



































 

Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:2 (2019-2020): 159-160 © American Folklore Society 2021 

Review of: 
 

Rooted Resistance: Agrarian Myth in Modern America 
Ross Singer, Stephanie Houston Grey, and Jeff Motter. Fayetteville: The University of 
Arkansas Press, 2020. Pp. 261, bibliography, index. 
 
Review by: Rosalind V. Rini Larson 
____________________________________________________________ 
 
In Rooted Resistance: Agrarian Myth in Modern America, Ross Singer, Stephanie 
Houston Grey, and Jeff Motter provide a riveting historical and rhetorical account of 
“agrarianism,” a philosophy that hinges upon the inherent virtue of pre-industrial family 
farming as a way of life, and of the connectedness among people and with the land that 
it fosters. Agrarianism underpins a powerful social and political discourse, which they 
call “American agrarian myth.” Linked to a democratic political vision since the era of 
Thomas Jefferson’s influential writings on the yeoman farmer as the ideal democratic 
citizen, American agrarian myth not only asserts the exceptional moral, social, and 
political virtue provided by pre-industrial family farming, but the exceptional character 
of Americans as a people empowered and shaped by the collective experience of 
agrarian life. American agrarian myth is deployed most commonly today in the service 
of legitimating consumer products or political figures, yet it continues to be a contested 
and ambiguous rhetorical space that retains power and widespread appeal for the 
American public, both rural and urban. The authors explain that “Rooted Resistance 
examines this reservoir of myth as a source of trusted social truth and persuasive 
commonplaces” (6). The case studies discussed in this volume reveal how the new 
agrarianism that functions as an ethic of resistance entwined with this myth can be co-
opted by corporate or industrial interests just as easily as it can be deployed to the ends 
of social justice or environmentalism. Despite this vulnerability to distortion, the 
richness and ambiguity of American agrarian myth are the basis of its transformative 
potential to appeal to and unite diverse parties within American culture in the face of 
multiple imminent and interconnected global crises, including climate change and food 
insecurity. In their own ambitious words, the authors conclude by considering “the 
prospect of a new-agrarian identity informed by myth and spreading across the world, 
capable of dismantling the industrial food system and culture of death at its root” (33). 
 
Setting the tone for the agricultural metaphors that crop up in this work, the authors 
titled the sections of their book “Part I: Seeds of Resistance” and “Part II: Threatened 
Harvests,” in which they introduce key figures and movements in the history of modern 
agrarianism and then illuminate the way those early influences fostered articulations of 
new agrarianism across various ideologies, respectively. The seven case study chapters 
spread among Parts I and II feature diverse manifestations of American agrarian 
mythmaking from World War I to 2013, tracking patterns and revealing “the complex 
relations between agrarian myth and the discourses of industrialism and consumerism” 
(15). 
  
Opening Part I near the beginning of the 20th century, Chapter 1 focuses upon the way 
American food propaganda during World War I—under the leadership of U.S. Food 
Administration head Herbert Hoover, U.S. Committee on Public Information head 
George Creel, and U.S. National War Garden Commission head Charles Lathrop Pack—



160    Larson, Review, Rooted Resistance  Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:2 (2019-2020) 

 

drew upon American agrarian myth to mobilize food production on the home front with 
enormous success. Chapter 2 profiles the postwar effects of this wartime expansion for 
American farmers by conducting a close analysis of the use of American agrarian myth 
in the writings of the American Country Life Association, an organization whose mission 
was to advocate for rural citizens and farmers as essential to democracy. Chapter 3 
explores American agrarian myth in the rhetoric of the Southern Agrarians, another 
organization advocating for the existential importance of American farming and 
farmers, this time with a regional twist that simultaneously tried to renew an idealized 
Southern identity. Despite the internal contradictions of idealizing an agrarian 
agricultural past that was in fact defined by plantation-based slave labor, the Southern 
Agrarians made a lasting contribution to American agrarian myth in the form of 
imagining agrarianism as a form of resistance to industrialized modernity. Chapter 4 
profiles the father of organic farming, Jerome I. Rodale, and how his landmark work 
Pay Dirt (1945) evokes and contributes to American agrarian myth through adapting 
the Biblical genre jeremiad to provide a prophetic vision of contemporary American 
agrarianism. 
 
Part II brings us into the late 20th century, starting with Chapter 5 about the famous 
case of the South Central Farmers of Los Angeles profiled in the documentary film The 
Garden; the authors argue that the film adapts American agrarian myth to new 
communities (Latinx farmers) and contexts (urban spaces), opening up new 
opportunities. Chapter 6 refocuses on how contemporary American agrarian myth has 
been co-opted by corporate interests, chronicling the rise and dramatic fall of Chipotle’s 
“food with integrity” branding campaign, rhetorically analyzed by way of several widely 
viewed videos. Chapter 7 presents the Dodge Ram commercial “So God Made a Farmer,” 
aired at the 2013 Super Bowl, as the final case study, examining how the ad expertly 
draws on and reimagines modern American agrarian myth through words and images 
that appeal to urban majorities despite internal contradictions. 
 
Rooted Resistance presents an ambitious project of knowledge building, critique, and 
social advocacy by way of painstakingly detailed rhetorical history and incisive analysis, 
whose ultimate goal is no less than to reveal the revolutionary potential of new 
agrarianisms to remake and save the world. Written from a decidedly non-folkloristic 
perspective—by scholars of rhetoric writing at the nexus of communication studies and 
food studies about discourse they call “myth”—the volume achieves its interdisciplinary 
goals in offering a great deal of interest and value to folklorists and other humanities 
scholars who consider public discourse crucial context rather than a primary subject. As 
a folklorist studying a foodways tradition only tangentially related to farming life, I see 
incredible resonance between the American agrarian myth as an ethic of resistance, as 
described in this book, and the individual and collective identities expressed through the 
fricassee soup I study. I imagine that other folklorists studying food in today’s complex 
moment of accelerating climate change, growing social justice awareness, and seemingly 
irreversible agricultural industrialization might also find some salient rhetorical context 
for understanding the social meanings of the traditions they study in Rooted Resistance. 


	Review of:
	Rooted Resistance: Agrarian Myth in Modern America
	Review by: Rosalind V. Rini Larson

