Culinary Infrastructure

Jeffrey Pilcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351347334
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the past two centuries, global commodity chains and industrial food processing systems have been built on an infrastructure of critical but often-overlooked facilities and technologies used to transport food and to convey knowledge about food. This culinary infrastructure comprises both material components (such as grain elevators, transportation networks, and marketplaces) and immaterial or embodied expressions of knowledge (cooking schools, restaurant guides, quality certifications, and health regulations). Although infrastructural failures can result in supply shortages and food contamination, the indirect consequences of infrastructure can be just as important in shaping the kinds of foods that are available to consumers and who will profit from the sale of those foods.

This volume examines the historical development of a variety of infrastructural nodes and linkages, including refrigerated packing plants in Nazi-occupied Europe, trans-Atlantic restaurant labour markets, food safety technologies and discourses in Singapore, culinary programming in Canadian museums, and dietary studies in colonial Africa. By paying attention to control over facilities and technologies as well as the public–private balance over investment and regulation, the authors reveal global inequalities that arise from differential access to culinary infrastructure. This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Food History.

Culinary Infrastructure: How Facilities and Technologies Create Value and Meaning around Food

Jeffrey M. Pilcher

ABSTRACT
Culinary infrastructure comprises the diverse artifacts, organizations, and media that mobilize food or that organize and convey knowledge about food, thereby facilitating production and consumption, but without having those transformations as a direct goal. This infrastructure includes both material components (such as transportation and sewage networks, marketplaces and ports, refrigeration, and communication technologies) and immaterial or embodied expressions of knowledge (recipes and cooking practices, futures markets and intellectual property, quality certifications and health regulations). Although failures of infrastructure become apparent in the form of supply shortages or food contamination, the indirect consequences of infrastructure can be just as important in shaping the kinds of foods that are available to consumers and who will profit from the sale of those foods. By surveying a diverse variety of infrastructural nodes and linkages, this essay seeks to overcome fundamental divisions within the interdisciplinary field of food studies between economic and ecological dimensions of food supply and the social and cultural meanings within which they are embedded. Historical analysis of the technological and knowledge-based systems of infrastructure can also highlight both the imperial origins of industrial food production and the contingent and contested nature of food systems. The essay gives particular attention to struggles over the boundaries between public and private control of infrastructure.

Culinary infrastructure refers to the basic facilities and technologies used to convey food, and knowledge about food, not only from the proverbial field to the fork, but also across continents and cultures. Although often overlooked in favor of the more direct transformations effected by industrial food processing, the infrastructure that connects production and consumption has had its own far-reaching and often unanticipated consequences in creating the modern industrial diet. Consider the grain elevator, a structure consisting of multiple, round towers, like a giant pack of beer, commonly found along industrial waterfronts and railroad crossings. Devised in 1842 by Joseph Dart, a warehouseman from Buffalo, New York, it facilitated the transfer of grain between carts, trains, barges, and ships. Whereas stevedores had worked long hours to haul unwieldy sacks of grain up and down ladders and across gangplanks, it took just minutes to lift grain into vertical storage bins using the elevator’s steam-driven conveyor belts or to pour it directly into railroad cars and ship holds. The invention achieved savings in time and labor, but as the historian William Cronon observed, it caused even more significant changes in the nature of grain as a commodity. No longer could the final buyer evaluate an individual farmer’s harvest according to weight, cleanliness, and taste because it had to be removed from the sack to move efficiently through the system. Once mixed with grain from other farms and rendered interchangeable according to grade, such as first- or second-class spring wheat, it could be traded on international commodity markets and futures exchanges, where it was bought and sold before it had even been harvested. Thus, an infrastructural facility designed to speed intermodal transfers had the unintended result of erasing grain’s origins and material qualities, helping create a world of “food from nowhere.”¹

Although facilities for transporting, storing, and exchanging food date back to the ancient world, the concept of infrastructure emerged in the nineteenth century in response to the growing complexity of industrial systems. French engineers coined the term in 1875 while seeking to improve the national railroad network, whose inadequacies had contributed to defeat in the Franco–Prussian War.² Infrastructure is inherently plural, “a collective term for the subordinate parts of an undertaking,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, and it refers broadly to organizational and knowledge-based as well as physical structures and facilities.³ Despite its omnipresence in the modern world in the form of roads, bridges, power lines, sewage pipes, marketplaces, and grain elevators, infrastructure tends to be ignored – until it breaks down. The French unhappily discovered this point in 1870, when they were unable to match the trainloads of Prussian soldiers rumbling with clocklike precision across their borders. Failures in the infrastructure of conveying food can have similarly disastrous consequences in supply shortages or food contamination. Even when functioning properly, infrastructure shapes the kinds of foods that are available to consumers and who will profit from the sale of those foods. This essay and its companion pieces in this special issue of Global Food History survey the broad reach of culinary infrastructure and identify crucial nodes and linkages that convey power by determining the nature and meanings of food.

Various components of culinary infrastructure have appeared in diverse studies on the industrial transformation and commodification of food, but never in a unified fashion. The commodity chain literature of rural sociology and geography, inspired by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory, has described technological systems involved in global linkages of supply.⁴ Interpretative social scientists such as the anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Arjun Appadurai meanwhile developed the food biography and the “social life of things” as perspectives for examining the ways that the movement of foods across societies has changed its values in fundamental ways.⁵ The food regime approach of Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael adopted the perspective of international political economy to locate changing points of control over production and distribution.⁶ Food systems analysis, which grew out of environmental sciences and agroecology, has pointed to the ways that distancing producers from consumers can create power inequalities and push the external costs of food production toward marginalized populations and regions.⁷ Urban geographers and planners have analyzed most fully the role of infrastructure both in provisioning cities and in perpetuating inequalities.⁸

Notwithstanding these efforts to include infrastructure as an element within various studies of industrial foodways, there is analytical value in examining infrastructure holistically on its own terms. An innovative issue of the design magazine Limn recently proposed the concept of “food infrastructures” as a way to “move beyond the tendency towards simple producer ‘push’ or consumer ‘pull’ accounts of the food system, focusing instead on the work that connects producers and consumers.”⁹ The contributors to the current issue of Global Food History agree wholeheartedly, but we want to expand the perspective even further. Reaching beyond traditional conceptions of food systems, these essays probe fundamental divisions within the interdisciplinary field of food studies between economic and ecological dimensions of food supply and the social and cultural meanings within which they are embedded. In seeking to connect these too often disparate scholarly literatures, we have purposely chosen the term “culinary infrastructure” because it expresses the tension between avowedly subjective symbols and meanings of culinary cultures and seemingly more objective, indeed concrete, physical infrastructure.

The term infrastructure has been assigned diverse meanings within wide-ranging contexts, and therefore it is necessary to begin by offering a definition of culinary infrastructure. We intend it not simply as a substitute for food systems, a term that has been widely adopted for its implied scientific rigor (as distinct from, say, foodways) but that has seldom been defined beyond a rather amorphous sense of encompassing everything involved in the production and consumption of food.¹⁰ We adopt a more restricted definition of culinary infrastructure as those artifacts, institutions, and media that are used to mobilize and organize food or to convey knowledge about food, thereby facilitating the production and consumption of food, but without having those transformations as a direct goal. The transformative power of infrastructure is nonetheless powerful for its indirect approach; the grain elevator inspired fundamentally new ways of using and conceptualizing grain without actually affecting its material nature. Of course, food often undergoes changes, generally unintended and undesirable, in transit and storage. Food may also be produced as a consequence of culinary infrastructure, for example, during a cooking demonstration intended primarily to convey knowledge. Infrastructure is also analytically distinct from commodity chains, with their linear nature, because of the multiplicity of uses for infrastructural components such as transportation and communication networks, port and market facilities, and even dedicated technologies such as grain elevators. Whereas the central question for a chain is generally distance, albeit measured in distinct ways, the most relevant attributes of infrastructural systems are the complexity and resilience of their networks.¹¹ Moreover,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Culinary Infrastructure
• 1. Culinary Infrastructure: How Facilities and Technologies Create Value and Meaning around Food
• 2. Frozen Food and National Socialist Expansionism
• 3. Food Safety as Culinary Infrastructure in Singapore, 1920–1990
• 4. A Museum’s Culinary Life: Women’s Committees and Food at the Art Gallery of Toronto
• 5. Developing Constipation: Dietary Fiber, Western Disease, and Industrial Carbohydrates
• Index