Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T20:14:20.288Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 9 - Junk Food for Thought: Decolonizing Diets in Tommy Pico’s Poetry

from Part II - Environmental Genres and Media

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2022

Sarah Ensor
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Susan Scott Parrish
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Get access

Summary

This chapter traces how queer Indigenous poet Tommy Pico (Kumeyaay) has developed a critique of the “Ecological Indian” trope. While this critique begins most obviously in 2017’s Nature Poem – in which Pico boasts that he “would slap a tree across the face” – I show how he extends and refines this impulse in 2018’s Junk. Junk gestures toward dietary colonization – displacement from ancestral lands and the forced adoption of a Eurowestern diet – as a major force behind Indigenous health problems. But the book also satirizes pervasive trends such as urban “foodiesm” and gay men’s obsession with fitness – developments that, at first glance, seem to offer some corrective to those problems, but which ultimately exacerbate them by imagining eating as a matter of individual choice. Further, Pico resists the utopianism of decolonial dietary discourse, in favor of a perverse celebration of junk food. As I explain, the focus on future generations found in decolonial dietary discourse can be co-opted to pathologize “bad” eating habits and even link them to “bad” parenting. I conclude that Pico believes in the projects of dietary decolonization and Indigenous food sovereignty, but not in the affects or sensibilities they seem to require.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×