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.