From wild weeds to artisanal cheese

Chapter 2: From Wild Weeds to Artisanal Cheese Richard Wilk In the previous chapter, Sidney Mintz provides a magisterial view of global changes in food systems over the last millennium. Instead of sudden points of rupture or watersheds, he identifies a slow and uneven process of transition. Food systems in which the majority of every persons’ diet came from the immediate local environment and through the efforts of neighbors and kin, have gradually been replaced, supplanted, or perhaps just augmented by systems of trade that move food as a commodity between anonymous producers and consumers. I can see this contrast every Saturday morning in my home town. On my way to the thriving downtown farmer’s market, I pass lines of cars stacked up at the take-out windows of McDonalds, Taco Bell and Burger King. While I am buying organic peaches grown less than ten miles from my house, and loading up my cooler chest with grass-fed lamb chops from an Amish farmer, others are on the way to the supermarket for grapes grown in Chile and frozen lamb from New Zealand. In our county some people live on a diet that is substantially home-grown or traded with friends and kin, who know where every bite came from, while many other families eat meals whose every ingredient has been processed in distant factories by strangers. Contrasts like this reveal the incredible variety and heterogeneity of the food system in this country, its protean creativity and unpredictable trends. But at the beginning of a semester when I ask the students in my Food and Culture class about the future, this complexity suddenly disappears. They tell me that local food is dying, that fast food is completely taking over, and the future will bring more and more artificial industrially-processed food, until we are all eating chemicals and protein grown in vats. And this is before they have begun to read their first assignment, Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation! My students see the stark contrast between the farmers’ market and McDonalds, and like many other people, they jump to the conclusion that we are in the midst of an epic world-changing transition from one kind of food economy to another. They have been brought up with an essentially linear understanding of history as progress. Even in their short lives they have seen new waves of fashions and technologies constantly driving old things out of the market. Many of them also come from very strong Christian backgrounds, so they have a lifelong acquaintance with biblical morality tales about the rise and fall of civilizations, including the original fall from grace (see Sahlins 1996). They have been ideologically prepared to think of the world as a sequence of states marked by radical transitions, where the old traditional world disappears under the weight of the new. So they look at the mixed food systems around them and extract a linear evolutionary story. They only disagree on the moral valences – some think the death of local and home-made foods is a tragedy that should be prevented if possible, while others see it as an inevitable sign of progress, or even as a great convenience that liberates people. After all, most of my undergraduates eat fewer than four sit-down meals a week; the rest of the time they swallow sandwiches and pizza in a process they have poetically termed “squat and gobble.” I never cease to be amazed that at the beginning of the semester, without having read a page or listened to a single lecture, my students seem capable of arriving at exactly the same conclusions as the learned experts and scholars who wrote the books and articles on the syllabus. The students even come up with some of the same solutions. Even before they have started to read Petrini’s Slow Food, they guess that the spread of modern gourmet tastes is supporting a ‘revived’ or ‘resuscitated” form of traditional old-time cuisine. Most are already far too intimately familiar with the revival of artisanal beers, since our small town supports two micro-breweries. They intuitively understand what people are talking about when they contrast local slow foods with industrialized fast food, and they find it easy to arrange things in evolutionary phases that fit the sequence of premodern  modern  postmodern. My students, like many of those writing about food for a popular audience, have fallen into a very basic fallacy about globalization and culture change, which most anthropologists will recognize immediately. In the long term, and at a very general scale, we can indeed see what Mintz identifies as the “expansion of scale, the increased velocity of the market mechanism, and the new migrations” which have so fundamentally changed world food systems from the time when most people were hunter-gatherers or small village farmers. But when we look at any individual particular place or people, we find their food system works at a variety of scales. Part of the diet may be grown far away but processed at home, while another part is bought already cooked from street vendors who grow the ingredients, or trade for them in the informal economy. Food is everywhere cooked which usually means mixed, processed and prepared in ways that combine ingredients of different origins. In one bite you may have slow grains and fast oils. The smaller the scale, the closer you look, the harder it is to use large-scale evolutionary generalizations to understand what you are seeing. This is one of the most important and central points made by the papers in this collection, an issue which came up repeatedly at the conference where the papers were originally presented. The extremes of slow and fast, local and global, artisanal and industrial are ideal types; at some level they may be good intellectual tools, but all the real action takes place in between, in the terrain Mintz identifies as “food of moderate speed.” Each chapter in this book faces the general fact that over time industrial food systems that are more concerned with convenience, consistent delivery, and profit than flavor, individuality or health, have flourished, often tearing away at the intricate webs of relationships that protect and sustain the poor and preserve local environments. As Mintz points out, we have good reason to worry about a future where the whole world eats as wastefully and as unhealthfully as the majority of North Americans do today. There are a number of excellent studies that show just how destructive industrial food systems can be, especially when they are abetted by political and trade policies that aim to steamroller the systems that support more than a billion rural farmers under the wheels of “free trade,” “efficient markets,” and “improved technology” (e.g. Goodman and Redclift 1991, Goodman and Watts 1997, Andrae and Beckman 1985, Madely 2000, Barndt 2002). The authors in Section One of this volume generally share this alarm, but each one also shows the inadequacy of terms like slow and fast, or traditional and modern, to understand how people really eat, in settings as far apart as Yap and Mali. From a global scale, what looks like a linear long-term trend begins to resolve into processes that are full of contradictions, the contingencies of culture and human agency, and unexpected cycles, rehearsals, reversals, and reprises. I have found exactly this degree of complexity in my research over the last 15 years on the history and development of diet and cuisine in Belize (see Wilk 1999, 2001, 2004). As in the rest of the Caribbean and many other parts of the world, industrial mass-produced food was part of the diet of the very first European settlers of the area. Buccaneers and pirates, masters and slaves, all ate large amounts of salted meat and fish, peas, biscuits and bread, wines, beer and liquors, which were produced by proto industries in Europe and North America. Producing, processing and exporting this early industrial ‘fast food’ diet was the major force in the economic rise of the North American colonies. Historically the imported ‘industrial’ diet has changed and developed alongside, and completely intermingled with local subsistence economies, production for local markets and an export economy. Brown sugar produced in Belize was exported to England, and processed into white sugar, which was then re-exported to Belize and other colonies where it was considered far “superior” in quality to raw and local sugars and sweeteners. Coffee, cocoa, tobacco and even curry powder followed a similar long and complex pathway from colonies to the metropolis, and then back out to the colonies. My point is that in Belize what appears today as ‘local’ and ‘traditional’ cuisine incorporates earlier phases of industrial food. In the current phase of globalization driven by labor migration and tourism, new mixtures and interpretations of Belizean cuisine are appearing in places like Los Angeles, coastal tourist resorts, and among street vendors in Belize City. To be sure you can visit a brand-new Subway store in Belize, and order a sandwich made almost entirely from ingredients imported by the container-load each week – only the tomatoes and green peppers are local (the very idea of importing jalapeno peppers to Belize has comic potential). But Subway really has very little significance for understanding the process of change in Belizean foodways. More telling is what I learned when I recently spoke to the owner of a restaurant in western Belize that serves some Cambodian and Vietnamese dishes. She explained that when she lived in Los Angeles, she learned the cuisine when visiting Asian markets, which were the best place to find the tropical root crops and vegetables she missed from home. Now she can buy some of those same vegetables from Chinese immigrants who have taken up truck farming around cities and towns in Belize. You could ask for no clearer example of the intricate ways that processes of globalization affect food of all speeds, often in unexpected ways that resist being slotted into a grand narrative of progress or destruction. Mid 20th century theorists of economic development tried to understand the complexity of poor countries with a concept of the “dual economy” (Boeke 1942, Furnivall 1948, Ranis 1977). Within each developing country you would find at the same time a ‘modern sector’ that should be encouraged to grow and a ‘traditional sector’ that would be pushed aside or allowed to wither away. Even at that time many economic anthropologists knew better, and recognized that so-called primitive or traditional people had long historical engagements with the world economy, that urbanism and trade were ancient parts of economic life in many parts of the world. This is not the place for a history of early economic anthropology; one can find many examples of early economic anthropologists who included both subsistence and cash crop production in their holistic studies. Manning Nash’s “Machine Age Maya” is a good example. The first group of papers in this book carry on this tradition of empirical holism, taking an open-minded approach to understanding how food systems are changing, rather than using evolutionary categories to pre-determine the categories for analysis. They show how Yapese households combine food from many different sources in their daily meals (Egan et al.), how famine foods and gourmet treats are unexpectedly juxtaposed in Laotian markets, that capitalist development and the appreciation of food heritage have become compatible in Moscow (Caldwell). In a comprehensive and holistic discussion of cuisine in Oaxaca, Pilcher shows how slow food tamales, culinary tourism, mass migration, and industrial tortillas combine in a setting that is simultaneously thoroughly global, and completely local. CONTRADICTIONS AND COUNTER-CURRENTS If the local food histories of places like Laos and Belize are not so easily separated into slow and fast categories, what about the centers of global industrial food like the United State and Canada, or the far-flung fast-food empires of McDonalds and the Kentucky Colonel? Every time I go to a supermarket it looks like more and more of the shelf space belongs to fewer and fewer agribusinesses and food processing conglomerates. In my local market, “choice” of chicken means Perdue or Tyson, and a close look at labels shows that the frozen birds have all been treated with “broth” solutions full of salt and preservatives. Once again, however, the closer you get to the monolith of the food industry, the more it resolves into a complex mix of contradictions and contingencies. Recently anthropologists like Miller (1997) and Michael Blim (2000) have urged us to think not of a single unitary capitalism, but about capitalisms in the plural, to use the same ethnographic tools to understand the local particularities of capitalism that we have always used to analyze other kinds of economies. To a large extent the ethnographic study of capitalism was prefigured in Geertz’ work in Java and Bali (1963); economic historians like Kirzner (1979) and more recently Storr (2004) have argued for a cultural approach to the varieties of capitalist enterprise. Section two of this volume take up just this task, showing how the global/industrial food system includes both movements towards generification, homogeneity and mass production, and new kinds of localization, creolization, and hybridization. The authors in this book identify several different kinds of contradictions in the industrial food system. At the most intimate level, while the food industry continually strives to standardize and regularize their products, making food into just another commodity, consumers are fickle, and the dimensions of taste and preference continually elude the efforts of food science to reduce everything to stimulus and response. As scholars of consumption in general, particularly those in cultural studies, have gone to great lengths to show, consumers are often creative agents who subvert and bend mass-market commodities to their own ends (e.g. Mackay 1997). This is especially strong in food consumption, which is never a passive activity and often involves processing, preparation, presentation and other creative processes. De Certeau uses the particularly apt metaphor of “poaching” to describe the way consumers use commodities in ways their producers never expect (1984), as when young Canadians transform a cheap convenience food like Kraft macaroni and cheese into a nostalgic symbol of childhood and comfort (Rock, this volume). As Whitelaw shows in chapter nine, this can lead retailers and consumers into a perpetual cat-and-mouse game where vendors have to stay agile in constant pursuit of the very food fashions they have promoted. Even the largest behemoths of the food industry have to deal with the resistance and indifference of consumers, and the inherent contradictions of their tastes and demand, wanting for example both high speed convenience and home-cooked flavor, lots of fat, but no calories. Diners want to find the same food in every outlet of a chain, but they also want a memorable meal and want to be welcomed and treated as individuals. In the long term this has led not to the much-anticipated flattening out of a “McDonaldized” world of uniform burgers and franchises, but to a continual diversification and localization of the fast food industry, as shown by Zhu’s and Matejowsky’s contributions to this book. As Bestor points out, the tools of mass production offer considerable gains in convenience and profits, but all such efforts must eventually cope with the ineffable qualities of taste, and continually changing ideas about health and well-being that are often expressed through food preference. As shown by their dogged efforts to force genetically-modified and irradiated products onto markets around the world, agribusiness still does not understand the degree to which food has cultural significance, that it connects directly to very deeply-rooted ideals about the healthy body, so it is never going to be an industrial feedstock like gasoline or other fuels. Even as simple a substance as water is so full of cultural meaning, that the international trade in exotic bottled waters is now a $2 billion a year business. This brings us to a central contradiction in mass food capitalism that appears in many of the book’s chapters. While business seeks to turn food into a substitutable generic commodity, people as consumers constantly find ways to decommodify food, to make it personal, meaningful, cultural, and social. Family recipes and local food traditions can be seen as archetypical examples of what Weiner (1984) called inalienable wealth, property so thoroughly decommodified that it cannot be bought or sold, only gifted in ways that maintain its social identity and meaning. The very point of many food consumption rituals, from family meals to ceremonial feasts is to transform sometimes anonymous raw materials into meaningful social relations. One paradox of the marketplace, however, is that the very acts that decommodify – identifying a food as a part of a heritage to use Van Esterik’s example from six, or Pilcher’s from chapter five – give them higher value as commodities to high-end gourmets and cultural tourists. This ability of food to instantly change from commodity to non-commodity and back makes the traditional division of the food economy into cash crop and subsistence sectors useless and misleading, as Egan et al. and Koenig point out in their chapters in section one. These contradictions combine to account for the failure of grand evolutionary narratives to describe both what is happening today, and what can potentially happen in the future. In thinking about the inequities and failures of mass-produced industrial food, a long-term historical and anthropological perspective has a great deal to offer. Davis, for example, shows how global “free trade” in food commodities is hardly a new concept, and argues that late Victorian free trade policies led to famine and desolation in many parts of the British Empire (2001). This and other work on China and Japan suggests that different areas have been through many cycles of commodification and decommodification of food, with continual patterns of boom-and-bust in the production and long-distance trade of specific crops. These studies also show that the history of food industrialization has been contingent and unpredictable, connected to the history of colonialism, trade, and warfare in unexpected ways. Davis, for example, shows how those pursuing the free trade agenda really believed it would benefit Indian farmers. Like innumerable trade and agricultural bureaucrats before and since, they completely failed to understand how farming and food consumption are deeply rooted in culture, in existing socioeconomic structures, and in local human-environmental relationship that are complex and sensitive. As Lansing (1991) and Netting (1993) have persuasively argued, governments uninformed meddling with these culturally-grounded agroecosystems often leads to catastrophe. MAKING NEW CONNECTIONS Mintz ends his chapter on an optimistic tone, suggesting that somewhere between the pure ideal types of slow and fast food there is room to find a moderate pace where healthy and meaningful food is available to everyone. This is a realist vision that accepts that fast food is never going away, but that farmers’ markets, home cooked meals, and a passion for fresh non-industrial tomatoes that actually have taste and texture are never going to disappear either. This perspective moves us away from the idea that we are on the edge of a millennial precipice, watching the dying moments of a world of ‘real’ food. There are many causes for concern, and an urgent need for activism, but in many ways we are better off without the tinge of inevitability, the sense of fighting against a leviathan, that comes from simplistic evolutionary thinking. Instead, Mintz’ realism prompts us to ask what can be done to find that moderate pace, and improve the kinds of choices and options open to producers and consumers who want quality and variety? The third section of this book addresses both the strengths and limitations of food activism and the growth of new connections between producers and consumers that promise something more than a flow of generic industrial commodities. Food has long been a focus for political and social movements in many parts of the world; food is a potent symbol of what ails society, a way of making abstract issues like class or exploitation into a material, visceral reality. Slow Food is only one of many activist communities concerned with diet; one could also point to political vegetarians, animal rights activists, biolocalists, simple living and neorural groups, world trade opponents, public health advocates, the anti-GMO movement, and various other kinds of environmentalists and conservationists. Each of these communities is itself culturally constituted and amenable to being studied using all the tools of anthropology. Three papers in section (Stanford, Paxson, Banwell et. al.) critically examine the economic networks centered around farmers markets and specialist gourmet “boutique” food production, asking if they are really achieving their goals. After all, the Slow Food movement has been widely criticized as elitist, and it is easy to see it as just another example of the power of consumerist capitalism to commodify everything, even your opposition to commodification (see Frank and Weiland 1997). The authors in this section show, however, that the fundamental issue for those seeking alternatives to industrial farming is finding ways to make new connections between producers and consumers. There are plenty of small farmers willing to produce high-quality food, and an abundance of consumers looking for healthy alternatives to supermarket fare, but in most rich countries the national infrastructures of agribusiness and large food processors has completely supplanted the local economic networks that connected retailers with producers. The case discussed by Imbruce is particularly important in this light, showing how new market connections are being forged to serve the Asian community in the New York area through the actions of individuals working ‘from the ground up,’ rather than by large corporations or well-intentioned NGOs. All the papers in this last section of the book show that rebuilding connections between producers and consumers is a challenging and difficult task. The multinational food industry is highly mobile and flexible, allowing them to easily move capital and production to exploit cheap labor and resources wherever they are available. They use sophisticated information technology to track and predict production and manipulate markets for their own ends. Small farmers, cooperatives, and alternative food networks are going to have to use some of the same tools to get information moving between scattered producers, marketers, and consumers, so they can find and expand new niches. Even with the best intentions, as in the fair trade coffee networks discussed by Lyon in the last chapter of the book, we are likely to end up with a system that is “a combination of both the oppositional characteristics of slow food and the market driven strategies of fast food.” Lyon’s conclusions are a suitable summary of the main theme of the whole book. Even though I have used the terms fast and slow food in the title, in practice they are deceptive categories that obscure more than they illuminate. The real world is far more interesting than any binary opposition or simple evolutionary sequence, and while simple terms may make for good propaganda, they prove woefully inadequate as tools for understanding the processes of change in food systems, and are misleading and useless for anyone who is seriously interested in making safe, quality food of moderate pace available, not just the gourmets and food activists, but to everyone. NOTES This is not the place for a history of early economic anthropology; one can find many examples of early economic anthropologists who included both subsistence and cash crop production in their holistic studies. Manning Nash’s “Machine Age Maya” is a good example. To a large extent the ethnographic study of capitalism was prefigured in Geertz’ work in Java and Bali (1963); economic historians like Kirzner (1979) and more recently Storr (2004) have argued for a cultural approach to the varieties of capitalist enterprise. REFERENCES CITED Andrae, Guinea and Born Beckman 1985. The Wheat Trap: Bread and Underdevelopment in Nigeria. London: Zed Books. Barndt, Deborah 2002 Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization on the Tomato Trail, Boulder CO: Westview Press. Blim, Michael 2000 Capitalisms in Late Modernity. Annual Review of Anthropology 29:25-38. Boeke, J. H. 1942 The Structure of the Netherlands Indies Economy. Washington, D.C: Institute for Pacific Relations. 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