Is Talk Cheap? Making Palm Oil ‘Sustainable’: A conversation with Montserrat Perez Castro

In this episode, Kate and Ariana catch up with Montserrat Pérez Castro in the midst of her fieldwork in Mexico. Transnational food companies and palm oil mills employ sustainability workers to ensure they are ethically sourcing raw materials from farmers using sustainable practices. But what do industry insiders count and communicate as “sustainable,” and what kinds of value does this practice add? Pérez Castro describes her fieldwork and argues for why we need to think of sustainability workers in the palm oil industry as engaging not just in “practices” but in an important form of labor. Along the way, we talk about supply chains, transparency, secrecy, expertise, the meanings people attach to their work (or don’t), the crucial differences between primary/industrial and charismatic commodities, interdisciplinary research, and the work of translation. Montserrat Pérez Castro is a PhD candidate in the Ecology, Evolution, Environment and Society graduate program at Dartmouth College. She is interested in the relationship between desire, capitalism, and ethical-political imagination. Her previous research focused on class relations, affect, food practices, and urbanization. For her dissertation, she examines sustainability labor in the production of value in the palm oil supply chain in Mexico. Her research is at the intersection of economic anthropology, geography, political ecology and science, technology, and society studies. Co-hosted by Dr. Kathryn Graber [Link] and Ariana Gunderson [Link]. Edited and mixed by Richard Nance. References from the conversation: Pérez Castro, Montserrat. 2023. "Plantationocene “On the Ground”." Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, January 24. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/plantationocene-on-the-ground Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave. Sanchez, Andrew. "Transformation and the Satisfaction of Work", Social Analysis 64, 3 (2020): 68-94, https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2020.640305 Rofel, Lisa and Sylvia J. Yanagisako. 2019. Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion. Durham: Duke University Press