Empire of Things
Page 77
Local markets may come in a great variety, but they play to a shared script: to give consumers the feeling of being connected to farmers and the land. Locality and a face-to-face encounter at stalls create trust and simultaneously promise quality food and a sense of community. Local chicken from a local farmer has added emotional value missing from the anonymous bird on the supermarket shelf. A good deal of what happens in these markets, therefore, is about personalizing food. Customers do not only buy some eggs but want to know from farmers how many eggs their chicken laid; if they buy pork, they want to know when the pig was reared and killed and what might be a tasty way to roast it. Stall-holders learn to act their part, selling an image of tradition, local stewardship and rustic farming. Locality, in other words, is not a geographical fact but a stage: origin has to be performed. Local markets are democratic successors to Marie Antoinette’s model farm in the gardens of Versailles. People feel they are keeping tradition alive. For parents, it is a way to show their children what ‘real’ food used to be before industrial farming. The demands on heritage require appropriate display and packaging: tweeds and sheepdogs; cheese wrapped in paper, not plastic; a little soil on vegetables to indicate their natural freshness.
In reality, of course, heritage is an industry like any other and local markets exist in the modern world, not outside it. Local farmers, too, use abattoirs. Nor are vegetables automatically organic because they are local, as many customers presume. In her classic study of the regional market in Carpentras, near Avignon, Michèle de la Pradelle reconstructed this theatre of illusion and self-deception. Potatoes here were deliberately kept muddy and presented in bulk to suggest they came straight from the farm. In reality, very few small farmers survived in the region. The salespeople were retailers who bought from wholesalers; some hailed from Paris. Olives were imported from Tunisia, just as in the supermarket. The demand for authenticity reversed the conventional price signal. If something was too cheap, it created suspicion and customers moved on. Friday after Friday, the market was bustling because it gave customers a sense of community and of a shared past, of being part of la Provence éternelle.52
These markets reflect the dialectic of globalization. At the same time as it flattened distinctions, it triggered a search for new ones. The result has been a bi-polar moral geography, with local food looking in the opposite direction from fair trade. Whereas global commerce stretched the ethics of care to far and distant strangers, local markets concentrate on the nearest and dearest. Local farmers guarantee good, safe food and look after nature. Consumers, in turn, are asked to reward them with their custom. ‘You do like to think that in buying their products you are benefiting your neighbours,’ as one London woman told researchers.53
The appetite for local food is an indicator of how trust and caring can diminish with distance. This is a major point, but we must add an equally important addendum: distance here is not a geographic unit, measured in kilometres, but a political one. For many local foodies, trust in the food chain stops at the border. ‘When you go to the supermarket and pick up some tomatoes, they could be from anywhere,’ one English woman explained: ‘I suppose the good thing about the FM [farmer’s market] is that it is British produce.’ It matters little that Dutch farms are closer to London than those in Wales or Scotland.
Local food articulates popular disquiet about global agro-business and fast food. It gives consumers a chance to respond to a growing sense of risk manifest in food scandals and anxieties about increasingly complex and invisible food chains. But to see it only in these terms would be unhelpful. We must also understand it in relation to the state and national systems of provision. Trust in the food system varies considerably across the rich world. Britons, interestingly, have the highest trust in food in Europe, notwithstanding the catastrophic outbreaks of mad cow disease in 1992–3 and foot and mouth in 2001. Their strong sense of consumer power is matched by their confidence in the state and in supermarkets. Germans and Italians have less of either. Norwegians live in the shadow of corporate paternalism: the state, they believe, will ensure that their food is safe. In Norway, the state has traditionally bolstered agricultural producers, making national food a byword for health. In such a setting, organic food has found it hard to get a foot in the door. According to a manager of a producer co-operative, ‘nothing can be closer to ecological than traditional Norwegian meat production.’54
Many Finns, similarly, treat national origin as a mark of ‘natural’ quality. ‘What’s relevant in organic foods, is the origin,’ one Finn told researchers in 2004. ‘I feel it’s more trustworthy if it’s domestic,’ another added. Someone who bought organic foods regularly explained that ‘if you have to choose between Italian organic tomatoes and Finnish normal tomatoes, then I will buy the Finnish ones.’ In general, there was a consensus that organic food from Finland was purer, safer and tastier than organic food from abroad. ‘I think that the “organicness” is totally lost’ on the way from central Europe, a young woman said, even though food from northern Finland travelled a greater distance to a Helsinki dinner plate than from farms across the Baltic. Natural food here is not imagined as slow or small-scale but in the first place as national. As one Finnish consumer put it, with ‘domestic organic products, you can imagine there’s a real farmer or producer somewhere in Finland. But if it’s Belgian, it can be anything.’55 The legacy of nationalism for perceptions of nature could not be clearer. Natural food comes from one’s own people, foreign food from some unknown, artificial process.
Local food networks that look like a radical ‘alternative’ to global neo-liberalism from Bristol, Berkeley or Barcelona appear more like a continuation of conventional orthodoxy if we view them from Oslo or Tokyo, where national food has long expressed the solidarity between consumers and producers. In Japan, the Seikatsu Club, founded in the 1980s, now delivers local produce from several thousand farmers to 30,000-odd households a week. On a smaller scale, though more demanding, is the tekei system, where consumers enter into a partnership with organic farmers, pledge to take whatever the harvest delivers and even help with weeding. Shinto traditions and cleaning rituals to eliminate contamination from the outside probably reinforced a preference for local over foreign foods. More immediately, such initiatives grew out of the Japanese consumer movement and politics after the Second World War, which made food safety a top priority and called on urban housewives to remember their dependence on their cousins in the fields. The experience of war and hunger meant reliable Japanese rice was favoured over the cheap, imported variety. Consumers were conditioned to see their interests as being tied up with those of producers. It is no coincidence that the foods which attracted the greatest flak from Japanese critics of GM (genetically modified) produce were the very ones where Japan had come to depend on imports: soybean and corn.56
In Europe, buying groups started to crop up in the 1990s. In Fidenza, near Parma, Italy, fifty families got together in 1994 as a ‘gruppo d’acquisto solidale’ to purchase organic products for mutual benefit. What started as a buying club developed into an education in food miles and solidarity. Today, there are around nine hundred of these GAS in Italy.57 Over 2,000 communities have declared themselves GM free. Local food has had a helping hand from the state as well as from concerned consumers. By 2009, many Italian provinces had their own laws to provide schools and hospitals with organic food. Organic here had to be local. Local authorities help organize farmers’ markets. Calabria, in its 2011 law, spelled out the vision of local solidarity: ‘bringing the end-consumer and farmer closer together was an effective way to raise the added value for the producer and make it cheaper for the consumer to obtain certified local produce that was distinctly fresh.’58 In France, Parisians and tourists can sample pâtés, liqueurs and other delicacies from the Lozère in the Maison de la Lozère sponsored by that department’s tourist board.
‘Terroir’ is no longer a French speciality. In neighbouring countries, too, local foods invoke the emotional an
d cultural qualities of the soil as well as its distinctive mineral composition. In Germany, local food is inseparably tied to Heimat, a sense of the homeland. All regional states have their own food schemes and labels, although their criteria and philosophy vary considerably; Hesse requires 100 per cent of the main ingredient to come from within its boundaries; Thuringia takes a more relaxed view, with 50.1 per cent. Across Germany, there are some five hundred regional food initiatives. Together with state television, the Federal Ministry of Nutrition, Agriculture and Consumer Protection has organized culinary competitions for the best regional dishes. The winner in 2012 was a Bavarian pork roast with dumplings made from pretzels and topped with beer gravy.59
Today’s search for the local repeats the pattern of the late nineteenth century that we observed in Chapter 3.60 Both were periods of intense globalization that made farmers and traders turn to local tradition and regional customs to fight off foreign competitors. The years around 1900 saw the birth of local certification regimes and regional product brands such as champagne. Dresden’s Striezelmarkt, today one of the world’s biggest Christmas markets, took off in the 1890s in response to toy competition not only from Japan but also from Nuremberg. Such well-marketed regional customs were part of a broader momentum towards ‘invented traditions’.61
What has changed? Several important things. Probably the major one concerns the expanding role of the state. In 1900, food-safety policies were in their infancy and there were no agencies to regulate or check on origin. By and large, producers had the field to themselves. Today, ‘Protected Designation of Origin’, ‘Protected Geographical Indication’ and ‘Traditional Specialities Guaranteed’ are the subjects of national and European governance – in 2011, the European Union registered the thousandth food name under these schemes, the Piacentinu Ennes, an Italian cheese made from raw sheep’s milk, saffron crocus and salt. (Almost a quarter of protected foods come from Italy.)62
When consumers say they find it easier to trust a local market or a farmer from their country, or slow fooders’ first response to a food scandal is to ask their local butcher for a special cut of meat and have it minced under their eyes, they take for granted that national mechanisms are in place to protect them against being poisoned. Before governments took on greater responsibility for food safety, consumers were just as likely to be struck down by old meat from the shed next door as from abroad; indeed, a consumer in Edwardian London might have been safer with French food, thanks to more advanced regulation across the Channel.
Alimentary localism is unthinkable without the state. This is true for fascist and socialist as well as capitalist countries; Mussolini’s Italy gave a boost to regional dishes and Dresden’s Stollen (Christmas bread) and local crafts had the support of the East German state. The current worry and confusion about local food results from the tug of war between states and supranational organizations as well as from fears about anonymous agro-business. Origin is a zone of conflict between rival liberal and national conceptions of food, between the European Union’s mission to promote the competitive, free flow of goods on the one hand, and states’ efforts to protect national farmers on the other. Today’s consumers have to negotiate a jungle of local product claims and a thicket of labels unimaginable to their great-grandparents. In 1999, the ‘week of Saxony’, for example, offered over 3,000 heimische (native) products from the region. Dresden no longer just prides itself on its Stollen but on Dresdner Brie, Gouda, even shampoo.
Local food, then, is part of modern life. We have already noted the stake of producers in the promotion of regional and national brands. Tesco, Britain’s biggest chain, introduced a ‘Cheese Challenge’ for regional varieties and asked customers to ‘Enjoy the Taste of Scotland’. Walmart, the American giant that would be difficult to mistake for a farmer’s market, declares ‘when produce has been grown and picked closer to home, it tastes wonderful.’63 Supporters of local food, likewise, live inside consumer culture, not outside it. One manifestation is a drive for distinction. The huge drop in the price of food from the 1960s to mid-2000s meant that class-based diets were eroding in the affluent West. The poor began filling their shopping baskets with many of the same items as the rich. The phenomenal jump in the consumption of meat and soft drinks in this period speaks volumes. A special trip to a farm, rather than to the supermarket down the road, is partly a way to regain distinction. Cooking and serving local food to dinner guests involves time, knowledge and taste. Appreciating seasonal patterns of cultivation and, perhaps, knowing the name of the cow or chicken and their surroundings, sets a host aside from hoi polloi who toss convenience food into a microwave. It is telling, too, that farmers’ markets echo the key words of mainstream consumption: freshness, choice and diversity. Regular customers contrast the ‘crisp and fresh’ vegetables at local markets with the pre-packaged ones on the supermarket shelf. The current concern with freshness, however, is not something natural but itself a product of modern history, engineered in the last century and a half by advances in refrigeration (in the home and in shipping), transport and packaging, food science and, yes, supermarkets.64
There are clear limits to how far today’s consumers are prepared to go back in time and eat subject to the seasons. For most, local food is not a radical alternative to supermarkets but an add-on that increases further the range of food already available. ‘I’m quite keen on supporting smaller local producers,’ one English woman explained, ‘because I think that way you get diversity, more competition and different qualities . . . it is a way of making sure we maintain choice.’ 65 This is a far cry from the dull and repetitive diet that ruled when food was really local. Tellingly, the regional market of Carpentras today offers greater variety in winter than in summer.66 Commentators like to stress the potential of local food networks. It is equally important to recognize the limits of people’s commitment. In the United States, Community Supported Agriculture initiatives have found it difficult to survive once the enthusiasm of the first harvest is over. For many members, a CSA is little more than a food-buying club. In New Mexico, they lose half their members every year.67
ON THE MOVE
Fernando Sánchez left his native Mexico for Los Angeles in the 1920s. Across the border, he found a new material civilization where homes had hot baths and electrical lights and people listened to the radio and drove to the local movie palace in a private car. Sánchez, a typesetter from the city of Saltillo in north-eastern Mexico, enjoyed his share of the new comfort and conveniences. He owned a record player and, occasionally, would go to the cinema, too. But new technology did not mean an entirely new way of life. Instead of a smoky wood stove, he now cooked with gas – it made for ‘better taste’ – but the food he ate was the same as in Mexico. ‘I follow my Mexican customs and I won’t change them for anything in the world,’ Sánchez said. He did not let his sisters cut their hair, nor ‘go around like the girls here with all kinds of boys’. On Sundays he met with friends in the park, where they played Mexican songs on their guitars. ‘I have a great many records of Mexican song and also many American ones, but I have the latter because they are the ones my children like.’ 68
Sánchez was one of many thousands of Mexicans who in the 1920s crossed to ‘the other side’. Many stayed; others returned. An official list of 2,000 returning immigrants registered what they took back with them to Mexico. On average, a repatriate had two trunks full of American-made clothes. Three in four had bought beds and mattresses. One in five had a phonograph, some even a piano. One in four drove home in a Ford.69
Migration is a major channel for goods, taste and desire. When people move, so do things. The material flow, however, is in more than one direction. Migrants take from the lifestyle in the host country but at the same time add their own customs to it. Sánchez’s compromise with the American way of life shows how assimilation was often piecemeal. Moreover, a large effect of the flow does not concern the migrants and host country directly. The families who are left behind receive not o
nly a share of the migrants’ earnings but also a taste of their experiences in the form of gifts and stories. In addition to moving labour, then, migration moves things, lifestyles and aspirations back and forth between the richer and poorer regions of the world. How this circulatory system works in all its global complexity we still do not fully understand. What the following pages are meant to do is to illuminate some of the material currents and cross-currents that happen in the wake of labour migration. To be clear, our focus is on ‘free’ migrants, not slaves, indentured labourers or internal migrants, although they, too, have played a role in these exchanges.
In 2012, global remittances exceeded $500 billion, according to the World Bank. People in poor countries received an impressive two thirds of such cross-border person-to-person payments. How much does this matter? It depends on the home country. In Lesotho, Nepal and Moldova, remittances make up a quarter of the entire economy. Private transfers from the US to Haiti are roughly the same. Every year, Mexicans in the USA send back around $12 billion to their families south of the border. Thanks to the break-up of Yugoslavia and migration within the European Union, rich regions such as Europe, too, have witnessed an increase in such flows. In Serbia, the money sent from neighbouring Austria accounted for 10 per cent of GDP in 2010.70
Remittances, like migration, of course, are nothing new. The wave of people who left the old world for the new a century ago – a time when one in ten Norwegians and Italians emigrated – was as large, if not larger, than recent movements. Scattered evidence suggests how migrants were already then leaving their mark on the old country. In the British empire, money earned in the colonies was sometimes left in bequests for churches and charities back home. In the Belhelvie parish in Aberdeenshire, for example, it was Jamaican and Indian money that paid for local schools and poor relief.71 The introduction of the Imperial Postal Order Service in 1904 made transfers simpler than ever. Between 1873 and 1913, around £170 million worth of private transfers reached Britain, just under 1 per cent of GDP at the time. The bulk came from generous cousins in the United States. Within the empire, it was Britons in South Africa who gave most. Cornwall then was to South Africa what Haiti is to the United States today. Without the weekly ‘home pay’ from Cornish miners working in the goldmines of the Transvaal, wives and mothers back home would have had to tighten their belts.72