Category: Media

Food Sleuth Radio Interviews Andrew Flachs on Food Production and the Efficiency Trap

Posted on by maryreynolds

June 23, 2026

Food Sleuth radio host Melinda Hemmelgarn recently interviewed Andrew Flachs author of Feeding the World as if People Mattered: How Small Farms Produce Value Beyond Yields. This book draws on fifteen years of anthropological research, taking readers to fields in South India, Eastern Europe, and North America, where people are already feeding the future amid global change. From these fields, Flachs shows us how a radical rethinking of the value of small farms and farmers is already happening. Listen to part 1 of the interview here and part 2 here. Flachs is an associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University, a father of two children, and a semi-retired musician.

Asked about creating more farms and more farmers instead of increasing yields, Flachs replied, “When we think about increasing yields, what sort of systems are we perpetuating? There is this specter of food production, overpopulation, and environmental degradation that is so tied to a crisis mode of thinking (from the 1970s). If we see it simply as a production question, then all of our solutions end up being how do we create more and more of this thing. The United Nations [and other international researchers] have concluded that the problem of world hunger is not that there is not enough food, it’s that food cannot reach the people who really need it.” This food distribution problem is already being solved with a variety of local farming methods in different parts of the world. Listen to the full podcast interview: part 1 here and part 2 here.

About the book:

Backyard gardens flush with cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers where bees buzz and chickens scratch. Beyond, a forest filled with blackberries and jewelweed. Inspired by childhood memories of his grandmother’s overflowing backyard garden, author Andrew Flachs has embarked on a multi-continent, decades-long look at agriculture and its value.
 
The dominant view of agriculture has focused only on what we produce. It sees value in terms of capital gains or yield efficiency, masking how our global food system produces tremendous amounts of food commodities while failing to feed people, support rural communities, or enhance ecological well-being. Feeding the World as if People Mattered asks us to look more deeply and more humanely at what we perceive to be most valuable in our agricultural systems. Bringing together conversations in agriculture, economics, anthropology, and the environmental humanities, Flachs deftly shows how small farms reproduce social and ecological relationships that are the only sustainable path forward.

Kimberly Blaeser Featured on NPR

Posted on by maryreynolds

February 4, 2026

Neda Ulaby interviewed Kimberly Blaeser, author of Ancient Light on National Public Radio for “All Things Considered.” Blaeser spoke about her book being a National Book Foundation Science +Literature selected title, and she spoke about finding inspiration from social issues. Ancient Light is a poetry collection that uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time.

In the interview, Blaeser read her poem “About Standing (in Kinship).” Listen to the full interview here.

Blaeser is the author of six poetry collections and served as Wisconsin Poet Laureate from 2015–16. An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, Blaeser is an enrolled member of White Earth Nation, an MFA faculty member for Institute of American Indian Arts, and professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She also mentors Indigenous poets through Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po), an organization she founded in 2020.

Mujeres de Maiz Featured on Mexican TV News

Posted on by Anissa Suazo

November 21, 2025

Mexico’s Canal Once (Channel Eleven, Mexico’s public television network) featured the Mujeres de Maiz organization on its Cooltureando program. The reporter interviewed Felicia ‘Fe’ Montes, co-editor with Amber Rose González, and Nadia Zepeda, of Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis. In the interview, Montes talks about the Mexican inspiration for Mujeres de Maiz, and the need to create a “safe space and a brave space” in Los Angeles for women who are artists and activists. She also emphasized the organization’s indigenous roots; she explained: “There’s a Native concept of braiding mind, body, and spirit. So we are always trying to put those together.” Montes visited Mexico City to share her work at Chicanxs Sin Fronteras, as part of “Encuentro de Cultura Chicana.”

Watch the Cooltureando video here.

About the book:

Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis‘ political-ethical-spiritual commitments, cultural production, and everyday practices are informed by Indigenous and transnational feminist of color artistic, ceremonial, activist, and intellectual legacies. Contributors fuse stories of celebration, love, and spirit-work with an incisive critique of interlocking oppressions, both intimate and structural, encouraging movement toward “a world where many worlds fit.”

The multidisciplinary, intergenerational, and critical-creative nature of the project coupled with the unique subject matter makes the book a must-have for high school and college students, activist-scholars, artists, community organizers, and others invested in social justice and liberation.

Tim Z. Hernandez on Latino USA Podcast

Posted on by maryreynolds

July 14, 2025

Fernanda Echavarri of Latino USA interviewed Tim Z. Hernandez, author of All They Will Call You and They Call You Back, about the lasting impact of deportation over generations. She first interviewed him in 2018 about his life’s mission to find the families of the victims of the 1948 plane crash in Los Gatos Canyon, California. This new podcast interview reveals interesting developments on his search, including a forthcoming documentary film, and how the original Latino USA story uncovered clues that helped his search.

All thirty-two people on board died in the 1948 crash. Twenty-eight of them were Mexican farmworkers who were in the United States because of the Bracero Program, which brought millions of Mexican guest workers to the United States. All the people on the plane died the same way, but in death, they were not treated the same. For the four American crew members, U.S. officials gathered what remains they could, and sent caskets to their families. The remains of the twenty-eight Mexican braceros were not sent back to Mexico to be repatriated or given proper burial by their families. It was the deadliest crash in California history.

Listen to the Latino USA podcast here.

About All They Will Call You:

All They Will Call You is the harrowing account of “the worst airplane disaster in California’s history,” which claimed the lives of thirty-two passengers, including twenty-eight Mexican citizens—farmworkers who were being deported by the U.S. government. Outraged that media reports omitted only the names of the Mexican passengers, American folk icon Woody Guthrie penned a poem that went on to become one of the most important protest songs of the twentieth century, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee).” It was an attempt to restore the dignity of the anonymous lives whose unidentified remains were buried in an unmarked mass grave in California’s Central Valley. For nearly seven decades, the song’s message would be carried on by the greatest artists of our time, including Pete Seeger, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, yet the question posed in Guthrie’s lyrics, “Who are these friends all scattered like dry leaves?” would remain unanswered—until now.

About They Call You Back:

In this riveting new work, Hernandez continues his search for the plane crash victims while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world. They Call You Back is the true chronicle of one man’s obsession to restore dignity to an undignified chapter in America’s past, while at the same time making a case for why we must heal our personal wounds if we are ever to heal our political ones.

Enrique Ochoa on New Books Network Podcast

Posted on by maryreynolds

April 24, 2025

Enrique C. Ochoa spoke with New Books Network podcast host Miranda Melcher from Kings College, London, on how Mexico’s corporations shaped global demand for Mexican foods, while twenty-five percent of Mexicans lived in poverty, without access to nutritious foods. Ochoa is the author of México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality.

When asked about how he started writing this book, Ochoa said, “I started exploring the contradictions in the 1980s and 1990s, where Mexico on the one hand begins to have a booming capitalist food sector that dominated markets globally, for example Bimbo bread, the leading packaged bread producer in the world at this point. And by 2020, there were Forbes Magazine millionaires from Mexico’s corporate food sector. But at the same time, Mexico’s poverty rates and lack of access to food in Mexico continued to hover at about a fourth of the population. So we had a global food boom, and global corporate chefs talking about Mexican food and how wonderful it is on the one hand, but at the same time we had all these people with lack of access to nutritious food in Mexico. They suffered from the twin scourge of malnutrition and the modern junk food diet.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

***

About the book:

México Between Feast and Famine provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of Mexico’s food systems and how they reflect the contradictions and inequalities at the heart of Mexico. Ochoa examines the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of neoliberal policies that have reshaped food production, distribution, and consumption in Mexico. Ochoa analyzes the histories of Mexico’s mega food companies, including GRUMA, Bimbo, Oxxo, Aurrera/Walmex, and reveals how corporations have captured the food system at the same time that diet-related diseases have soared. The author not only examines the economic and political dimensions of food production but also interrogates the social and cultural impacts.

Enrique Ochoa on the “Esculent” Podcast

Posted on by maryreynolds

April 3, 2025

Enrique C. Ochoa spoke with “Esculent” podcast host Elizabeth McQueen from University of California, Davis, on the role of corporations in constructing a thread of Mexico’s culinary history. Ochoa is the author of México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality.

In the interview titled, “Corporate Power and a visit to Disneyland’s Mission Tortilla Factory,” Ochoa talked about what happened after 1492 contact with Europeans: “Eighty to ninety percent of the indigenous population is wiped out in the areas where Europeans go in a short period of time. And that leads to the takeover of those lands, the expansion of wheat and of European notions of food at the expense of indigenous ways of knowing and foodstuffs. And over time, indigenous foods were seen as poor people’s foods. Instead of talking about pulque and maize and eating from nature, the notion is that to live well, one has to eat wheat bread and drink wine like Europeans do.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

***

About the book:

México Between Feast and Famine provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of Mexico’s food systems and how they reflect the contradictions and inequalities at the heart of Mexico. Ochoa examines the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of neoliberal policies that have reshaped food production, distribution, and consumption in Mexico. Ochoa analyzes the histories of Mexico’s mega food companies, including GRUMA, Bimbo, Oxxo, Aurrera/Walmex, and reveals how corporations have captured the food system at the same time that diet-related diseases have soared. The author not only examines the economic and political dimensions of food production but also interrogates the social and cultural impacts.

Washington Post Interviews Tim Z. Hernandez

Posted on by maryreynolds

February 4, 2025

Tim Z. Hernandez, author of All They Will Call You and They Call You Back, spoke to Washington Post reporter Petula Dvorak about deportees who were victims of the 1948 plane wreck in Los Gatos Canyon, California.

In the article “Deportees died in a plane crash. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about it,” Hernandez shared some of his research from interviews about the plane wreck: “’There were hundreds of Mexicans in line waiting to be deported, and they were cramming many into that first plane,’ Hernandez said. The stories suggest that some passengers may have been sitting in the aisle or on baggage, overloading the World War II surplus plane. He found an eyewitness account from a man who tried to get on that first plane, but it was too full. They made him wait and board the second one, saving his life. It was the deadliest crash in California history.'”

Read the Washington Post article here.

About All They Will Call You:

All They Will Call You is the harrowing account of “the worst airplane disaster in California’s history,” which claimed the lives of thirty-two passengers, including twenty-eight Mexican citizens—farmworkers who were being deported by the U.S. government. Outraged that media reports omitted only the names of the Mexican passengers, American folk icon Woody Guthrie penned a poem that went on to become one of the most important protest songs of the twentieth century, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee).” It was an attempt to restore the dignity of the anonymous lives whose unidentified remains were buried in an unmarked mass grave in California’s Central Valley. For nearly seven decades, the song’s message would be carried on by the greatest artists of our time, including Pete Seeger, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, yet the question posed in Guthrie’s lyrics, “Who are these friends all scattered like dry leaves?” would remain unanswered—until now.

About They Call You Back:

In this riveting new work, Hernandez continues his search for the plane crash victims while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world. They Call You Back is the true chronicle of one man’s obsession to restore dignity to an undignified chapter in America’s past, while at the same time making a case for why we must heal our personal wounds if we are ever to heal our political ones.

Theodore H. Fleming on WICN’s “Inquiry”

Posted on by maryreynolds

January 24, 2025

Get to know our authors via podcasts and radio programs!

New England radio station WICN’s “Inquiry” host Mark Lynch recently interviewed Theodore H. Fleming about his book Birds, Bats, and Blooms: The Coevolution of Vertebrate Pollinators and Their Plants.

During their conversation, Fleming speaks about differences in the way bats and hummingbirds carry pollen. He says, “Hummingbirds tend to be highly territorial when they are feeding, and they have small territories. But bats are not territorial and have large feeding ranges. They can carry pollen kilometers at a time.”

Fleming also talks about early hummingbird fossils found in Europe: “The earliest fossils dating from 32 to 30 million years ago were first unearthed in shale deposits in Germany. Previous to this fossil discovery in 1984, we thought of hummingbirds as New World only, but now we think they probably developed in tropical Eurasia.”

Listen to the entire interview here.

***
Theodore H. Fleming is a professor emeritus of biology at the University of Miami. He spent thirty-nine years in academia at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the University of Miami, teaching ecology courses and conducting research on tropical rodent populations and plant-visiting bats and their food plants in Panama, Costa Rica, Australia, Mexico, and Arizona. He lives in Tucson.

Stephanie Opperman on the “Unsung History” Podcast

Posted on by maryreynolds

January 21, 2025

Get to know our authors via podcasts and radio programs!

Stephanie Baker Opperman spoke with “Unsung History” podcast host Kelly Therese Pollock recently about Isabel Kelly, the subject of the new book Cold War Anthropologist: Isabel Kelly and Rural Development in Mexico.

Opperman remembers discovering Kelly when looking through archives in Mexico related to her dissertation work, “I came across this thoughtfully articulated ethnographic report of a community and a community center with all of its details about what was working in this community and what wasn’t. And it was written in English. It seemed like a thorough and well-researched piece. . . . and I wanted to know who is this person? What is her story?”

Opperman also discusses how Kelly’s story illuminates changes happening in Mexico and in the field of anthropology at the time. “In the post-World War II period, Mexico is going through industrialization, towards unification, towards having global alliances,” Opperman says. “The field of anthropology is also changing in the midst of all of this. It’s going through changes, many ups and downs and swerves and twists in this period. And for me, she’s the connecting piece.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

***

Stephanie Baker Opperman is a professor of Latin American history at Georgia College. Her work has been published in the Journal of Women’s History, Bulletin of Latin American Research, the Latin Americanist, and Endeavour.

Authors on Podcasts and Radio

Posted on by maryreynolds

December 19, 2024

Treat yourself to some excellent listening to celebrate the end of the year. Recently, our authors were featured guests or guest hosts on radio programs and podcasts. Tune in to go behind the scenes of three of our 2024 books, and listen to a brand new poem from one of our poets!

Phoenix’s KJZZ public radio station interviewed Rafael A Martínez about his new book, Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States. Martínez talked about how today’s youth movements were inspired by the history of activism. He says, “Most of these activists that I write about were trained by folks and leaders in the civil rights movement. [In the 1960s] there was a lot of civil disobedience in the country, but then they also had to push politicians to pass things that would actually make significant change. Undocumented youth took a page from that history book and started to say: we need to take our activism to sites and places like detention centers where undocumented communities are being criminalized and we need to change the narrative.” Listen to the radio show here. The full transcript is also available.

Rick Tabenunaka of the “Decolonized Buffalo” podcast interviewed Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq, authors of Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State. The authors talk about Westphalian sovereignty and its Eurocentric roots, in comparison to Indigenous sovereignty. Canessa and Picq also discuss the concept of “tribalism” within a Eurocentric concept of sovereignty, and they also analyze the “Doctrine of Discovery” as a pillar of the modern political system. Listen to the podcast here or watch the video here.

Diego Báez, author of Yaguareté White, was guest host on the “Poetry Centered” podcast. He introduced three poems from Voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s online audiovisual archive. Báez discusses poems by Gabriel Dozal, Gabriel Palacios, and Jimmy Santiago Baca. Then he reads a new poem of his own “Neuropathy with Lamb.” Listen to the podcast here.

“Imagine Otherwise” podcast host Cathy Hannabach interviewed Amber Rose González, Felicia Montes, and Nadia Zepeda, editors of Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis. In the conversation, Amber, Felicia, and Nadia share their journey with the Mujeres de Maiz organization and the collective liberation the group is building. Traversing poetry, performance, zines, healing ceremonies, visual art, autoethnography, and a plethora of other mediums, these scholars demonstrate the power of collaboration and intersectional solidarity. Listen to the podcast here.

For Authors

The University of Arizona Press publishes the work of leading scholars from around the globe. Learn more about submitting a proposal, preparing your final manuscript, and publication.

Inquire

Requests

The University of Arizona Press is proud to share our books with readers, booksellers, media, librarians, scholars, and instructors. Join our email Newsletter. Request reprint licenses, information on subsidiary rights and translations, accessibility files, review copies, and desk and exam copies.

Request

Support the Press

Support a premier publisher of academic, regional, and literary works. We are committed to sharing past, present, and future works that reflect the special strengths of the University of Arizona and support its land-grant mission.

Give