Local Foods Meet Global Foodways

Tasting History

Benjamin Lawrance, Carolyn de la Peña, Benjamin N Lawrance

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415697750
• eBook ISBN: 9781135758714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the intersection of food and foodways from global and local perspectives. The collection contributes to interdisciplinary debates about the role and movement of commodities in the historical and contemporary world. The expert contributions collectively address a fundamental tension in the emerging scholarly terrain of food studies, namely theorizing the relationship between foodstuff production and cuisine patterns. They explore a wide variety of topics, including curry, bread, sugar, coffee, milk, pulque, Virginia ham, fast-food, obesity, and US ethnic restaurants.

Local Foods Meet Global Foodways considers movements in context, and, in doing so, complicates the notions that food 'shapes' culture as it crosses borders or that culture 'adapts' foods to its neo-local or global contexts. By analysing the dynamics of contact between mobile foods and/or people and the specific cultures of consumption they provoke, these case studies reveal the process whereby local foods become global or global foods become local, to be a dynamic, co-creative development jointly facilitated by humans and nature.

This volume explores a vast expanse of global regions, such as North and Central America, Europe, China, East Asia and the Pacific, India, sub-Saharan Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, and the USSR/Russia. It includes a foreword by the eminent food scholar Carole Counihan, and an afterword by noted theorist of cuisine Rachel Laudan, and will be of great interest to students and researchers of history, anthropology, geography, cultural studies and American studies.

This book is based on a special issue of Food and Foodways.

INTRODUCTION

Foodways, ‘Foodism,’ or Foodscapes? Navigating the Local/Global and Food/Culture Divides

Carolyn de la Peña and Benjamin N. Lawrance

The term foodways has emerged from the intersection of popular and scholarly literature about cuisine to account for everything about eating, including what we consume, how we acquire it, who prepares it, and who is at the table.¹ In the words of Patricia Harris, David Lyon, and Sue McLaughlin, foodways, as a concept, summons to mind “[o]ur attitudes, practices, and rituals around food” and offers a “window onto our most basic beliefs about the world and ourselves.”² Robert Blair St. George has described foodways as a form of vernacular expression with autoethnographic dimensions.³ Other recent characterizations of the term foodways have focused on the procurement, preparation, and consumption of food.⁴ Foodways has invigorated food studies and done much to awaken readers to the profound impact foods have on culture, politics, and industrial practices.⁵

This volume — which on a practical level emerged from a conference at the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science at the University of California, Davis, and a subsequent special issue of Food and Foodways exploring food globality and foodways localities⁶ — uses the term “foodways” primarily as a critical lens to explore transcultural, trans-national, and trans-regional mobility, locality, and local embeddedness of foodstuffs. Our focus on global foodways explores local dynamics of global food and drink production, consumption, and mobility via a trans-locational lens. The chapters address issues of migration, settlement, colonization, imperialism, race and identity, consumption, distribution, governmentality, and globalization. Sites and processes include the transplanting and importation of food crops and animals from one region of the world to another; the hybridization of foodstuffs; the dissemination of technologies of food production; the creation of recipes and beverages for local and global markets; the shift in consumption patterns as echoes of modernity and post-modernity; and the relationship between food, drink, and political change.

Here in this anthology, nature and culture converge to create desirable, or undesirable, food and drink. We see this as a logical next step in the expanding domain of food and cuisine studies, the contours of which have recently been articulated by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. In the second edition of their now-standard reader, they ponder the mushrooming of the sub-field, and in particular how “food has permeated almost every scholarly field and become a widely accepted research topic.” Whereas when they embarked on their careers, food was “marginalized as a scholarly focus,” by the late 2000s, the proliferation in food, drink and cuisine research extends deeply into historical studies, anthropology, geography, ethnic studies, and sociology, and is also making significant inroads into human biology, archaeology, political science and economics.⁷

As an intellectual project, this volume emerged from an ongoing conversation about food, drink, and globalization between two scholars – one seeking to write a book about the history of a foodstuff and its attendant foodways; and the other exploring how to teach the emergence of food and cuisine within a global historical context as a vehicle for the examination of geopolitical change and social history.⁸ This book represents a concerted effort to ground our common interests in the narratives of things within the dynamic “global” communities that produce, transport, and consume them. Alexander Nützenadel and Frank Trentmann have forthrightly observed that although food and globalization “are inseparable,” financial markets, migration narratives, communication concerns and trans-national political contingencies have often overshadowed the contours of food globalization.⁹ Popular histories of commodities and luxuries have done little to undercut this, however. Whereas we accept the generalized proposition that “things” can “talk,” we continue as scholars to struggle to listen to them within their complex local and global contexts.¹⁰ This volume offers numerous instances of that struggle, across disciplines and periods. Here anthropologists and geographers join cultural studies scholars, sociologists and historians, each offering a unique framework (some disciplinary, others interdisciplinary) to explore the intersection of dynamic communities and globalized commodity paths.

We are particularly interested in the relationship between the pieces in this anthology and two types of food research that have proven remarkably popular with academic and lay readers alike in recent years. The first are commodity histories: books that focus on one particular food object (salt, cod, the banana, et cetera) and trace its journey across time and space as a means to understand shifts in eating patterns as well as plant and human history.¹¹ The second are books and films (e.g. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, or “Super Size Me”) that trace the environmental and health consequences of particular modes of American/North American food harvesting and eating. There are, of course, numerous reasons why readers—academic and non-academic alike—are drawn to these texts. Yet at their core, what often makes them so compelling is their ability to render food into a glue that connects us, intimately, to broader social, political, and historical concerns. For Martin Spurlock, eating at McDonald’s is not just a personal choice, it constitutes participation in a complex system that can both facilitate ill health and generate immense corporate profit.¹² For Michael Pollan, cheap corn is not only a consumer product, it is also—and most importantly—a byproduct of a system of intentional overproduction that helps certain people and harms others.¹³ At the hands of skilled writers, single commodity studies reveal our supermarket shelves to be full of micro histories. Individual products we often take for granted come alive, and our personal purchases are revealed to be enabled by historical actors long silenced. In all of these books, the buying and eating of food becomes something far more than a personal experience. It is a means of participation in a dynamic system to which we are conjoined (or not) through ingestion.

Yet there are important elements of this interconnectivity that are difficult to explore with these approaches. For instance, in single-commodity studies, stories about bananas, potatoes, tea, and cod have enthralled lay readers and scholars alike with tales of intrigue, happenstance, and opportunity. At the same time, their close focus on the movement of a particular commodity or luxury good has, on occasion, obscured the pre-conditions of cultural, political, and economic change that enable a particular traveling food to be accepted (or rejected). Single commodity foci can also easily neglect instances where cuisine—or ideas of cuisine—impact individual and community food and drink choices. They may leave little room for stories wherein individuals are valued or devalued by others because of their consumption (or non-consumption) or particular foods. Projects tightly focused on the social and political practices of industrialized food production in the United States have their own challenges. While they shine a powerful light on the practices of subsidies, trade policies, agribusiness, and fast food, they can obscure the myriad ways in which foods move across borders, especially those not of the United States. Aesthetics-driven frameworks, including “foodscapes” and “foodism,” mire us in the present, limiting our ability to see how people across time and societies have dealt with the cultural and dietary changes that accompany shifts in food supplies.¹⁴ And they concretize particular terms, like “local” and “global” in ways that while perhaps true of the present, within an American context, are more flexible elsewhere, particularly in the past.¹⁵

We believe that the perspectives taken by authors in this anthology have much to offer readers who are interested how particular food choices (or non-choices) bind us as individuals to complex, external social systems. At the same time, because their perspectives are historical, and global, they are able to offer evidence about just how these relationships are formed across boundaries, and over time, that can be of use to us in the present. While each is concerned with a particular site (from Rwandan coffee production, and milk in China, to sugar in Indonesia, and a Greek restaurant in New York City), a number of overlapping questions bind them to one another and offer insights beyond the sum of their parts into the broader field of global foodways. As readers move through diverse terrains from colonial Mesoamerica and contemporary Philippines, to tidewater Virginia and imperial Britain, we suggest that three sets of questions be kept uppermost in mind. These sets of questions comprise many of the core research concerns and pedagogical interests of scholars and teachers in cuisine, food, drink and nutrition today.

The first set of questions includes: How or in what contexts do food and drink become tasty and the object of desire (or otherwise)? Are the sensory experiences of taste and preferences for certain taste sensations the same across all of humanity? Or are these experiences and preferences more cultural than biological? Is this determined by political forces, cultural values, or both? Building on taste, the second broad set of questions concerns value, and how value is produced as plant and animal products move along chains of production and process. Do consumers, or producers, or both create value? How do they know and meet the interests and demands of the other? Can small groups of consumers have an impact on large producers, and even local markets? Is this impact easier, or harder, when products emerge from local versus global systems of production? A third set of concerns expands on taste and value and deploys foodways to destabilize the traditionally linear relationship between local and global, with respect to both production and consumption. In different ways, the authors ask: How can a product be perceived of as global when production and consumption appears to remain entirely local? Conversely, when a food or drink appears to be only discovered or encountered by new communities as a consequence of global flows, possibly colonial, imperial, or neo-colonial, what happens to our comprehension of foodways when evidence for the local is prioritized? Although there are no definitive answers to these expansive questions, in differing ways the authors attempt answers to one or several of them.

Notwithstanding the fact that the general questions above in various ways guided the authors in their respective research, we also observe responsive and thematic commonalities productive of interdisciplinary collaboration. To this end, we encourage readers to consider the collection as a whole. Interdisciplinarity in food and drink studies operates on the individual and collective level.¹⁶ The anthology responds collectively to the themes of the original conference and synthesizes broad perspectives, knowledge, interconnections, and epistemologies of the relationship between food, drink, nutrition, and mobility. As the Afterword by cuisine scholar Rachel Laudan affirms, the chapters herein enable us to see that an interdisciplinary global foodways approach that holds in tension the local/global and nature/culture divides has three important things to offer the study of food and culture—themes, if you like, rather than definitive answers to the sets of questions asked above.

First, the interdisciplinarity of the global foodways rubric returns a needed sense of exchange and dynamism to the study of food flows. Second, it problematizes any designation of “local” food as determined by geography alone. And third, it takes us beyond the “McDonaldization of Everything” explanation of the culinary contours of globalization. Below we expand on each of these further.

COMMODITY “TRACING” IS DECEPTIVE

Whereas tracing commodities privileges particular socioeconomic sectors and can naturalize the “laws” of finance and monetarism, considering jointly the movement of foods and the reception of human actors opens up the field of influence and places rules and regulations on the table. By jointly considering mobile foods and their human communities (at points of origin and consumption), we break free from notions that commodities have had their truest, or most profound, influence when they remain single objects moving through space unencumbered by the impact of humans. Instead of focusing on where a food comes from and where it goes, several authors in this volume ask how it is instead that moving foods and drinks become desirable (or not).

In many respects sugar represents the sine qua non of commodity tracing for food historians, anthropologists, and others; and even before Sidney Mintz drew together what previously appeared to be competing narratives about labor, race, capital, consumption and production, it occupied the center-stage of narratives of global food and cuisine connectivity. Mintz and his followers emphasized commodities as vehicles whereby one may explore the dialectical processes of contradictory forces. The commercialization of sugar products had lasting effects in Europe and beyond, from facilitating the resource base of the industrial revolution, to transforming entire foodways and revolutionizing European tastes and consumer behaviors.¹⁷ Historian Roger Knight extends these analytical insights in his examination of the transformation in taste in the decolonializing Dutch East Indies/Indonesia, and in particular the growth in demand for white factory-made sugar.

Over several decades from the 1930s, Indonesians began to abandon brown sugar forms in favor of white, as they began to associate white sugar with everything that was “up-to-date, fashionable, and desirable.” But rather than pursuing the movement and consumption of sugar in a linear producer-consumer narrative characteristic of many popular commodity tracing monographs, Knight reveals the shift to white sweeteners to be highly contested and part of a broader set of struggles about market share, government patronage, and the embracing of modernity by decolonizing elites. What Knights sees as the “victory” of white sugar domestic cultural preferences is revealed to be tightly bound up with and dependent upon, the political economy of the local production of white sugar.

So-called commodities are often not quite what they seem; some food items masquerade as commodities, while others attain the status of commodity through a complex set of culturally determined processes. As cultural studies scholar, Stephanie Maroney, demonstrates, “curry powder” from its earliest date of invention (possibly the mid-seventeenth century), was constructed as a spice, treated as a commodity, and funneled into the Asian-European spice market for transport to Europe. Rather than being a locally produced and consumed spice, such as fenugreek or cardamom, the mixture was processed in India, but only for the purposes of export to the United Kingdom. Furthermore, the rapid popularization of all things Indian in metropolitan Britain via the publication of accessible, simple, and imitable recipes and cookbooks, “turned India’s local food culture into a commodity constructed through colonialism.”

Indeed the limits of commodity tracing are further illustrated in contrasting chapters on colonial Mexico, post-genocide Rwanda, and twentieth-century United States. Spanish language and literature scholar, Daniel Nemser, demonstrates how pulque (a traditional alcoholic drink of the indigenous population) emerged as a global product in spite of the fact that it was produced and consumed in what might otherwise have been considered an entirely local context, Mexico City. In seventeenth-century reports written by New Spain’s colonial elite about the role of pulque in the June 8, 1692, Mexico City rebellion, Nemser finds a transnational biopolitical project enacted at the local level. Pulque blanco was recognized across New Spain as beneficial, but mixing other materials into it transformed pulque blanco into pulque mezclada, a completely different substance, credited with the propagation of all manner of “evil.” Evidenced in the linguistic and conceptual slippage between pulque mezclado (mixed pulque) and plebe mezclada (mixed plebian masses), Nemser identifies a biopolitics aimed at purifying New Spain (socially, spiritually, and biologically), first through the purification of bodies and then through their spatial segregation. As Nemser states, “It was not just the salvation of the Indians’ souls that mattered to these ecclesiastical authors; it was their belief that the threat of mixing was not contained in the metaphorical mug of pulque mezclado but overflowed, penetrating both the blood of the individual and the physiology of the social body.” The ambiguity inherent in the notion of mixture, one that metaphorically connected the “impurification” of a beverage with the impurification of Spanish blood, proved mixing to be a threat to colonial order. The international politics of the colonial world thus played out in these local concerns about pulque.

International development programs and the politics of taste are on full display in geographer Jennifer Gol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction: Foodways, ‘Foodism,’ or Foodscapes? Navigating the Local/Global and Food/Culture Divides
• 2. Milk for “Growth”: Global and Local Meanings of Milk Consumption in China, India, and the United States
• 3. Appetites Without Prejudice: U.S. Foreign Restaurants and the Globalization of American Food Between the Wars
• 4. Virginia Ham: The Local and Global of Colonial Foodways
• 5. Making White Bread by the Bomb’s Early Light: Anxiety, Abundance, and Industrial Food Power in the Early Cold War
• 6. “To Avoid This Mixture”: Rethinking Pulque in Colonial Mexico City
• 7. “To Make a Curry the India Way”: Tracking the Meaning of Curry Across Eighteenth-Century Communities
• 8. The “Coffee Doctors”: The Language of Taste and the Rise of Rwanda’s Specialty Bean Value
• 9. Fast Food and Nutritional Perceptions in the Age of ‘Globesity’: Perspectives from the Provincial Philippines
• 10. A House of Honey: White Sugar, Brown Sugar, and the Taste for Modernity in Colonial and Postcolonial Indonesia
• Afterword
• Index