the

tarps. Workers in neighboring fields are also subject to drift.

This is not to say that neighbors are well protected: regardless

of buffer zones, fumigants also seep into the groundwater

affecting the wells of those who live nearby.

Disregarding the serious concerns raised in this regula-

tory review, the former DPR director, Mary Ann

Warmerdam, announced her intent to register the chemical

in April 2010. This announcement triggered a CEQA-re-

quired public comment period. It was during this period

that activist organizations mounted a major internet cam-

paign to encourage members of the general public to

comment on methyl iodide registration. Through this

effort, DPR received an unprecedented number of written

comments (over 53,000), with all but a handful writing in

opposition to registration.

As discussed above, these comments turned out to have

negligible impact on the outcome of the registration deci-

sion, albeit modest impact on grower adoption. Regardless

of the actual political effectiveness of these public com-

ments in cementing methyl iodide’s demise, they are

tremendously useful for understanding the substance of

citizen-consumer subjectivity that has been such a focus of

debates on agro-food activism.

Consumers, citizens, and consumer-citizens

Spurred by popular food writing and media in which con-

sumers are enjoined to ‘‘vote with their forks’’ (or their

dollars), in the last few decades consumer choice has

become the dominant way to enact food politics. By pur-

chasing foods that are ostensibly produced in more socially

just and ecologically sustainable ways, or ‘‘buycotting’’

food with positive qualities, consumers reward producers

whose practices are consistent with the desires of consci-

entious consumers (Friedman 1996; Neilson 2010). Sup-

posedly, buycotts send a message to growers and processors

to produce more of these foods and, over time, displace less

sustainable products. For example, DuPuis (2000) suggests

that the rapid rise of the organic milk industry can be

attributed to consumer concerns about the potential effects

of drinking milk from cows treated with recombinant

bovine growth hormone (rBGH). Here DuPuis argues that

although they do not emanate from organized campaigns

but from anxieties among middle and upper class con-

sumers, these choices count as political acts. Somewhat

differently, activists often speculate that fork voting, and

‘‘knowing where your food comes from’’ may be a first step

to broader political engagement within the sphere of

citizenship.

Despite the popular appeal of the approach and that

many consumers are enrolled in such acts of putative

resistance, some food scholars have been critical of an

approach in which the public acts in their capacity as

consumers by leveraging (or attempting to leverage) their

buying power. These scholars argue that a consumerist

sensibility stems from neoliberal governmentality, in which

578 J. Guthman, S. Brown

123

the exercise of individual choice, while represented as a

freedom (Dean 1999; Rose 1999), is all that remains when

more collective forms of action has been made more

politically difficult and even illegitimate. While fork voting

may well derive from deeply held ethical and political

concerns, for these scholars it still reflects a constrained

politics of the possible (Alkon 2014; Allen et al. 2003;

Brown and Getz 2008a; Guthman 2007, 2008; Johnston

2008; Lavin 2009). 2

Scholars have also critiqued voting with your fork for its

tendency to bring focus to the sphere of consumption rather

than production, to make better food, that is, rather than,

say, to improve working conditions for agricultural and

food workers (Gilson 2014; Guthman 2011; Harrison

2008a). Here the public acts on behalf of consumers,

making themselves the object of concern. And indeed, to

the degree that the agriculture and food industries have

responded, they have responded with ingredients and pro-

duction qualities that are more geared to consumer well-

being rather than that of agricultural workers and neighbors

(Harrison 2008b; Wright 2005). Wright, for example, notes

that consumer protest about pesticides led to a generation

of chemicals that are acutely toxic for workers but dissipate

quickly and/or leave no residues. Moreover, these pyrrhic

achievements rarely spread to all consumers (after all,

workers are also consumers). Through support of organics

and other labeling schemes, in another instance consumers

have achieved—or have attempted to achieve—what Szasz

(2007) calls an ‘‘inverted quarantine,’’ such that those who

can afford to effectively buy their way out of food qualities

that seem hazardous or unhealthful (Guthman 2003a,

2011). Such not-in-my-body politics, as DuPuis (2000)

concedes, can be even more individualistic and voluntary

than not-in my-back-yard (NIMBY) politics.

In addition to being exercises in neoliberal governmen-

tality, ‘‘not-in-my-body politics’’ or ‘‘inverted quarantine’’

appear also as what Foucault (2007) called technologies of

security. These are mechanisms that aim to protect and

enhance the lives of what he termed ‘‘the population’’ while

not unduly thwarting economic activity. The pesticide

mitigation measures briefly discussed earlier are a

quintessential contemporary example of such technologies.

Crucially, for Foucault the population subject to these

protections does not include all people. In his 1975–1976

lectures published in Society Must Be Defended (1997), for

instance, Foucault referred to the population as those who

have been victors in wars, colonization, and other forms of

subjugation—here the ‘‘master race.’’ In modern regimes,

their lives came to matter while others were not as much

killed as let to die. In History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1985)

he makes an additional move to suggest that those in the

population are not only to be protected but exalted relative

to others. There he argued that members of the loosely

construed ‘‘classes that ruled’’ had to have their bodies

‘‘cared for, protected, cultivated and preserved from the

many dangers and contacts’’—a protection that was grad-

ually extended to others—and that this ‘‘has to be seen as

the self-affirmation of one class rather than the enslavement

of another’’ (p. 123). The overarching point is that for

Foucault biopolitical sortings are intrinsic to technologies

of security; certain lives come to count more even as pro-

tection aims at a population. While we want to be careful

not to apply his late 19th century parables to today’s situ-

ation tout court, we nevertheless want to suggest that con-

sumer’s exaltations of their own bodies in the politics of

consumption, especially in attempts to purchase (relative)

safety, enacts an analogous biopolitical sorting.

It is not that production relations have been entirely

ignored in voting with your dollar efforts. In this regard,

fair trade and related ethical consumption initiatives are

among the most prominent. Ironically, though, fair trade

efforts can reinforce the importance of consumers. While

some scholars have argued that these initiatives promote an

ethics of solidarity and reciprocity with farmers and

farmworkers (Clarke et al. 2007; Goodman 2004; Raynolds

2000; Renard 2003), others note that fair trade has not

necessarily had the positive effects on resource poor

farmers and farmworkers. This is in large part because fair

trade schemes are not organized or operationalized by the

farmers and workers who would presumably benefit most

from the standards, but instead by market driven and phi-

lanthropically motivated actors (Bassett 2010; Besky 2013;

Freidberg 2003; Fridell 2007; Jaffee 2012; Wilson 2013;

Wilson and Curnow 2013). Accordingly, some suggest that

such initiatives are more reflective of consumer desires to

feel virtuous than true solidarity (Brown and Getz 2008b;

Dolan 2010; Shreck 2005; Ziegler 2007). Relatedly, with

its focus on product prices rather than wages, the fair trade

model tends to privilege farmers over farmworkers (Brown

2013; Brown and Getz 2008a).

Nevertheless, after a long hiatus, issues directly affect-

ing labor in the food system seem to be receiving increased

attention among alternative food activists and popular food

writers, owing in part to the pointed and abiding critique of

activists, policy researchers and scholars who have con-

sistently called out the food movement for its inattention to

labor (Allen 2004, 2008; Allen and Sachs 1993; Bauer and

Ramirez 2010; Brown and Getz 2008b; Getz et al. 2008;

Guthman 2003b, 2004; Harrison 2008a, b; Jayaraman

2012; Liu and Apollan 2011; Shreck et al. 2006).

2 This critique has generated a counter-critique. Following in the

footsteps of Gibson-Graham (2006), some argue that voting with your

dollar and others acts of consumer agency must be ‘‘read for

difference.’’ By this, they mean that the neoliberalism critique is

totalizing and self-fulfilling in ways that foreclose possibilities of

transforming food systems (Harris 2009).

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Accordingly, some recent efforts to address food and

agricultural labor are being defined by workers, while still

giving consumers opportunities to play an important role.

As cases in point, the highly visible campaigns levied by

organizations like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the

Restaurant Opportunities Center, and the 2014 efforts by

fast food workers, encouraged consumers to use their

purchasing power to affect worker wages and working

conditions by both supporting businesses that comply with

high labor standards and avoiding those that reject such

standards (Alkon 2014; Besky and Brown 2015; Jayaraman

2012; Minkoff-Zern 2014).

Involving aspects of boycotts as well as buycotts, these

campaigns thus harken back to the days when, as Johnston

(2008, p. 236) notes, ‘‘boycotts were used by unions,

political activists, and individual consumers as a way to

enact political preferences through anti-consumption

behaviors.’’ Moreover, they mobilized consumer power as

a collectivity rather than the individual choices associated

with neoliberal forms of rule. As detailed in histories of the

United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, these boy-

cotts often entailed enormous organizing efforts and per-

sonal sacrifices that in turn resulted in higher wages and

better working conditions (Bardacke 2012; Ganz 2004;

Garcı́a 2012). Incidentally, the use of pesticides was a

major bone of contention in these boycotts and the union

contract negotiations that ensued, as farmworkers them-

selves made limits on pesticide exposure one of their most

primary demands (Pulido 1996). And at times growers

capitulated to these demands in recognition that consumers

would be averse to buying grapes associated with poisons.

A critical aspect of such organized buycotts and boycotts

is that individuals act in their capacity as consumers but on

behalf of others. Their actions thus straddle consumerism

and citizenship, but in a different way than voting with your

dollar, as described by Johnston (2008). For Johnston, the

very idea of voting with your dollar collapses the distinction

between consumers who buy and citizens who vote, sug-

gesting something of a hybrid (see also Arnould 2007; Jubas

2007; Scammell 2000; Soper 2004). As she insightfully

notes, the two impulses that come together in consumer-

citizenship are ideologically distinct: one is about con-

sumerism, an idea rooted in individual self-interest, and the

other is about an ideal rooted in collective responsibility to a

social and ecological commons; one is based in neo-clas-

sical notions of market supremacy; the other is based in

political philosophy and political economy; and one is rel-

atively easy while one takes hard work (Johnston 2008,

p. 232). She thus argues that the hybrid is hard to achieve,

and that consumerism has tended to dominate. Still, her

conclusion lies in part because she has examined consumer-

citizenship through the case of Whole Foods Market, where

despite whatever social and political proclivities consumers

may have, they enter, literally, as shoppers. Organized

boycotts do not neatly fit into this schema, since they are

based on consumption but in fact people participate in

collectivities. Nor, for that matter, do public comment sit-

uations in which people participate as citizens, at least

nominally so, but do so in way that is as easy, if not easier

than shopping (clicking on a button) and, moreover, invoke

individual consumption choices after all.

What is striking about the methyl iodide comments, in

this last regard, was that at first glance, individuals were

asked to act neither in their capacity as consumers nor on

behalf of consumers, but to act as citizens with collective

responsibility for the working and living conditions of

others. Yet, as we shall see, in their efforts to engage in

regulatory politics on behalf of others (or a broader sense

of the common good), many commenters were not fully

able to relinquish either their role or their concerns as

consumers, so much so that in some cases their comments

reinforced their own stature as bodies that count.

Comments on the public comments

Our analysis of the 53,000 public comments against reg-

istration of methyl iodide was part of a larger project to

understand what led to the chemical’s demise. In reviewing

the comments our goal was to ascertain what sort of issues

were raised in the public comment period—environmental,

public health, and economic—and by whom. We were

specifically interested in gauging how concern over farm-

worker lives registered, especially in light of new knowl-

edge of the intergenerational effects of certain chemicals,

since farmworker lives have otherwise tended to be

neglected in regulatory debates. To conduct this analysis,

we were able to obtain approximately 3500 comments from

DPR. According to the response to our public records

request, DPR disregarded the vast majority of ‘‘generic and

repetitive’’ comments and these thus represent all of the

‘‘substantive comments’’ received and retained by the

department. We then coded the content of the comments

using the qualitative research software NVivo10. 3

In

3 While NVivo was highly useful to identify and compile exemplary

content, we found it unsuitable for quantitative analysis given the

format of the data provided. All comments, that is, were provided to

us in one 3700 page PDF file, making several of NVivo’s functions

virtually unusable on an ordinary laptop, especially for tabulating

individual comments. Therefore, except for the word frequency count,

the quantitative analysis was done ex post facto using an Excel

spreadsheet to tabulate the occurrence of key themes in relation to

individual comments. For these purposes, we sampled approximately

one-half of the individual comments. We report this analysis with

percentages rather than numbers in recognition that numbers give an

impression of exactitude that is not generally possible when

interpreting textual data.

580 J. Guthman, S. Brown

123

setting the codes, we developed themes related to our

original hypotheses. For instance, we were explicitly

interested in biopolitical questions—and therefore we

coded for what populations were mentioned as objects of

concern, including pregnant women and future children of

farmworkers and neighbors. As non-hypothesized themes

emerged, we added additional codes. This includes the idea

of a boycott, which emerged out of several codes related to

the economic viability of the industry. Indeed, the emer-

gence of this theme and how it was discussed in relation to

consumer bodies was a true surprise, and thus was the

inspiration for this particular article. Given this surprise,

we looked for the on-line prompts provided by the orga-

nizations involved in the public comment campaign. Some

had been taken down from the internet long ago, but DPR

provided that of CREDO Action, a dedicated internet

activist organization which apparently generated the vast

majority of comments, and we were able to locate the

prompts of the Pesticide Action Network, the United Farm

Workers, and Beyond Pesticides, all of which also played

major roles. All of these data are supplemented with

knowledge gained through qualitative interviews with

activists, growers, agricultural extension agents, and

industry representatives.

In the very act of submitting public comments to a reg-

ulatory agency, many commenters were indeed exercising

citizenship, and doing so on behalf of a greater good.

Although a significant number of comments said very little

other than ‘‘please do not register methyl iodide,’’ many

comments appealed to a policy decision and mentioned

some of the key issues that had emerged in the regulatory

debates: the dubious science that supported methyl iodide,

the availability of alternatives, the effects of the chemical

on environmental and public health, especially with respect

to fumigant drift and ground water. And yet, most people

who provided lengthier comments were also acting as

consumers. This was evidenced not only by the frequency

with which terms such as eat (1311), food (1274), buy

(411), and consumer (554) appeared, but also in the popu-

lations they named in expressing their opposition to methyl

iodide. Still, how they were acting as consumers bears

further parsing, in accordance with the discussion above.

Many commenters did in fact register their concerns in

their capacity as consumers, with 18 % stating or sug-

gesting that they would no longer buy strawberries—or that

they would buy only organic strawberries were methyl

iodide to be registered. Typical comments included: ‘‘Our

family will no longer buy conventionally grown California

strawberry, however inexpensive,’’ or ‘‘If methyl iodide

becomes legal to use on crops in California, I will per-

sonally boycott all fruits and vegetables grown there!’’ A

much smaller percent invoked the idea and terminology of

an organized boycott, saying they would join or organize

one, or the industry should expect one. ‘‘If you permit

methyl iodide to be used, expect huge boycotts of straw-

berries grown with this product,’’ one person wrote. ‘‘My

wife and I buy about 2–3 baskets of strawberries every

1.5 weeks or so. If enough people like us refuse to buy

strawberries coated with cancer causing pesticides, maybe

THAT will get your money grubbing attention,’’ wrote

another. Even if not as part of an organized collectivity,

most of the commenters, it appears, imagined that refer-

ence to their potential buying power would affect industry

behavior.

Turning to the question of on whose behalf commenters

were acting, here we looked at which populations were

invoked in commenters’ expression of opposition to methyl

iodide. Of those that referred to a population of concern

(about 62 % of commenters), the majority (60 % of those)

referred to consumers or consumer health, revealing a

veritable misunderstanding of the chemical, its mode of

entry, and its attendant risks. Wrote one person: ‘‘People

who ingest methyl iodide contaminated strawberries will

be at increased risk for cancer. This is not worth the slim

gain in profit margin for strawberry growers.’’ Another

wrote: ‘‘Please, for the sake of consumers everywhere,

reconsider introducing a known toxin into our atmosphere

and supermarkets.’’ Yet another referred to strawberries as

‘‘coated with cancer-causing pesticides.’’ Here it is worth

reminding readers that methyl iodide, while associated with

carcinogenesis, does not leave residue on the fruit.

Less than half of commenters invoking a population

discussed those who would be most at risk from the use of

methyl iodide: those who live nearby or work with or near

fumigations. About 38 % mentioned workers as a popula-

tion of concern, with comments such as ‘‘It is unacceptable

to put farm workers at risk’’ or more elaborately, ‘‘The

unskilled, vulnerable and often undocumented workers

with language barriers who do most of the work on large

farms where this will be used also do not need to be further

exposed to such dangerous substances.’’ Twenty-six per-

cent focused on neighbors, including those that highlighted

both neighbors and workers. Relatively few commented on

the potential of exposure to children who live or go to

school nearby, as well as nearby or working pregnant

women and their future children, suggesting that knowl-

edge on the effects of fumigants on fetal health has not

circulated widely. These few comments were nevertheless

highly thoughtful. Wrote one person: ‘‘The biggest nega-

tive affect [sic] is for those strawberry field workers who

work there everyday [sic]. [It] also means that pregnant

farmworker women who have to work (no choice) in those

fields are risking to lose their unborn babies… we cannot afford the risk of having new born [sic] children born

without hand legs backbone without brain. I have seen

many of those cases in my life.’’

I will never eat another strawberry again: the biopolitics of consumer-citizenship in the… 581

123

It is worth nothing that quite a few commenters used

language to suggest that multiple populations would be put

at risk, including workers and consumers. ‘‘Please consider

the health effects to the farmworkers, water contamination,

and the consumers who you are asking to risk their lives for

a few people’s profit,’’ stated one commenter. ‘‘Not only is

it terrible that strawberry pickers are exposed to this

chemical, but it also poses risks to people who consume

these strawberries,’’ wrote another. Potential exposure to

children as a generic group was another salient theme in the

comments, with many suggesting that children were both

more vulnerable to the health effects of exposure—and ‘‘the

backbone of our future’’—deserving special protections.

Significantly, most of the comments that invoked a

personal boycott or other terms suggestive of their future

purchasing focused on their own and their family’s health,

with a strong measure of not-in-my-body, or, more point-

edly not-in-my-baby’s-body politics. ‘‘I will never buy

strawberries treated with Methyl Iodide. Period. My fam-

ily’s health and wellness trump corporate profits,’’ wrote

one commenter. ‘‘I will not feed these toxins to my fam-

ily,’’ wrote another. ‘‘As the parent of a very picky eater, I

will tell you that I purchase fresh strawberries twice a

week, dried strawberries every 2 weeks or so. If you move

forward on this proposal, I will ensure that I either purchase

berries that were not turned into cancer carriers or omit the

fruit from my daughter’s diet,’’ wrote a third. And a fourth:

‘‘If the state approves this, I WILL NOT BUY ANYMORE

STRAWBERRIES. PERIOD. It’s just not worth it to sac-

rifice my son’s health, the strawberry growers’ health, and

the environment’s health.’’ Of particular interest is the

relatively measured comment of a person who understood

that her ‘‘personal boycott’’ would not solve the problem of

farmworker exposure. As she wrote, ‘‘I’m an active,

working mother and this will only strengthen my resolve to

buy organic produce for my family. But my fears for the

impact to groundwater, soil and the farmworkers remain.’’

We were most struck by highly telling comments, in which

letter writers amplified the importance of their own bodies

and lives. ‘‘We, here in Massachusetts, love your straw-

berries, but we also love our bodies, so, I for once, will stop

buying California-grown strawberries and rely on my

preserves and farmer’s markets from Massachusetts’

organic local farms.’’ Or, ‘‘to protect my family from

getting cancer, I will no longer be buying strawberries. Our

lives are much too precious to risk over eating strawberries

that have been treating with methyl iodide.’’

One question is why so many people wrote comments

that made methyl iodide a concern for their own food and

bodies. Industry spokespeople and some growers have

suggested that the activists deliberately misled the public.

Through our examination of the available prompts we

found that the organizations that actually work on these

issues did not provide misleading statements. Pesticide

Action Network’s alert, for example, which was linked to

many blogs and articles, was quite clear on who would be

affected by the use of methyl iodide in its suggested lan-

guage: ‘‘Please consider the impact of this decision on the

environment, rural communities, and farmworkers and

their families… Say no to methyl iodide. CREDO’s action alert was mildly confusing in suggesting that methyl iodide

might be found on food. It prompted, ‘‘I am deeply con-

cerned with the pending approval of methyl iodide for use

on strawberries and other food crops in California;’’ how-

ever, the rest of the prompt was accurate in saying that ‘‘it

can be especially damaging during fetal development, and

it has no business being used as a fumigant in the open

atmosphere.’’ Nevertheless, some of the accompanying

journalism implied that methyl iodide could be found in

food. For instance, the online magazine Civil Eats relayed

information about the public comment period in an article

called ‘‘Strawberry Show Down: No Methyl Iodide with

My Shortcake, Please’’ (Starkman 2010). The article went

on to say that the DPR was ‘‘accepting public comments on

its proposal through June 14, so unless you’d like some

more toxins with your strawberry smoothie, you might

want to urge DPR to immediately withdraw the recom-

mendation to approve its agricultural use.’’ In short,

available evidence does not support the idea that the public

was ‘‘deliberately’’ misled by the primary activist organi-

zations, although it is clear that some misunderstandings of

the potential for the fumigant to leave residues on food

circulated in the media.

A second question is why so many commenters men-

tioned boycotts, personal or otherwise. Here again, we

found no evidence that major organizations in the internet

campaign provided sample text that mentioned a boycott as

a possible course of action. Pesticide Action Network,

quoted above, certainly did not and CREDO suggested the

following language as a point of leverage: ‘‘I would like to

register my emphatic opposition to the proposed approval

of methyl iodide, and urge you (and the DPR) to imme-

diately withdraw the recommendation to approve its agri-

cultural use.’’ And yet, ideas of a boycott apparently

circulated in the media in the form of letters to the editor,

blogs, and web-published commentaries. For example, a

letter to the editor of the Monterey Herald suggested that

‘‘a public boycott of conventionally grown strawberries

from methyl iodide-treated fields… may quickly demon- strate the anger of the public over the callous decision by

DPR and those who benefit financially from it’’ (Monterey

County Herald 2010).

Of course, given the nature of our data it is impossible to

divine how potential letter writers made sense of organi-

zations’ messaging, as well as the accompanying media,

and so these ‘‘why’’ questions cannot be conclusively

582 J. Guthman, S. Brown

123

answered. Yet, at some level whether the public was misled

is beside the point. For, regardless of the actual content of

action alerts and blog posts, commenters necessarily take up

the issues that most resonate for them. We thus want to

suggest that they were ‘‘interpellated’’ to both write – and

write in a certain register. Here we refer to Althusser’s

(1971) famous metaphor of a police officer ‘‘hailing’’ a

passer-by. Those who turn to the police officer effectively

admit that they are the subjects to which the police officer

speaks. His point is that particular ideologies become

powerful because subjects recognize themselves in the idea.

And so it is with these letter writers, many of whom have

been subjected to neoliberal governmentalities of choice

making and personal responsibility for health—themes that

have been pervasive in contemporary food movements and

thus at least some of the media that spread word of the

campaign. In that light, it makes much sense that they would

turn up the volume on fork voting and concern with their

own bodies. Indeed, it may well be that these concerns are

what animated them to write in the first place.

Conclusion: Whose lives matter?

By definition, all of those who wrote letters to DPR

regarding methyl iodide registration nominally went

beyond the mode of engaging politics solely through pur-

chasing. Regardless of their impact on the actual outcome,

they engaged in identifiable public action on a regulatory

decision, even if an easy ‘‘slacktivist’’ version. Moreover,

many letter writers exercised citizenship not only through

the act of writing, but in expressing broader collective

concerns about environmental safety and public health. It is

particularly important that a sizable number wrote on behalf

of workers, especially in the context of an agricultural

system that uses undocumented status to squelch workers’

voices. At the same time, not all letter writers abandoned

their consumer subjectivities; many still registered their

potential purchasing choices. Moreover, they did so in the

individualistic and voluntary way noted by DuPuis (2000),

rather than as part of a concerted effort to force an industry

change on behalf of workers or broader publics, as orga-

nized boycotts have done. That so many commenters read

into the campaign concern with their own choices suggests

that that the citizen apple hasn’t fallen very far from the

fork-voting tree—and certainly reveals the persistence of

neoliberal governmentality in food movements.

Of separate concern is that most of those who were

inclined to conduct a ‘‘personal boycott’’ of strawberries

saw it as a way to ensure their own safe eating, and perhaps

even unconsciously misunderstood or disregarded methyl

iodide’s uses and toxic pathways when responding to a

message that otherwise interpellated them. In our view, the

prominence of the not-in-my-body theme in a regulatory

dispute in which consumer lives were tertiary speaks to a

troubling biopolitics of consumer-citizenship. Here we

draw specific attention to the telling comments in which

letter writers explicitly invoked the preciousness of their

own bodies and lives. Those whose lives already unques-

tionably count in the calculus of regulatory and market

actions were effectively asserting that their lives should

continue to count—and count for more. This is a move

reminiscent of the slippage that occurred in the post-Fer-

guson protests when the slogan of ‘‘black lives matter’’

morphed into ‘‘all lives matter.’’ At best such a flattening of

focus (akin to the letters that focused on workers and

consumers) loses sight of those most subject to harm; at

worst, following Foucault, the exaltation of certain bodies

is a disregard of others, effectively allowing them to die.

To be clear, letting die is more than a metaphor in the

case of fumigants and other pesticides. As we have noted,

consumer voice has sometimes led to chemical formula-

tions and regulatory systems that are safer to consumers

while leaving workers in the (chemical) dust. Today, as

California is revisiting mitigation measures for all

remaining fumigants, we see priority given to those mea-

sures, such as buffer zones, that are more protective of

neighbors than workers, not coincidentally as strawberries

are increasingly grown next to middle class housing. There

is precedent, in other words, for regulations that serve those

with the most entitled voice.

Despite the substance of some of the public comment,

which has been the emphasis of this paper, the fight against

methyl iodide as a whole was nevertheless a notable vic-

tory for the anti-pesticide movement. And it was particu-

larly remarkable because it shows what can happen when

food and agricultural politics go beyond voting with your

dollar. Forward movement in containing the harmful

effects of fumigants and other agricultural pesticides will

require advocates and activists to keep up their good,

strategic work. It will also take promulgating strong, clear

messages of who is at risk in the use of pesticides in hopes

that a broader public will recognize that other lives matter

and will then exercise citizenship, not only consumerism,

to help make that mattering a changed material reality.

Acknowledgments Funding for the research contained herein was provided by the National Science Foundation, Award #s 1228478 and

1262064. We are grateful for the research assistance of Zoe Chertov

and Savannah Coker, as well as the generative comments of three

anonymous reviewers.

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Julie Guthman Ph.D., is a geographer and professor of social sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz where she

teaches courses in global political economy and the politics of food

and agriculture. Her publications include two multi-award winning

books: Agrarian Dreams: the Paradox of Organic Farming in

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Award from the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society.

Sandy Brown Ph.D., is a geographer and an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco and a research associate at the University

of California at Santa Cruz. She has published articles on the politics

of fair trade and farm labor relations in both California and Latin

America.

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