Bodies, Visceral Difference, Visceral Imaginaries

Dear Ian et al, thanks of course for the invitation. Apologies for an abbreviated response as we have been traveling, exploring food-worlds sans-laptops. We write this from the top of our heads, as the saying goes (… and/or maybe from our guts?)

We were pleased to read Rachel Slocum´s comment on our AAG paper. We are indeed focusing our attention on engaging with bodies. Inspired by Probyn´s (2000) use of the term, along with several other feminist scholars’ conceptions of bodies and embodiment (e.g. Grosz 1994, McWhorter 1999, Brison 2001, Alcoff 2006), we have been playing around with notions of the visceral. We find it exciting that others are also finding intrigue with the term. For instance, Mike Goodman´s comment in this blog (and in Goodman 2008) that,

The viscerality of food is about its connections—inside, outside, gender, sexuality, et al—but also how food contains the emotional (e.g. one’s stomach on one’s sleeve), the inexpressible, and the biological and how these are all inseparable and entangled in complex, complementary and ambiguous ways.

Although we might use different language, this comment resonates with what we have been exploring through empirical work with particular food-based eco-social projects such as those of the Slow Food movement and school garden and cooking programs. Through this work we have been trying to specify what it means to study the nebulous ¨viscerality of food¨ that Goodman mentions. It is quite obvious that we connect to food viscerally, and more that multiple visceralities of food exist (perhaps even within the same body). The pressing task for us has been how to actually apprehend these visceralities, how to conduct empirical work on the interpersonal (ever-relational) ways in which bodies feel food. We see this as politically important for a number of inter-connected reasons. In the visceral realm, foods link up with ideas, memories, sounds, visions, beliefs, past experiences, moods, worries and so on, all of which combine to become material – to become bodily, physical sensation. If we can understand such sensation – how it forms, what it does to the body, how it can be shaped – then we might be able to understand and utilize food’s differential power to affect bodies.

We can also use this insight to understand social difference more completely; we can begin to discuss difference not so much in terms of constructed identities but rather in terms of fluid visceralities. A visceral conception of difference does much to illuminate the inherent complexity to the “categories” of race, class and gender. In terms of the critiques of whiteness and eliteness within alternative food, with visceral difference we too find that there is [always] more to say (as Slocum notes in this blog). We see this “more-ness” as a result of the material realities of bodies themselves; not only do (minded) bodies develop seemingly static habits of being, but bodies are also always changing and changeable in contest with these (socially recognized and labeled) stases. Academic work on these subjects must therefore recognize and make room for such changability, and must furthermore encourage movement in progressive directions. By understanding how “tendencies and latencies” towards particular visceral sensations develop via bodily relation with food, we can begin to more fully comprehend the patterns, inequities, habits, preferences, and opportunities that have developed around alternative food. In so doing, we can begin to sense what it would take for all kinds of different people to gain the capacity to feel food (and eat food) in other (i.e. alternative/ transgressive) ways. This ability for individuals and groups to sense/imagine/taste different bodily futures – to develop what we have been terming in shorthand as alternative “visceral imaginaries” – is a critical but heretofore under-discussed part of feminist empowerment and self-determination (as discussed, for example, by hooks 2004). Thus, as wary as we are of the oft-noted exclusiveness of alternative food, we are also optimistic about the (admittedly chaotic!) potentials for change that accompany visceral connections to food. We hope that academic work in this domain will lead to increased equity and justice within alternative food.

--Allison and Jessica Hayes-Conroy

Alcoff, Linda Martin (2006) Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Brison, S. (2002) Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, Princeton: Princeton University Press

Goodman, M. (2008) Towards visceral entanglements: Knowing and growing the economic geographies of food. in R. Lee, A. Leyshon, L. McDowell & P. Sunley (eds) A compendium of economic geography. Sage, London

Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press

hooks, bell (2003) Rock my Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem, Atria Books, New York

McWhorter, L. (1999) Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization, Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Probyn, E. (2000) Carnal appetites: Food, sex, identities. London: Routledge.

From Charlie Mather

I’d like to echo what has already been said about this blog: it’s a really interesting process and will be an amazing resource.

I was asked to contribute to the blog based on what Ian described in his first review as a ‘weird and disturbing’ paper I published together with Carla Mackenzie in Social and Cultural Geography (er, thanks Ian, I think…). The paper is about a promotional campaign for South African citrus that involved the use of ‘Outspan girls’ – they were young white South African women who were sent to Britain to promote Outspan branded oranges during the height of apartheid. The idea was that the tanned young ‘girls’ would, like the sun-ripened oranges, bring sunshine to a wet and dreary Britain. In Ian’s paper it was discussed together with other examples of how food can be ‘defetishized’ in a theoretically informed way.

I want to make three brief comments – one is about Outspan girls paper, the second is about postdisciplinarity and the third is about food inflation and food regulation.

In Louise Crewe’s contribution she writes about our preoccupation with body size and shape and its obvious relationship to food. She argues, following Bordo, that this preoccupation is one of ‘the most powerful normalizing mechanisms of the modern era’ (Bordo 2003). I couldn’t agree more and there are interesting insights from our paper on this issue. Although the campaign’s initial focus was on linking tanned Outspan ‘girls’ with sun-ripened South African oranges, the campaign shifted emphasis during the 1970s. Rather than stressing health and sunshine, the campaign designers decided to promote citrus as a slimming fruit. Consumers were provided with a wide range diet recipes involving grapefruit (for obvious reasons) but also oranges (oranges and peanuts, orange and gammon etc). The recipes came with additional promotional material including the amazing story of Pauline Turner, ‘who in her heart knew she was fat’ (see below). What is significant about this vignette and the other stories that accompanied the recipes was how deeply embedded they were in discourses on women, food and body shape. The women were described as not being able to control their urge to eat – Bordo argues that for women hunger is represented as ‘as an insistent, powerful force with a life of its own’. Women who don’t meet the ideal body size/shape – as is the case with Pauline who is described as ‘a nice plump armful’ are under enormous pressure especially within the domestic environment to control these urges with a view to reshaping their bodies (also below). There is also no question that this discourse is gendered: there is a male in one particular diet card and unlike his female counterpart he finds it a ‘piece of cake’ to lose weight. So I suppose I am joining others in this blog who have called for a continued and sustained engagement between food and bodies, or more broadly around the viscerality (is this a word?) of food and eating.



My second point is about postdisciplinarity, a theme that Ian discussed in his first review. A good example of postdisciplinary work that involves following networks, things and all sorts of complex actors is the research being done on biosecurity relating to livestock diseases like avian influenza, foot and mouth, BSE etc. I am thinking here of the really amazing papers by Hincliffe, Bingham and others (refs to follow). Because biosecurity involves a range of different disciplinary traditions including molecular biology, veterinary science, medicine, agriculture, trade etc, engaging with these processes means that you can’t be bound by disciplinary borders. You see this mix when biosecurity breaches happen. In my own very recent research on an avian influenza outbreak in ostriches in South Africa, the ‘command and control’ centre set up to eradicate the disease included the defence force, police, scientists, veterinarians, disaster management, the SPCA, department of agriculture, farmers, etc. etc. Being postdisciplinary is not without its challenges and I can’t work out whether I’ve wasted many hours reading hundreds of papers on the molecular biology of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N2 in ostriches. At the same time, doing this kind of cross disciplinary work where you’re trying to follow a virus in a food production system rather than the food itself is incredibly interesting and stimulating.

Finally, when I think of food these days the issue of food inflation has taken centre stage. We know from where I live that it is having a really devastating impact on poor people and the working poor. The state has responded by increasing social grants to poor people affected by higher food prices. Civil society organisations have argued that these measures involve ‘tinkering at the margins’ – the real source of the crisis is the structure of the country’s food system, which was liberalised (together with the rest of the economy) after the country’s first democratic election. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and other civil society groups have pointed to the concentration that has occurred in food production, processing and retailing in the last 10 years. This concentration has, they argue, allowed companies in the food sector to secure super profits at the expense of the poor. Their position has been fuelled by evidence that these large conglomerates are using their market power to fix prices for food and collude on payment systems for farmers [1]. So the current debate on food parallels the much broader debate on economic policies in post apartheid South Africa: although the government has put many policies and structures in place to create jobs and address poverty and inequality, this hasn’t had the desired impact because of the deeper impact of economic liberalisation. The politics of food in this part of the world is such that seemingly global processes (e.g. food inflation) are articulated in locally specific ways.


[1] Left leaning academics have for some time been concerned that the liberalisation of food and agriculture after 1994 would lead to new forms of private regulation that would allow large conglomerates to exercise market power. The evidence in milk and bread value chains seems to suggest that this is precisely what is happening.

Corporeality

Before the last two days are up, I’d like to add to the call to think about corporeality, subjectivity and the visceral as some of the bloggers have done. I’ve been inspired most recently by feminist theorists Elizabeth Grosz (2005) and Elspeth Probyn (2005) who, at least in these texts, are not writing about food but instead about embodied difference. Grosz is particularly interested in the debt representation owes to ontology and spends several chapters resituating nature and culture. My forthcoming paper on feminist corporeal theory, race and the farmers’ market attempts to talk about what raced bodies do there and how race is a corporeal relationship to food practices (growing, selling, buying food) as well as emergent in the frisson of contact. Bodies are not just inscribed by food practices but are materially produced through what people buy and sell. I used Ann Laura Stoler (2006) to consider intimacy as both revealing of structures of dominance (racial divisions at the Market) but also as holding the promise of ‘something else’. The question that is most compelling for me is what (anti-racist) politics would follow when bodies, formations in which they act and bodily practices are foregrounded?

The posts on this blog have been really wonderful to read.

Grosz, E. (2005) Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham: Duke University Press.
Probyn, E., 2005. Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Stoler, A. L. (2006) Intimidations of empire: predicaments of the tactile and unseen, in Stoler, A. L. (ed) Haunted by empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Duke University Press, Durham, pp. 1-22.


best,

Rachel Slocum

On guilt, disruptive narratives and the lingering taste of laksa

Thanks, Ian, for an opportunity to contribute belatedly (entirely my fault – sorry). I’ve re-read your papers and most of the posts to date, and find these rich in nuance, reflections and tough questions. With your deadline looming, I just want to sift through a couple of their many ingredients that together promise a satisfying review.

At the moment I’m starting work on an ethnography of an Ethiopian restaurant in an inner-suburb of Adelaide, Australia. (I’m an Anglo-celtic Australian woman, virtually monolingual, with England and Singapore the only countries I’ve ever lived in – at least for any considerable time.) With each new research project, it seems I experience afresh the hooks (1992)/Cook et al (1999)/Heldke (2003)/whoever [add your favourite anthropologists here] dilemmas of ‘eating the Other’, with all their attendant feelings of guilt and ambivalence. To assuage the conscience, I once promised myself that I would only carry out ethnographic work in which I had some legitimate ‘location’, some connection, a reason for hanging around. Hence, my account (Duruz, 2007) of the introduction of the nyonya dish laksa (from the Straits Settlements of Malacca, Penang and Singapore) into the culinary and political cultures of Adelaide during the 1970s and 1980s. At first, this chapter took shape as a story of Singaporean and Malaysian immigrant communities’ home-making through ‘productive nostalgia’ (Blunt, 2003: 722), with the taste of laksa becoming ritually associated with small businesses established close to the fresh food market where I shop every week. Over time, this chapter took on a life of its own, teasing out a story of a generation of Anglo-Australians – their coming-of-age (politically, culinarily) and nostalgic yearning about this subsequently.

However, while laksa might form part of my own political history, especially in an earlier climate of Australian leftist/feminist/ multiculturalist leanings towards Asia, the road now to my neighbourhood café, Addis Ababa, with its ‘olfactory geographies’ (Law, 2001: 273) of injera (bread baked from rice-flour) and dishes of robustly spiced siga wat and fasolia, is less clear. After all, this is not my community. This is not my food. This is not my language. Am I just a greedy stickybeak once again? Probably … but not quite.

To allay the usual breast-beating and guilt (though not for a minute denying the seriousness of cultural theft through appropriation and commodification), I turn to the following as sources of comfort. Traditionally, I’ve found a kind of solace in the resonances of Ien Ang’s conception of ambivalence (2001: 200-201). Ian has already quoted my drawing on Ien Ang in a previous paper (see ‘mixing’, n.vi ), so I’ll simply add here that the element of instability that Ang’s ‘ambivalence’ implies can be very useful – one is never too comfortable, too complacent, but, at the same time, never so completely unsettled that some kind of cultural exchange becomes impossible. In this way, guilt is transformed into an effective tool for understanding difference rather than hovering in the wings, always ready to perform a script of self-indulgent self-blame in which the white ‘ “Anglo”-cosmopolitan eating subject’ (Hage, 1997: 118) is (yet again) positioned centre stage. Comfort is also to be found in Narayan’s powerful decentring of whiteness as the fulcrum of relationships to ‘others’, and her shifting of emphasis to relationships between various ‘others’ (1997: 184). I have been playing with this idea for some time, and it seems it has also emerged in different forms within the posts. Crudely put, despite my Anglo middle-classness, cultural capital and just plain disposable capital, at Addis Ababa I am not the centre of attention. The focus here, instead, is on the strength of the Ethiopian community (its culture, languages, politics, food, religion, citizenship status) and its complex relationships with various ‘others’ (refugees, poor people, students, working class ‘Anglo’ women, academics, travelers, local workers, various ethnic groups – African, Asian) who appear at its doors. I am treated kindly, but often ignored, which is salutary (I suppose). At the same time, this is not to deny the circuits of power in which small ‘ethnic’ food businesses are placed: a positioning usually to their disadvantage and certainly not one of privilege.

More recently, my place and actions at the corner table (enthusiastically mopping up curries with injera, licking the last tastes from my fingers, inhaling the spicy aromas from the smoking bark accompanying the coffee, listening to the sound of animated conversation I can’t understand …) has been confirmed by Lai Ah Eng. Researching exchanges in ‘mixed’ public housing neighbourhoods in Singapore, she says:
While there is an advantage and need … [for researchers to work within their own ethnic communities] there is also a place, and perhaps even a necessity for researchers to go beyond their own ethnic boundaries to undertake cross-cultural work. After all, in a multi-ethnic society, there is nothing more crucial than interethnic and cross-cultural understanding – a task that both the anthropologist and the oral historian are in a very good position to effect (1998: 113).

As a faux geographer (sympathetic to, but with a different intellectual lineage from those who call geography ‘home’) as well as an ardent ethnographer, here I want to respond to Damian Mayne’s question on ‘following’ as imagery/a strategy in teaching and research: ‘must following always to be ethnographic and about relations between producers and consumers?’ While the answer is probably no, I suppose, I actually want to take the discussion elsewhere, commenting briefly on the power of ethnography for unravelling binaries (production/consumption; self/other; embodied/abstracted) and disrupting the taken-for-granted. Most of my own work has evolved from the curious, unsettling detail in people’s stories – the moment that doesn’t ‘fit’, offering the opportunity to ‘think against the grain’ of established theoretical frameworks. It is this ‘not-fitting’ that I find so beguiling and so challenging. Furthermore, through the dynamic of talking and listening (while tasting, touching and hearing and smelling), it is possible to trace how people try/don’t try to make their stories ‘fit’ or subversively allow these to poke beyond the usual boundaries. A mother originally from an Ethiopian village who, contrary to ‘tradition’, has also learnt to make lasagna and pizza … the practice of handwashing in the restaurant explained to Anglo-Australians as necessary for purposes of ‘hygiene’, to various ‘others’ as respect for ‘culture’ – such details permit the strangeness of the everyday (Highmore, 2002: 12ff) but also the possibility of multiple perceptions and more complicated conceptions of identities than mythical figuring allows.

Time to go home. I’ll be back at Addis next week, still curious, always hungry for more. Meanwhile, the taste of siga wat lingers.

Additional References:
Ang, A. (2001) On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West. London: Routledge.
Blunt, A. (2003) Collective memory and productive nostalgia: Anglo-Indian homemaking at McCluskieganj. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, 717-38.
Cook, I., Crang P. & Thorpe, M. (1999) Eating into Britishness: multicultural imaginaries and the identity politics of food. In Sasha Roseneil and Julie Seymour (eds) Practising Identities: Power and Resistance. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 223-248.
Duruz, J (2007) From Malacca to Adelaide … : fragments towards a biography of cooking, yearning and laksa. In Sidney C.H. Cheung and Tan Chee-Beng (eds) Food and Foodways in Asia: Resource, Tradition and Cooking. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 183-200.
Hage, G. (1997) At home in the entrails of the west: multiculturalism, ‘ethnic food’ and migrant home-building. In Helen Grace, Ghassan Hage, Lesley Johnson, Julie Langsworth and Michael Symonds Home/World: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West. Annandale, NSW: Pluto, 99-153.
Heldke, L. (2003) Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer. London: Routledge.
Highmore, B. (2002) Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Routledge.
Lai, A.E. ((1998) Some experiences and issues of cross-cultural fieldwork. In P. Lim Pui Huen, James H. Morrison and Kwa Chong Guan (eds) Oral History in Southeast Asia: Theory and Method. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 98-115.
Law, L. (2001) home cooking: Filipino women and geographies of the senses in Hong Kong. Ecumene 8 (3), 264-283.

Straight-up Food Geographies

Thanks to Ian for the invite and the reminder nudge. Hopefully this will just squeak in before the deadline, as my department is currently interviewing a new head which has consumed my time of late. This has had one significant benefit: spending serious amounts of departmental cash on taking candidates to expensive restaurants around town, and to do some consuming, participant observation, and thinking all at the same time.

My first comment regarding Ian’s intriguing and challenging progress reviews, and this excellent and rapidly proliferating blog, is regarding the role of restaurants. They are simultaneously great and poor places to reflect on ‘mixing’ and ‘following’. Great, because of the wide variety of food ingredients and preparation methods that are embodied, and because the close hubbub of humanity lends to interesting evesdropping on conversations on and around food. Poor, because most ingredients, and indeed many preparation methods in most (but not all) restaurants, are hidden from actual view, and so ‘things’ are not so easily ‘followed’. Wine lists are invariably great places to trawl the globe, but menus rarely mention the origin of food, unless it’s some signature piece (Loch Fyne salmon, Prosciutto di Parma, and Bluff oysters come to mind). Some restaurants quite deliberately bring the food preparation into customer view, such as the theatricism of Teppanyaki (which got a mention in ‘Mixing’), Mongolian barbeques, and Brazilian churrascaria, but for most we can only vicariously experience the culinary show through Gordon Ramsey and a multitude of other food ‘reality’ TV. This is important because of the increasingly out-sourced nature of food preparation in many households over the last decade, reducing the opportunity for these households to make more informed choices about the origins of their meal ingredients, beyond choosing the type of restaurant. Interestingly, McDonalds is a standout among fast food chains for highlighting through TV advertising the local origin of its ingredients, at least in New Zealand (pickles apparently being the only exception to NZ sourcing). If only their foods weren’t so poor in what they mixed together…

I liked the two vignettes Ian opened and closed ‘Mixing’ with, though their similarities struck me more than their differences, particularly on the notion of authenticity. I am reminded of an ad for Patak’s curry sauces that is currently running in New Zealand, with the tagline “straight-up Indian”. The TV ad is overdubbed from its original language (unknown, but the audience is meant to presume it is ‘Indian’, judging from the music and appearance of the actor) with a country-bumpkin Kiwi accent. This perhaps signifies three things: the supposed authenticity of the product; the pseudo-sexual imagery implied in the tagline; and the pastiche of a budget ad in the knowing style of asynchronised Japanese-American overdubbing, positioning the brand as authentic but inexpensive. Authenticity is a theme I see running through many of the blog entries, be it fairtrade (real income support to the people that matter?), organic (really better for the environment/worker/health of consumer, or simply a segmentation strategy to extract greater margins?), local (carbon footprint vs trade-aid?), as well as the whole discussion around bell hooks’ “eating others”.

Third, food is frequently bound up in notions of nationalism as well as ethnicity; we eat countries as well as ethno-cultures. There is nothing “more American than apple pie” (or “Tex-Mex” or Twinkies or doughnuts); Greece is Tzatziki (and the salad); Japan is sushi; and the New Zealand signature desert is Pavlova (with Kiwi[fruit]), although such assertions tend to infuriate Australians who nefariously claim it as theirs. Fusion food may try to blend these “national signifiers”, and their significance is often shallow or regionalism transcended (witness chicken tikka masala being recognised as Britain’s national dish – see Collingham, 2006; and Robin Cooke’s famous speech in 2001). In my reading of Ian’s pieces, the notion of (ethnic) food is couched in positive terms, and it is the language around food that needs working on (similar to Gibson-Graham’s (1996) notion that the language available to describe the economy in part determines the kinds of economy that can exist). But what happens when the food itself is contested: whale, dog, cow (in India), horse (for pets or humans), let alone alcohol in the middle east? Henry Buller’s blog entry discusses animal vs food geographies, but more could be made of this treacherous ground, I feel.

I take heart from the blog discussion and Ian’s mentions in both papers the disquiet that surrounds the producer-consumer linkage and the “missing consumer”. Ian notes that many commodity chain studies progress from the producer/worker only so far as the retailer, and often not even that far, whereas consumption studies often link retailer to consumer, but not further backwards (see for example Danny Miller et al, 1998), and consumption studies reviewed by Louise Crewe (2001, 2003) and Jon Goss (2004, 2006). The BBC documentary Mange Tout did this to a limited extent, looping back to a middle-class dinner party and tracing links to producers/workers in Zimbabwe (see a UK student’s blog on the doco here: http://jamesomalley.co.uk/blog/2005/11/mange-tout), but that is a rare example. It’s not producer-consumer links we need to worry about, so much; it’s crossing the retailers (in both directions, and both meanings). While Ian’s (2004) “Follow the thing: Papaya” paper included an end consumer in his wonderful exposition, ‘Emma’ was borrowed from another project, and did not herself directly consume the fruit (though the ‘sting in the tale’ was the number of products she was unknowingly consuming that might contain papain extracts). Not always ‘missing’, then, but definitely muted. Can’t consumers shout, in the way that Mike Goodman is accused of? Would we want to hear them if they do?

Kersty Hobson, David Nally and Louise Crewe all blog that the consumer cannot / should not be loaded with responsibility for solving ethical problems in food supply, since this privileges the rich that can and absolves corporates from their moral duties. David Nally’s quotation from Felicity Lawrence’s new book (Eat Your Heart Out) is quite telling: “… Then the supermarkets will be able to say ‘Ethics? We just do what our consumers want.” Of course this is what supermarkets already do: Tesco is not a charity, and consumers are (mostly/often/occasionally, depending on their location) free to choose other sources of their food with different ethical approaches, albeit not at Tesco prices (witness the Whole Foods Market in London). This is a present reality, not a future nightmare scenario, and consumer choices DO matter, even if the politics of this is not always explicit, and choices are inherently constrained (it is difficult to signal to a Tesco supermarket which products you would like to buy that are not currently stocked, though this demand signalling is more effective with online shopping as failed searches are recorded).

Ian no doubt asked me to participate because of my status as a refugee: a lapsed (food/retail) geographer, now in exile in a business school in the antipodes. Perspective and context do matter, and teaching consumer behaviour and going to marketing conferences has altered my perception of the ‘dark arts’ of food marketing. While I miss wandering down Birmingham corridors to chat with Ian (though he has since exiled himself to the wilds of Devon), I am enjoying the renaissance within marketing of its social uses and greater reflexivity of its impacts, and the increasing importance of qualitative methods, particularly ethnography.

In “following the thing”, what Ian and others mean (or at least do) is following a product from point of production to some end-point down the supply chain. In the other direction flow money (rapidly reducing as intermediaries clip the ticket) and value (likewise, as most value added at retail sale comes from the retailer’s assortment of like products at a location convenient to the consumer, taking the risk of spoilage and theft, as noted in Ian’s (2004) Papaya piece). Louise Crewe’s post notes the disconnect between these: consumers that “know everything about price, but nothing about value”. Marketers (in the “real world” sense) make this disconnect their business, because if the link between value and price is obfuscated, then margins can be improved, as a cost-plus markup is replaced by “what the market will bear”. Consumer behaviour research suggests that consumers are increasingly aware of this game. But marketers are also aware that consumers are aware, which consumers are in turn increasingly aware of… This circuitous reflexivity of course leads to the designer / Primark jeans conundrum that Louise discusses, where consumers have little idea whether a luxury brand is more expensive to produce or just a basic product with incredibly fat margins, and so might as well start with the cheapest, with ramifications back through the supply chain.

I intend this discussion to note that there are many “things” that can be “followed”, not all of them tangible like papayas or French beans, from different starting points. Because of the signalling power (if not truly emancipatory power) of consumer choices, starting from the consumer and working back through the retailer/market to the producer/worker is as valuable theoretically and politically as the reverse, and something I am attempting to do for organic foods (in NZ, and the UK to Dominican Republic, with Amy Trauger), and for ethical consumption more generally (NZ). Farmers markets of course shorten and simplify these links dramatically, as Moya Kneafsey et al (2007) found out in the UK and I am discovering in NZ, but their small scale also reduce their political significance.

There is at least one benefit of an antipodean exile: the excellent annual Agri-Food Research Network conference, which brings together a truly multidisciplinary audience as well as practitioners. The next is in Sydney in November – see http://www.geosci.usyd.edu.au/news_events/afrn08/index.shtml for details.


References:

Collingham EM (2006). Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors. Oxford University Press

Cooke R (2001). Speech to Social Market Foundation, extracted in The Guardian, April 19 2001.http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/apr/19/race.britishidentity

Crewe L. 2000. Geographies of retailing and consumption. Progress in Human Geography, 24(2), 275-290.

Crewe L. 2003. Geographies of retailing and consumption: markets in motion. Progress in Human Geography, 27(3), 352-362.

Gibson-Graham J.K. 1996. The end of capitalism (as we knew it). Blackwell, Oxford.

Goss J. 2004. Geography of consumption 1. Progress in Human Geography, 28(3), 369-380.

Goss J. 2006. Geography of comsumption[sic]: the work of consumption. Progress in Human Geography, 30(2), 237-249.

Kneafsey M, Holloway L, Cox R, Dowler E, Venn L, Tuomainen H. 2007. Reconnecting Consumers, Food and Producers: Exploring Alternatives. Oxford: Berg.

Miller D, Jackson P, Thrift N, Holbrook B, Rowlands M. 1998. Shopping, Place and Identity. Routledge, London

Murphy AJ, Trauger A. 2006. On the Moral Equivalence of Foods: Organic and 'Conventional' Bananas in Global Production Networks. Massey University Department of Commerce Working Paper Series 06.06 / SSRN working paper (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1068404)

Mixing in aesthetics

Dear Ian et al.,
Many thanks for the invitation. What follows takes seriously the luxury of the blog format whereby big topics can be mused on and written in short periods of time! In your really informative and enjoyable paper you ask: “Have important perspectives been underplayed, misunderstood, ignored?” (p.10). When considering the various geographies of food, I think it is important to consider the role of aesthetics.

It seems to me that the social practices and experiences of preparing and eating food bring to the fore aesthetic spaces qua the taking place of sensory values and judgments of taste. I believe that aesthetics, so often eclipsed by or mistakenly opposed to ‘the political’, is one of the most undervalued categories in critical geographies of food. Too often in critical human geography, our engagements with aesthetic events and spaces involve an impatient appeal to their more ‘serious’ socio-economic and political imports and ramifications. I think it is important that we are able to find ways to critically map the aesthetical taking place as both part of and separate from the social and the political (Kingsbury, 2005; forthcoming). On the question of the ethics of interpreting Otherness, Tim Dean (2002, 38) writes the following:

Although cultural studies (especially in its postcolonialist variants) has elaborated an ethical commitment to honoring the alterity of other cultures and their subjects—that is, a commitment to respecting the various ways in which different cultural ontologies might not make sense within the terms of hegemonic discourse—there has been less willingness to extend this ethical commitment to the aesthetic realm as such…While we try to respect the otherness of other persons, our interpretive practices do not respect the otherness of art. It is as if art needed to come from an alien culture before we could concede that some aspect of it remains untranslatable into meaning (p.38).

I don’t think it is too far a stretch to replace the word “art” with “food” in the above. I think there is a great deal of alluring Otherness that permeates the social spaces of food cultures: for example, the strange taste of a certain ingredient; the elusive X-factor that makes a certain food exquisite or repellant; the odd way someone prepares a specific dish; the difficulty of putting into words the wonderful or dreadful taste of a food item. The aesthetics of what you call the “rich and complex connections” (p.9) in Simon Choo’s example seems especially relevant here. Perhaps these allures and enigmas of food (that pertain to the senses, especially taste and smell) are one of the reasons why food is a key vehicle for defining, bonding, and mediating people’s experiences of cultural Otherness (see also Žižek, 1993, 200-237). Take for example the policies and practices of multiculturalism. And here I write from the perspective of living in Vancouver, BC, Canada. During the past decade or so in Canada, the state, corporations, and settlement agencies have increasingly invested in multicultural events including festivals and parades to promote local ethno-cultural heritage, diversity, and unity through the consumption of food. While these events are structured around the aesthetics of celebration, enjoyment, and revelry, as we know they are also fraught with political struggles over appropriate cultural practices, identities, and beliefs.

I believe that much of multiculturalism and its political dimensions are not entirely “beyond, food, festival, folklore, and fashion” (Meyer and Rhoades, 2006), but also intimately related to such domains insofar as they incarnate the aesthetics of food. I agree with geographers, for example, yourself (Cook and Harrison, 2003) and Claire Dwyer and Phil Crang (2002) that the commodification (of food) is not a thing that is submitted or done to pre-existing ethnicities and ethnic subjects but a process through which ethnicities are reproduced. I would argue that much of this process of reproducing and defining ethnicities and cultures is intimately related to aesthetics qua the enduring alluring mysteries of food.

Well, I hope the above is suitably ‘bloggy’. It’s sketchy for sure and that’s why I’d like to devote some of my future research on the intersections between the aesthetics, politics, and multicultural consumption.

Best wishes,
Paul Kingsbury
Department of Geography,
Simon Fraser University,
Canada

References
Cook, I. and Harrison, M. 2003. Cross over food: re-materializing postcolonial geographies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28 (3), 296-317.
Dwyer, C. and Crang, P. 2002. Fashioning Ethnicities: The Commercial Spaces of Multiculture. Ethnicities 2 (3), 410-430.
Dean, T. 2002. Art as symptom: Žižek and the ethics of psychoanalytic criticism. Diacritics 32 (2), 21-41.
Kingsbury, P. Jamaican tourism and the politics of enjoyment. Geoforum 36 (1), 113-132.
Kingsbury, P. Forthcoming. Unearthing Nietzsche’s Bomb: Explosiveness, Nuance, Aesthetics. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies.
Meyer, C.F. and Rhoades, E.K. 2006. Multiculturalism: Beyond food, festival, folklore, and fashion. Childhood Education 42 (2), 82-87.
Žižek, S. 1993. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.

Messy, Visceral, and Tasty: Just How I Like My Grub

Ian et al, many thanks for the luncheon date as well as the sorts of things you have put on the menu for everyone to digest (ahem); sorry also that I am so late to the table (double ahem). Not quite drunk yet, but am trying.

I think I will take this moment to continue my ‘shouting’ (jeez was I that loud? Don’t answer that Julie) and take this space to reflect on Ian’s pieces, everyone’s comments, as well as some things I have been thinking about recently. Sorry I am not going to weave these things into a narrative, but here goes nothing; and pardon the light referencing as well as I am being extremely lazy.

· Alison says she might come across as ‘anti-consumption’? How is this possible? If you were anti-consumption, you would be dead. This is a short way saying consumption—and food consumption—is not negotiable at some very basic biological level; we all know this but it gets lost sometimes. Rather there is consumption, then there is Consumption (i.e. meanings, relationalities, affects, etc) just like there is consumption and there is Ethical/Sustainable consumption. This too is a ‘mixing’: the banal/ordinary with the hyper-meaningful et al in (and outside) of consumption.

· Right let’s get to it then: there is food, then there is Food. The point? This gets to what Probyn (2000; 32) talks about in terms of the ‘visceral’ nature of food and eating. Here is how she puts it:

[e]ating refracts who we are. Food/body/eating assemblages reveal the ways in which identity has become elementary, and that its composite elements are always in movement. As alimentary assemblages, eating recalls with force the elemental nature of class, gender, sexuality, nation. But beyond these monumental categories, eating places different orders of things and ways of being alongside each other, inside and outside inextricably linked. Beyond the facile celebration of authenticity, sincerity or conversely of the simulacra and artifice, alimentary identities reveal a mix of the primal and the hyperfake. But what is of interest here is the ways in which this extends our understanding and appreciation of the rich complexity of living in the present. … For some, this means wearing one’s stomach on one’s sleeve: thinking about where food comes from, or how core identities are now ingested in multicultural ways of being in the world. As such, these alimentary identities are ways of reworking the categories that once defined us. Now, beyond a model of inside and out, we are alimentary assemblages, bodies that eat with vigorous class, ethnic and gendered appetites, mouth machines that ingest and regurgitate, articulating what we are, what we eat and what eats us.

Now I’ll take Julie’s self-citation one step further and quote myself (Goodman, 2008; well it’s not published yet and I’d like to try some of this stuff out here) in order to take her point a bit further:

Here, drawing on Elspeth Probyn’s (2000) work, I wish to suggest that the complex and situated visceral nature of food—food as profound and deeply felt in the gut, yet also quite ordinarily instinctive, elemental and ‘everyday’ in the biological sense—needs to inform considerations of its economic geographies. This viscerality of food, then, is about the powerful role that food plays in constructing and re-constructing our lives, identities, families, communities and cultures and the uneven economic geographies these create and are enmeshed in. Yet, focusing at the scale of the consuming body is just one way of working up and on the economic geographies of food. I want to argue that it is just as equally important to consider how absolutely viscerally entangled food is in the landscapes of contemporary capitalistic political economies. This then is about the powerful role that uneven economic geographies—and also uneven environmental, social and political geographies—play in shaping and reshaping food and how these political economies, then, construct and reconstruct our lives, identities, families, communities and cultures…

The viscerality of food is about its connections—inside, outside, gender, sexuality, et al—but also how food contains the emotional (e.g. one’s stomach on one’s sleeve), the inexpressible, and the biological and how these are all inseparable and entangled in complex, complementary and ambiguous ways. The visceral incorporation of food in the rendering of our corporeal bodies (FitzSimmons and Goodman, 1998) is about the centrality of the meanings of food, but also very much the (non)emotional and biological relationships we have with it. In short, food is ordinary in its characteristic as simply the ‘fuel’ that keeps us going, but also extra-ordinary in the meals that make who and what we, our families and our cultures are. Simultaneously, food is also extra-ordinary in its characteristic as fuel and also ordinary in the meals that make who and what we, our families and our cultures are. You are what you eat, but also how, when, where and why you eat. Thus, food is ‘good to think’ (Beardsworth and Keil, 1997; see also Sage, 2003)—especially for those that can buy into this knowledge economy—but also very much ‘good to feel’ and often in ‘more-than-representational’ (Lorimer, 2005) in unconscious and ‘primal’ ways. Thus, reflexive aesthetic taste and its antimonies (Guthman, 2003) are just one factor in constructing the visceral entanglements we have with food, especially in a world where a full belly can often trump those dictates of ‘good taste’.

· This means to me that food can never just be about politics; thus there are food politics, then there are Food Politics, the later of which has been aired quite well by Guthman, Allen, et al. Food can never be ‘fixed’ given it is so messy and ‘dirty’, incomplete and un-orderly. Can we start to talk about food politics as ‘dirty’ and what might be gained doing this and what might be lost? In short, political food/food politics gotta taste good or no one will eat them. Thus, we can ask the following: when/where is food mixing versus fiid ‘Mixing’? When/where is food politics, versus food ‘Politics’? When is good tasting, versus ‘Good Tasting’? What are the boundaries here, who draws them and why? Both Julie and Ian are onto something here, but from different angles I think.

· Building on this, food suffers from a radical contingency. Just as the same pizza from Pizza Express (chain in the UK) will taste different each time you eat it, so is there contingency to everything having to do with food, especially around meanings. Take Mexican Food (as Ian does in ‘Mixing’). For me this is the taste and indeed meaning of home (Southern California); here, in the UK, it is ‘exotic’ to some extent. For me, never; I grew up with it, love it and can’t get enough of it. It’s ‘my’ food because of were I grew up and what I ate. Or take turkey: at Thanksgiving, it is invested with conviviality, family, affect, etc; other times of the year, it’s just an alternative dish to chicken to keep the menu different and my palate from going stale.

· Where is taste in all of these discussions? Then again, there is taste and there is Taste. Why is it always so vilified when we surely like things to taste good? Clearly I know about the classist issues with taste, discernment, preciousness (thanks for this Julie), but, again, even political/alternative foods are going to have to taste good on some level. I love Pringles and can’t get enough of them I hate to admit; talk about ‘tasteless’, processed, low class, uniformed, unhealthy food, but for the life of me I cannot stop eating them, especially the Paprika ones! What about some fair trade Pringles? Also, here often good tasting (fusion food?) gets in the way of ‘authenticity’; hey if it tastes good who cares if its ‘proper’???

· Some interesting research is showing that consumers (kids actually) like it when the normal products they buy (sneakers, chocolate bars) normally become fair trade/organic. Thus making a fair trade Twix might actually be a good idea to spread fair trade, open markets, promote development, etc. So sayeth Nichols and Lee (2006); it is very ‘marketing’ oriented but I think the point is a very interesting one in connection to ethical consumption and fair trade. Is there radical possibility in the fair trade Twix or just another consumerist patch on the System?

· Why don’t we every talk about the ironies of ethical consumption? I like Barnett et al’s work but, come on, the inequalities and privilege of being concerned with ‘governing the ethical self’ as a fair trade consumer surely has to be questioned a bit when at the other end of the chain people are concerned about clean water, not going hungry and have access to toilets. Additionally, we really have gone too far around this cultural/consumption bend and have forgotten about the effects of the cultural politics of ethical consumption/fair trade on the actual people producing this stuff; fair trade ethical consumers have no idea that the drive to ‘quality’ in these production networks has actually left out those producers in most need of access to these markets because they have the worst quality compared to others; ethical consumption might be about and ‘ethics of care’ over distance but it is selective and it is competitive; Tad M’s (Mutersbaugh, 2002) work also gets right to this in organic markets. Here we need to do work on the realities and praxis of ethical consumption, not just theorise about it and call it ‘ethical’ when, at the other end and based on market realities, it might not really be so ethical.

· Is ethical consumption ‘alternative’ anymore? Wal-mart is one of the biggest purveyors of organic food and supermarkets in the UK sell more fair trade than anyone else. Is it time to talk about these as ‘transgressive’ foods with the alternative now thoroughly in the mainstream/conventional and vice versa? Fine, we are selling more organics, thus using less pesticides, etc; great we are selling more fair trade thus more Development. But, whence the cultural politics of these thing? I think we have lost there in some respects; this will be a point I make in an upcoming paper in Geoforum (if I can ever get it done!)

· The mirror of consumption stuff that Julie mentioned; yes this too is coming in the same Geoforum paper mentioned above, but just think about who is the face of ‘alternative’ fair trade consumption now (at least in the UK)? Chris Martin the lead singer of Coldplay. A celebrity is now fronting for what used to be a very different set of cultural politics in fair trade. Related quip: it’s sometimes worth looking in the mirror (reflexivity?) to see if you have something bad (racism?) caught in your teeth is it not???

· Transparency versus de-fetishisation: I think this is one of Julie’s key point made here and Ian you need to make some hay out of this if you can! We never can get ‘rid’ of that pesky fetish can we? It’s like a bad dinner, it keeps coming back and even ‘tearing it away’ (dare I say purging???) it makes itself anew as the re-fetished/de-fetished fetish! Ha, put that in your pipe and smoke it Karl!

Wow, for not having much to say, I sure blathered on. Hopefully something to chew on at least. And Ian, I think we are pretty much all in agreement: keep the style of writing as is (it is engaging no matter what others say!) and I love the ending; the later is about the visceral-ness/indeterminacy of writing—just like food—is it not???

Beardsworth, A. & Keil, T. (1997) Sociology on the menu: An invitation to the study of food and society (London: Routledge).

FitzSimmons, M. & Goodman, D. (1998). Incorporating nature: Environmental narratives and the reproduction of food, in: B. Braun and N. Castree (Eds.) Remaking reality: Nature at the millennium, pp. 194-220. (London: Routledge).

Goodman, M. (2008) Towards visceral entanglements: Knowing and growing the economic geographies of food. In A Compendium of Economic Geography eds. R. Lee, A. Leyshon, L. McDowell & P. Sunley, pp. Sage, London.

Guthman, J. (2003) Fast food/organic food: Reflexive tastes and the making of 'yuppie chow', Social and Cultural Geography, 4(1), pp. 45-58.

Lorimer, H. (2005) Cultural geography: The busyness of being 'more-than-representational', Progress in Human Geography, 29(1), pp. 83-94.

Mutersbaugh, T. (2002) The number is the beast: A political economy of organic-coffee certification and producer unionism, Environment and Planning A, 34, pp. 1165-1184.

Nicholls, A. & Lee, N. (2006) Purchase decision-making in fair trade and the ethical purchase 'gap': 'is there a fair trade twix?' Journal of Strategic Marketing, 14, pp. 369-386.

Probyn, E. (2000) Carnal appetites: Food, sex, identities (London: Routledge).

Sage, C. (2003) Social embeddedness and relations of regard: Alternative 'good food' networks in south-west ireland, Journal of Rural Studies, 19, pp. 47-60.

Afters/ Where should we go?

This blogs agenda is about the many facets within foods production and movement to consumption in the broader sense, but consumption is not straightforward either. There is no linear chain to describe our blogs movement; here, the commodity chain as a metaphor (Whatmore and Thorne 1997; Leslie and Reimer 1999), is not sufficient. “Aftering” is also about following place and the implications of place in the “consumers’ world” (Sack 1993) since, above all, place continues to inform our own particular geographies. In the global sense, there is only one world, leading us to consider the unsettling prospect that by constructing our own consumer world, we invariably contribute to the construction of others as well. Place and consumption are a moral project (Sack 1997), thus we are implicated, requiring that we take responsibility for our actions as they extend through geography. Broadly speaking, the purpose of this blog is to establish a framework leading to the understanding of how what people eat can also dictate what others must consume. In the end, challenging our consumption of foods into different categories such as desire (as in the fetish) versus need (Benson 2007) forces us to re-examine the idea of food itself. Maye echoes these thoughts (see blog) through the comment “what is the job of a critical food geographer?” Harvey’s central concern is about commodities and their “fingerprints of exploitation,” about where they are from and the abuse that geographic ignorance induces. How we are implicated (responsible) in the consumption imposed by us on others is as important as the extent to which it is hidden. We ask; “Do we have much to do with the process, even if unknowingly?” is it all just reflexive consumption- responding to that defetishising stimulus that Guthman questions? Disparities between the rich and poor emerge in the different geographies visible through food. But geography does not allow for ambiguous agency. Specific markets, specific commodities and specific processes of commodification mediate our own particular social and economic life much differently then those of ‘others.’

As a sense of locality, place is illuminated by the commodities moving through these places. Their movement becomes a means of identification. Appadurai (1986, 4) writes that there are other reasons for the circulation of commodities than the mere exchange of values; “desire and demand, reciprocal sacrifice and power interact to create economic value in specific social situations.” My interests in the linkages between consumers, their objects, and how they negotiate the various identities therein makes me realize I do not understand connections very well at all.

Recognizing the impacts of consumption forces us to acknowledge how economies filter our lives, give ‘life’ to commodities (Harvey 1990) and embed (Winter 2003) them with meanings. Fetishism, however, does more than replace social relations with object relations. Looking back along the delivery network to see from where the object has come, seeing the fingerprints of exploitation during production, is not enough. Harvey would argue that, we, by merely buying the food, are directly responsible for the lives of everyone in that chain, and willingly or not, the act of consumption signs us up to this reality, and we choose to take this knowledge into our world or choose to ignore it.

E. Melanie DePuis defines it thusly:

“A reflexive consumer is therefore not a social activist, nor is he or she necessarily committed to a particular political point of view, as espoused by other actors in the public sphere…. However, the reflexive consumer listens to and evaluates claims made by groups organized around a particular food issue…and evaluates his or her own activities based on what he or she feels is the legitimacy of these claims” (2002, 228).

In this way, reflexive consumerism makes a mockery of claims to understand those who bring food into our world since we can pick and choose how we consume, while those who produce and those who consume our scraps may not have that option.

The interrelatedness of place requires differing shades of interaction and agency. Because we stand in front of a produce section and next to someone whose “life world” requires that they eat what we throw away does not mean always that our consumption predicates his; the geographies of commoditization are subtler than that because, on the face of it, there is no causal relationship that had to happen.

In place, everything is local, even when acted upon a global scale, but we only recognize immediate effects upon people around us. Understanding the consequences of our actions as “geographic leviathans” (Sack 1997) requires that we connect the inequalities of society into our own lives beyond merely “thinking global, acting local.” Our place making mediates our ability to effectively see the consequences of our actions. Our place creates other places. Eating food creates collections of places each constructed for that project and connected by that food’s mobility. Some have the power to buy food and thus make places to that end, but places are interconnected and the power that creates places for consumption also makes places to deal with the waste created.

These revelations suggest that connectivity through material culture supersedes heritage and a food’s history. “It’s what we eat because we’ve always eaten it” no longer offers adequate solace as we confront the entangled politics of consumption. A particular commodity system is composed of relationships where some nodes have more power than others based on the relations they are each able to produce and maintain, while others are of a more reflexive nature. Each link, whether voluntary or not, reacts to the others as information is passed and received across the network while simultaneously reproducing relations locally on the landscape. Each agent is invested in the immediacy of their actions at the same time across all scales, regardless of their awareness. Human/object boundaries are questioned as the food enters the commodity system and physically moves from its origin to the places of its consumption. As it traverses arbitrary local/global distinctions and engages with human agents, the commodity system is produced and perpetuated, but the system itself is also dependant on place, and therefore, the meanings and value of a commodity are negotiated in place. Consumers, through and during negotiation decide price and by extension determine the composition of value and price differential for themselves as a representation of that value. Negotiation is inscribed by (and in) place, giving place agency in how price represents value. Some consumers then decide whether or not it comprises the social (ecological) relations hidden by the fetish while others simply buy dinner.

The point is, in places of consumption, we negotiate all facets of a commodity’s identity, whether or not we realize the full extent of what that means (realization of fetish—or into double fetish). What lies outside our negotiation are the side lives, or the forward life, of things. The markets where foods circulate are fraught with different uses and ideas about the culinary value of those foods. The markets themselves are a place and thus embedded within their own locally existing definitions. Commodity exchange is a valuable tool in the ongoing search for understandings of a globalizing world. Nature has been co-opted to produce foods in all seasons, the wastes of those foods becomes food for others when what is desired leaves nature behind or becomes segmented into different understandings of what nature is. By-products of consumption become products of consumption themselves, particularly in a recycling world. Geographers are presented with many opportunities for further research because of this.

Lucius Hallett IV, Western Michigan University

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______. (1997) Homo Geographicus: a framework for action, awareness, and moral concern. Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press.
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