Taking Food Public

Redefining Foodways in a Changing World

Psyche Williams Forson, Carole Counihan, Psyche Williams Forson, Carole Counihan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134726349
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The field of food studies has been growing rapidly over the last thirty years and has exploded since the turn of the millennium. Scholars from an array of disciplines have trained fresh theoretical and methodological approaches onto new dimensions of the human relationship to food. This anthology capitalizes on this particular cultural moment to bring to the fore recent scholarship that focuses on innovative ways people are recasting food in public spaces to challenge hegemonic practices and meanings. Organized into five interrelated sections on food production – consumption, performance, Diasporas, and activism – articles aim to provide new perspectives on the changing meanings and uses of food in the twenty-first century.

1

Taking Food Public

Psyche Williams-Forson and Carole Counihan

What does it mean for food to go public? For us, it means that well beyond the academy people across the globe are consciously shaping food in the public sphere, contesting the status quo, and promoting creative options. With the choices they make come burdens and responsibilities that bear thinking through. We chose the name Taking Food Public over time as we developed the book to focus on the increasingly important topic of how people take food public in myriad ways. To this end, we have organized the discussions in this volume into five sections that focus on production, consumption, performance, diaspora, and activism.

PRODUCTION

We begin with production because it forms the foundation of every society and food is at the core of every economy. Since World War II, as Tim Lang’s “Food Industrialisation and Food Power” describes, the industrial agrofood system has emerged, transforming land, labor, agriculture, diet, food culture, and the environment across the globe. Concentration, long-distance trade, high chemical and fossil fuel inputs, nonsustainability, and profit-making characterize the global agrofood system. Today, 80% of the world’s poor still rely on agriculture for their survival, yet the majority of the world’s population increasingly crowds into cities, and food production is increasingly more globalized and concentrated.

Many articles in this volume discuss how women, small farmers, ethnic minorities, displaced persons, and the poor are coming up with new ways to advocate for changes in food production from gleaning to food stands to urban gardens and sustainable agriculture.

Because women are still primary food providers all over the world, we included Patricia Allen and Carolyn Sachs’s important article on “Women and Food Chains.” They take a feminist approach to food and look at how gender affects understandings of the body, nurturance, labor, power, and food activism. Larch Maxey addresses directly the question of whether family farmers can carry on sustainable agriculture in the global North by examining two small farms in Canada and the United Kingdom. Hanna Garth provides another, different case study of alternative production in her descriptive ethnographic study of food availability in Santiago de Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the concomitant demise of Cuban agriculture. She finds that small-scale sustainable agriculture can provide adequate, healthy, and culturally appropriate food for the Cuban population and a successful alternative to the highly industrialized agriculture that previously dominated the Cuban landscape.

Focusing on rural Western Oregon, Joan Gross examines those returning to pre-capitalist ways of food acquisition as resistance to the global food system. Gross discusses two groups—the back-to-the-landers relying on subsistence agriculture, and freegans—modern day foragers living off the waste of others and on what they can gather in the wild. These extreme practices call into relief how the foodshed can be expanded beyond the reach of corporate agriculture. Laura Lawson looks at another emerging form of public food production—urban gardens—in her article on the Los Angeles South Central Farm established in the heart of the city by mainly Mexican and Central American immigrant gardeners on city land that later was successfully claimed by powerful developers. The article raises important questions about the challenges to producing food in urban spaces. Meredith Abarca uses a method of “culinary chats” to explore Mexican women’s “public kitchens”—small-scale food businesses based on women’s knowledge of budgeting, preparing, and serving food. They convert their home cooking abilities into an economic resource to support themselves and their families and also create “family wealth,” a network of extra-economic support of food gifts, labor exchanges, jobs, and moral support.

CONSUMPTION

An important dimension of taking food public is consumption, which is inevitably tied to production. Food studies are well served by taking an approach that examines both production and consumption as two sides of the same coin, mutually determining each other. Consumption choices are powerful and where they exist they are often based on several considerations including personal values, economic considerations, politics, convenience, and knowledge of health and nutrition. Daily, we are confronted with the reality that more and more people find themselves in food insecure situations while others have abundant resources and overflowing larders. Reasons for food insecurity addressed in this volume range from the lack of whole and healthy food choices and/or the inability to access these choices due to disabilities, poverty, lack of transportation, and emigration. In addition, there are a number of pervasive and powerful influences from advertising to marketing that shape people’s food beliefs and choices. Yet through alternative forms of consumption—such as dumpster diving or veganism—people challenge the status quo and promote alternative meanings and forms of food acquisition and consumption.

But what options remain for healthy eating when choices are limited? Kwate, Yau, Loh, and Williams consider this question in their study of the high prevalence of obesity in African American populations, which they argue is due in no small part to the density of fast food restaurants in many predominantly African American urban areas. Popular opinions often lead to misinformed judgments about the choices people make to participate in sustainable food consumption. Despite the barriers of cost, geography, and lack of knowledge, many still wish to feed their families healthy foods. Webber, Sobal, and Dollahite take on some misperceptions about food choices in their examination of physically impaired and disabled food shoppers from low-income households who desired to eat healthy foods but found themselves hampered by their health conditions and disabilities.

Consumption links individuals and households to the outside world in myriad ways. Psyche Williams-Forson describes the meeting of African American and Ghanaian cultures and cuisines inside her household and the complex gender issues at play as she and her Ghanaian husband negotiate culinary practices. By reflecting on the tensions involved when other women cook for her husband, Williams-Forson uses theory and auto-ethnography to question how the broad sociopolitical forces of gender, race, class, and diaspora play out around meals in her home. A. Breeze Harper also looks at how social and economic statuses affect food choices by examining Black female vegans. Harper details how some women of color have made veganism an explicit political choice to promote greater health and equity for food and the planet. Writing from a similar standpoint of consciousness, Rouse and Hoskins articulate the ways food consumption helps followers of Sunni Islam conform to and express publically Islamic notions of purity and holiness. Edwards and Mercer continue the discussion of alternative consumption through their study of young people in Australia who, primarily for political reasons, choose dumpster diving as one means of obtaining food. They also participate in Food Not Bombs, collecting past-prime produce free from markets, which they cook into soup and serve to the homeless. Julie Guthman also examines how food conveys political ideology by considering how farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture project a discourse that often alienates people of color. Ethical issues are at the heart of these articles on food consumption.

PERFORMANCE

Our section on performance focuses on the ways people have taken food “on the road” to disrupt conventions and transform meanings in and through performances—public, structured, and explicit enactments of food ideologies. What does it mean to perform food? In their special issue on food of Text and Performance Quarterly, Laura Lindenfeld and Kristin Langellier write that food, cooking, and eating constitute “a complex system of performance practices and epistemologies.”¹ The things we do with food—acquire, prepare, create, consume—are, they argue, performative by nature. They go on to cite what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett defines as three junctures at which food and performance intersect: doing, behaving, and showing. The question becomes how and what do food performances mean and reflect?²

In the category of performance we include literature, art, competitive eating, firehouse cooking, ambulatory food vendors, and other forms of public food displays. Anita Mannur analyzes Asian literature and film to think through how family norms and domestic routines define and constrain men’s and women’s sexual identity and longing in heteronormative ways, and how public food production in diverse Diasporic locations can offer potential routes to liberation. Julia Ehrhardt also uses literature to think through the performance of identity—specifically how queer studies can inform the ways “food practices and beliefs reinforce and resist heterosexual gender ideologies.” C. Wesley Buerkle further complicates hegemonic gender identities by disrupting the dichotomies between masculine and feminine in his discussion of metrosexual masculinity. Metrosexuals are men concerned with self-image, personal grooming, fashion, and aesthetics—attributes stereotypically associated with heterosexual women and gay men. Buerkle argues that meat consumption and advertising counter this suspect sexuality and celebrate a “retrograde masculinity” that reinforces heteronormativity and reinscribes dichotomized gender divisions through food consumption.

Continuing the theme of performing gender identity through food practices, Deutsch examines how urban firemen use sexual humor to assert their masculinity while they negotiate the stereotypically feminine tasks of cooking, shopping, and meal planning in the public/private space of the firehouse. Taking a different tack, Adrienne Johnson considers “gurgitators,” men and women who risk mind, body, and soul to perform competitive eating. Johnson asks why they are motivated and provoked into such performances and why we, as spectators, find them fascinating. Another kind of consumption linking performance, gender, reproduction, and the body is explored in Penny Van Esterik’s “Vintage Breast Milk.” This article considers the social and symbolic meanings of Toronto performance artist Jess Dobkin’s controversial “Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar” where breast milk tastings mimic conventional wine tastings and disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions about private and public, (re)production and consumption.

Public food consumption always communicates meanings, values, and identities. How do meanings surrounding food assistance change when the recipient is living with disabilities? Denise Lance raises these kinds of questions in her article, “Do the Hands That Feed Us Hold Us Back?” She explores the challenges faced by those who need eating assistance and the ways they try to balance dependence, potential embarrassment, and intimacy of assisted eating.

New ways of eating and receiving food are also at the heart of Alison Caldwell’s essay “Will Tweet for Food.” Caldwell explores the intersections of new media, urban spaces, gourmet-like foods, and food carts to illustrate the ways in which Twitter has increased interactions with mobile food consumption and heightened the levels of performance involved in the acquisition of such foods. Considering another form of new media, Melissa Salazar raises our awareness of the benefits of using visually based research methods to capture and explore food behaviors, interactions, and implications. The work of Caldwell and Salazar, goes a long way toward redefining “public” interaction with food in a rapidly changing technological era. Taken together, the articles in the performance section reveal that there is an increasingly public and politicized moral discourse around food and a growing need to address class issues embedded in hegemonic meanings. Articles in this section provoke discussion and enlarge considerations of “alternative” food in ways that are democratic and inclusive rather than elitist and exclusive.

DIASPORA

A global perspective enlarges the meaning of taking food public. This section explores how global movement has characterized and shaped peoples and foods in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, displacing cultures, transforming diets, creating new identities, and altering meanings embedded in food. It examines the movement of foods not only as commodities like coffee, corn, and Coca-Cola, but also as capsules of culture, homeland, and nostalgia for people in the diaspora—like the envios food packages common among Mexican emigrants or kosher foods for Jews in the southern United States. As foods and their production and consumption travel around the world, their meanings change; like Spam in the Philippines or matzah in Mississippi, they become both globalized and localized. They may represent corporate power, transnational identities, and cultural imperialism, but also local power, cultural resistance, and the grassroots politicization of food.

Starting off this section is Daniel Reichman’s study of the global coffee market and three ways it is regulated: through violence in Honduras against coffee farmers, in fair trade consumer initiatives, and by international regulatory treaties. By looking at these three forms together, he exposes the strengths and limitations of political power, the ways citizens are developing grassroots efforts for economic justice, and coffee can be a symbol of people’s stance towards and place in the global economy. Exposing another fascinating dimension of food on the move, Valerie Imbruce gives rich detail on the Chinese vegetable trade in New York City, which imports vast quantities of fruits and vegetables from all over the globe and furnishes them to independent greengrocers and ambulatory vendors in NYC’s several Chinatowns. This business provides an alternative form of food globalization characterized by multiple small traders, intense competition, resistance to consolidation, and high-quality produce at reasonable prices. Ty Matejowsky focuses on one of the most successful global industrial foods—the canned chopped pork known as Spam—and its consumption in the Philippines to interrogate food globalization and show how local populations incorporate global foods into local cultures and give them sometimes surprising meanings. James Grieshop examines another fascinating case of transnational migration, food globalism, and small-scale entrepreneurship—envios—the small-scale package services sending food and other culturally meaningful goods from Mexico to far-flung citizens in the United States. The envios demonstrate the enduring importance of food as a cultural glue linking migrants to their homeland and to each other in the diaspora.

Furthering the discussion of transnationalism, indigeneity, and consumables, June Nash illustrates the evolution of ways in which water, rum and now cola have had a profound effect on the lives of Mesoamerican people. Marcie Cohen Ferris takes up a similar yet different evolution of food and foodways involving religious and secular practices in her discussion of Jews in the Mississippi Delta. Her article begs the question of how landscapes can have an impact on Diasporic peoples and how they in turn change and affect their host communities by bringing in new foods and folkways. Julie Botticello asks the same question in decidedly different ways. In her essay on “The Yoruba Body,” Botticello takes note of the steadily increasing population of Nigerians in the UK. Focusing on a variety of foodstuffs including medicinals, Botticello notes how the Yoruba people have used food through the process of market selling with makeshift stalls and barrows to assist in their resettlement. Gaytán takes up this thread in her recognition of tequila as a powerful symbol of Mexican national identity. More than an inebriant, tequila is a material culture artifact used in most every ritual and activity central to this culture. Elizabeth Fitting rounds out this group of essays by calling into question the discussions of maize production in Mexico. Fitting argues that genetically modified maize production is much more complex than the dichotomous debates that currently surround its discussion.

ACTIVISM

While food has always been a key piece of governmental domestic and foreign politics, it has increasingly become a channel for counter-hegemonic political actions, which we call food activism. Where food is concerned, the personal is indeed political. The ingestion of food forces us to consider the consequences of what we eat for our bodies and the environment. Citizens are striving for food democracy and more just food systems through personal choices like eating vegan and buying at farmers’ markets, to collective solutions like participating in food banks and community kitchens, to global movements like joining Slow Food, Via Campesina, and the anti-GMO movement.

Articles in this section examine both individual and collective efforts to change the world by changing the way food is produced, distributed, and consumed. Hassanein defines and discusses the important concept of “food democracy” and asks whether small changes in foodways can lead to transforming the dominant agrofood system to be both more democratic and more sustainable. Rebecca Sims analyzes another very different effort to promote good local food in her article on sustainable tourism in two regions of the United Kingdom. She explores the concept of authentic food and the value of embedding it in geographical place to enhance the tourism experience as well as to promote local and sustainable agriculture. Carole Counihan examines the continuum between women’s food roles in the home with those in public and explores how food can be both a symbol of women’s oppression and a channel to public power. Kathleen Schroeder looks at community kitchens in Peru and Bolivia and shows how they simultaneously empower and oppress the women who run them. These community kitchens foster initiative and self-sufficiency at the same time as they perpetuate the neo-liberal market economy that denies resources to women of marginal income and social status. Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy examine links between public activist work and the most private corporeal experience of eating, suggesting that attention to “visceral differences” among people may make the efforts of activist groups like Slow Food more successful.

Farmers’ markets, recently burgeoning alternative agrofood institutions, are the topic of Lisa Markowitz’s article, which ponders their relative lack of success in reaching economically vulnerable and racially and ethnically diverse populations. Using ethnographic research in Louisville, Kentucky, Markowitz explores the factors that have contributed to and detracted from farmers’ markets ability to enhance food access to all citizens. Carol Morris and James Kirwan take an interesting approach to vegetarianism by asking if a movement based on such an individually focused act of consumption can really transform the food system and promote the alternative food economy. Denise Copelton looks at another individually rooted form of food activism around the autoimmune reaction to gluten known as Celiac Disease (CD). Drawing on field research with CD support groups, national CD conferences, and interviews, she explores the search for gluten-free foods and the determinants of everyday activism, and she compares those who embrace their daily activism with those who res...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Taking Food Public
• SECTION 1. RETHINKING PRODUCTION
• SECTION 2. RETHINKING FOOD CONSUMPTION
• SECTION 3. PERFORMING FOOD CULTURES
• SECTION 4. FOOD DIASPORAS: TAKING FOOD GLOBAL
• SECTION 5. FOOD ACTIVISM
• Contributors
• Credit Lines
• Index