VN AfterTaste

Edible Secrets is a forthcoming book by Michael Hoerger and Mia Partlow. It is a collection of declassified documents pulled from archives around the country. The documents are a window looking out onto the vast field of US government policies during the twentieth century.

But how did we frame this view of the US government? What is our perspective, and how much of the picture will you get to see?

We dug through the archives until we found a collection of documents that all feature an item of food, such as brownies, ice cream, donuts, and Coca-Cola (American don’t eat very well, even in secret government documents). Did you know the CIA attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro by poisoning his beloved daily chocolate milkshake? Or that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of espionage with a Jell-O box as the prosecution’s main material evidence? These documents are a little voyeuristic, providing us a glimpse into how the US government conducted its policies. The Cold War, COINTELPRO, secret CIA experiments, free market neoliberalism, globalization, and of course, Resistance–all are touched on in Edible Secrets.