As thousands waited in breadlines or chose to go hungry so that their children might eat, the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) paid farmers to plough their crops back underground, leave food to rot and discard slaughtered meat. The programme was designed to stabilize food prices by reducing supply, increasing demand and thus restoring health to the US economy during the Great Depression, but the reality of ‘want amid plenty’ elicited protests and riots throughout the United States. Winner of the 2016 CLR James Award for the Working Class Studies Association, Ann Folino White's thoroughly researched and well-written Plowed Under brings a sharp critical eye to the AAA, the performances of resistance that it engendered, and the theatrical strategies that workers, food producers, mothers and the federal government used in their pitched battles for public sympathy, legal support and physical aid during this period of crisis.

Plowed Under operates at the intersection of food, performance, morality, American identity and citizenship, carefully weaving together these seemingly disparate ideas into a uniform whole. White's interdisciplinary methodology uses archives, newspapers, food protests, World's Fair displays, literary and performance analysis and more to create a living, breathing representation of this historical moment with depth and care. Using five case studies that map out the various controversies surrounding the AAA, White first examines the humanitarian intentions behind the AAA through food exhibitions at the 1933–4 World's Fair in Chicago. Shifting to case studies that challenge the official narrative, White explores the Wisconsin Cooperative Milk Pool strike, the Women's Committee for Action against the High Cost of Living meat boycott in Hamtramck, Michigan, and the Missouri sharecroppers’ demonstrations in 1939. As White aptly explains, Plowed Under ‘employs insights from theater history and performance studies to explore what historic changes to the American agricultural and food system meant to citizens living in the midst of national economic and human turmoil’ (p. 3). Each case study effectively illuminates a different crux of the discussion, focusing on how these performances of resistance manifest in American citizenship, morality and the real, material lives of American citizens during the Great Depression.

White gives particular attention to disparities across race, class and gender. In Chapter 4 her discussion of Missouri sharecroppers – typically poor rural whites and African Americans – weaves together issues of nutrition, class and racism with one form of resistant performance: ‘by consuming not enough and not the right food, croppers performed the slow starvation of daily, historic deficiency’ (p. 179). White argues that the conspicuous lack of milk, meat and vegetables drew particular attention to narratives of starving children and the mothers who struggled to feed them. Food thus becomes both a manifestation of social productivity and a moral imperative for a nation struggling simultaneously with overproduction and hunger.

While each case study has many strengths, I found the final chapter the most engaging. Chapter 5 explores the hugely popular Triple-A Plowed Under (1936), the Federal Theatre Project's first produced living newspaper (a theatrical genre that dramatized factual research and information focused on current events). White thoroughly contextualizes the play as a sociocultural event, offering detailed analysis of the play as a theatrical object, but also exploring the play's social, political and ethical resonance. Triple-A ‘was theatre, but it would not be neatly contained as such’; its actors felt the effects of the food shortage as acutely as their audiences. As a final manifestation of the tensions that surround the issue of ‘want amid plenty’, this culminating chapter builds on White's previous discussion by refusing to minimize the stakes, resisting binaries and delving into the complexity of the many issues at work. White's book is newly relevant in the days that follow the Great Contraction of 2007 and the ongoing debates about agricultural policy in the United States, and it reminds the reader – whether experienced academic or engaged layperson – that food and food policy play a far greater role in the well-being of the nation than simply providing nutrients and staving off hunger.