Why Food Matters

Critical Debates in Food Studies

Melissa Caldwell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350011427
• eBook ISBN: 9781350011458
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Agriculture & Food Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

What is food and why does it matter? Bringing together the most innovative, cutting-edge scholarship and debates, this reader provides an excellent introduction to the rapidly growing discipline of food studies. Covering a wide range of theoretical perspectives and disciplinary approaches, it challenges common ideas about food and identifies emerging trends which will define the field for years to come. A fantastic resource for both teaching and learning, the book features:
- a comprehensive introduction to the text and to each of the four parts, providing a clear, accessible overview and ensuring a coherent thematic focus throughout
- 20 articles on topics that are guaranteed to engage student interest, including molecular gastronomy, lab-grown meat and other futurist foods, microbiopolitics, healthism and nutritionism, food safety, ethics, animal welfare, fair trade, and much more
- discussion questions and suggestions for further reading which help readers to think further about the issues raised, reinforcing understanding and learning. Edited by Melissa L. Caldwell, one of the leaders in the field, Why Food Matters is the essential textbook for courses in food studies, anthropology of food, sociology, geography, and related subjects.

PART ONE

Revaluing Food in a Global Economy

Introduction

What makes food meaningful? This is a question that encourages us to recognize the tremendous variation that exists around the world in terms of how people and communities decide which foods are useful, edible, desirable, and pleasurable for whom and under what circumstances. Both the elevation of some foods to a special, perhaps privileged status, and the denigration of other foods—or even the same foods—reflect different sets of beliefs, principles, practices, and priorities. Paying attention to the diversity of meanings that foods acquire at different times and places opens up important questions about how and why people and their communities come to hold particular beliefs and attitudes about specific foods and food practices.

Entangled in these questions about what makes food meaningful and significant is a related but slightly different question: What makes food valuable? In some cases, the significance of a food or food practice may be represented by the monetary or cultural value placed on it, such as with scarce or luxury foods that attract both high prices and high prestige because of their rarity or singularity. In other cases, the personal or cultural significance of a food eludes easy social or economic valuation, such as a family recipe that can be fully appreciated only by members of that family who remember not just the taste of the dish but also the conversations, jokes, and dinners that were part of their experiences with the dish. The cost of ingredients, the experience of a skilled cook, and the care and personal histories invested in and made possible by a family dinner cannot be neatly calculated as elements with equal or convertible value. Examining the ways in which foods are valued or devalued sheds light on the types of value that are at play—financial, social, emotional, cultural, or even political—and the hierarchies in which these values are arranged. Does financial value supersede cultural value, or vice versa? When does a food have more value as a political symbol than it does as a commercial product?

Economic activities have long occupied a privileged position within studies of the value of food, as researchers have examined the systems of production, distribution, consumption, and disposal that move foods from farms or factories to markets and on to tables, as well as the forms of labor and types of laborers required to move those foods along those networks. As foods move through those relationships, they also change from one state to another, as well as acquire (or change or lose) value: from crop to commodity to dinner, or from object of necessity to object of desire, or from raw material to commodity to gift, or from fresh to expired to rotten. Tracking food as it moves through these different relationships has long been an important topic for researchers interested in studying a broad range of economic topics: access, demand, production, distribution, manufacturing, labor, pricing, scarcity, entitlement, welfare, and charity, among many others.

Recognizing that value can be understood from multiple directions helps us think about food beyond cost, price, or access. Attention to the values attached to food, as well as the moments when value is added or lost, helps us rethink the nature of economic systems, as well as how these economic systems have been studied. In many ways, the ordinariness of food in everyday life and its necessity for biological sustenance can obscure the reality that people’s access to food and the choices they make about which foods to consume are deeply embedded in extensive and convoluted economic systems that bring together many different people, communities, and traditions into relationships of dependency and obligation across multiple scales.

Studies of food invite exciting possibilities for rethinking not only what we know about the economic systems that make up food practices but also what alternative economic systems might look like. The chapters in this section present new vantage points from which to reconsider some of the most enduring issues and debates in economic anthropology and the political economy of food more generally. Drawing on scholarship and theories about exchange, systems of circulation, commodity chains, value production, globalization, consumer demand, scarcity, and labor, these chapters develop those ideas and methods and connect them fruitfully to critical discussions about ethics, morality, positionality and intersectionality, performance, agency, choice, and pleasure. Collectively, the conversations and disagreements forged through these chapters are multiscalar, as they shift registers between the very local to the national and the transnational, and simultaneously reveal new synergies and divergences among economic systems in different parts of the world.

Potential Questions to Guide Reading and Discussion

What is “value” and how does “value” change depending on the context?

What are the circumstances under which “value” comes to be an important quality?

Who determines what counts as “valuable” and for what reasons?

How does comparison of food practices across different societies reveal different types of value and hierarchies of value?

How does attention to value shape our understanding of the many different people and activities involved in making, distributing, consuming, and disposing food?

What other qualities are associated with, or embedded within, the quality of “value”?

How does attention to “value” help us understand the structures and ideologies that constitute different economic systems such as state socialism, market capitalism, or gift exchange and barter?

How do the values attached to foods and food practices change at different moments in their movement through economic processes or their life cycles?

How can we understand differences between use value and exchange value?

How does waste become revalued?

How are ethical or moral qualities attached to economic activities?

What is a moral economy?

1

Willing (White) Workers on Organic Farms? Reflections on Volunteer Farm Labor and the Politics of Precarity

Julie Guthman

A not uncommon ambition of young adults these days is to work on organic farms as volunteers and interns. Many do so through programs such as Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms/Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF); opportunities abound where I am located, as well. In the United States, most of these volunteers come from middle-class backgrounds, they are generally white, and they have grown up around or have been educated in progressive university towns. The San Francisco Bay Area and central coast of California, where I do much of my research and teaching, is a fountain of such interest, replete with deep foodie culture and histories of social experimentation. In the course of my teaching at UCSC, I have worked with many students who want “to put their hands in the soil” or otherwise hang out with farming and gardening. I have learned from countless conversations and papers that they seek unalienated labor, a chance to connect with others, and the opportunity to grow their own food.

I have an inkling about what makes food work so attractive. American foodie icons such as Alice Waters, Mark Bittman, and Michael Pollan have extolled going back to the kitchen as a way to reconnect with both the pleasures and health-giving properties of food. Waters, for example, rejects convenience discourses because they omit what Waters sees as meaningful work. Trying to save time by not cooking or shopping, she claims, misses out on “one of the few worthwhile pleasures in life—not in getting away from work but in doing good work that means something” (cited in Biltekoff 2013: 101). Enacting her vision no doubt enhances one’s status. Emma Maris (2014) has noted that the labor devoted to food preparation has replaced scarce ingredients as the way to indicate gourmet food. At the same time, it is an ideal that many find difficult to attain (Bowen et al. 2014).

As we also see in Waters’s statement, food work conflates with good work and even hints of philanthropy. As I have written (2008, 2011), the missionary practice of teaching others how to garden, cook, and eat has become a common mode of activism for those who want to effect social justice in food systems, albeit a mode that often reflects the desires of the givers much more than those of the recipients. Waters’s own biography in trying to align the city of Berkeley’s public schools, and now the University of California, with her own vision of teaching food further indicates a conflation of food work and philanthropy. (Here I allude to Waters’s imprint on the university’s Global Food Initiative.)

Yet, I have still wondered what exactly about farmwork is so attractive to these young people—especially when it is unwaged. After all, this work is extremely demanding, painful, and has been historically demeaning. How has it apparently become a source of pleasure, reward, and even status? And always cognizant of political economy, I have also wondered about whether those who volunteer have considered the potential impacts of their unwaged labor on those who are relegated to doing farm labor for a living. What is the relationship between privilege and precarity in this realm of action? To begin to answer these questions, I interviewed several UCSC students about the meanings of volunteer farm labor for them. I did this as my contribution to a UC working group, funded by the Mellon Foundation, on Rethinking the Purpose of Work through the Pleasures and Displeasures of Food. What I learned confirms some of my suspicions about their privileged positionality, yet upon further reflection suggests some lines of flight, including their pursuit of creative ways to piece together a life. In that way I think these students’ desires and trajectories open up much broader questions about the blurring of productive and reproductive labor, the meaning of precarity, and how living the precarious life works as politics in a very uncertain world.

* * *

All of those I interviewed were pursuing voluntary farmwork “for the experience,” and to some extent to learn new skills, including those that could not be attained in formal university training. These are motives that other researchers have identified for nonwaged farmwork (McIntosh and Bonnemann 2006; Mostafanezhad 2016; Schugurensky and Mündel 2005). These were skills they would not necessarily include on their resumes, although with today’s emphasis on “service learning” would make for feathers in their caps nonetheless (Cody 2016).

Several mentioned that they hoped WWOOFing, in particular, would give them the ability to travel very cheaply, a finding noted by MacIntosh and Campbell (2001), as well. None expected to be very good at farm labor, and none expected to do it for a living. They were fully cognizant of the privilege of dabbling in farmwork as a way to enrich their own lives and, for that matter, that it required considerable social and economic capital (Ekers et al. 2015).

In terms of the pleasures and pains they would experienc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• Introduction: Why Does Food Matter?
• Part One: Revaluing Food in a Global Economy
• Part Two: The Power of Food: From Politics to Microbiopolitics
• Part Three: New Bodily Realities in a Techno-Science World
• Part Four: More than Human, More than Food
• Index
• Copyright Page