In the most recent lecture for Environmental Literature, we took a look at a commercial for Sun Maid Raisins and how the company sells the product and how the environments in the commercial are depicted.

We went over this commercial as a class about how parts of the environment are depicted in the advertisement. There were phrases about how Hollywood is presented as an Edenic place where everyone is fit and healthy (likely not to be the case in reality). Beyond the Hollywood Hills, there is a pastoral landscape and in that area are grape vineyards where raisins are “naturally” made with sun and grapes without labor (hence the use of pastoral). However, the advertising does not take into account what goes on behind the scenes and there was even a parody of the Sun Maid Raisins packaging titled “Sun Mad Raisins”.The picture shows, essentially, the opposite of what the original packaging suggests. We discussed how the raisins are not made with just sun and grapes; there are a lot of other factors that go into the production of their raisins such as the labor of the workers, the processing in the factory and, as was also mentioned in class, the pesticides that were used on the grapes, which is also discussed in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus.

As we discussed with Silent Spring, pesticides can create some very negative effects on both human life and the environment. Carson discussed how pesticides create an imbalance in nature and the indiscriminate use of these “biocides”, as Carson labeled them, also causes serious health problems for humans. Carson uses a metaphor of two roads to illustrate what paths humanity can take: the first road, the end of which Carson describes in the beginning, is a very dark world where all life is in danger from the overuse pesticides. “The Other Road”, the final chapter of Silent Spring, shows the end of the opposite road where pesticides are not used as an essential part of life but a tool to be developed further through science; the result of this is a world where human and nature live in harmony, which also gives us an ideal outlook on the pastoral.

In the novel Under the Feet of Jesus, Helena Maria Viramontes’s depicts what really happens in the orchards and uses the pesticides in her novel to challenge the pastoral. The first two parts of the novel show the peach orchard where Estrella, the main character, lives near and how the use of pesticides negatively affects those that are in constant contact with pesticides. Alejo, one of the characters in the text and a friend of Estrella’s, becomes exposed to the pesticides sprayed from the biplane onto the peach trees and suffers some ill effects. Viramontes uses the pesticides to contradict the supposed “pastoral” and illustrate what really happens to people who live very close to these places where these harmful pesticides are used.

Viramontes, Carson, and the creator of “Sun Mad Raisins” use the pastoral, but in different ways. Carson uses the pastoral as an alternate road to take away from pesticides whereas both Viramontes and the Sun Maid parody challenge the world that the higher class or advertising views as a pastoral one. These authors and the “Sun Mad Raisins” creator, all use the pastoral to illustrate points that there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes in the production of produce an it causes a lot of damage to those around it.