From Goats to Gardens: Feeding Southern Colorado’s Working-Class Poor

Abstract

The events of the 1913–1914 southern Colorado coal strike and the cooperative work of the Colorado Coalfield War Archaeology Project provide the opportunity to explore archaeology’s relationship to poverty, hunger, and social justice. This article considers poverty in evidence of worker foodways. I consider what kinds of foods were promoted, what foods were available and from where, what foods were eaten, and how they were prepared. This article includes a comparison of prestrike, strike, and poststrike contexts. In so doing, it reveals the futility of dichotomous categories of deserving and undeserving poor as they relate to a transformative project of working-class poverty. It suggests that the distinction between deserving and undeserving poor has been and continues to be about justifying particular sorts of intervention in people’s lives meant to sustain exploitation of their labor.