Food Activism

Agency, Democracy and Economy

Carole Counihan, Valeria Siniscalchi, Carole Counihan, Valeria Siniscalchi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857858344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Across the globe, people are challenging the agro-industrial food system and its exploitation of people and resources, reduction of local food varieties, and negative health consequences. In this collection leading international anthropologists explore food activism across the globe to show how people speak to, negotiate, or cope with power through food. Who are the actors of food activism and what forms of agency do they enact? What kinds of economy, exchanges, and market relations do they practice and promote? How are they organized and what are their scales of political action and power relations? Each chapter explores why and how people choose food as a means of forging social and economic justice, covering diverse forms of food activism from individual acts by consumers or producers to organized social groups or movements. The case studies embrace a wide geographical spectrum including Cuba, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Mexico, Italy, Canada, France, Colombia, Japan, and the USA. This is the first book to examine food activism in diverse local, national, and transnational settings, making it essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology and other fields interested in food, economy, politics and social change.

Part I

Introduction

–1–

Ethnography of Food Activism

Valeria Siniscalchi and Carole Counihan

Introduction

The idea for this book was born during fieldwork. We met doing research on the same subject—the Slow Food movement—but along two different pathways, one focusing “from above” on the movement’s headquarters, the other focusing “from below” on the local grassroots chapter leaders. When two anthropologists meet on the same research site and discover each other, they can have diverse reactions, one being the realization: “my” field is no longer only mine! But we took a different tack and decided to join our paths and perspectives rather than building walls between them.

We began our cooperation by organizing a double session on food activism, a topic that encompassed our fieldwork and aimed to extend to other related projects as well, at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans. From this panel, and from a second double session we organized the following year at the association’s Annual Meeting in Montreal, was formed the initial nucleus of this volume. Our idea was to compare diverse forms of activism centered on food initiated by both consumers and producers. We decided to draw flexible borders that allowed us to consider together individual and collective mobilizations with a variety of forms, actors, and strategies in diverse parts of the world.

By food activism we mean efforts by people to change the food system across the globe by modifying the way they produce, distribute, and/or consume food. Although our goal in this book is to be inclusive rather than exclusive and to present and analyze a broad range of activism, we decided not to include antihunger movements because these are so vast as to warrant their own book.

The geographic range of these chapters—including sites in Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Japan, Italy, France, Canada, and the United States—shows that food activism is a worldwide movement taking place in both the Global North and the Global South. An important element that emerges from reading across the cases is that the actions and ideologies of food activism are connected through transnational flows, like those linking peasants in India and Brazil through La Via Campesina’s struggles for food sovereignty, and those linking consumers in the United States to coffee producers in Honduras through fair trade and transparency regimes. Taken together, the chapters allow us to analyze food activism as a set of multisited practices and reveal how concepts and strategies are used and appropriated from one group or place to another. For example, we can see how the anti-GMO movement in Colombia borrows yet differs from its Mexican counterpart, and how urban Sri Lankan food activists transform ritual meanings surrounding food that are typical of the countryside into forms that make sense to international funding agencies. The chapters reveal the changes that occur over time in the forms of mobilization and their aims, for example, how the spontaneous coming together of a small group of Oregonians seeking to revitalize local food production and consumption evolved into a permanent organization with paid employees, a funding structure, and a formal mission statement.

Anthropology and Ethnography of Food Activism

Increasing numbers of studies in anthropology and the social sciences look explicitly at diverse forms of food activism, including studies of ethical consumption, commodity chains, local food, community-supported agriculture, and the anti-GMO movement (Borras, Edelman, and Kay 2008; Carrier and Luetchford 2012; Dubuisson-Quellier 2009; Fitting 2011; Lamine 2008; Pratt 2007; Siniscalchi 2013; Williams-Forson and Counihan 2011). As Richard Wilk says, “Food has long been a focus for political and social movements in many parts of the world; food is a potent symbol of what ails society, a way of making abstract issues like class or exploitation into a material, visceral reality” (2006: 21–22). Many recent studies of food activism focus on the North American context; for example, Clare Hinrichs and Thomas Lyson’s (2009) edited book gives extensive coverage of U.S. alternative food practices, from CSAs to farmers’ markets to chicken labeling. Sandor Katz (2006) provides an overview of seed saving, labor struggles in the food industry, vegetarianism, farmers’ markets, home fermentation, and other challenges to food-system consolidation and degradation in the United States. Mark Winne (2011) also focuses on efforts to change the North American food system with case studies of meat production, school food, and food sovereignty, while Alison Alkon and Julian Agyeman’s (2011) collection explicitly highlights how low-income people and communities of color strive for sustainability and environmental justice in the North American food system, which is plagued with race and class inequalities.

Some studies take a more global approach to food activism, such as Eric Holt-Giménez’s (2006, 2009, 2011) writings on peasant struggles for food justice and Rachel Schurman and William Munro’s (2010) collection about social movements against biotechnology and agribusiness. Wynne Wright and Gerad Middendorf’s (2008) anthology uses the concepts of agency and structure to anchor several articles about challenges and changes in food production around the world, such as fair trade banana production in the Dominican Republic, red meat production in New Zealand and South Africa, a community food-sharing program in Toronto, and farming in Puerto Rico. Our book aims to contribute to this body of work by investigating how globalization instigates and structures food activism and how activists experience globalization, by providing a holistic look at diverse kinds and scales of food activism in a range of global contexts, and by mustering an explicit ethnographic perspective and comparative approach.

Just as the idea of this book was born in the field, it aims to validate the centrality of fieldwork, and one of its distinctive elements is the adoption of an ethnographic approach to food activism. Ethnography highlights diverse insider perspectives on ongoing lived processes. Each case study—from those focused on highly localized mobilizations to those examining transnational movements—is grounded in a deep understanding of activists’ visions and practices in specific cultural settings. The researchers approach food activism using a variety of methods. They look at food activism in its social and cultural context—linked to economic, political, and ideological forces and taking place at diverse scales and in different forms.

The authors position themselves at different vantage points, some at the heart of a movement and others on the periphery. They choose varying foci, including activists’ discourses, values, practices, forms of resistance, political and economic dynamics, challenges, and successes. Authors share a common search for an “empirical alignment” between observed phenomena and qualitative analysis (Olivier de Sardan 2008: 7–8). At the same time, like all ethnographers, they navigate a fine line between being participants and observers, between being involved insiders and detached outsiders, a tension that is perhaps particularly acute in the study of activism. Alexander Koensler and Amalia Rossi write, “The study of social movements, in fact, often involves tension between the disengaged posture of scientific observation and the ideological beliefs of the researcher. This can call into question the theoretical foundations, results, and boundaries of ethnographic work, and causes numerous dilemmas in the ethnographic relationships with activists” (2012: 15; our translation). Like all ethnographers, the authors here are always also involved persons whose perspectives are never completely neutral. Moreover, as Judith Okely affirms, during fieldwork the anthropologist is forced to take a position and “must either be involved or perish” (2012: 14).

Just as activists hold a variety of political ideologies, from revolutionary to conservative, so ethnographers have different analytical positions (cf. Edelman 2001: 301–303), and the authors in our volume are no exception, even while varying in their critical posture and efforts to balance competing views. As Wilk reminds us, “The range of groups involved in food activism covers the entire spectrum from left to right and can create unlikely alliances between conservative religious groups and Marxists. Each of these activist and policy communities is itself culturally constituted and amenable to study using all the tools of economic anthropology” (2006: 22). In this volume, for example, Nefissa Naguib faces a difficult challenge in providing an insider’s look at the Muslim Brotherhood’s use of food in its religious activism, a view that differs radically from other accounts that emphasize the Brotherhood’s hard-line fundamentalism. From certain points of view this insider’s perspective may be considered insufficiently critical; at the same time, it is important to remember, as Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan writes, that “our charge…. is to render familiar and comprehensible the subjects of our research, whether they are culturally close or distant” (2008: 21; our translation), even though this mission may at times undermine a more critical stance.

What Is Food Activism, and What Is Not?

Food activism takes aim at the capitalist system of production, distribution, consumption, and commercialization. We include in food activism people’s discourses and actions to make the food system or parts of it more democratic, sustainable, healthy, ethical, culturally appropriate, and better in quality. It is an umbrella that permits us to include spontaneous actions like Cubans refusing government food or Sardinian women making choices to valorize local food consumption, organized groups like the local community coalition Ten Rivers Food Web in Oregon or the citywide urban garden program in Seattle, and transnational social movements like Slow Food, La Via Campesina, or fair trade.

The comparative study of food activism investigates its form, ideologies, and levels of political commitment. Sometimes immediate concrete struggles against neoliberalism appear as food activism through their forms of action and expressions of dissent, such as those of Canadian wheat farmers seeking to maintain the single-desk sales of wheat. At other times food activism is manifest in ethical commitments that extend beyond the food sphere, as in the antimafia goals of the Sicilian agricultural cooperatives, or the environmental and cultural heritage ideals of Mexican activists manifest in efforts to outlaw genetically modified corn. Aimee Shreck proposes a useful typology of activism that includes (1) acts of resistance composed of people’s explicit nonparticipation in hegemonic systems and their challenges to it, (2) redistributive acts aimed at more equitable distribution of resources that are steps toward future change, and (3) radical social action seeking “positive structural transformation of the system resulting in something qualitatively different” and more equitable for all (2008: 127–128). Specific food activist initiatives may fall on a continuum between these forms of militancy as well as between spontaneous and institutionalized, individual and collective.

This book showcases all kinds of actors holding a range of social and political affiliations and positions—from explicit, militant, politically aware activists to people who resist for less articulate, less political, and more personal reasons. People acting to change the food system or speaking out against it in whole or in part include consumers, academics, farmers, chefs, environmentalists, “professional” activists, political activists, religious activists, and business owners. Some initiatives engage several diverse actors; for example, the Kyoto local food movement links farmers, chefs, and consumers, whereas other actions engage mainly single constituencies, such as the Canadian wheat farmers. Still others struggle to include diverse constituencies, like the white Seattle activists grappling to deal with the food needs of Latino immigrants. In the Sicilian antimafia food cooperatives, the leaders and some of the farmers declared themselves to be political activists, whereas other farmers participated in the cooperatives simply to have a good job. This raises the issue of how any activist initiative balances individual motivations with the impact of collective action; the apolitical farmworkers contributed to the success of the cooperatives through their labor even though they did not hold the same ideals as the more politicized leaders.

The critical approaches of activists are not always explicit or cohesive. For example, disgruntled Cuban consumers commit quiet, spontaneous, and unorganized acts of resistance to the Cuban state by spreading rumors about adulterated government food. They express opposition that goes beyond food and links individual choice to political opposition. Slow Food members around the world share a goal of “good, clean, and fair” food but differ in their commitment and strategies, with some emphasizing changed consumption and others valorizing local economies or promoting biodiversity by protecting local foods. Some case studies fall at the very edges of activist practice, like the tactics of the young Muslim Brothers who distribute free food to the populace for religious and political conversion, or the coffee-labeling and transparency regimes established by private corporations as marketing strategies. Our choice of an expansive perimeter permits us to include cases located at the boundaries of food activism, through which we can reflect critically on the limits and meaning of the term.

Finally, food activism is a fruitful term for examining together the diverse forms of dissent and resistance practiced by political activists, farmers, restaurateurs, producers, and consumers. Their common goal is to have control over or take charge of production, distribution, or food choice, but their discourses and practices may range from aiming for an overreaching political impact to simply seeking closer ties between producers and consumers on the local stage.

Spaces and Places of Activism

The question of scales of political action is another thematic axis of this volume. Some mobilizations are based in groups with a collective image and common identity, like the Sri Lankan members of the Movement of National Land and Agricultural Reform or the Slow Food activists. In other cases, food activism involves more gradual and less visible efforts, like those of French biodynamic grape growers, who make changes in production methods and seek a place within French wine hierarchies, or the Oregonian members of the Ten Rivers Food Web, who promote farmers’ markets and support local agriculture.

The case studies fall on a continuum from those that are more locally based to those that are more globally focused. Some that operate mainly on the local stage are, for example, the urban garden directors and their clients in Seattle; the women of Cagliari, Italy, who aim to revitalize their local food system; and the chefs and consumers in Kyoto, Japan, who valorize local heirloom vege...