Geographies of food: 'Afters
Transcript of Geographies of food: 'Afters
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http://phg.sagepub.com/content/35/1/104The online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/0309132510369035
2011 35: 104 originally published online 29 April 2010Prog Hum GeogrMegan Blake, Richard Le Heron, Heather Putnam, Damian Maye and Heike Henderson
Duruz, Chris Philo, Henry Buller, Mike Goodman, Allison Hayes-Conroy, Jessica Hayes-Conroy, Lisa Tucker,Louise Crewe, David Nally, Emma Roe, Charles Mather, Paul Kingsbury, Rachel Slocum, Shoko Imai, Jean
Ian Cook, Kersty Hobson, Lucius Hallett IV, Julie Guthman, Andrew Murphy, Alison Hulme, Mimi Sheller,Geographies of food: 'Afters'
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Progress report
Geographies offood: ‘Afters’
Ian CookUniversity of Exeter, UK
Kersty HobsonAustralian National University, Australia
Lucius Hallett IVWestern Michigan University, USA
Julie GuthmanUniversity of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Andrew MurphyMassey University, New Zealand
Alison HulmeGoldsmiths, University of London, UK
Mimi ShellerDrexel University, USA
Louise CreweUniversity of Nottingham, UK
David NallyUniversity of Cambridge, UK
Emma RoeUniversity of Southampton, UK
Charles MatherUniversity of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Paul KingsburySimon Fraser University, Canada
Rachel SlocumUniversity of Wisconsin La Crosse, USA
Shoko ImaiUniversity of Tokyo, Japan
Jean DuruzUniversity of South Australia, Australia
Chris PhiloUniversity of Glasgow, UK
Henry BullerUniversity of Exeter, UK
Mike GoodmanKing’s College London, UK
Allison Hayes-ConroyBryn Mawr College, USA
Jessica Hayes-ConroyWheaton College, USA
Lisa TuckerInterdisciplinary artist, writer and curator, California,
USA
Megan BlakeUniversity of Sheffield, UK
Richard Le HeronUniversity of Auckland, New Zealand
Heather PutnamUniversity of Kansas, USA
Damian MayeCountryside and Community Research Institute, UK
Heike HendersonBoise State University, USA
Corresponding author:Ian Cook, School of Geography, University of Exeter,Exeter EX4 4RJ, UKEmail: [email protected]
Progress in Human Geography35(1) 104–120
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AbstractThis third and final ‘Geographies of food’ review is based on an online blog conversation provoked by the firstand second reviews in the series (Cook et al., 2006; 2008a). Authors of the work featured in these reviews –plus others whose work was not but should have been featured – were invited to respond to them, to talkabout their own and other people’s work, and to enter into conversations about – and in the process review– other/new work within and beyond what could be called ‘food geographies’. These conversations werecoded, edited, arranged, discussed and rearranged to produce a fragmentary, multi-authored text aimingto convey the rich and multi-stranded content, breadth and character of ongoing food studies research withinand beyond geography.
Keywordsfollowing, hunger, mixing, otherness, poverty, race, relating, viscerality
I IntroductionThe first two ‘Geographies of food’ reviewswere written by ‘Ian Cook et al.’. He chose thethemes. ‘Following’ (Cook et al., 2006) wasbased on research influenced by Arjun Appa-durai’s (1986) ‘social life of things’, DavidHarvey’s (1990) ‘getting behind the veil ofthe commodity fetish’, and George Marcus’(1995) ‘multi-sited ethnography’. ‘Mixing’(Cook et al., 2008a) was based on research influ-enced by bell hooks’ (1992) ‘eating the other’paper. In both, he said he wanted a final ‘Afters’1
review to be an experimental, blog-based, colla-borative, co-authored affair. In summer 2008,he set up http://food-afters.blogspot.com andinvited over 100 people to take part. Most werethe authors of the work cited (briefly and indetail) in ‘following’ and ‘mixing’. Others wereauthors of work that had not but perhaps shouldhave been cited. Also invited were those whohad discussed ideas, sent pdfs, and commentedon drafts of ‘following’ and ‘mixing’, and peo-ple who had got in touch after they were pub-lished. Finally, there were a handful of peoplewho had been recommended by others to beinvited to take part. He invited them to read andrespond to the ‘following’ and ‘mixing’ reviewson the blog. Eventually 26 of us did so, talkingabout our work, each other’s work, and otherwork that had (not) featured in the series so far.We were sociologists, artists, geographers andcultural, American and literary studies people.
Not all of us worked on food. We were PhD stu-dents, early-, mid- and late-career faculty. Wewere based in the UK, Canada, USA, New Zeal-and, South Africa, Australia, and Japan. Few ofus had blogged before.
Here, what ‘food studies’ are became an openquestion. They were being defined and redefinedas we each brought to the conversation our ownquestions and concerns about difference, ethics,materialities, politics and change. Our bloggingmirrored the complexity, diversity and fluidityof the work we discussed. But these were discus-sions with a purpose: to produce this writtenpaper. Following advice from similar online-to-journal writing experiments (eg, Sakellariadiset al., 2008), Ian coded all 43,000 words of blogcontent posted before a deadline, put together afirst draft, sent it to us for comments and sugges-tions, posted a Google doc version for us to workon, and then drafted this final version.2 What wereceived, discussed and worked on was novel forus and for this journal’s progress reports. Themain body of the paper comprised carefully jux-taposed fragments from our blog conversations.This was collective writing that did not assumethe ironing-out of all differences, the adoptionof a uniform voice or a uniform direction ofargument. It showed lines of thought, not all ofwhich related to one another. It was surprisinglycoherent and faithful to the blog. Written thisway, we hoped, these conversations about foodand its geographies could continue.
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II ConversationsI am in the process of reading John Law’s (2004) After method: mess in social science research.
The book basically explores where the desire and practice of (re)presenting our worlds (in our case,through our research and publications) as singular comes from: and how we might work in and
through the multiplicities/slipperiness of things that we all encounter but don’t quite know how toput across, and thus end up silencing – arguments/experiences I am sure you are all familiar with. Sothis got me thinking of different ways such approaches might work for this blog/project – how we
might tell divergent stories, opinions, representations, etc, in one piece. Kersty
While it may be said that‘Marx is dead, capitalism
won’, it must be notedthat the fetish link, or
view, the ‘rip-aside theveil’ (Harvey, 1990),
continues to be both usedas well as useful. As
noted ... earlier ..., it isoften (not) caricatured
and dismissed and yet isstill with us. [Julie]
Guthman’s (2008a) paper... – as well as my work inKansas City and ongoingwork in Kalamazoo, MI’s
farmers market – pointthat out in a new and veryinteresting way. From my
field notes comes thequote ‘if a Spanish or
black person is inBrookside, they had bet-ter be either mowing thelawn, cleaning the pool,or taking care of some-
one’s kids!’ The crux ofthese studies is that even
well-intentioned andwhat seem on the surfaceto be anti-racist policiesare once again not what
they seem. Guthman hasdone a great job at the
I have always wondered whether the trope of tearing aside the veilever did justice to Marx’s notion of the commodity fetish ... with itsemphasis on the violence of the abstraction, [this] does much, muchmore than invoke a ruse that must be exposed for its truth. ... I find itunfortunate that far too much work that employs political economy(and sometimes even other work that analyzes representationalpractices) does indeed get caricatured as ‘tearing away the veil’ (seeGoodman and DuPuis, 2002). But this begs the question as to whethercommodity chain analysis and/or the construction of alternative/ethical trade networks was ever about defetishization. While that wascertainly the call of Harvey (1990) and Hartwick (2000) in terms ofcommodity chain analysis and has also been applied to ethical tradenetworks (see Hudson and Hudson, 2003), the defetishized (ethical)commodity feels like a post-hoc read, and probably an oxymoron(Guthman, 2004) ... It seems that much has been read onto theseethical/alternative commodity production and trade networks, butinvestigations of the real politics3 of these things has revealed somuch, well, less. I think Aimee Shreck (2002; 2005) ... does a goodjob of spelling out the possibilities and limitations of fair tradespecifically in terms of its own claims. She seems to say that fair tradeis redistributional at best. Shifting where ‘value’ is produced andappropriated is not tantamount to defetishizing, however. And somemore recent work on fair trade sheds doubt even on its practicalredistributional qualities (see Tad Mutersbaugh’s 2002 and 2005work ...). I have written quite a bit over the last several yearsaddressing the distributional consequences of organic regulationmostly through the analytics of political economy, and specificallyrent. My most recent piece in Antipode (2007) is a sort of capstone ofthis work where I consider several different types of voluntary foodlabels, which others have posed as resistant to neoliberalglobalization. I argue that these labels are in some respects analogs tothe very things they are purported to resist, namely property rights thatallow these ascribed commodities to be traded in a global market;among other things they also support neoliberal rationalities of rule.
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peeling back to show this.This suggests that themetaphor of the fetish
exists and is still relevant.Lucius
Given the way most of these labels are almost always incentivizedthrough intentional barriers to entry, I would say that ethicalconsumption practices are necessarily for the better off (cf. [Alison’s]posting [below]), and that is putting aside how ‘organic, local’ hails aparticular sort of consumer. Julie
Julie, [while] I agree with much of what you add here, [I don’t agree with your last sentence] ...While on average consumers of ethically oriented goods and services may be better off, and indeedsurveys of organic consumers do indicate this is true (Hughner et al., 2007; Murphy, 2008), it is
surely a caricature to imply this is necessarily so. Some not-very-wealthy consumers DO privilegelocal and/or organic food despite its significant impact on their budget, for two reasons: it’s bettervalue (in some circumstances lasts longer than supermarket produce that’s travelled much further,
or been handled more); or because they willingly sacrifice quantity for quality (of food volumeand/or nutritional outcomes). For example, low-income consumers of a weekly organic box
scheme I have studied in Vancouver welcomed the variety of fresh produce it delivered,because it forced them to be inventive with the foods they cooked and to cook more often from
scratch, which often works out cheaper if you discount the time value of labour. This isencouraged by the box scheme operator, with the inclusion of recipes for the ‘unusual’ itemsincluded in that week’s box (such as curly kale). The fact that modern consumers need recipesto know how to cook and serve what was once one of Europe’s most common vegetables, is a
story in its own right. Andrew
Isn’t that what we’re trying to do ... ? Get people to thinkabout where things come from? Get them to have the kind of
‘embodied’ experience Ian mentioned in the ‘Following’piece? Get them to feel, and care, and take responsibility?
Sure. I guess we are. But how to do this without it beingsimply a consumer movement, and a rather preachy one at
that? Taking responsibility is, in this case, the luxurydomain of the well-off. As Louise Crewe says, consumer-
based responses can indeed be ‘socially divisive’ (2001:631). It is not that I am against fair-trade by any means, it issimply that I recognize it as something that only the better-off can indulge in. Ethics are inexpensive for middle-class
shoppers. And supermarkets know how to make a decentprofit out of selling them. [Kersty’s] point in the ‘Follow-ing’ piece is a good one – the responsibility and behavior
change needed to redress inequalities of supply chains is tooheavily laid at the door of the consumer, when governments
and large corporations should be taken to task (Hobson,2002). In many ways this question as to who should feel thegreater responsibility echoes the concerns of trying to mapthe whole ANT versus Marxism conundrum. Both attempt
I think it would be good if foodstudies paid more attention to theself-provisioning practices of ‘pro-ducers’ (who are also always ofnecessity consumers of food).I always think of Haitian anthro-pologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’sbook Peasants and capital (1988),which is a study of banana farmersin Dominica (in the British WestIndies). The farmers told him thatwhen times were hard at least theycould eat their crop (‘I can alwayseat my fig’) – unlike other cropslike sugar or coffee. And that keepsreminding me that we need to thinkmore about the economies andcultures of consumption of peopleat the production-end of food sys-tems ... when I think of ‘roundedpeople’ (and the simultaneity of
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to expose the traversals of products for the same reasons; itis the ‘what is to be done?’ part that separates them. Whichleads us to the thorny question of boundaries, mentioned inthe ‘Following’ piece. What I shall continue to call ‘thing
following’ ... needs badly to give itself some boundaries anda clear raison d’etre if it is to withstand the criticism leveled
at it. By boundaries, I do not mean defining what is fol-lowed, how, by whom, where, etc ... I do not even mean that
any historical disciplinary colours need be nailed to themast. Like [Louise] Crewe (2003), I would agree thatattempting to combine theoretical traditions is of little
interest and may be of little use. No, what I mean, is thewhy? The key to thing following is in the issues. Alison
production and consumption) theimage that jumps to mind is chil-dren with distended bellies frommalnutrition. Shouldn’t food stud-ies help us get beyond the feel-good‘feed-the-world’ jingles of worldfood aid programmes? Maybe theproblem is not so much ‘eating theother’ (in the sense of spicing thingsup with exotic food ...) but ‘eatingeach other’: a.k.a. eating the foodright out of other people’s mouths,leaving them with nothing. Mimi
Let’s not forget that it isn’t just distantproducers that are the dominated and
oppressed. We as consumers are also ‘victims’in all sorts of ways. In the specific case of
fashion ... the excessive attention paid todistant sweated labour practices within the
fashion industry has masked a number of otherinequalities, asymmetries and connectionsthat begin to scramble many of our trusted
assumptions about the taken-forgranteddistinctions between production and
consumption, near and far, us and them, nowand then. As recent press reports have
revealed, hyper-thin has become the newindustry standard in fashion, where a UK size
10 is seen as too large for the catwalk andemaciated size zero bodies cease to shock ...While fashion has always been notorious for
perpetuating abnormally thin bodies (theaverage model weighed 9% less than the
average woman in 1989, she now weighs 23%below the national average) skeletal thinness
is increasingly ubiquitous across television,magazines and the screen ... There may be
some consumers who don’t feel the need toself-justify spending £250 on a pair of jeans,and others who bargain boast ... as they stuff£3.00 Primark jeans into their shopping trol-leys without a thought for the conditions that
I think you are correct to identify a broaderspectrum of victims, although we obviously needto retain some distinction between those who arestarving in the midst of plenty or dying ofpreventable diseases and those who are affectedby media projections of ‘hyper-thin’ as the newbodily norm (for example). In this context it isuseful to identify those who produce and areresponsible for the injustices you describe. In theThird World this is increasingly difficult,however. Pierre Spitz (1985) suggests thattoday’s ‘extractive forces’ are ever more slipperyand difficult to identify. In contrast, historicalmechanisms like tariffs, poll taxes, rent andusurious credit systems are, for example, easilyidentified as ‘extractive forces’ that producedearth and hunger. It is also relatively easy toidentify those responsible, ie, tax collectors,money-lenders, large farmers and landlords. Butcurrent systems of extraction (the terms ofinternational trade, relative pricing, inflationaryprocesses, etc) are more mysterious and complex... I agree we need to extend our notion ofoppression beyond a simple producer-consumerdichotomy, but in order to fight such injusticeswe also need to identify actors, scales ofviolence, sites of power, etc, which willrequire discretion as much as comparison,I think. David
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enable such pricing structures. These consu-mers may be one manifestation of commodi-fied contemporary Britain, where consumers
know everything about price, but nothingabout value. I suspect that a majority ... woulddearly like to pay more ... if only they could ...,
and who would love to act in caring and/orpolitically active ways to ensure more equi-
table systems of provision. If only they couldafford to. Shopping can be an ethical, an
economic and an embodied nightmare and acitizen consumer may be doing all that he or
she realistically can under precarious eco-nomic conditions at home and away. Louise
As I have argued in Roe (2006a; 2006b), peopledo not always do what they say they do anddespite a discourse about unhealthy eating,unhealthy food is still eaten. The geographies offood need to develop research agendas thatexpose how foods are developed that exploit thesensibilities of people whose long-term healthinterests may not be to eat certain types of food.Everyday consumption practices are stronglyshaped by the marketing, advertising andaesthetic might of global food brands; andimportantly these brands also have enormouspotential to improve where exploitation existsthroughout all sites in the food industry. Emma
When I think of food these days the issue of food inflation has taken centre stage. We knowfrom where I live that it is having a really devastating impact on poor people and the workingpoor. The state has responded by increasing social grants to poor people affected by higher food
prices. Civil society organizations have argued that these measures involve ‘tinkering at themargins’ – the real source of the crisis is the structure of the country’s food system, which wasliberalized (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 havepointed to the concentration that has occurred in food production, processing and retailing in thelast 10 years. This concentration has, they argue, allowed companies in the food sector to securesuper profits at the expense of the poor. Their position has been fueled by evidence that theselarge conglomerates are using their market power to fix prices for food and collude on payment
systems for farmers ... So the current debate on food parallels the much broader debate oneconomic policies in post-apartheid South Africa: although the government has put many policiesand structures in place to create jobs and address poverty and inequality, this has not had the
desired impact because of the deeper impact of economic liberalization. The politics of food inthis part of the world is such that seemingly global processes (eg, food inflation) are articulated in
locally specific ways. Charles
Sometimes, [‘eating the other’]seems [like] an argument looking
for a illustration – see DannyMiller’s (1998a) ’virtualism’
argument – and I haven’t seenany major critique of it in print ...So, what happens when ... ratherthan – for me in the content of the
‘mixing’ review and my ownwork to date ... – [we don’t] start
I think there is a great deal of alluring Otherness thatpermeates the social spaces of food cultures: for example, thestrange taste of a certain ingredient; the elusive X-factor thatmakes a certain food exquisite or repellent; the odd waysomeone prepares a specific dish; the difficulty of putting intowords the wonderful or dreadful taste of a food item. ... Per-haps these allures and enigmas of food (that pertain to thesenses, especially taste and smell) are one of the reasons whyfood is a key vehicle for defining, bonding, and mediatingpeople’s experiences of cultural Otherness (see also Zizek,
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in places ... where hooks’arguments help to decide what to
study, because things sort of fitalready? ... I’m trying to get
myself out of this habit by doingnew research on commodities
that choose me to study them – ina way – like prescription
medicines [like hydrocortisone](see Cook et al., 2007). ...
Strangely, this relates to Emmaand Henry’s ... posts [below]
about missing animalgeographies: as hydrocortisone
was initially extracted fromcows’ adrenal glands for human
use, then chemically synthesizedusing yams (and/ or sweet
potatoes), and is nowbiosynthesized using alcohol andyeast cells modified with humanand other genes. Then there arethe US civil rights issues at the
heart of the drug’s history, itsmanufacture helping to fund the
struggle in the 60s ... Ian
1993: 200–37). Take for example the policies and practices ofmulticulturalism. And here I write from the perspective ofliving in Vancouver, BC, Canada. During the past decade orso in Canada, the state, corporations, and settlement agencieshave increasingly invested in multicultural events includingfestivals and parades to promote local ethno-cultural heritage,diversity, and unity through the consumption of food. Whilethese events are structured around the aesthetics of celebra-tion, enjoyment, and revelry, as we know they are also fraughtwith political struggles over appropriate cultural practices,identities, and beliefs. I believe that much of multiculturalismand 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 theyincarnate the aesthetics of food. I agree with geographers, forexample, Cook and Harrison (2003) and Dwyer and Crang(2002), that the commodification (of food) is not a thing that issubmitted or done to pre-existing ethnicities and ethnic sub-jects but a process through which ethnicities are reproduced. Iwould argue that much of this process of reproducing anddefining ethnicities and cultures is intimately related to aes-thetics qua the enduring alluring mysteries of food. I alsothink it is important that we are able to find ways to criticallymap these aesthetics taking place as both part of AND sepa-rate from the social and the political (Kingsbury, 2005; 2010).Paul
About a year ago, Jessica Hayes-Conroy and Iwere discussing the politics of the school gar-
den project in Berkeley where she did herrecent field research. We were talking about
the race politics of such programs, specificallythe effect of what I have dubbed as whiteswanting to teach others, especially African
Americans in the case of that program, how toeat (Guthman, 2009). While I was thinking
about the lack of resonance, she had found acomplex mix of rejection, curiosity, joy,
humor, and transformation among the AfricanAmerican youth she had observed, spoken
with, and gardened with ... my undergraduatestudents who are indeed hailed by alternativefood (deeply so) and want to spread the gospel
I think that desire to ‘decolonize the self’ may bea starting point for some (many?) critical peopleengaging with questions of race in the USA(Slocum, 2009). It’s ... encouraged by antiracistactivism and one could argue that it’s a liberal,individualistic response. But one could also saythat efforts at reflexivity are a pathway toward,for instance, where Cook et al. (2008a) suggestsHeldke (2003) ended up. For all the criticismswe might level at people trying to change theirconsumption practices individually orcollectively, it’s important to acknowledge thefraught, fuzzy and fragile nature of thesepositions and the embodied connections madethrough food. I’ve been trying to do that whileadmiring the work of those who have been very
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of the local, seasonal, and organic to others(read: low income African Americans (Guth-man, 2008b). During their required six-month
field studies ... many experience profounddisappointment when they find that their
excitement doesn’t resonate. It seems this goesright to the questions about mixing ... raise[d]
in [the] second review. Do these alternativefood networks and/or food explorations evokea politics of care or do they promote (poverty)tourism? Well, I would say they do both – and
more. Through these experiences mystudents see how they are projecting their
desires onto others and learn something aboutan anti-racist praxis, making me a little more
sanguine about touristic ‘mixing’ than Imight have been (which is what Rachel ...
considers, I think). But I am not sure of theeffect they have, although I am pretty sure theyreinforce a coding of alternative food space as‘white.’ All of this is to say that we should at
least pay attention to who is asking for themixing, for the transparency, for the
defetishization. And if such encounters andnew knowledges do evoke care, what comes
next? Julie
critical of the liberal, wealthy whiteness ofalternative food and of various politics ofconsumption. I tend to agree with these critiquesbut find there’s more to say. That was mystarting point, at least, when I suggested that theviscous spatiality of alt food’s whiteness is lesscohesive, more desirous of nonracist connection,more interesting in its gendered female form orless relevant than we think (see Jean’s comment[below]). And in highlighting the importance ofthinking about the corporeality of race andvegetables (Slocum, 2008), I was proposing(with others) that opening up the concept of race(beyond static formulations like ‘eating theother’ and beyond its mediation solely by thesocial) should be useful to anti-racism and ourown analyses. Seen this way, race emergesmaterially through corporeal relationships tofood – what people gravitate toward, what theytouch and taste, what they grow. If race is anevent, an open-ended becoming made byongoing connection rather than only exclusionand erasure (Saldanha, 2006), it suggests theneed to look at what possible worlds open upthrough the connections that both divide groupsand draw them together. Rachel
I wonderwhether this
‘eating theother’ can be
possibly appliedto the discussion
... [of] Asianpeople ... What
does it implywhen white
people eat Asianfood, for
example ... [orwhen] blackpeople eat ...Asian food?
I’m an Anglo-celtic Australian woman, virtually monolingual, with Englandand Singapore the only countries I’ve ever lived in – at least for any consid-erable time. With each new research project, it seems I experience afresh thehooks (1992)/Cook et al. (1999)/Heldke (2003)/whoever ... 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 outethnographic work in which I had some legitimate ‘location’, some connec-tion, a reason for hanging around ... To allay the usual breast-beating and guilt(though not for a minute denying the seriousness of cultural theft throughappropriation and commodification), I turn to the following as sources ofcomfort. Traditionally, I’ve found a kind of solace in the resonances of IenAng’s conception of ambivalence (2001: 200–201) ... the element of instabilitythat Ang’s ‘ambivalence’ implies can be very useful – one is never too com-fortable, too complacent, but, at the same time, never so completely unsettledthat some kind of cultural exchange becomes impossible. In this way, guilt istransformed into an effective tool for understanding difference rather than
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What kind ofideology would
be constructed ordestroyed by
doing that? Or isit, from the
beginning, Asianpeople should be
in the samecategory with
black people orwhite people, or
wouldn’t fit ineither of them,[or] something
else? Shoko
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 inNarayan’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 ithas also emerged in different forms within the posts. Crudely put, despite myAnglo middle-classness, cultural capital and just plain disposable capital, [inone Ethiopian restaurant in Melbourne] I am not the centre of attention. Thefocus here, instead, is on the strength of the Ethiopian community (its culture,languages, politics, food, religion, citizenship status) and its complex rela-tionships 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 circuitsof power in which small ‘ethnic’ food businesses are placed. Jean
bell hook’s ‘eating the other’ argument... doesn’t work with the way I conceivethe human subject, for there is no ‘other’
but rather different configurations ofsubjectivity ... [Her] quote ‘Within
commodity culture, ethnicity becomesspice, seasoning that can liven up the
dull dish that is mainstream whiteculture’ (1992: 21) is challenged as we
see the ethnicity (if you are happy to callit that) of animals and plants enliveningmainstream white culture dishes. Emma
[N]on-human animals eat stuff too, andwe humans will tend to call this ‘food’ ...[So]: (1) what happens if we do a post-
human geography of food, wherein foodis everywhere for every being, etc (does
this just become ‘ecology’ by anothername?); and (2) what, culturally, is atstake in labeling something as ‘food’
(something that potentially can be eaten,by what?), and if we radically relativizewhat we mean by ‘food’, what it is, what
can be eaten, what can eat it, when,where, with humans involved or maybe
Confronted with the growing dissociation of food fromflesh, one sometimes feels, like Charlton Heston in‘Soylent Green’, like shouting ‘It’s animals !’ In theUK, we slaughter some 750 million anonymous broilerchickens per year. Where will this lead ... to their totalnegation as one day, synthesized animal protein willreplace the need to raise and kill the real thing[?] Or dowe actively seek to revitalize them in our understand-ing and explanation of the relationality of eating (andof raising and, of course, of killing). Foods might bealternatively seen as ... ‘the contagions and infectionsthat wound the primary narcissism of human excep-tionalism’ (Haraway, 2008: 32). I’m with Emma ... onthis, and with Derrida (1991) who states ‘One nevereats entirely on one’s own’. Of course, there are awhole series of issues associated with greateracknowledgement of the animal lives in the processesand procedures of human food production (Buller andMorris, 2003; Buller and Cesar, 2007). Nevertheless, itseems to me that this is a necessary further stage ofacknowledging the eating of the other (Cook et al.,2008a) yet also of active de-othering. And yet this issomething that ‘animal geographies’ (and also foodgeographies) have generally avoided. It is paradoxicalthat both ... have tended to ignore farm animals. Per-haps they are not ‘other’ enough, being – as Callicott
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not, then what does a ‘food geography’end up looking like? Chris
(1980) argues – as ‘human-made’ as chairs and tables.Henry
This gets to what Probyn (2000: 32) talks about in terms of the ‘visceral’ nature of food andeating: ‘[e]ating refracts who we are. Food/body/eating assemblages reveal the ways in whichidentity 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 andways of being alongside each other, inside and outside inextricably linked. Beyond the facilecelebration 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 inwhich 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 wherefood comes from, or how core identities are now ingested in multicultural ways of being in theworld. As such, these alimentary identities are ways of reworking the categories that once definedus. 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.’ ... Thus, food is ‘good to think’
(Beardsworth and Keil, 1997) – especially for those who can buy into this knowledgeeconomy – but also very much ‘good to feel’ and often ‘more-than-representational’ (Lorimer,2005) in unconscious and ‘primal’ ways ... 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? Mike
[Mike’s post] resonates with what we have been exploringthrough empirical work with particular food-based ecosocial
projects such as those of the Slow Food movement and schoolgarden and cooking programs. Through this work we have beentrying to specify what it means to study the nebulous ‘viscerality
of food’ ... The pressing task for us has been how to actuallyapprehend these visceralities, how to conduct empirical work on
the interpersonal (ever-relational) ways in which bodies feelfood. We see this as politically important for a number of inter-
connected reasons. In the visceral realm, foods link up withideas, memories, sounds, visions, beliefs, past experiences,moods, worries and so on, all of which combine to becomematerial – to become bodily, physical sensation. If we can
understand such sensation – how it forms, what it does to thebody, how it can be shaped – then we might be able to under-
stand and utilize food’s differential power to affect bodies. Wecan also use this insight to understand social difference more
completely; we can begin to discuss difference not so much interms of constructed identities but rather in terms of fluid
The comments regarding theviscerality of food and‘following’ are of interest tome as I’ve been contemplatinga new project along the SantaAna River Bike Trail inSouthern California, thehomeless population who livethere, native edible plants, andarts events where I work as anartist and curator in DowntownRiverside, California. Howbodies feel food, as mentionedby Allison and Jessica ...among others, make mequestion the practices of thedowntrodden who visit ourmuseum and gallery during artopening receptions. When they
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visceralities. A visceral conception of difference does much toilluminate the inherent complexity to the ‘categories’ of race,
class and gender. In terms of the critiques of whiteness andeliteness within alternative food, with visceral difference we toofind that there is [always] more to say ... We see this ‘more-ness’as a result of the material realities of bodies themselves; not onlydo (minded) bodies develop seemingly static habits of being, butbodies are also always changing and changeable in contest withthese (socially recognized and labeled) stases. Academic workon these subjects must therefore recognize and make room for
such changeability, and must furthermore encourage movementin progressive directions. By understanding how ‘tendencies and
latencies’ towards particular visceral sensations develop viabodily relation with food, we can begin to more fully compre-hend the patterns, inequities, habits, preferences, and opportu-
nities that have developed around alternative food. In so doing,we can begin to sense what it would take for all kinds of differentpeople to gain the capacity to feel food (and eat food) in other(ie, alternative/transgressive) ways. This ability for individualsand 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 underdis-
cussed part of feminist empowerment and self-determination (asdiscussed, for example, by hooks, 2003). Thus, as wary as we are
of the oft-noted exclusiveness of alternative food, we are alsooptimistic about the (admittedly chaotic!) potentials for change
that accompany visceral connections to food. We hope thatacademic work in this domain will lead to increased equity and
justice within alternative food. Allison and Jessica
come there are a few who linetheir pockets with cubes ofcheese and other buffet fare.Why would someone who getsfree food from communityservices want squares ofcheddar? ... Considering whatappear to be elite food fashions..., I am interested in givingthose who live in the riverbed asource of fresh, readilyavailable, novel food thatwould take the place of artreception refreshments. Nativeedibles are very trendy at themoment here. California has avariety of native edibles thatwill grow along the Santa AnaRiver Trail, close to where thehomeless sleep. The gardens Ipropose will be tended by thecyclists who ride along thetrail, with the help of nearbyresidents. The food followingwould be a relatively short trip,but interesting to watch as thestories develop in the form ofreally slow food in a rather tinygeographic region.4 Lisa
[But] what happens when things un-become food (takingoff from Roe’s (2006a) comments about things becom-ing food)[?] Food waste is a huge proportion of the UKgreenhouse emission. The UK government estimates thatapproximately 40% of all emissions are derived from theactivities that we do every day as ordinary people going
about ordinary lives. Approximately 20% of all UKemissions are associated with food production, process-
ing, transportation, and storage (Ventour, 2008).Research commissioned by WRAP, a UK government
funded organization whose aim is to help reduce carbonemissions in this country, suggests that about one third of
all food purchased in the UK is thrown away. Of this
How ... we take and mix Barbas(2003), Bost (2003) and Cook et al.(2008a) and others into decision-making contexts is a challengingquestion for ‘afters’. Again angles onthis have been dealt with in Le Heron(2009). Why are geographers hesitantto engage with bigger actors in theagri-food scene? A rather differentfood geography I found myselfinvolved in was a co-presentation atthe recent New Zealand GeographyConference. Stuart Gray, a senior
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discarded food, about one third is untouched and a sig-nificant proportion is still in date. Furthermore, while all
types of foods are thrown away, fruit and vegetablesaccount for the largest proportion at about 40% of allfood waste, which suggests that while consumers aretrying to live healthier lifestyles, much of their good
intention is finding itself in the rubbish bin. Finally, thehouseholds with the greatest amount of food waste are
those with children. What is the impact of food waste inother industrialized countries? Certainly people do not
buy food with the intention of wasting it – so the questionis what happens? WRAP argues that many consumers donot plan appropriately when they purchase food and buytoo much. When this is considered against the ways thatretailers market foods to consumers (eg, buy one, get onefree offers) it becomes clear why cost-conscious shop-
pers would end up with more food that they need, espe-cially as care is expressed through the savings achievedwhen goods are purchased (see Miller, 1998b). Megan
manager from Fonterra and I ‘fol-lowed’ Fonterra’s development out ofNZ by creating a conceptual space thatwe both inhabited. Through this welooked at all sorts of mixing/non-mixing as Fonterra has engaged viastrategic partnerships in differentdairy spaces, so reshaping the globa-lizing dairy supply chain. Afters?I also find myself wondering if thisplayful idea is shutting down follow-ing, as it could imply the end of a meal,in the sense of a stimulus followed by aresponse. Where has ‘following’ beentaking me (us), what political/ethicalsubject positions and subjectivitieshave I found myself in, throughdifferent sorts of interventions(especially beyond text)? Richard
It is ... [these] moral economies of food andfollowing that make it interesting. I take a
quote from Dixon and Jones (2004) referring toGibson-Graham, that ‘the field site can becomean encounter . . . in which one can experiencecreation rather than mere recognition via the
testing or correction of theory’ (p. 386). I havefound myself in a position as an organizer and
activist within a national student fair tradeorganization in the last few years (Putnam,2007; 2008). This position has been one in
which I have power and resources to reflect notonly individually and collectively with otherson the political economy of fair trade coffee
networks, but also to recreate them in ways thatselfconsciously attempt to rectify some of theunderstandings that we collectively have as a
result of white guilt and neocolonial dynamics.I have been able to participate in creatingspaces of discussion and collaboration at
international conferences, at meetings betweenorganizations, and by coordinating long-term
exchanges in both directions between north
This picks up another, slightly wider point about‘critical food geographies’ which I’d like toraise in response to the papers – in terms of theway we do food research, why we do it and howwe disseminate it. I take my lead from twoslightly contrasting sources. The first is acommentary published a couple of years ago byDavid Harvey (2006) in Transactions where heprovided a pretty scathing critique of so-called‘critical human geography’ in the UK. He wasparticularly critical of the RAE process (nosurprise there then!), the type of research itproduced and for whom. He called for what hereferred to as more ‘substantive pieces’,empirically grounded but also theoreticallystrong. He basically wants us (if you callyourself a ‘critical geographer’) to do more ofthe stuff (in a methodological sense) he andsimilar folks did in Baltimore and other places(usually cities) in the 1970s and 1980s. The toneof some of the arguments is a little hard to take inplaces, but his wider point about the need forsubstantive work I think is an important message
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and south, all the while talking to all partici-pants – men and women producers and coop-
erative leaders, youth leaders and students,importers and coffee business people, NGOworkers, certifiers, baristas, coffee drinkers,
and others – about their experiences and viewsin relation to fair trade, coffee and the peoplesurrounding those things. This is what my PhD
is about, and it has been a journey of negoti-ating a commitment to ‘follow’ the social
relations of three different places of coffeeproduction with the constant self-questioning
of how my choices are determined by myposition as a researcher-activist, while also
wondering how this research can contribute toeveryone getting to know each other so that
they all benefit. So far I am impressed by theextent to which inequities within coffee net-works are related to people not knowing the
experiences of other people; I am thinking thatfollowing the thing, and talking about the
moral economies of ‘mixing’ cultures throughfood puts the researcher in an incredible posi-tion of power to create spaces of interaction. It
is the potential of these intentional spaces ofmixing that I would like to explore. Heather.
for those of us also operating in the subfields offood geography. In fact I would argue that someof the examples cited in the following and mixingprogress reviews are testament to the fact thatsome of this work is in fact still very much aliveand kicking, albeit in a different conceptual guiseand writing style. A second recently publishedpaper by Bill Friedland (2008) in the USA makesan equally interesting point about the idea ofresearch and the role of the researcher indeveloping sustainable agri-food systems, dis-cussing in this case the nature of activism andactivist work alongside academic paper writingcommitments. The broad message seems to be tothink much more seriously about the actual latentimpacts that our research has on the ground overand above writing responsibilities and to redresswhat he sees as a current ‘chasm’ between thetwo. In a much less politically motivated tone,the current Rural Economy and Land Use(RELU) programme in the UK is a case whereresearchers are being encouraged to cross disci-plinary boundaries and engage stakeholders and‘publics’ in the research process, rather thanmerely as endusers, or the ‘missing consumer’.Damian
III Endings . . . ?
We found [draft one’s] conclusion (as in the end of thedocument where one might expect a conclusion) to be ...satisfying in its non-conformity and complexity (thoughmaybe a little short: one more post with a ‘wrapping up’type theme might help) . . . [or] perhaps some sort of sub-
headings ... might be helpful to guide our readers, or at leastto signal that there are various key themes circulating
throughout, eg, ‘relating’, ‘race’, ‘other’, ‘hunger’, ‘poor’,‘mixing’, ‘visceral’ ... Allison and Jessica
I’d ... suggest, rather than conclusions, connections thatgenerate further inventiveness (paraphrasing Elizabeth
Grosz) – or that unsettle ... Rachel
Personally, I would like to see thisshaping and polishing taken a stepfurther with fragments ofsubheadings indicating where anew thread of argument gathersforce (not too aggressively, mindyou, just slipped in (writingtogether in public . . . borders,fragments, loose ends . . . thingsthat travel . . . veils and fetishes. . . whose organic food, whosefood? . . . victims and violentconsumption . . . reflexively
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I like the idea of the fragments and snippets. To me, thatsounds more in line with the different voices in this blog; itdoes provide the opportunity to incorporate a wide variety ofviewpoints and ideas without trying to force them into one
big master narrative. With fragments, you can jump fromone part to another, there is less of a hierarchical order, andthey usually do form (sometimes unexpected) connections.
Heike
eating the ‘other’ . . . ‘other’animals . . . ‘dirty’ politics and‘visceral imaginaries’ . . . writingacross borders or some such). Onthe other hand, I wouldn’t want tobe too prescriptive, and perhaps theonly thing needed, after all, is mytrusty highlighter? Jean
This question about who we produce thesegeographies of food for, with, and without,
also can be addressed to related concernsbrought up in the beginning of this article
about what kind of conclusions we produceand how we present them ... [This] allows
us to identify a moral common ground –justice – by which we can measure our
research and form conclusions that matter.Heather
... there’s no one conclusion here, becausewhat might be more useful is to hold as
similarly valid these multipleinterpretations of the same problem/object
... [But] the conclusion [could] saysomething about how the process of this
article, which both widened and relaxed theconversation about food, might be used as a
model in food movements themselves ...something that refers to how a different sortof process leads to different sorts of places,
intellectually and communicatively. Julie
Working across disciplines generates a form ofexcitement and novelty that leads to exploration.The hurdle now seems to be getting everyonetogether, which I think this blog addresses. As I’veread the many posts made by social scientists, it isintimidating at first, because the way I do research[as an artist] is so different from yours, but the ideasgenerated are worth the risk. There is a forum hereto share information and hopefully help one anotherwith our projects – or, at the very least, find sourcematerial to investigate. In a way, I feel like I’mlooking through a keyhole at a completely differentworld, but on the other hand we all seem to beinterested in similar topics. The way wecommunicate is just a little different. Art informedby social science or other fields of study are rich notonly experientially, but the finished work is morecomplex and open to a much larger audience. On theflip-side, I can also see how art may be a useful toolfor social scientists ... It seems that both disciplinesreach a limited audience and have a tough timeaffecting real change. Perhaps together we canchange that? Lisa
Notes1. The word ‘afters’ has an important double meaning
here: (1) as in eating (eg, ‘British informal: the final
course of a meal, as pudding, ice cream, or the like; des-
sert’ (Anon, 2010), and (2) as in fighting (eg, from a
newspaper report on a football match: ‘With just 10 sec-
onds to go, Deco produced a truly lamentable dive. Car-
los Gurpegui kindly helped him up by the neck and
Deco retaliated, pulling the Basque’s hair. As both sets
of players piled in, Barca coach Frank Rijkaard had to
come on to the pitch to haul Deco off as referee Teixeira
Vitienes waved a red card. Deco ... wait[ed] for his
adversary in the tunnel for a bit of afters, where he was
held back by coach Rijkaard’s right-hand man Henk
Ten Cate, his chest pumped up and his fists rotating fur-
iously as he screamed, ‘‘Lemme at’im! Lemme at’im!
I’ll pulverize him!’’’ (Lowe, 2006)).
2. See Cook et al. (2008b: section 3f) for more on this
process.
3. ‘Real’ not as in revealed/unveiled, but in the realpolitik
sense of how these things work in practice.
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4. See http://sartfood.blogspot.com for more on this
project.
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