McTowersMaid: Food novel 2
1974

Serial postcard novel in fifteen parts, first mailed between September and December 1974

In the mid-1970s, Rosler created three “food novels,” each a set of typewritten postcards sent to friends and others in weekly installments. In all three, the interconnections of food, women and labor are central. Delivered by mail, the cards mediate between the interior space of the home and the external network of the postal system. Each pause before the arrival of the next card is time in which the communication could unfold and reverberate.

Rosler’s second postcard novel tells the tongue-in-cheek story of a vegetarian fast-food line cook gone rogue. As the tale unfolds, the speaker offers an array of unappetizing details about how an imagined chain of hamburger stands (finally revealed as a subsidiary of "the giant agriglomerate Corporate Foods") raises and prepares its menu offerings, from injecting cows with antibiotics to a chemical the cooks call “essence of bread.” The story draws connections among various forms of oppression and depravity: mistreatment of animals, questionable food, deadeningly repetitive low-wage work, and a veiled corporate hierarchy that pits workers against one another to prevent collective action. After some surprising detours through drug-laced “flyburgers,” the novel ends with a hamburger stand and the workers trying to make a revolution from a hamburger stand and affirming: "Workers' power!"