Julie Guthman

Julie Harriet Guthman (born 1957) is an American geographer and Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work has dealt with the political economy of California agriculture, the certification and limits of organic farming, the politics of obesity, the chemical and biological foundations of the California strawberry industry, and the Silicon Valley-based tech forays into food and agriculture. She is the author of five books with the University of California Press, including Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (2004), Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (2011), Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry (2019), and The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can't Hack the Future of Food (2024). Guthman held a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship and a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship at Harvard University in 2017–2018. Early life and education Guthman has described her father as a "health-food advocate" of the 1950s and 1960s who imposed strict dietary rules at home. She told the Harvard Gazette that as a child she would visit friends' houses to eat the junk food forbidden in her own.