Refashioning Nature

Food, Ecology and Culture

David Goodman, Michael Redclift

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9781138881297
• eBook ISBN: 9781134918645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

We live in a society as dominated by food preference as by sexual preference, as obsessed with eating too much as with eating too little. In this accessible, cross-disciplinary text, David Goodman and Michael Redclift look at the development of the modern food system, integrating different bodies of knowledge and debate concerning food, agriculture, the environment and the household. They link changes in our diet and concern with the environment to many of the problems afflicting developing countries: food shortages, poor nutrition and wholesale environmental destruction.

1
Food into Freezers: Women into Factories

The modern food system developed around several components, each of which is complex in itself, and usually interpreted by specialists within the social and natural sciences. For example, technological changes in agriculture (Chapter 3) and food manufacture (Chapter 7) are the province of economists and food technologists, and though they have attracted a lot of attention, agricultural change and the transformation of food through industrial processes are rarely linked to the social and economic processes which help to explain both of them. They are treated as discrete areas, as separate, if related, concerns. In a similar way the discussion of the urban household's food consumption, and the changes in the work undertaken by women within this household, although it has attracted the interest of feminist scholars, is not usually linked to the changes occurring within the household farm economy. In this case the urban-rural divide serves to divorce two closely related social and economic processes, which have divested women of direct (technological) control over the transformation of organic nature and food. The shifts in women's labour market participation, which have accompanied the development of the modern diet in urban areas, have come about partly because of the kind of food we eat, and the availability of domestic technologies. They also mirror what has happened on the farm; in most of the advanced industrial societies women play a larger role in the family farm, and have assumed roles which might have been performed in a more specialized salaried form, had the family farm (usually owneroccupied) not been the dominant social institution in rural areas.

As we shall see in Chapter 2, the transformation of the family farm in turn reflects changes in the wider industrial economy, notably in the supply of industrial inputs to farming, which echo those within the 'downstream' food processing industries. It is essential, then, that we view the food system as a system, and the connections between parts of this system as essential to its formation and development. These components -women's labour in the urban household and on the farm, technological change in agriculture and in food processing, ecological systems viewed both as resources for agriculture and necessary to the preservation of other values - are usually addressed as discrete realities, within relatively bounded disciplinary traditions. In our view this makes more urgent the need to break the boundaries of thinking, of intellectual categories. The analytical (and empirical) connections between the labour process, technology and policy are not easily summarized, and it would be facile to do so without giving proper attention to the specific issues involved at each stage of the argument. Nevertheless, much of the hard work in exploring these connections must lie with the reader - and with future researchers. Where there is a shift of gear between chapters, or between different levels of analysis, we trust the reader will bear with us, and recognize our attempt to signpost some of the problems, as well as some of the benefits, of a very wide-reaching approach. This book often considers familiar territory in an unfamiliar context, and one much broader than is usually considered appropriate. In taking the discussion through successive chapters, and successive components of the argument, we invite the reader to consider connections and explanations which are sometimes tentative but always potentially illuminating. To view the whole picture we need to begin with the parts; but, unlike much of the literature we shall be discussing, we do not intend to end with the parts, merely to suggest that forging new connections between ideas and issues carries its own dangers as well as benefits.

This chapter examines the role of domestic labour and changes in food consumption in the development of the modern food system. Women play a particularly important part in most aspects of food production, processing and consumption, in developed and developing countries. In developing countries there is a considerable literature which draws attention to this role, and it would not be an exaggeration to state that our understanding of rural development has been transformed by our understanding of women's work and status. In the industrialized countries the picture is rather more patchy; perhaps it is testimony to the advance of the modern food system that much less research and policy criticism has been devoted to women's role in the food system of the North, than that of the South. Recent work in the United Kingdom and the United States has pointed to the way in which house-work has been transformed during this century (Gardiner, Himmelweit and Mackintosh 1980, Bose 1982, Meissner et al. 1988). Important research has been published on the allocation of money within the family (Pahl 1983, 1989). Similarly, empirical research on the role of women's management of food, within the family, was undertaken during the 1980s (Charles and Kerr 1988). However, we still lack a body of literature which addresses the central question: what part have changes in gender divisions played in the way food is prepared and consumed within the family?

This chapter addresses this question, but, in the absence of studies whose principal focus is the gender dimension of the food system, we can only begin to answer some of the larger, empirical and theoretical issues. It is nevertheless important to raise them at the outset, and to flag their importance for further research and understanding. Gender, like class, needs to be theorized as a category of social power relations, with an active structuring potential of its own. Questions such as how skills become gendered, and how divisions in the labour force shape gender identity, are complex issues, which require close attention to historical evidence and to the role of ideology at an intimate, personal, level, within the household and in defining 'the family'. We shall argue that the economic and technological processes which mark the development of the food system rest upon changes not only in human behaviour but also in human perceptions. The analysis of these perceptions should encompass the ideology of food preparation and consumption, but current knowledge barely enables us to understand the shifts in the perception of women's roles on the broader canvas. We know next to nothing about how changes at the ideological level have influenced or facilitated the development of the modern food system.

It is clear that women's roles have been radically transformed during the last century, in all the industrialized countries. Every social group, from servants to single parents, and most social phenomena of industrialized societies, from child labour to class divisions in women's work experience, indicate major changes in the structure and internal relations of domestic food consumption. One concomitant of industrialization has been a significant shift in the way in which food is produced, processed and consumed, especially in the division between the home and the factory, the two principal locations where food is processed. Similarly, as we shall see in the next chapter, women play a central role in the transformation of food production, through changes within the household farm economy. Again, to fully appreciate the part played by gender relations in these changes we need to unravel a largely unwritten and often invisible history: that of food practices within the household, and their relationship to food ideologies in the society at large.

This chapter explores some important facets of the question, but, inevitably, it only begins to explore some of the most important issues. It would be useful, for example, to distinguish between households, on class and ethnic lines, in exploring the balance between domestic labour and paid labour for women in food processing. Similarly, the whole area of food self-provisioning in the evolution of modern industrial society needs to be opened up to more rigorous analysis. If we examine working-class households over time, then it is clear that women in such households have long possessed extended working lives outside the confines of the household. However, we still have only the vaguest, most impressionistic sense of how these experiences have shaped tastes and patterns of food consumption, and habits of food preparation in the home. Some of the social changes surrounding discussion of the family in industrial society today, such as the 'new servant class' of child-minders and nannies, or the effects of prolonged male unemployment on the domestic division of labour, have clear implications for the future evolution of the food system. As we shall show in the concluding chapter, the advertising and marketing of food products and domestic technology today makes great use of different household consumption styles, and the food industry has adopted different marketing strategies for what are perceived as different segments of the market. However, although we know more about the food people consume, we know very little about changes in the tasks and responsibilities that govern the preparation of food, beyond the fact that they are largely in the hands of women.

A central concern, it will be argued, is that of causation. To what extent have changes in the household, and in the role of women, influenced or helped to bring about wider changes in the food system? By the same token we can ask: how have changes in the wider food system influenced or helped to bring about changes in gender divisions within the household? Clearly both processes are important and interrelated, but to approach the question through a crude theory of causation would be unhelpful. As much of the work connected with food (like other work) has turned into 'jobs', so female employment has become 'packaged' into different activities, located in different parts of the food system. This would not have been possible without technological changes or, as we shall see in Chapter 3, an economic system based on increasingly intensive accumulation. As the purchasing power of most consumers has risen, so the transformation of food has engendered a transformation in work. Labour and food have long been commodities, but their interrelationship has changed over time, as the locus of consumption has moved further from the locus of production. Both also provide evidence that what we look upon as 'natural' is in fact infinitely variable; food has been subjected to naturalization, it has been socially constructed, but changes in consumption habits are also closely linked to technological and economic changes. In place of simple cause and effect, we suggest a model with component parts each able to influence, and transform, one another. Rather than emphasize causative links between ideology, social roles and technical change, we suggest thinking in terms of a system. In a sense, our point of entry into this system could be through production (the farm), consumption (the household) or processing (the food industry). By considering the point of consumption first, we are simply placing the emphasis with the universal, biological necessity which food conveys, and which societies shape: the need to eat. We return to consumption in the concluding chapter.

To appreciate the key role played by shifts in family consumption and women's employment in the way in which the food system has evolved, we need to examine the historical process through which a rural society that largely consisted of rural food producers became one largely made up of food consumers. The Industrial Revolution, and the development of a large, urban working class, marked the beginning of the process through which food, and the labour which went into producing it, became fully commoditized.

The principal clue to these changes is provided by Engels in The Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844, in which he discusses the way in which a growing urban population pressed on limited natural resources, forcing the 'agricultural revolution' to confront increasingly extensive technological limits:

in consequence of the increase of population, the demand for agricultural products increased in such measure that from 1760 to 1834 some 6,840,540 acres of waste land were reclaimed; and, in spite of this, England was transformed from a grain exporting to a grain importing country.

(Engels 1892: 13)

Urban population increase in this period was a necessary stimulus to industrialization (although historians continue to debate the relationship between cause and effect) because industry produced many of the commodities required by the enlarged domestic market and, especially as the nineteenth century advanced, by overseas markets as well. At the same time, food was the single most important wage-good in the newly industrialized society, and food needed to be imported if enough of it could not be produced domestically. It was essential to the development of manufacturing industry that food was acquired cheaply, just as the raw materials for the textile industry had to be acquired cheaply. Engels noted that, by mid-century, the 'reduction of the cost of raw material, and the keeping down - if not as yet the bringing down - of wages' remained the principal objective of manufacturing capital (Engels 1892: xii). By the late nineteenth century an international food order had been created, linking Britain at its hub to the newly created 'settler societies' in North America and Australasia, where grains and meat were being produced for the market provided by the core industrial countries.

At the level of macro political economy this process is discussed more fully in the next chapter. At the moment it is sufficient to note that the shift from a cheap food policy, under early industrialization, to the development of a wider consumer market, not simply for food or other basic commodities but for a range of sophisticated consumer goods, domestic technology or 'white' goods, played a critical role in the development of late capitalist industrialization.

The food consumed by the household has increasingly, in the past half-century, become processed and prepared outside the home, in the food manufacturing sector, service industries and, through a growing sophistication in household food preparation, using new domestic technologies. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the full elaboration of the food system involves important changes at the farm level, which in some respects parallels changes in food manufacturing and within urban households. To begin to understand the full importance of the modem food system, we need to consider the transformations taking place in the 'parts' themselves: the family and women's labour in urban areas; the consumption of food; and the technology of food production, processing and manufacture.

Our starting point in this chapter is women's labour, including food preparation, in the urban working-class household.

Women’s Work: The Transfer of Domestic Skills

Until the First World War the British middle and upper classes relied heavily on large numbers of domestic servants to clean their houses, wait on them at table and prepare their food. This area of women's domestic experience- there were many more women servants than men- reproduced in other people's homes what women were called on to do in their own. By 1921 there were 1,232,000 domestic servants, only 80,000 fewer than before the war, and the demand from the middle class for servants was increasing (Dawes 1984: 164). After the war, unemployment had risen again, and economic hardship had forced many former domestic servants back into service. Even full-blown economic depression, however, could not undo the changes in women's expectations that the war had introduced. In 1901, one in three girls between the ages of 15 and 20 was a domestic servant, and 28 per cent of the female servant population was less than 20 years old. After the First World War the shortage of servants became an officially recognized 'problem', and led in 1924 to a Report from the Central Committee on Women's Training and Employment, which argued for shifting the costs of training a new generation of 'skivvies' to the taxpayer. It was argued at the time that domestic training was not only useful in servants to the middle classes, it was also essential in working-class wives (Dawes 1984). This echoed the way in which, during the nineteenth century, the professions concerned with diet, as they became the preserve of women, were progressively marginalized from mainstream medicine (Belasco 1989: 198). Women's domestic role was 'professionalized' in both the middle and working classes.

In the 1930s, women's work in most urban working-class households was extremely onerous. The classic description of Marjorie Spring Rice captures the unremitting toil which women were forced to undertake. It also serves as a benchmark from which to observe many of the changes introduced by the modern food system during the last half century:

When once she is up there is no rest at all till after dinner. She is on her legs the whole time. She has to get her husband off to work, the children washed, dressed and fed and sent to school. If she has a large family, even if she has only the average family. . ., four or five children, she lives. . . in a house extremely inadequately fitted for her needs. Her washing up will not only therefore be heavy, but it may have to be done under the worst conditions. She may have to go down (or up) two or three flights of stairs to get her water, and again to empty it away. She may have to heat it on the open fire, and she may have to be looking after the baby and toddler at the same time. When this is done, she must clean the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 FOOD INTO FREEZERS: WOMEN INTO FACTORIES
• 2 THE PASSING OF RURAL SOCIETY
• 3 THE ORIGINS OF THE MODERN AGRI-FOOD SYSTEM
• 4 INTERNATIONALIZATION AND THE THIRD WORLD FOOD CRISIS
• 5 ENGINEERING LIFE: AGRI-BIOTECHNOLOGIES AND THE FOOD SYSTEM
• 6 THE FOOD SYSTEM AND THE ENVIRONMENT
• 7 CONCLUSION: COUNTER REVOLUTION
• Bibliography
• Index