Sarah Fouts is an Assistant Professor in American Studies and co-director of the Orser Center for Public Humanities at UMBC. Fouts’s research spans food and labor studies, political economy, disasters, and community engagement, with a focus on New Orleans and Honduras. Fouts’s book, Rebuilding New Orleans (UNC Press, 2025), explores immigrant labor, multiracial solidarities, and resistance in post-Katrina New Orleans. Fouts co-produced The El Camino Series which are two documentary shorts for Library Congress’s American Folklife Center. Fouts was a Whiting Fellow in 2022-2023 and contributes to outlets such as Southern Cultures, Gastronomica, Journal of Southern History, The New York Times, NACLA, and Gravy magazine.  

Fruit for Thought: Journeys Between New Orleans and Honduras is a three-part documentary series exploring the connections between Honduras and New Orleans through three key food commodities: bananas, palm oil, and coffee. Each episode traces these foods, revealing deeper histories of labor, immigration, tourism, indigeneity, environment, architecture, and cultural exchange. The series is unified through the story of Sllim Ydur, an Afro-Honduran musician based in New Orleans, whose experiences serve as a narrative thread across all three episodes. Arriving in New Orleans in 1959 as a young laborer on the banana docks, Sllim went on to pioneer Caribbean funk music, run for mayor in the 1990s, and later become a DJ and community organizer in the 21st century. His journey—from unloading bananas to political organizing and music-making—embodies the longstanding, reciprocal ties between Honduras and the Crescent City. Overall, the series weaves together the global journeys of the stories of people–from banana moguls to dockworkers to bakery owners and construction workers–through the framework of food commodities. This documentary is rooted in local contexts and place-based histories, with themes that offer critical insights into some of the most pressing historical and contemporary issues of the twenty-first century.