Specters of the Dead

Aymara legend has it that some 5000 years ago there was a massive drought across the land, across what would become known as the Andean Altiplano spanning southern Peru and Bolivia. During this years-long drought harvests were lost, there was hunger, and many people and their animals died. Farmers, llamas and alpacas, travelers subsisting on the hospitality of locals all ran out of stores and eventually starved. There was virtually no food to be found, save for two plants that grew wild: quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa), and its cousin cañihua (Chenopodium pallidicaule). These two species grow primarily in the Lake Titicaca basin and are remarkably resilient in the face of drought and frost, and can grow in salty, sandy, and acidic soils that kill most other plants. People quickly realized the nutritional qualities of these plants, and quinoa became famous for sustaining those who ate its seeds. The plant was named jiwra in Aymara which translates in Spanish to “levanta moribundos” or that which raises the dying (Canahua y Mujica, 2013).

This legend was recounted to me in perhaps an unusual place by an unexpected storyteller: a plant geneticist told the tale in-between explaining the orthomolecular and nutraceutical qualities of quinoa.

Agricultural scientists play a key role in the production of quinoa in Puno, Peru. That may seem overly obvious from a scientific point of view, but this fact easily gets overshadowed in contemporary marketing images of happy indigenous farmers in traditional clothing, alpacas grazing open fields, and organic quinoa blowing in the wind. Moving beyond these representations to where quinoa is produced in primarily in the Titicaca – Poopo basin between Peru and Bolivia, it becomes clear just how much some agronomists shift back-and-forth between so-called ‘forward-looking’ agricultural science and ‘traditional’ quinoa agricultures, which they view not as opposed but as complementary and mutually reinforcing. The examples explored below take inspiration from Gabriela Soto-Laveaga’s Jungle Laboratories (2009). Yet, rather than seeking to recuperate the hidden histories and lives of indigenous producers behind the ‘scientific’ creation of the Pill, I draw here on ethnographic research in southern Peru to analyze the work of several Puneño agronomists who actively use their scientific capital to keep indigenous knowledge, agriculture and history a part of quinoa’s story.

Quinoa’s Agricultural (Social) Scientists

Agronomist Alipio Canahua Murillo and Plant Geneticist Angel Mujica are two of the vanguard who began research in earnest on quinoa in the late 1960s and 70s, work which has continued to this day. Recently, Murillo and Mujica published the Aymara myth to argue for the need, in agricultural circles and in the broader public consciousness, to keep in mind quinoa’s history as it is asked to take on more of a role in the future of global food security.

For Murillo in southern Peru, agricultural science isn’t divorced from local agricultural practices, including the social relations and lives of indigenous Quechua and Aymara farmers. For example, Murillo currently works alongside both Aymara farmers and 5-star tourist hotels in Puno city, collecting recipes using local quinoa varieties and bringing them to executive chefs in the hotels in order to adapt them for tourist palates. Murillo and executive chef Jose Maguiña joke that they are promoting local agriculture through “la conquista del estomago de la turista”, or the conquest of the tourist’s stomach. But this is not just about exporting more quinoa. Becoming more serious, Murillo continues that Puno has the highest rates of malnutrition in Peru (Collyns, 2011), an issue he also wants to tackle through this project.

Murillo’s agro-gastronomic project is three pronged. First, the trick is to create a demand for local, non-market varieties of quinoa as a means to incentivize farmers to grow rather than replace them with market-demanded varieties. Why does this matter? Locally adapted varieties of quinoa are more resistant to the increasingly erratic effects of climate change in the Altiplano. Further, multi-variety planting, known as chaccru in Quechua and chajillo in Aymara, is a risk-controlling strategy that helps ensure a harvest. According to local knowledge, this strategy improves the assurance of a viable harvest and food security for farmers. Additionally, this opens up better opportunities to engage in the expanding quinoa market as demand for new colorful varietals gain momentum.

Second, Murillo draws on the social capital of foreign tourists and their tastes for exotic cuisines as a means to revalorize traditional recipes, varieties, and uses for quinoa among locals, thereby encouraging healthier food consumption in the Altiplano. This appears counterintuitive, but local tastes and desires for foods have been deeply shaped by the influx of ‘external’ foods – eating rice and noodles, for Puneños, is a way to signal their cosmopolitan embrace of modernity. What that has meant, is increasing instances of malnutrition, as people who would have otherwise eaten quinoa overlook it for its ‘whiter’, less-nutritious counterparts (Jacobsen 2011). This is not a question of full stomachs versus empty stomachs then, but a rather different one of dietary preferences and food quality. So, if social capital based on ‘modern’ tastes can sway populations towards less-nutritious food consumption, Murillo thinks that perhaps quinoa’s rising superfood status amongst Western consumers can reverse the trend too.

Third, Murillo is working with local communities to recuperate a traditional form of ecological agriculture based in communally-held land called aynok’a in Aymara. This form of production emphasizes not only quinoa, but a seven-year cycle of crop rotation – beginning with potato, followed by quinoa, then tarwi (an Andean legume traditionally grown in the third year, now mostly replaced by barley or oats), followed by a three-year rest period. For example, the population center of Pallallamarka has 15 aynok’as, four of which grew quinoa in the 2015-2016. For the following year, the quinoa fields will be replaced by barley or oats, and the potatoes by quinoa, etc. This system of agriculture, developed over thousands of years in the southern Altiplano, is under rapid decline, with more than 50% of aynok’as abandoned (Canahua, et al., 2002).

Part of Murillo’s quest, then, is to gloss traditional agricultural practices as forward-looking, in essence using the language of agronomy and science to validate extant cultural truths: multi-variety plots help promote agrobiodiversity and crop improvement, and crop rotation provides a natural cycle of nitrogen-fixing and pest management without the need for chemical pesticides. Murillo and colleagues argue that production practices like aynok’as, or ditched agriculture known as suka’k’ollas, (Canahua, 2014) or terraced agriculture known as andenes can provide solutions to some of the most pressing food-related challenges presented by climate change.

Another side of this puzzle is the use of gastronomy and market demand to promote these practices. This mixing of market, culinary, and local logics reveals ambiguities that can be perceived as a threat to biodiversity and cultural practices as well as a possible mechanism for conservation, self-esteem, and improved livelihoods. Quinoa as the fulcrum of Murillo’s project complicates these ambiguities as its own shifting status reveals power inequalities playing off of different layers of social capital and competing claims for legitimacy. For example, quinoa’s 10-year rise to global demand masks the fact that it has been socially denigrated in the Altiplano for over 500 years. First the Spanish and then the rising mestizo class rejected quinoa as food for the poor, for the Indians. But the increasing availability of information on quinoa’s nutrition alongside the prestige of global demand is also turning local perception of quinoa on its head.

Perhaps this is partially why Murillo and Mujica published the story. This temporal, scientific, and cultural mixing points towards the hybrid representations of quinoa promoted by some agricultural scientists in southern Peru. Murillo’s work might complicate Maria Elena Garcia’s (2013) observation that large gastronomy movements like Mistura in Lima tend to exclude the indigenous lives who create these recipes in the first place. Actively fighting against such silences, Murillo’s piece of the quinoa puzzle gives us pause to reconsider the role of agricultural scientists as brokers between local indigenous agriculture, market logics, and forward-looking climate and nutritional sciences while also considering how social capital and inequality play into whose voices get heard.

References

Canahua, A. 2014. Revaloración del agro ecosistema tradicional de sukaqollos y desarrollo agrícola en Puno – Perú. http://www.minam.gob.pe/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/04-Alipio-Canahua-Humedales-Altoandinos-y-Agricultura.pdf

Canahua, A. M. Tapia, Z. Cutipa y A. Ichuta. 2002. Gestión del espacio agrícola y agro biodiversidad de la papa y quinua en comunidades de Puno. http://www.sepia.org.pe/facipub/upload/cont/881/cont/file/20080903022232_gestionespacio_canahuatapia.pdf,

Canahua, A. y A. Mujica. 2013. Quinua: pasado, presente y futuro. http://quinua.pe/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2013/04/quinuapasadopresenteyfuturo.pdf

Collyns, D. 2011. Can Peru’s new government continue to make progress on child nutrition? | Dan Collyns. Retrieved January 8, 2015, from http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/sep/27/peru-new-government-child-nutrition.

García, M. E. 2013. The Taste of Conquest: Colonialism, Cosmopolitics, and the Dark Side of Peru’s Gastronomic Boom: The Taste of Conquest. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 18(3), 505–524. http://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12044

Jacobsen, S.E. 2011. ‘The situation for quinoa and its production in Southern Bolivia: from economic success to environmental disaster’, Journal of Agronomy and Crop Science, vol 197, pp.390–399.

Laveaga, G. S. 2009. Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill. Duke University Press Books.

A May 7, 2015, piece on the website Science of Us, entitled “Diets are a Lot Like Religion”, cites Alan Levinovitz, a James Madison University professor who describes numerous parallels between religion and dietary regimes. Among reasons why dietary and religious practices are so similar is that both reduce complexity; play into nostalgia about a pastoral utopic past; engage discourses of morality using similar discourses of “good” and “bad”; and provide a sense of community (Dahl 2015).

I got interested in this as I was reading stories by people who have converted to vegan diets and share stories through blogs, books, and podcasts that detail their journeys through this new lifestyle (the Happy Herbivore Lindsey S. Nixon and No Meat Athlete Matt Frazier are but two examples). The stories often have all the elements of good conversion narratives – the teller is going about their business as usual, perhaps burying recognition of the ways they were cruising toward disaster at their own hands. Some series of increasingly threatening vignettes leads to a crisis in which it becomes clear that an immediate intervention is required for survival, and control is given over to some external power.  This higher power may be God, Alcoholics Anonymous, or the ethic behind a particular way of eating.

One thing I find particularly interesting about these conversion narratives is that conversion is not a one-time, completive event (Austin-Broos 2003, Coleman 2003). It is something that is continually re-enacted (Coleman 2003). I’ve chosen one focal figure for thinking about these issues, and about how the stories of conversion to veganism that get a lot of traction are those which convey aspects that most strongly resonate with what might be conventionally understood as some version of the American Dream (AD; see Copeland and Labuski 2013). Specifically, the AD includes, among other things, the ability to experience freedom through consumerism, individualism, and ability to work one’s way up the ladder (Copeland and Labuski 2013). This can be conceptualized as fine-tuning one’s physical and economic health through one’s diet. Just as with religious conversion, self-improvement can have internal emotional or psychological elements that make themselves visible through public action, especially through speech.

This is where adequation comes in. Adequation is a process by which one uses select discourses or discourse types to highlight elements of sameness while de-emphasizing discourses of difference that can prevent recognition of common identity (Bucholtz and Hall 2006).  One of the things I am interested in pursuing in further work is the idea that what makes certain vegan figures persuasive is that whatever popular connotations of radicalism might attach to vegan diets are submerged in favor of talk about how veganism can fit in with pre-existing individualist and consumerist behaviors. Further, these vegan conversion narratives and testimonials are attractive because they “sound like” stories with which people are already familiar. These narratives are intertextual resonances with stories people have heard at church, etc., themselves or through other people. The use of familiar language or discourse genres familiarizes the strangeness of veganism.

One of the recurring figures in this scene is Rich Roll, a former Los Angeles entertainment lawyer who has written a book (Roll 2012) and has a widely listened-to podcast series (www.richroll.com). He’s so prominent there is even a spoof Twitter handle, @richrole. The real Roll has also been featured in numerous publications listing people who have achieved amazing athletic feats, and when he appears in these publications, his veganism is sometimes mentioned as one of many factors that contribute to this kind of achievement.

Roll was named in 2009 one of the “25 Fittest Men in America” by Men’s Fitness magazine. In this same year, Lebron James and Usain Bolt also made the list. This ranking is proof of Roll’s success as a plant-powered athlete that helps him continue his media success and to sell vegan nutritional products with his wife, Julie Piatt (also known as SriMati; srimati.com), a figure with her own compelling food-related healing story.

While a competitive swimmer in college, he became an alcoholic, leading to disruption of work and personal relationships, DUIs, rehab, and AA (Roll 2012). Even after getting sober, he wasn’t safe. He became overweight by eating a meat-heavy diet of “bad” foods and not exercising, and had his epic crisis while climbing the stairs at home, when it became clear he was on track for a heart attack. This prompted him to undertake a massive lifestyle change, which leads to his participation a scant two years later in the 2008 Ultraman, a three-day triathlon in Kona, Hawai’i, comprising “a 6.2-mile swim in the ocean and 90-mile cross-country cycling race on Day 1, 170-mile cycle on Day 2, and a 52-mile “double marathon run on the searing hot lava fields of the Kona coast” on Day 3 (www.richroll.com/bio). His finish in the 11^th position, “first among non-pros” (Men’s Fitness 2009), positions him as the protagonist in a story of dramatic personal achievement that has yet to hit its apex. The Men’s Fitness piece leaves out the vegan angle, thought that’s exactly the element that makes Roll a persuasive evangelist and which enables him to label himself as a “full-time wellness & plant-based advocate, motivational speaker, husband, father of 4 [sic] and inspiration to people worldwide as a transformative example of courageous and healthy living” (www.richroll.com/bio). Roll achieved this major transition by training 15 to 20 hours a week, and cutting out everything else except work and family (Men’s Fitness).

Roll’s message resonates with many people, and one measure of that is his ability to attract a wide array of guests to his podcasts to talk about their own dietary, career, or spiritual journeys, to the tune of 207 podcasts as of Jan. 12, 2016.  I suggest this is because Roll’s story suggests a way of being that is at once intensely strange and intensely familiar. Worry about money, his health, what his wife and kids would do without him, persistence – all these things are concerns with which a lot of American readers are conversant. Climbing the ladder of athletic performance very much fits the DIY narrative that underpins talk about the American Dream in the particularly neoliberal fashion it often gets talked about currently. But, there are important differences – many people do not have the luxury of choosing when and how much to work, focusing the bulk of their non-work time on athletic pursuits, or spouses who are willing to throw their faith and trust behind something that looks like a highly speculative enterprise the way his wife, Julie, did. So here, it becomes critical that the major take-away message for listeners and readers is about the ways in which they are like Roll already and how they can become more like him during their own journeys.

I noted at the beginning that not all vegans approach the diet the same way. There are a wide variety of ways to embody vegan principles –as part of the quest for a healthier self (Nixon), as a separate vegan-capitalist system (Ivonin and Donovan 2015); as a lifestyle of punk protest (Clark 2004); or as semi-religious belief system (Zeller 2015), and a single person can integrate multiple perspectives simultaneously. For “vegan abolitionists,” those who choose to adequate themselves with the consumerist, individualist everyman are complicit in forces of patriarchal  oppression and abuse (Vegan Feminist Network). Or, they see capitalism as the ultimate problem, and vegans who do not pursue economic “de-growth” neglect solidarity with the poor (Wheale 2015). For these vegans, the pursuit of the end of the exploitation of animals, women, and the poor are tied through fractal recursion that sees these as expressions of the same underlying tendencies.  And, here, there is recognition about the kinds of adequational work Roll does: as Lauren Corman (2014) notes in a column for Species and Class, vegans who take a capitalist orientation are doing so to subvert others’ panic about veganism.  To be fair to Roll, many of his podcasts do deal explicitly with issues of animal welfare and environmental protection, and many of his guests are interested in social justice issues. But from the vegan abolitionist perspective, people whose primary orientation is not to agitate for the destruction of property rights; communitarian values; the end of classism, racism, and sexism, and the equivalence of human and animal lives are not really vegans.

Veganism has become a hot issue, especially in a place like Austin, where I live. This is a city that hosts an annual Paleo conference, but is also the home of the “whole-foods plant-based” Engine 2 diet created by former local firefighter Rip Esselstyn, son Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, of one of the forces behind the documentary Forks over Knives. As veganism becomes more mainstream, we will have a fertile field for researching what happens when people change dietary and perhaps political orientations in large numbers, and gain insight into how practitioners of diets that have much in common (e.g., not eating animal products) are actually enacted with a tremendous degree of variety, symbolic value, and effects on identity.

References

Austin-Broos, Diane. 2003. The Anthropology of Conversion: An Introduction, In The Anthropology of Religious Conversion, ed. Andrew Buckser and Stephen D. Glazier. Lanham:  Rowan & Littlefield: 1-12.

Bucholtz, Mary and Kira Hall. 2006. Language and Identity, In A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, ed. Alessandro Duranti, 369-394.  2006.

Clark, Dylan. 2004. The Raw and the Rotten: Punk Cuisine, Ethnology, 43: 19-31.

Coleman, Simon. 2003. “Continuous Conversion? The Rhetoric, Practice, and Rhetorical Practice of Charismatic Protestant Conversion,” In The Anthropology of Religious Conversion, ed. Andrew Buckser and Stephen D. Glazier. (Lanham:  Rowan & Littlefield, 2003), 15-28.

Nicholas Copeland and Christine Labuski. 2013. The World of Wal-Mart: Discounting the American Dream. New York: Routledge.

Lauren Corman. 2014. http://speciesandclass.com/2014/10/06/capitalism-veganism-and-the-animal-industrial-complex/, Accessed December 2015.

Dahl, Melissa. 2015. Diets are a lot like Religion, Accessed January 2015.

Frazier, M. No Meat Athlete. www.nomeatathelete.com

Ivonin, Mikhail and John Donovan, Vegan-Capitalism, Electronic document, http://www.readandenjoy.me/2015/04/08/vegan-capitalism/ April 8, 2015. Accessed June 2015.

Nixon, LS. The Happy Herbivore. www.happyherbivore.com.

Roll, Rich. Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World’s Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself New York: Crown Archetype, 2012.

Vegan Feminist Network. www.veganfeministnetworkcom.

Wheale, Marv. “Veganism, Degrowth and Redistribution,” http://veganfeministnetwork.com/tag/intersectionality/, Nov. 25, 2015.

Zeller, BE. 2015. Totem and taboo in the grocery store: Quasi-religious foodways in North America, Religion and Food 26: 11-31.

“In faith work, you want your faith to fuel you, personally, and it will shine out in what you do—you won’t have to try to convert anyone. We don’t want to tell people what to believe. But we do want to beg the question, ‘Oh my gosh, why are things going so well for them?—Well, let me tell you! It’s because of the light of the lord. And you know I’ll answer questions if people ask, but I won’t push it. And lots of times people start asking these questions in our garden”

– Carly Smith, co-founder of a Midwestern urban-agriculture centered faith based organization (FBO).

Federal welfare rollback has made nonprofits and faith-based organizations like Carly’s increasingly responsible for urban governance and welfare provision in the United States (Morgen and Maskovsky 2003; Swyngedouw 2005). The 1996 Personal Work and Responsibility Act (PWORA), specifically, ushered in drastic policy changes—PWORA’s “Charitable Choice” provision opened up funding for religious nonprofits, allowing them to retain religious identity while competing for government contracts (Nagel 2006). Concurrent with these policy changes has been the rise of new, youth-led conservative Christian movements—championed by former mega-church attendants, disenchanted with what they see as “consumer Christianity” and outmoded methods of evangelism (Bielo 2011b; Clayborn 2006). Many of these movement participants, largely white, upper-middle class Americans in their 20s and 30s, attempt to enact their faith through simple living and social service—an increasing number are moving to urban areas, staying in Catholic Worker houses, neo-monastic intentional living groups, forming non-profits, and working in service of the urban poor (Bielo 2011a; Bielo 2011b).

A dominant trend among these “new” Christians has been to utilize urban agriculture and community gardening as a means of feeding and creating community with the poor (Carnes 2011; Clayborn 2006; Roberts 2009). The garden, however, is also emblematic of new methods of domestic evangelism (Elisha 2008)—as outlined by Carly, above. For the evangelical urban gardeners involved in this study, the garden served as a site to recruit new church members and to ‘model’ several aspects of their conservative religious ideology—most notably, as I’ll argue, a heteronormative patriarchal family structure and gendered division of labor.

Here I draw on ethnographic research conducted over the course of 2013-2014 in a large Midwestern city in the US. In addition to living with a FBO for 5 weeks—the Urban Pioneers, a 501c3 nonprofit—I conducted 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews with FBO staff and volunteers, who collectively represent 10 FBOs. The Urban Pioneers is headed by a husband and wife team, Carly and Mark Smith, and draws on volunteer labor from a 35-family Christian intentional community located nearby. The Urban Pioneers purchased 10 large abandoned lots in what they identify as a “blighted” area of the city, and at the time of this research were placing raised garden beds—to be used by community members—on each lot. The organization also offers training courses in small-scale aquaponic tilapia farming and chicken and rabbit husbandry. This research was conducted collaboratively with the Urban Pioneers and other local FBOs—staff and volunteers spoke to me about their work in exchange for my labor in their gardens, and feedback on how their efforts were being perceived by community members.

Sharing the Gospel in the Garden

As Carly’s quote illustrates, urban agriculture and community gardens serve as important sites of evangelism for new, urban-relocated Christians. These domestic methods of evangelism draw on long traditions of intentional Christianity—in which faith is lived in daily life, rather than in a church—and place focus on becoming embedded in impoverished urban neighborhoods, forming cross-racial relationships, and sharing the gospel by example, rather than proselytization (Kauffman 2009; Bielo 2011b). For the Urban Pioneers, having a prominently placed garden—colorful and overflowing onto the sidewalk—and clucking chickens that could be heard several blocks away, served as a means to meet “non-believers” and form relationships that could eventually lead to acceptance of faith. Numerous times per day, during my stay with the Urban Pioneers, neighborhood children would walk past the home-based nonprofit and comment—“That’s a good lookin’ garden!” which prompted one of the staff or volunteers to invite the neighbor in for coffee or snacks. Visits like this had led to at least five Christian conversions at the time of my stay in the summer of 2013. Jonas, a 23 year old volunteer at Urban Oasis—a nonprofit offering free gardening plots to the homeless—states:

There’s enough food pantries and charities, we don’t want to do that. You know, people just come in and use up the resource and that’s that—we’re not trying to knock on  people’s doors and answer questions they’re not asking. But these things often come up while we’re working in the garden, you know?

In this statement, Jonas echoes Carly’s assertion that conversations about religion are easily broached during garden work. He also points out that in contrast to food pantries or other traditional methods of feeding the urban poor, there are fewer perceived guarantees that community members will regularly return. FBO staff like Jonas voice the idea that when community members are placed in charge of their own garden plot, they’re more likely to regularly return, form relationships with FBO staff, and are ultimately more likely to be receptive to evangelization.

Shaping Patriarchal Family Futures

In addition to providing a space in which to meet and possibly convert neighbors, the Urban Pioneers and other Midwestern FBOs involved in this study envisioned their gardens as “modeling” sites, where conservative Christian ethics could be demonstrated and hopefully imparted. The most prominent “modeling” I witnessed was of heteronormative patriarchal family values, and a gendered division of labor. Evangelical Christians strive to fulfill a “nineteenth-century model of the bourgeois family,” in which “the family operates as a haven from the outside world, characterized by romantic love, the glorification of childhood, unquestioned parental authority and instruction, and clear hierarchical roles for men and women.” (Wadsworth, 1997, p. 346). Within this “haven,” gender roles “find expression in traditional ideals regarding wives’ domesticity and husbands’ leadership”(Gallagher, 2003, p. 9). For many conservative evangelical men, leadership and authority—within and outside of the family circle—are important definitions of identity (Gallagher, 2003; Bartkowski, 2000; Bartkowski, 2002).

These ideologies were prominent at community garden workdays at FBOs involved in this study. I was told by Samuel, founder of a soup kitchen that asks neighboring homeless to help out in the garden—tending bees, chickens, and citrus trees—that part of the reason they moved [to the inner city] was to “provide a strong male presence, show neighborhood boys what it looks like when a man provides for his family.” This patriarchal discourse is racialized—African American men were often spoken of as particularly devoid of leadership skills, and in need of the hard labor and consistency that garden work teaches. Elijah, speaking of the Urban Pioneers, where he volunteers on weekends, states:

One of their goals is to produce food, but also their goal is to help [community members] to find out what their gifts are, what their talents are, what their abilities are, and help them invest them. A man largely gets his identity out of what he does. And a woman often gets her identity out of her family. You know if I say who are you to a man, he’ll tell me about his job. If I say who are you to a woman, she’ll tell me about her family. And if a man is not investing his talents, his self-esteem is low and he’s a lot more susceptible to the temptations that are around. So that’s one of the things that [Carly] and [Mark] and ministries like theirs are doing.

In this passage, Elijah clearly establishes masculine identity as work-derived, and feminine identity as borne out of motherhood and family. Manhood, for Elijah, cannot exist without the investment of energy and work into proper pursuits.

Consequently, in order to reform “dysfunctional” urban families according to conservative Christian ideology, the Midwestern FBOs involved in this study modeled “proper” investment of labor for men and women during community garden workdays. The Urban Pioneers solely recruited men—predominantly African American men—for their aquaponic tilapia farming and chicken and rabbit husbandry training courses. Several neighborhood women expressed interest in these courses, and were redirected into canning and preserving seminars held by Carly. During community garden workdays at the 10 FBOs involved in this project, women—regardless of skillset or expressed interest—were consistently given “feminine” tasks, such as watching the children of other volunteers, picking berries, or providing water to rabbits and chickens. Men were handed power tools, charged with building raised beds, slaughtering rabbits or chickens, and tasked with tree pruning. This gendered division of labor frustrated women in particular, many of whom were interested in learning to use tools and build garden structures at their own homes.

This focus on the reformation of urban male labor and behavior draws on ideology concerning the dysfunctional black family, as evidenced most prominently in the 1965 Moynihan Report (Lewis 1996; Goode 2009; Di Leonardo 1998). Many US conservative evangelical Christians have been found to draw on the culture of poverty thesis, and believe “African Americans do not have good ‘family values’ or have bad relationships with others” (Tranby and Hartmann 2008:344). Hannah, a staff member at Urban Oasis, spoke to me at length about the issue of urban fatherlessness, and the abandonment of fatherly duties by urban black men.  During one of our conversations she argued:

A big factor we’re seeing is a generational fatherless-ness, where…the fathers are the beginning and it just snowballs from there. But when kids are taught from a young age that they don’t have to take responsibility for their children, or their wives, or vice versa—that the wives aren’t responsible for being a good wife to their husband and raising their kids, then kids grow up without any kind of role model. I mean, our father is usually the one who teaches us about responsibility, and what it looks like to take care of something, and to go to a job faithfully, and to fix things, and take care of things, and all that. As good as mothers try, they can’t always do it all—and especially not without good male role models.

The onus of teaching children about responsibility, work ethic, and stewardship are placed solely on the backs of fathers—mothers can try, but they can’t really teach children about such things. This patriarchal conceptualization of parental roles manifests as gendered labor roles in the garden, and the dismissal of single mothers who express interest in Urban Oasis’ programing on turning local food production into a small business.

Implications & Suggestions for Future Work

Religious ideology consciously and unconsciously permeates the actions of religious actors. Policy changes placing the onus of caring for the urban poor on nonprofits, and increasing the access of religious organizations to federal funding, raise the importance of studies examining how such organizations actually interact with and disperse aid to the needy. The creation of urban green space and community gardening plots, in particular, are often seen as an unequivocal good—by troubling this narrative and interrogating the different ways garden sites are employed by different actors, we gain a better understanding of how urban agriculture is actually functioning in today’s US cities.

The manifestation of these gender ideologies in the garden created uncomfortable distance between these FBOs and those being served. The dominant idea that women-headed households were deficient both socially and economically resulted in the exclusion of many single-mothers from FBO programming. Perhaps a viable method of reform would include educating faith-based welfare actors in diverse family structures, specifically, female-headed households. More broadly and ambitiously, training for FBO staff that dispels the culture of poverty myth—which includes many of these discriminatory ideas against women-headed households and black men—would work to ensure equitable welfare provision for all.

References

Bartkowski, John P., and Xiaohe Xu. 2000. Distant Patriarchs or Expressive Dads? The discourse and practice of fathering in conservative Protestant families. Sociological Quarterly 41(3): 465-485.

Bielo, James. 2011a. City of Man, City of God: The Re-Urbanization of American Evangelicals.  City & Society 23(S1):2-23.

Bielo, James. 2011b. Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity.  New York: New York University Press.

Carnes, Tony. 2011. Back to the Garden: Row by row, urban Christians learn to bear literal and spiritual fruit. Christianity Today, July 27.

Clayborn, Shane. 2006. The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical.  Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

Di Leonardo, Micaela. 1998. Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Elisha, Omri. 2008. You Can’t Talk to an Empty Stomach: Faith-Based Activism, Holistic Evangelism, and the Publicity of Evangelical Engagement. In Proselytization Revisited: Rights Talk, Free Markets and Culture Wars. Rosalind J. Hackett, ed. Pp. 431-454. London: Equinox.

Ellison, Christopher G., and John P. Bartkowski. 2002. Conservative Protestantism and the Division of Household Labor among Married Couples. Journal of Family Issues 23(8): 950-985.

Gallagher, Sally K. 2003. Evangelical identity and gendered family life. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

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Wadsworth, N.D. 1997. Reconciliation politics: Conservative Evangelicals and the new race discourse. Politics & Society, 25(3), 341-376.

On a vernal Sunday morning, I meet with a group of retired women to travel to the mountains of rural Kochi in Japan. The day is overcast, yet the drive outside the city is pleasant with patches of flowering trees dotting the side of the road. We reach a small windy lane wide enough for one small car. Mitani sensei, the driver, tells me that the road did not exist when she was younger and the trip had to be made on foot. We reach her hometown, a hamlet, also called Mitani where we came to collect wild mountain vegetables called sansai. For many in Japan, spring evokes recollections of a peculiar grassy bitterness that can only be found in these wild mountain greens. This bitter taste is one that Japanese people seek as it reminds them of seasonal flavors from times immemorial. The aim of this essay is precisely to uncover the relationship that exists between unique flavors of the past and the elusive sentiment of nostalgia.

The ancestral village

In Japan, sansai are more than mere edibles as they represent the change of seasons, past traditions and the mountain village. These mountain greens are an important resource for isolated communities that sometimes transform this cultural capital into an economic one (Love 2010). Isolated rural villages have been hampered by a dwindling economy with few jobs, an aging population and a rural exodus that leaves some small villages entirely abandoned. Japan’s national demographic crisis and decades-old economic slump are almost palpable in these rural communities. The Mitani hamlet, for instance, primarily relies on sustenance agriculture practiced by elderly villagers. Year after year, their numbers dwindle as no young people take over the old mountain farmhouses.

Still, the rural village occupies a significant place in the Japanese imaginary. The furusato or ancestral village carries with it the essence of Japanese traditions (Robertson 1988). Far from being a tangible place, this village is a space that exists in the hearts and minds of Japanese people as even long time city dwellers experience a lingering feeling of loss when one mentions it. The furusato is ever present in traditional country songs called enka (Yano 2003) and the tourist industry (Creighton 1997). Although the furusato exists in this rarified state, its image has very real impact on the experience of taste. Products and dishes associated with the furusato possess a distinctive flavor that qualifies as rustic, pristine and unpretentious. These flavors, far from only being a marketing ploy, are the product of a unique context, as these hometown specialties never taste the same when consumed outside the furusato.

If we are to believe popular discourse, the ancestral village is under threat of disappearing. Rural regions, widely considered the guardians of Japanese traditions, are seen as slowly dying as a result of their dwindling demographics. The demise of the rural village means that a whole way of life and the essence of Japanese culture would disappear with it. This now permanent state of fear surrounding the disappearance of the ancestral village is anchored in Japan’s collective consciousness. In “Discourse of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan”, Marilyn Ivy (1995) argues that many in Japan are occupied by this deep anxiety about the loss of traditions of the past. Japanese cultural traditions that are assumed to be continuous throughout time need to be protected because they are part of Japanese identity. In this context, nostalgia for flavors of the past becomes a quest for representation of what constitutes the essence of Japaneseness.

Memory and the sense of taste

The connection between food and memory has been explored in literature (Proust 2006) and in the social sciences (Holtzman 2006). Although widely acknowledged, few have pondered on how memory, in particular nostalgia, affects the experience of taste. We love the food we ate growing up not because of its inherent taste qualities but because we associate pleasant memories with it. One can also be nostalgic for an imagined past he or she has never experienced. Regardless of how we acquire these food memories, the taste of food is enhanced as it incorporates history and tradition in its meaning. After a Japanese plum harvesting trip with a group of elderly people, we were invited for tea and handmade rice cakes wrapped in Japanese ginger leaves (hagedango). Everyone could barely contain their amazement at how delectable the rice cakes were. The rice cakes carried particular significance for people that had eaten them in their youth but still tasted delicious to people that had never experienced them as they could taste the weight of tradition in every bite.

The link between food and personal memory has a tremendous impact on the experience of taste. However, this phenomenon reaches maximum potency when it is experienced by a collective—whether it is national, regional or familial. According to David Sutton (2001), food and taste participate in building a type of collective memory that is referred to as Historical Consciousness. In the region of Kochi, history is remembered in the form of narratives that allude to the past and tradition using the feudal name of the region (Tosa). Following this logic, traditional papermaking becomes Tosa washi, the local dog breed becomes Tosa inu and of course the cuisine is collectively referred to as Tosa ryori. Such historical representations are important because they shape how we experience traditions in the present. As people consume the cuisine of Tosa, they can appreciate a taste that is anchored in a shared experience of the past.

Of course, economic imperatives also foster the creation of a mythical past that only exist in the consumer’s mind. In the remote village of Umaji, farmers banded together to build a Japanese citrus (yuzu) pressing factory. According to local lore, elderly residents of Umaji were unable to produce perfect looking yuzu fruits. This fruit would not sell as Japanese consumers only buy flawless products. The elderly population in a feat of self-reliance decided to manufacture a drink made from pressed yuzu. Umaji is now famous as the village that fought the odds to become a textbook example of rural revitalization. The old-fashioned glass vial drink tastes delicious to consumers as it encapsulates the purity of the mountains, the weight of traditions and the resilience of a rural community. Although the popularity of this drink might be the product of a manufactured image, it has a very real impact on the taste experience of the consumer.

Nostalgia in Kochi cuisine

In the region of Kochi, nostalgia for tradition of the countryside serves the interest of local entrepreneurs. In a region that has few economic opportunities, businesses tap into the one resource they can readily use. The commodification of nostalgia through the use of imagery of tradition and the past adds value to a product that would be otherwise difficult to sell. Food souvenirs called omiyage are sold in every tourist shop. As these souvenirs are meant to be gifts, the taste of the product is intimately tied to a different place and a time past. In this manner, the image of Sakamoto Ryoma, a famous samurai from Kochi, is displayed on souvenirs to add value to them. Nostalgia is also merchandised in markets and festivals. In the small fishing village of Kure, the Taisho ichiba fish market takes tourists on a trip back in time. Little stalls display freshly caught fish that are sliced sashimi style and served across the way in a tiny, picturesque “tea house”.

Regional food discourse is permeated with the subtext of nostalgia. Books about the cuisine of Kochi must use the vocabulary of nostalgia if they are to capture the essence of tradition. Terms like furusato no daidokoro (the ancestral village kitchen), fukuro no aji (mom’s home cooking) and Tosa no aji (flavors of Tosa) contribute to disseminating an affective image of a cuisine that lives in the past. In the Kochi newspaper monthly “delicious Tosa” section, the reader learns about traditional dishes and their place in daily practices of the past. More than mere nostalgia for a flavor of the past, these columns articulate nostalgia for a way of life. Here, as well as elsewhere with tradition, one grows nostalgic for a cuisine and its flavors because they are intimately linked to a way of life.

Food one feels nostalgic for acquires a deliciousness that transcends the chemical reactions on the palate. Country cuisine (inaka ryori) and farmer’s restaurants (noka resutoran) attract wide numbers because they taste good to consumers in search of authentic taste. This food is good because it is more than a taste of times past. Its taste incorporates a way of life that is remembered with clouded nostalgia by some and awaiting rediscovery by many. The popularity in Kochi of country sushi (inaka sushi) made from mountain vegetables instead of raw fish exemplifies nostalgia that residents feel for life in the mountain village. This type of sushi tastes delicious because it reminds the consumer of days long gone when fresh fish was not available in the mountains and even rice was a treat as it did not grow readily in the mountains.

Traditions and flavors

In rural communities across Kochi, these flavors, like many other traditions of the past, are slowly eroding under the assault of the industrialization of the local diet and an aging population. The prefectural government in concordance with women’s cooperatives and local businesses have taken active steps in trying to reverse this unavoidable process of cultural transformation through a system of regional food certification. This system of local appellations enables the monopoly of a specific dish at the expense of other regions that might have practiced similar food traditions in the past. For example, seared skipjack tuna (katsuo no tataki) is now considered the specialty of the coastal city of Tosa Kure. This tacit monopoly is solidified via tourist food guides, regional food specialties maps and newspaper articles. The process cementing the legitimacy of certain dishes and flavors in particular places can easily become a battleground where political and economical interests are at stake.

In the end, few traditional flavors make the cut, as they are often hard to relate to for those not accustomed to them. Some flavors have lost favor because they are so unconventional that they require a particular social context for the consumer to get accustomed to them. In the mountains of Kochi, older residents eat a traditional dish of brown acorn jelly with a sharp bitter taste (kashikiri). Today, the dish is almost extinct, as younger generations cannot stomach such a flavor. Mushiyokan, steamed sweet potatoes and bean cake, is another dish that is slowly going out of favor. Relatively palatable to the younger generations, it is difficult to incorporate in most meals, as it does not fit the structure of the modern meal being neither a side dish nor a desert. In both cases, the loss of popularity engenders a rapid decline in the lengthy preparation required for these traditional flavors. As the techniques of preparation are forgotten so is the taste for such unusual dishes.

In the region of Kochi, significant efforts are put in place to transmit an appreciation of these flavors. School programs and traditional activities help to a certain extent to stem the tide. However, cultural change, especially when it comes to cuisine and taste, can hardly be stopped. Culture, even traditional culture, cannot afford to remain static if it is to conserve meaning and allow people to relate to it. As these changes take place, one can only feel a sense of nostalgia caused by the imminent disappearance of flavors so unique they defined people’s lives. The preservation and revival of these disappearing flavors through local products and traditional cuisine are in fact an effort to reconnect with a particular time and place. The characteristic taste of nostalgia is epitomized by this desire to reconnect with something lost. The issue at hand here is not resistance to change but instead keeping alive a deeply emotional and intimate pleasure.

Bibliography

Creighton, Millie. 1997 Consuming Rural Japan: The Marketing of Tradition and Nostalgia in the Japanese Travel Industry. Ethnology: 239–254.

Holtzman, Jon D. 2006. Food and Memory. Annual Review of Anthropology 35(1): 361–378.

Ivy, Marilyn. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. University of Chicago Press.

Love, Bridget. 2010. Mountain Vegetables and the Politics of Local Flavors in Japan. In Japanese Foodways, Past and Present. 1st Edition. Eric C. Rath and Stephanie Assmann, eds. University of Illinois Press.

Proust, Marcel. 2006. Remembrance of Things Past. Wordsworth Editions.

Robertson, Jennifer. 1988. Furusato Japan: The Culture and Politics of Nostalgia. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 1(4): 494–518.

Sutton, David E. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. First Edition. Berg Publishers.

Yano, Christine R. 2003. Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song. Harvard University Asia Center.

In 2007, I moved to the mountains of Western North Carolina to conduct research for my doctorate in applied anthropology and begin my immersion in an initiative to build a local food system through the efforts of one particular organization, Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP). Nearly 10 years later, I’m still here. I co-direct the work of Local Food Research Center, the research arm of the organization that is looking at what happens when we localize food systems and more specifically at the actions we need to take so that local food system building creates the economic, environmental, and social changes we imagine are possible through this process.

Ten years ago one of the first meetings I attended at ASAP was around the development of a local food brand, Appalachian Grown. With a group of farmers and other entrepreneurs making value-added products with locally-sourced ingredients, we met one afternoon to talk about brand qualities and standards. As we were waiting for members of the group to arrive, I took the opportunity to ask Greg^[1] one of the organizers at ASAP, “So what production standards will the logo stand for?” His response was “none.”  To further clarify my understanding of the purpose of the brand, I asked, “So other than the location where it was grown, what will the brand stand for?”  In reply, he said, “Well, the logo will brand food grown on family farms in the region that we serve.” Seeing the blank look on my face, he continued, “If we limit the program to farms growing in a certain way, then we are leaving out the majority of farms in the region and all of them need support. Without it, we will continue to lose farms and farmland. And farms can’t grow food or shift their production [to environmentally sustainable methods] if they are no longer in business.”

In that brief exchange, Greg revealed that organizers conceived of “local food” as fundamentally a process to engage in. In assuming that the brand would only label local food with particular desirable qualities (and, following, would only be available to farmers growing food in particular ways), I was reducing local food to a product, to a desired end rather than a means of moving toward achieving desirable ends. As I would come to appreciate, defining of the qualities of “local food” for the people in this region only serves to reinforce an established pattern, one that alienates us from food systems and the capacity to participate in their creation. It not only limits the transformative potential of local food, it ignores the current context that must be the starting point of change and following the necessity of engaging in a process that simultaneously attends to current conditions even as it tries to change them.

This idea of local food as a process is grounded in a belief that a condition of estrangement – from the processes of food production and provision, from our neighbors, from the communities in which we live – underlies the sustainability of an unsustainable and exploitative agri-food industry. To quote Ella, another organizer, when your relationship with food begins and ends with the grocery store, “There’s no association to the person that grew it. There’s no relationship to the land it was planted in. It has no connection to anything other than the shelf it came from, the shopping bag it was pulled out of. We are just so completely cut-off from our food supply. So why would you care about the land, the farmer, the community – why would it even occur to you to think to care about those things? They’re not even in your head.”

A global food system with far flung supply chains has removed from the consciousness of many people the biological workings of food production – cycles of planting and harvesting – and the connections between eating to the human and natural resources required to produce food. Within this framework, local food is not simply a matter of food miles, i.e., shortening food supply chains, it is about addressing the estrangement from food and food production in the global system that is at once geographical, social, and emotional.

The origins of a movement

By the mid 1990s, farms in Western North Carolina were already being impacted by an impending change to US agricultural policy that would end the federal tobacco program. Tobacco, specifically Burley tobacco, had been an enormously significant crop – a stable and profitable source of income for farms in this region for nearly 70 years and, to a degree, it had shielded the region’s farms from consolidating trends in the global agricultural market. Observing and experiencing first hand the negative impacts of the globalizing economy on this place and anticipating further detrimental impacts with the end of the tobacco program, a group of concerned citizens, farmers, and agricultural support personnel began meeting to talk about what could be done to ensure farming remained a part of the region’s communities. These early organizers believed that without some kind of intervention, farming would decline dramatically and with that there would be significant negative repercussions not only for farming but for the region as a whole. Understanding that production for global markets was not an option for the small mountain farms in the region, they hit upon the idea of “local food” – local food as a mechanism of engagement, a means to connect people to the region’s farms, farmers, and other members of the community, and on a more conceptual level to larger forces responsible for patterns of farm and farmland loss, rampant development, hunger, obesity, and a loss of community autonomy.  In 2000, the newly formed Appalachian Sustainable Agricultural project launched a local food campaign.

In essence the local food campaign in Western North Carolina has been an effort in community building centered on local food and farms – a process of rooting people in the conditions and (developing) relationships of this place and mobilizing action in support of the region’s family farms, land and natural resources, and a community of people increasingly linked together around an evolving local food and farm system. Underlying this work is a theory of change based on the idea of food system democratization.^[2] To change the food system – how food is produced and distributed, what its impacts are, who it serves and benefits, the values and principles on which it operates – we have to increase participation in the food system and transition from passive to active participants.

The movement in a movement

In coaxing this process of food system democratization along, our strategies, while informed by larger and longer term aspirations, are trained on the here and now – on the on-the-ground realities encountered in the day-to-day work of trying to create change at the local level in a food system deeply embedded in industrialized, global food markets. Both Greg’s and Ella’s statements allude to current circumstances that condition and direct our action. On the production end, farm loss has been and continues to be an immediate concern. Greg’s comments point to the ongoing stress on the region’s farmers who struggle to make a living farming in an economy dominated by principles of scale and profit and grounded in anonymous and opaque market relationships. Without farms, we lose the capacity to grow food for a region of nearly one million people and the opportunity to co-create a food system that reflects the particular conditions of the region. On the consumption end, Ella’s observation points to the significance of our perceptions. In our global economic milieu, we make many decisions in a vacuum, predominantly outside any awareness of their impacts and devoid from a larger sense of the ways in which our actions create the world around us. The dominant food industry is not only rooted in global food supply chains and in specific procurement and distribution patterns, it is rooted in us – as consumers and eaters – in the ways that we think about and relate to food and eating and in a lack of awareness that our actions support (or challenge) particular ways of doing things.

In this context, the economic sustainability of farms is a primary concern in our work – the need for farmers to make a living to continue farming and in a bigger and longer-term sense to have an agricultural base to engage with and affect. On one level, local food is first a strategy that engages us as consumers, that aims to build personal market relationships, and affect our purchasing decisions. The foundation of our work revolves around the creation of spaces where people can engage directly with food and agriculture – at farmers markets, local food and farm fairs, farm tours, through farm to school activities,^[3] in cooking demonstrations and tastings, and the like. We do these things to imbue food with meaning – with the significance of these experiences and interactions so that food choices become an extension of them and a means to express a growing sense of community and desire support it. On the market level, over the past 15 years, there have been palpable changes in the region’s food system – the proliferation of direct-to-consumer markets, demand from the conventional food industry, actions by larger retail entities in the region to change food procurement systems to accommodate the smaller scale and decentralized nature of food production here, and more generally, the emergence of an economy tied to the region’s farms, farmland, and locally grown food.

At the same time and on a different level, these spaces are designed to move people beyond actions grounded solely in a consumer sensibility to those grounded in an emerging civic sensibility. We view place-based food and farm experiences as means to increase knowledge about food production and about the ways food intersects with issues of land use, labor, poverty, energy, obesity, hunger, etc; a means to awaken in people a desire to do something about the negative impacts of the dominant food system; a means to develop in people a larger sense of how our actions around food and eating are tied to the welfare and wellbeing of the people, animals, and environments that are connected to food production and distribution systems. In this way, the significance of place-based food and farm experiences is in their capacity to provide the space for these kinds of outcomes to emerge – through engagement, interaction, and dialogue among and between participants. In these spaces farmers are able to share information about their farms – what they grow, how they grow it, what it means to produce food on a small scale. The public and people that work in the food industry are able to see working farms, participate in planting and harvest cycles, learn and ask questions about farming, express their concerns or desires for food produced in particular ways.

What we have seen is that alongside changes in the market in Western North Carolina, nonmarket movement activity is also emerging and continuing to take shape in the form of things like food policy councils; parent action to change school nutrition services; increasing public discussion on issues of food access, food justice, and land use; the actions of farms and communities to grow food for people who cannot afford; the place-based food, farm, and health education programs of universities and colleges and of individuals serving in the public health arena.

What has occurred in Western North Carolina over the past 15 years is indicative of a food system in transition and suggests the importance for organizers and scholars of food localization efforts to attend to process. This kind of perspective is not only vital to the work of local food system building, it is important for the capacity of research to apprehend the complexity of movement-industry interaction and contribute analyses with applied relevance. In the work that we do to try to facilitate this shift, we necessarily move iteratively between theory and practice – conceptualizing ideas, putting them into practice, assessing their outcomes. Novel understandings, perspectives, and strategies emerge out of this iterative framework and inform subsequent action. Accordingly, how and what we define as meaningful indicators of food system change attends to a food system in flux and to an understanding that “outcomes” are both provisional and incremental.  In a shifting food and farm landscape, the constraints and possibilities for action evolve as the local food system evolves – as the perceptions, expectations, and actions of farmers, members of the public, and people working at various points in the food system shift and conditions change.

References Cited

Hassanein, Neva. 2003. “Practicing Food Democracy: A Pragmatic Politics of Transformation.” Journal of Rural Studies 19 (1) (January): 77–86.

Hassanein, Neva. 2008. “THEORY & APPLICATIONS Locating Food Democracy : Theoretical and Practical Ingredients.” Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition 3 (2/3): 286–309.

Johnston, Josée, Andrew Biro, and Norah MacKendrick. 2009. “Lost in the Supermarket: The Corporate-Organic Foodscape and the Struggle for Food Democracy.” Antipode 41 (3): 509–532.

Levkoe, Charles Z. 2006. “Learning Democracy Through Food Justice Movements.” Agriculture and Human Values 23 (1) (March): 89–98.

^[1] All names are pseudonyms

^[2] Drawing in part on the work of Hassanein (2003, 2008), Johnston et al (2009), and Levkoe (2006)

^[3] Farm field trips, cooking demonstrations and tastings, school gardening for students, staff, and teachers

Introduction

According to the old German saying, “We are what we eat.” Therefore, many gastronomic stereotypes have come to describe people from various countries according to their food preferences.  For example, Italians are known as “macaroni”, English as “roast beef,” Belgians as “chip-eaters”, French as “frogs” and Germans as “krauts” (Fischler 1988: 279). The word ‘stereotype’ comes from the Greek, ‘stereos’: solid, and the French ‘type’: type, meaning “stereotype plate” or “image perpetuated without change” (Online Etymology Dictionary). As can be observed, some cultures reduce (and) locate other cultures by means of various gastronomic stereotypes. Hence, the ingestion of certain types of foods is what comes to define one’s culture.  This metonymic reduction (‘food’,(substituting) for ‘the diner’) is not free from disdain, scorn, or satire toward these respective cultures, and constitutes an expression of political power.

The question arises about the gastronomic stereotypes with respect to Americans, and specifically, Coloradoans. What is Colorado’s cuisine and thus, what is the culinary stereotype that defines Coloradoans? According to Linda Hayes, “We [Coloradoans] are known for our lamb, as well as wild game…” (Cited in Cross Castañeda xviii). If lamb defines Coloradoans, then should the Coloradoans be called “Lamb eaters?” My purpose in this article is to analyze Colorado’s gastronomic identity. Furthermore, I suggest that in addition to the traditional cuisine, over the last decade, international, vegetarian and molecular gastronomies, as well as cannabis, have been integrated into the Colorado cuisine, making it one of the most diverse gastronomies in the United States. More even than (simply) the different types of food – which can be found alone or in combination in other states of the American Union, what makes the gastronomy of Colorado unique is the co-existence and varying combination  of all the types of cooking already mentioned,  thus creating a century-old, multicultural gastronomic identity. There seems to be a discursive struggle of flavors and tastes that has affected the gastronomic identity of Coloradoans.

From the Gastronomical Lawless to the Cosmopolitan Foodies

Colorado’s cuisine belongs to the Southwest or Rocky Mountain gastronomic region. It can be defined as a hybrid between the colonial Spanish, Mexican, Native American and cowboy cuisines. Some of the ingredients that make up this cuisine include vegetables, wild game and chili. Among its most popular dishes are tacos, rice and beans, stuffed peppers, chimichangas, pozole, enchiladas, quesadillas, mountain oysters, chops, bacon-wrapped buffalo or lamb steak covered with wine or berry sauce, fish such as trout or bass, pecan-crusted venison, slow-roasted buffalo meat, patés, sausages and slow-cooked stews (Cross Castañeda 2006).

Coloradoans have created a century-old, multicultural gastronomic identity. In her article Colorado Cuisine is a Culinary Rodeo, Laura Shunk (2015) defines it as “Libertarian and lawless… Made without regard for authenticity or rules” (3). Moreover, she adds the following:

It’s a freakin’ culinary rodeo. And while I could predict that most menus will showcase farm-to-table vegetables, game meat and something spicy, I have no idea if those elements are going to show up in the form of Midwestern meatloaf and mashed potatoes, a fancified–and probably smothered–burrito or house-cured charcuterie and crudités (3).

Additionally, in the eyes of Shunk, Colorado’s cuisine defines the American Wild West experience: “Colorado cuisine pulls together defining elements of the American experience in this country – or at least the American experience in the Wild West – where pioneers abandoned what remained from European customs for libertarian lawlessness” (3).

Over time, Colorado’s gastronomic identity has undergone a transformation under the influence of international gastronomy. Nowadays, Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins could be considered to be among the ‘noteworthy’ gastronomic cities in the Southwest. You can find in these Colorado cities what are  known as “ethnic foods”, such as Ethiopian, German, French, Latin American, Japanese, and Italian. Denver, in particular, has lost its reputation of a “cow town” to become one of the most important cosmopolitan gastronomic cities in the Southwest. More recently, it has joined the list of cities that host molecular gastronomy restaurants. However, molecular gastronomy has not replaced the traditional and centennial Southwestern cuisine; both coexist on the state’s gastronomic map.

Colorado Cuisine: Struggle of Flavors

Food makes up an important factor in terms of building cultural identity in social practices through the “incorporation principle”, which connects the body with the external world through the mouth (Fischler 1988: 276-78). Fischler qualifies the incorporation of food substances as both “real” and “imaginary”, thus redefining the “We are what we eat” slogan. Additionally, she concedes: “Incorporation is also the basis of collective identity and, by the same token, of otherness. Food and cuisine are a quite central component of a sense of collective belonging” (278). Consequently, how do Coloradoans build their identity in relation to food (and its representation)? On the one hand, the image of the tough cowboy remains, the lawless Libertarian who incorporates the substances of the hunted animals (game meat) into his body; on the other hand, there coexists with this image, an alternate image of a Cosmopolitan foodie or a refined gourmand who frequents international, vanguard, molecular gastronomy restaurants. What this quandary suggests, together with other trends, is a struggle of flavors in Colorado. Besides the lawless libertarian and the molecular cuisine aficionados, there are people in Colorado who prefer junk food, others who are in the new movement of slow food, vegetarians (divided between vegans and fishetarians or pescatarians), the freegans, and the frugal health-focused eaters, sarcastically referred to as “granola people.” In addition to the former, we have to add those who experiment with cannabis cuisine. Should we call them “Cooking potheads?”

Any culinary preference implies an ideology expressed in a lifestyle and a discourse. Although various tendencies coexist, conflicts of discursive character are manifest through colloquial phrases, jokes and recommendations regarding one’s health.  The main confrontation, I think, could come from the common front of the vegetarians and the “granola people,” who prefer a healthy diet based on organic products, against the libertarians and junk food consumers who incorporate in their bodies large quantities of cholesterol, saturated fats, carbohydrates, sugar, and gluten, among other substances.

I am not sure where to locate cannabis cuisine, maybe it is the cuisine in-transit–between the lawless (due to the old prohibition) and the avant-garde experimentation. Another difference exists, between the healthy eaters, in general, and the molecular cooks, who consume harmful substances such as liquid nitrogen and carbon dioxide. In the latter case, in order to get an artistic and philosophical image, the gourmet refinement would be accompanied by a high level of toxicity. In terms of drinks, a divide has also formed between local beer drinkers and molecular mixology fanatics. While some prefer homemade beers or local microbreweries, others favor molecular drinks such as cocktails with liquid nitrogen added for the purpose of creating smoke.

New elements that introduce changes in any system represent a threat, since they wreak havoc with our beliefs and values. Therefore, there exists an attitude of rejection of dietary changes through the use of pejorative phrases.  What is at stake in this apparently simple choice of flavors is an identity that is expressed in beliefs, lifestyles, politics, artistic sensibility, and ideologies. Molecular and cannabis gastronomies represent a threat to the libertarian lawless, who identify themselves with traditional food inherited from their ancestors, in which they can recognize themselves as inhabitants of Colorado or the Old Wild West, as is the case with those who, in junk foods such as the hamburger and the hot dog, see the essence of Americanism. On the other hand, some militant vegetarians and “granola people” see in molecular gastronomy only the incorporation of harmful substances into what they call the “temple” of the human body.

Since marijuana legalization in 2014, there has emerged in Colorado a series of gourmet dishes that range from cannabis-infused breads, butters, peanut brittles, brownies, chocolates, and cupcakes. Recently, Bon Appétit magazine has published an issue featuring an article on cannabis-inspired food, which has caused consternation if not outrage among conservative groups. Here, for example, is the response of a local reader directed to the editors of Bon Appétit: “You should be ashamed of yourself. . .  Definitely, I am ashamed of you. Here I spend my life trying to keep kids off drugs, trying to counter the misguided impression that marijuana abuse is harmless and you run an article about cannabis in cooking” (Quoted by Moulton 2014). There is an explicit attack in this quote that equates marijuana to other drugs, from a moral and health-conscious point of view.

Furthermore, porno-molecular consumers would be perceived as yuppies or snobs by the libertarian lawless. There is also a pornographic aspect in molecular gastronomy that comes from representing dishes as “glossily lush of voluptuous and sinful” (Magee 2007: 1), as opposed to the simple, real and puritan aspect of wild game dishes. Although molecular gastronomy is not new in Colorado, not until recently  has it risen to  prominence. Several schools in Boulder, such as Escoffier School of Culinary Arts, offer courses dedicated to this specialty. More recently, three restaurants serving molecular food have opened in Denver: 1515 Restaurant in Northwest Lodo, Palace Arms in Northwest Uptown, and Tables in Park Hill. Here is the description of the dishes served at 1515 restaurant lounge:

As soon as you sit down, charming waiters offer you a list of available contemporary cocktails, many of which are cooled with liquid nitrogen that creates a billowing smoke effect. Once you’ve had your fill of delicious chemically-precise alcoholic beverages, you can turn your eyes to the menu. You will find a slew of appealing appetizers and main dishes, including lamb sweetbreads showered in truffle powders and stylishly decorated with almond gelatin. Or you could decide to enjoy a tender New York Strip steak, prepared sous-vide and paired with delectable wild mushrooms (picked locally) and a variety of garnish.” (Auguste Scoffier School).

Molecular gastronomy relies on scientific methods, more specifically physical-chemical procedures, in order to prepare food. In the process, chemical substances are used and these include liquid nitrogen, titanium, carbon dioxide, sodium alginate (E401), chloride or calcium salt (E509), xanthan, agar-agar (E406), sodium citrate, silver dust, liquid titanium, diluted citric acid, and methylcellulose ( Casalins 2012).

Molecular gastronomy, also known as deconstructive, vanguard, conceptual, author, technical-conceptual or technical-emotional gastronomy, emerged in 1998 as part of the project by French chemist, Hervé This. It had already been conceptualized by the Hungarian physicist Nicholas Kurti from Oxford University, who, in 1969, at the famous conference “The Physicist in the Kitchen” said the following: “I think with great sadness about our civilization, while we measure the atmosphere’s temperature in Venus, we ignore the Celsius temperature of our soufflés” (Casalins 2012: 126). As can be seen, for Kurti there exists a disparity of knowledge between physics and gastronomy. Porno-molecular and cannabis cuisines have scandalized the simplicity and puritanism of some healthy eaters who consider their body as a “temple” that needs to be respected by not adding toxins.

Conclusion

As we have seen, over the last fifty years, Coloradoans have experienced a transformation in their gastronomy, ranging from the southwest traditional cuisine through cannabis cuisine, vegetarian, vegan, fishetarian and international cuisines, ending with molecular gastronomy. The question remains: What has been Coloradoans’ relation to these cuisine trends, and how have they rebuilt their gastronomic identity after the inclusion of these new foods? Currently, all these trends coexist in a struggle of flavors between different generations and lifestyles, from the most conservative in terms of food, to the most avant-garde. If Colorado cuisine has been traditionally a hybrid of colonial Spanish, Mexican, and cowboy and Native American, molecular cuisine has become a scandal due to what Richard Magee would denominate as “pornography” of the dishes and the toxicity of the chemical substances used in the preparation of the dishes. Both molecular and marijuana cuisines emphasize their reduction to the molecular –THC for cannabis cuisine. The same could potentially be said for “health-food” eaters in the emphasis on reducing certain specific constituents of food (e.g. cholesterol). This could be the main source of the threats and conflicts among Coloradoans.

*Fernando Valerio-Holguín is a Dominican poet, critic, and John N. Stern Distinguished Professor of Latin American Literature at Colorado State University. He has been invited to lecture and read poetry at universities and institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution, the Oxford University, University of Antwerp, and the Library of Congress, among others. He has published extensively on Latin American and literature and culture, popular music, cinema, and gastronomy. He is the author of Poetics of Coldness: The Narrative of Virgilio Piñera, and Post-Modern Banality: Essays on Latin American Cultural Identity.

References

Auguste Scoffier School of Culinary Arts. 2014. Exploring the Molecular Gastronomy Scene Near Boulder. http://www.escoffier.edu/industry-news/exploring-the-molecular-gastronomy-scene-near-boulder/ accessed September 2, 2015.

Casalins, Eduardo. 2012. Cocina Molecular: Conceptos, Técnicas y Recetas. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Lea S. A. Cross Castañeda, Eliza
—–2006. Food Lover´s Guide To Colorado. Guildford, Connecticut: Globe Pequot Press.

Fischler, Claude. 1988. Food, Self and Identity. Social Science Information 27:275-293.

Magee, Richard M. 2007. Food Puritanism and Food Pornography: The Gourmet Semiotics of Martha and Nigella.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture.

Moulton, Rory. 2014. Cannabis Cuisine Takes Colorado with Gourmet Munchies, THC Sodas, Food-Pot Pairings.” Bon Appétit: Food+Culture. http://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/trends-news/slideshow/cannabis-cuisine-colorado/?slide=2 accessed October 23, 2015.

Online Etymology Dictionary. www.etymonline.com accessed July 16, 2016.

Shunk, Laura. 2015. Colorado Cuisine is a Culinary Rodeo: Libertarian and Lawless.”            http://www.westword.com/restaurants/colorado-cuisine-is-a-culinary-rodeo-libertarian-and-lawless-5734955 accessed September 9, 2015.

Anthropologists have long studied commensality as a means to gain insight into the life ways and worldviews of others.  Sitting at another’s table, mastering their etiquette and incorporating their cuisine are powerful ways to encounter and learn about other societies.  It is for this reason that I have long used commensal events as teaching tools in my anthropology classes at the American University of Paris.  A unique institution where Anglophone students come to study in the French capital – sometimes for a semester, though more often for their entire undergraduate education – AUP provides the perfect setting for a hands-on approach to learning the practices and perspectives of the anthropologist. In this short article, I want to explore commensality, and in particular welcome meals abroad, as a site for intercultural learning. 

To do so, however, I will draw not only from my students’ experiences, but from my own as well.  This is possible because for a decade, while teaching at the university, I also worked as a consultant, applying anthropology for corporate and non-profit clients.  It is in this capacity that I traveled to Ukraine in 2011 as a member of a research team asked to study a farming cooperative project.  While most of my applied work had been realized in familiar contexts, in this case I carried out several weeks of participant observation research in a place that was entirely foreign to me.  In other words, I found myself in the same subject position as my students, one of the cultural novice, and this provided me with a new perspective. In particular, I was reminded of the emotional force of such encounters, the analytical potential of the meal, and of the ways anthropological frames and methods help us to deal with our feelings and transform them into pertinent questions and insights.

To Eat is to Feel

Of course, anthropologists know that intercultural encounters can be emotionally taxing. Introductory textbooks describe the manner in which anthropologists can experience any number of hardships while trying to fit in, and more than one ethnography begins with an emotionally difficult event.  In all these cases, however, emotions are worked through, if not moved past, over time and with attention to the more serious business of learning the local language, keeping detailed notes, conducting interviews, integrating theoretical frames and so forth. But what of those first moments, when the emotional tide is often overwhelming?

After many years of living in France, I had been lulled into the belief that my students’ often strong emotional reactions to encountering France – waxing poetic about a French meal or pinching their noses above a cheese platter – were, first and foremost, signs of their youth and “Americanness”, and thus, of our difference.  Then I traveled to Ukraine.  And whether it was getting teary-eyed at a village feast, feeling giddy while sharing a late-night snack, or suffering fear and nausea when offered a leathery strip of smoked fish and a shot of vodka at 11am, I experienced, to my surprise, a whole series of raw, uncensored subjective reactions of my own.  So, as it turns out, we (even professors) never really mature beyond being emotionally impacted by new encounters, especially those held at the table.  In such circumstances, eating must be understood as an act of incorporation of otherness:  a fundamental act in which “we send food across the frontier between the world and the self, between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ our body” (Fischler 279).  These days, before pushing my students to move past their emotions, I ask them to acknowledge and, to the greatest extent possible, embrace them.

To Eat is to Feel and to Trust

One reason to embrace them is that the emotions felt and expressed when eating with strangers can help to establish relations of trust, an absolute necessity in the early stages of participant observation research.  Take, for instance, the “welcome meal”.  In Ukraine, each time our research team arrived in a village, we were welcomed with food and drink, and more often than not these occasions were highly ritualized.  My students experience similar kinds of meals: a first dinner with a host family, for example.  The purpose of such meals is to invite newcomers into the fold, be it a family, village and/or nation.  In this way, welcome meals can be understood as rites of passage (Van Gennep): they involve a series of prescribed activities organized in a set sequence of stages, but also a series of emotions (the strong feelings of communitas as identified by Turner, for example), which aim at moving the newcomer from the status of foreigner to guest. Thus, to feel moved during a welcome meal is, we might say, the whole point; and to express those feelings (albeit in an culturally appropriate manner) is central to the meal’s success, both for the newcomer and the community.

Of course, lest we romanticize such encounters, welcome meals also test outsiders. Bloch argues that while commensal meals act to reinforce bonds of solidarity, they also function, when an outsider is present, to “find out how far the other is willing to engage in greater intimacies” (146). In this way, welcome meals often consist of “dare foods”, which provoke fear or disgust for the outsider, but are highly symbolic of, and greatly appreciated by, the community. My students, for example, can be served a pungent Camembert or rabbit stew by a French host, who then, along with the other guests, carefully observes their boundary-crossing consumption. In Ukraine, my 11am vodka was presented to me by a choir of women wearing traditional dress, with much of the village standing witness.  In such cases, confronting our fears and possibly overcoming our nausea are near obligatory.  “Is there any way to refuse the vodka?”, I whispered to our interpreter as the singing ensemble approached.  “For me, yes. I can refuse”, he replied, “But, for you, no. You must drink.”

To Eat is to Feel and to Be

Eating with strangers, and the feelings that accompany it, are also bound to social identification dynamics.  Understood as a continuous, dialogical process, rather than as a thing people possess, identity here has to do with the manner in which representations of “us” and “them” are not only integral to our own identity, but also constitutive of social interactions.  Maintaining and using our awareness of such dynamics is key to participant observation.  One important aspect of this, of course, is coming to terms with the ways our informants categorize us.  For example, Stoller and Okles, using a meal experience within the context of long-term fieldwork, examine Songhay social hierarchies by aligning their observations of the social sphere with an understanding of their location within it.  For newcomers, however, in the midst of a new encounter, analysis is a long way off.  Instead, paying attention to how our informants position us in their social world helps us to formulate pertinent (i.e. culturally or relationally situated) questions, temper our desire to raise (or erase) boundaries or draw premature conclusions.  In Ukraine, for example, we had to recognize that our welcome meals – from the elaborate feast that made us feel loved to the stoic offer of lukewarm tea and cold stares that made us feel invasive – were also addressed to us as representatives of the organization financing the cooperative project and our study.  We were also seen as French, of course, and anything from our comments about a dish to our small appetites were interpreted as signs of our Frenchness.  Similarly, my students are often surprised to find that their meal gestures can be seen as American, and associated with either positive character traits (informality) or negative ones (self-centeredness).  Many of them find it difficult to discover (often for the first time) that their identities are not solely a matter of individual choice, but can also be imposed upon them.

Maintaining awareness of identification dynamics also involves confronting our representations of others. My students always nod solemnly when I talk about this in class (as if to say “of course, I am not ethnocentric”), and yet find it more difficult to carry through in the field. Take my student “Jennifer” for example.  Early in her stay, a French waiter refused to serve her a Ricard with a cheese plate.  Feeling humiliated and angry, she proclaimed this to be an example of French elitism; and this had to be true, she exclaimed, because, first, she had experienced it (wasn’t that participant observation?), and, two, well, it was a known fact.  In other words, our emotions can push us towards ideas about others that we share with our home culture, and more often than not, these ideas act to reconfirm our sense of self.  (Jennifer, for instance, went on to contrast French elitism with American egalitarianism).  While at the table in Ukraine (listening to dinner speeches peppered with references to the Soviet past, for example) I was surprised to find myself inhabited by any number of images of the Soviet Union that I knew were probably not quite relevant, but I didn’t initially have anything to replace them with.  The experience underlined for me the fact that being open-minded is not a set character trait, but a process, which is not about denying emotions or preconceived ideas of others, but becoming aware of them and suspending, as best we can, the judgments attached to them.

To Eat is to Feel and to Question

A strong emotion, I now tell my students, can actually signal that you’ve hit on something significant.  So, write it all down, trying to clearly separate your feelings from a description of the event.  Test out theoretical frames, which for the newcomer doesn’t mean finalizing an analysis in the field but formulating questions.  And, finally, give it time, enough at least to find other examples of the event.  In Jennifer’s case, it was only after many more meals and interactions with French waiters, as well as a series of class readings, that she began to ask herself questions about her initial reaction. In Ukraine, it was only after my second or third trip – after we had traveled through three regions and eaten our way through a vast array of welcome meals – that I began to tentatively use them to reflect upon the farming cooperative project as a whole.  For example: in one village the mayor and his wife presided over a town hall feast; in another, the cooperative leader brought us to a chic restaurant that served authentic local food, as elaborated for wealthy locals and visiting foreigners; in a third, the cooperative leader served us tea and biscuits, and then proceeded, in her white lab coat, to perform a series of quality tests using clearly labeled machines and vials.  Therefore, seen also as symbolic acts that serve as metaphors of the collective self (Ohnuki-Tierney), these meals also told us something about the manner in which different cooperatives envisioned themselves as agents (and particularly agents of change), and as communities (as political organizations, businesses, or modern scientific laboratories), which, of course, also spoke to us of the way their leaders practiced authority.

Conclusion

Eating and feeling are not activities that we immediately associate with a college education or consulting research.  And indeed, students or consultants may not readily present them to others as such.  I doubt, for example, that my students explain to future employers that they learned about identity, power or change by eating with others in France (and, even if they did, would such claims really be heard?); and my own experiences at the table in Ukraine never surfaced directly in our client’s report (“how I learned about your project by breaking bread with its participants” didn’t seem the best way to establish our legitimacy as experts).  And yet, as I have tried to show here, when we bring cultural anthropology’s methods and perspectives to the table, eating and feeling with others can teach us a lot.  In regards to my focus here, as a newcomer at the table in a foreign land, I learned not only to be more empathetic with my students’ trials and tribulations, but also to better address emotion while teaching – and as an integral aspect of – the discipline’s research methodology.

These reflections also relate to discussions about the value of a liberal arts education and studying abroad.  Liberal arts education has been under attack in recent years, in part because it is perceived as failing to teach skills directly applicable to the global market place.  And yet, my experiences as both teacher and consultant find this logic to be short sighted.  Applied in the so-called “real” world, cultural anthropology allows us to gain insights where, to stick to our topic, others might only see a nice (or horrible) meal.  And I don’t think that it would surprise a practiced businessman – quite astute ones already know – that deals are often cinched at the dinner table and not in the board room; or that sometimes getting ahead in the professional world is not about knowing how to read an account sheet, as much as it is about knowing how to read a room. Studying abroad, on the other hand, is often celebrated today as an important means to develop a global perspective, and an increasing number of American students spend time abroad.  And yet all too often students abroad fail to engage in meaningful cultural learning and exploration.  Ogden contends – and I join my voice here to his – that ethnographic methods could be instrumental in providing students with the perspectives and skills necessary to build essential intercultural competencies like mindfulness, cognitive and behavioral flexibility, cross-cultural empathy and a tolerance for ambiguity.  Few of my students go on to become anthropologists, but many of them go on to work in international contexts, and so developing such skills in the classroom can only be beneficial.  Learning to approach intercultural encounters as interactive processes rather than the meeting of two static entities seems to offer any number of possibilities for smart management, as well as engaged global (or local) citizenship.

References

Bloch, Maurice. 1999. “Commensality and Poisoning.” Social Research 66,1:133-149.

Fischler, Claude. 1988. “Food, self and identity.” Social Science Information 27,2: 272-92.

Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. 1993. Rice as Self: Japanese Identity through Time. Princeton University Press.

Ogden, Anthony. 2006.  “Ethnographic Inquiry: Reframing the Learning Core of Education Abroad.” Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad 13: 87-112.

Stoller, Paul and Okles, Cheryl. 2005. “Thick Sauce: Remarks on the Social Relations of the Songhay.” The Taste Culture Reader. Ed Carolyn Korsmeyer. London: Berg. 131-144.

Turner, Victor, 1974.  Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Cornell University Press.

Van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. The Rites of Passage. University of Chicago Press.

From a Caffeinated Elite to Average Joes

If you’re in academia, you probably have a very close relationship with coffee. For most Americans, coffee feels like a necessary part of our day, crucial to our higher-order cognitive functioning. Coffee has been a staple in American households and workplaces for over 100 years, and coffee as a commodity is one of the most widely traded and profitable items on the international market (Pendergrast 1999). In early 19^th century, coffee served as a strong index for the elite classes of American society. It was expensive, often challenging to obtain, and was consumed primarily within prestigious social circles. However, the increasing reach of white European imperialism and the fine-tuning of the mechanisms of colonial trade and exploitation led to such resources becoming accessible to a wider range of consumers. In less than a century, the notion of coffee as a beverage consumed in the drawing rooms of the upper crust eroded. Coffee instead became a ubiquitous fixture of the American working class, tied to notions of cheery productivity and the booming prosperity of the American labor force (Jimenez 1995).

New class-stratified consumption practices

Despite the place of coffee as a common fixture in the American psyche, there is an accumulation of evidence to suggest that the social meaning of coffee is again shifting. Today, it seems that coffee is being enregistered (Agha 2003), or is coming to be seen as, a symbol of a “higher class” America. But instead of the narrowly defined American elite of the past, coffee, and specifically “specialty” or “craft” coffee, is becoming an increasingly important part of the “yuppie”, “hipster” experience. Craft coffee in the United States is an industry of skilled artisans, focused on delivering handmade products to their communities. This reorientation in the American coffee industry towards a more craft-focused ideal is closely tied to the emergence and growth of independent micro-roasters and coffee shops that offer a “local”, community-centered alternative to the mass market coffee franchises that have until recently dominated the landscape of American coffee consumption (Roseberry 1996).

But specialty coffee, like other craft industries in the United States, comes with a high price tag. While the $.99 cup of coffee still exists, the world of specialty coffee is limited to those who can economically participate in the industry by paying $5 or more for a cup of coffee. This conspicuous consumption indexes an investment in not just the coffee itself, but also in how the coffee is grown, harvested, roasted, and brewed. At the same time, consumption of specialty coffee reifies the divide between the $.99 cup of coffee and the $5 cup of coffee. This is one way in which forms of stratification tied to wider issues of race and class in the United States become concrete.

The physical spaces that specialty coffee shops and roasters occupy play an important role in the wider landscape of the industry. In many cases, specialty coffee storefronts are opening their doors in urban areas undergoing gentrification. The white yuppies and hipsters at the vanguard of these changes hold an economic status that makes a five dollar cup of coffee affordable, something that in many cases cannot be said for the historical residents of these areas.

The symbiosis between the consumption-based desires of this new upper-middle class and the services provided by the specialty coffee industry creates a situation in which craft industries feed off these larger urban development projects. Gentrification encourages new specialty establishments. At the same time, the existence and proliferation of specialty coffee, in these locations, further encourages gentrification through the availability of the commodities that the new upper-middle class feel they “need”.

Now, coffee consumption has been imbued with new social meaning: it is a beverage for yuppies and hipsters, strongly associated with cool city-life in edgy, hip neighborhoods. For these educated, critical consumers, the “authenticity” of the coffee they consume matters. The origin, farming, growing, and trading practices, that go into a bag of coffee beans are all indexes that point to “good quality coffee”.

Discourses of authenticity and community

The historical association between coffee and the American elite brought with it a discourse of exclusion, a walling off of those particular social circles and the denial of the connections between coffee and race, colonialism, and lower-class America. This discourse gave way to one more heavily focused on the inherent properties of coffee to help people lead more productive, happy, and fulfilled lives through their consumption. The language of productivity and what coffee can do for consumers, their families, and their homes represents a hallmark of the period of American coffee consumption connected more directly with the working class.

Today, in the specialty coffee world the emerging aesthetic is rooted in a new form of elitist discourse, intertwined with the fetishization of authenticity and community building around how coffee is sourced and produced. These processes are enacted in the public face of the specialty coffee industry and the projection of their stories and values to the customers and consumers. One part of this is how they present their commercial identity through the language they use on their websites. The analysis and discussion of the public web presence of some of the major specialty coffee roasters presented below provides one means by which we can view these processes playing out across the industry.

A recurring theme we see in the discourses of specialty coffee is a focus on authenticity rooted in the exotification of coffee as an article of consumption. Coffee at its source is distant, remote, embedded in a different way of life than that of the consumer. Indeed, this remoteness is what makes this coffee “the best”.

In addition to the exotification of place itself, discourses of specialty coffee also authenticate their products by referencing the farmers themselves. This commodification of brown bodies as the source of authentic coffee suggests an intimacy with the other side of the supply chain. In reality, of course, most consumers will have no contact with these communities. Instead, their consumption mimics a connection with the farmer which allows the consumer to participate in a kind of “cultural tourism”, aligning themselves with the “authentic”, salt-of-the-earth coffee growers, and yet maintaining their own position in the global racial and socioeconomic hierarchies.

Beyond the actual product, specialty coffee discourse regularly highlights the cultivation and development of community, centered around the roaster and cafe. Coffee houses have long been viewed as intellectual and community hubs and this remains an important part of how the specialty coffee industry views itself (Gaudio 2003). Because the current industry discourse highlights the exotic nature of coffee, the consumer’s participation in this “community” allows them an imagined entrée to this exclusive, unique space.

Although Cartel does reference its access to the exotic locales of authentic coffee growth (“…bring in some of the world’s most intriguing coffees…”), it centralizes the role of “community”. Here, the most important aspect of an authentic coffee consumption experience is one that’s not solitary, but engaged, collaborative, and communal. Contiguous to this idea is the notion of “service with a smile”– in other words, the experience of coffee is one to be celebrated as part of a larger shared community of practice (Lave and Wegner 1991).

Here, Klatch coffee juxtaposes the “charm and comfort of a traditional coffeehouse” with “world class specialty coffees”. Once, coffee as “fuel” did not overlap with specialty or craft coffees. But Klatch does not seek to distance itself from the quintessentially “American” coffee experience. Instead, it offers a reimagining of what coffee can or should mean for consumers. Coffee is still a “slap in the face” in the morning, but it has also gone beyond that and has become emblematic of a certain lifestyle. This lifestyle is one in which coffee is appreciated for characteristics beyond its ability to “fuel” consumers, such as the “nurturing (i.e., authentic, progressive, first-world) relationships with the farmers who grow the beans”, the attention to the ground “right where the seeds are planted”, and the “commitment to honest business practices”. This discourse allows the consumer to be a part of these relationships through their consumption.

Specialty coffee and its consumption are marketed as an open door to a larger community, one that serves as a gatekeeper to a more authentic coffee experience—specifically by connecting the consumer with the actual farmers and growers in remote, exotic lands. It provides consumers with a collective of baristas, roasters, sourcers, and producers who serve as an anchor through which consumers can locate and live their consumption.  However, as we have argued, this experience and the notions of authenticity and communality that it entails are available to only a portion of an American populous that starts their day and lives their lives through coffee consumption. Despite its communal and authentic discourse, specialty coffee remains walled off by larger socio-economic and racial hierarchies that delimit who takes part in the coffee industry, their roles, and their seat at the bar.

*William Cotter is a doctoral student in the joint Anthropology-Linguistics program at the University of Arizona. His work focuses primarily on Arabic sociolinguistics and the effect of political conflict on language change in the Middle East. In addition to Arabic, he is interested in the discourse of specialty coffee and how it can serve as a window into understanding evolving class and race dynamics in the United States. He can be found on Twitter: @cotterw, and at http://u.arizona.edu/~williamcotter. Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint Anthropology-Linguistics program at the University of Arizona. Her work focuses on Spanish sociolinguistics and language in pop culture, and her dissertation. Her dissertation investigates language and identity amongst Argentine fans of US popular culture. She can be found on Twitter @mary_caitlyn, and at academia.edu/MaryCaitlynValentinsson.

References

Agha, Asif. 2003. The social life of cultural value. Language & Communication 23: 231-273.

Gaudio, Rudi. 2003. Coffeetalk: Starbucks and the Commercialization of Casual Conversation. Language in Society 32(5): 659-691.

Jiménez, Michael F. 1995. From plantation to cup: coffee and capitalism in the United States, 1830-1930. In Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America. William Roseberry, Lowell Gudmundson, and Mario Samper Kutschbach, eds. Pp. 38-64. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lave, Jean and Etienne Wegner. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pendergrast, Mark. 1999. Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. New York: Basic Books.

Roseberry, William. 1996. The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United States. American Anthropologist 98(4):762-775.

Food is an intrinsic element of all anthropological research. Sharing food can be an ice breaker; it can provide a context or an opportunity for the conversations with your interlocutors, it provides insights into their lives and often means that “you are in!” or at least you are getting closer.

In the case of anthropology of food, however, food becomes particularly important as it is placed at the heart of the research. What happens when food is not only a research tool which facilitates interactions, but also becomes the object of the research? How can we actually study something so ephemeral? And what happens when we eat it and therefore embody the object of our research? What sort of implications does it have for the researchers and the researched? What sort of tensions or connections does it create? Though anthropologists reflect on those issues, the centrality of food and its importance for many anthropological encounters, to a large extent, stays implicit. This essay aims to inspire the discussion about the role and place of food in anthropological research on food.

David Sutton considers the role of food in research by describing how he was warned that his manhood might be questioned if he keeps his vegetarian diet while conducting research in Greece. He uses his vegetarian practices and Kalymnians’ reactions to them to explore their culture (1997). In a similar way, Samantha Hurn recalls being a vegan while studying foxhunting and farming in Wales and how this provided her with insights into their culture (2013). Both authors show that eating differently while doing fieldwork was simultaneously challenging and revealing. It was difficult to fit in, to become a part of the group and to keep a chosen diet. However, it also provoked fascinating reactions which illuminated a lot about people’s expectations, values and norms. Persistently challenging what people know as good food – not eating meat, for example – can bring wonderfully insightful responses.

The role of food in food research is equally interesting to consider when the researcher’s food habits do not necessarily challenge her interlocutors’ food rules. That has been my case.

In my research I focus on the process of feeding children in Warsaw and the multiple negotiations this entails. In 2012 – 2013, over the period of 12 months I studied families and primary schools, other state institutions and non-governmental organizations, food companies and media. I was interested in the relations between these different social actors, in people’s ideas about feeding children and in their practices. Food, evidently, played an important role in these relations. And therefore an important part of my research became investigating and consuming the food itself. I ate meals with the families and in school canteens, and consumed food that is considered to be children’s food (mainly sweets, that is). I bought various food products sold in school shops in order to try them and to find out what the fuss was about (see Boni 2014). Moreover, I was often offered food by children, as the ethnographic vignette below demonstrates:

The break was almost coming to an end. I left the canteen and wondered around the school corridors. Two second graders, Zuzia and Wojtek, approached me. Apparently they had been looking for me. They wanted to show me what they were given as dessert today: a version of a Kinder Surprise, with chocolate and a small toy. Well, that’s a treat I thought to myself. It turned out they wanted to share the chocolate with me. I was astonished! They shared their most precious gift with me. We sat on the bench and chatted while eating the chocolate. [Field notes, 23^rd April 2013, translated from Polish]

Sweets were often forbidden by parents or teachers, so the fact that children shared it with me meant that they trusted me and, to some extent, accepted me. Food not only facilitated my interactions with children, it also created a special connection between us. The chocolate signaled the fact that I have been invited to peek into their culture. They not only shared food with me, but, more importantly, allowed me to participate in their resistance practices. Together, we were doing something naughty (see James 1979).

Even though we ate the same food, I had no idea what sort of taste and bodily sensations did it provide for my interlocutors. My sensations were different than theirs. And yet the experience was shared. I have not eaten this sort of food for quite a long time, while they were familiar with it and they introduced me to it. It also allowed me to bond with children, even if it evoked different experiences for each of us. In some instances my impressions might have been similar to theirs, for example chocolate evoked pleasure. In others it was different. For example a Shock chewing gum, which for them was mainly about fun because of the fuzzy sensations and the sweet and sour flavor combinations it provided, for me was a sentimental reminder of my own childhood.

Some of the sweets, to me, tasted awful: extreme sweetness; many surprising flavors which do not resemble any known foods; the unexpected combinations of sweet and sour enriched by the sensations of dissolving in your mouth; and the distinctive aftertaste of chemicals and sugar (see photo 1). And yet, I have tried these unknown and strange foods in an attempt to understand better the tribe that consumes them. Whenever I was offered one of these, I ate it. Food that we ate together created a sense of comradery and strengthened our social bond. It influenced the relations between us, making children the more knowledgeable ones in that interaction. It allowed me to taste what children ate and learn about their food practices and choices, about their social world. I have started to learn about children’s food.

Another food experience I had in schools, which again proved the importance of food in my research, was eating meals in the school canteen. When I accepted an invitation to eat meals in the school canteen, I did not expect that I would receive a full bowl of soup (e.g. tomato or borscht) and an enormous second dish (usually meat with potatoes and other vegetables, see photo 2) around noon. On each of the days I was in the canteen, despite my requests, I have always received “an adult portion”. The cooks sometimes joked that I had to give them back an empty plate, although this was not a joke for me. Of course the generous portions were a gesture of fondness and acceptance on the part of cooks. I was invited to eat what they prepared and that was a very important social interaction. So I complied with what was expected from me. I fulfilled the role of the guest. However, there was a cost. As I am not used to eating so much during lunchtime, my stomach bulged and I overate. My daily food pattern has changed completely.

Eating meals in the school canteen was a way to engage in participant observation, or observant participation as Loic Wacquant (2011) calls it. After all, I did not want to repeat the situation from the Kitchen Stories, where a researcher sits on a high chair and from beneath the ceiling observes how his subject eats and notes it down. I did make notes. But I also ate what children ate and could not only observe, but also participate in the canteen life. I used food as a topic and a tool. I tasted the canteen food, which has many, often negative, connotations in Poland. I have recognized some of the tastes which brought me back to my childhood memories and discovered others.

Food mediated in my relations with cooks who prepared it; with food supervisors, who were often the ones who invited me to eat; with teachers, with whom I often shared the table in the canteen. Food also connected me with children, even though I did not sit at the tables with them, as initially planned. Not only did I eat what they ate, I also often unintentionally assumed the role of a child. I picked at the food, I tried to hide the uneaten pieces of meat under the potatoes and I strategically chose the time to return my plate, so that nobody would see which one was actually mine and that I had left some of the meal uneaten for that would be unacceptable (though I would not be sent back to my seat to finish eating, as children were). At times, when I was not particularly hungry, had special dinner plans, or when something I did not like was served, I strategically avoided the canteen at certain hours, in the same way that some children do. Only after some time I realized that my behavior was similar to children’s. They employed similar tactics to avoid eating in the school canteen. They experienced much greater control and discipline expressed through and with food and used food in their resistance practices. Unknowingly and with the means of food, I learned a lot about adults – children relations in the canteen, about children’s experiences and about the multiple roles that food played in that context.

These different experiences I had with food in primary schools in Warsaw completed each other and the food, which was at the basis of these encounters, played an important role in my research. This certainly shaped my understanding of children’s food practices and feeding – eating negotiations. Food was a topic of many conversations I had. Food provided a way for me to comprehend children’s and adults’ practices. Food allowed me to better grasp the tensions between adults and children. Food was a way to facilitate my interactions. Food influenced my positionality and the relations with my interlocutors. Food brought back some memories. Food, in the end, influenced my own practices. Suffice to say, not only did I gain weight, I also have never in my life had so many dental caries and cavities as during my fieldwork.

When the researcher eats the food prepared or given to her, her research object in a way becomes the researcher, as the food is digested. The object becomes the subject as Annemarie Mol explains (2008). It does create a curious connection between the researcher and the researched (food and people) that is worth exploring. My experience with school food and its subsequent effects on my own eating habits (and perhaps my dental health), incites reflection on whether anthropologists should accept all the food that is offered to them as a way of immersing themselves into the field and experiencing their research object? Or is it a better strategy, as enacted by Sutton and Hurn, to keep to your own diet and see what sort of responses it evokes? It might be worth having a more explicit discussion about food as another aspect of our positionality in the field that must be negotiated.

Anthropologists and other social scientists rarely study the food itself. We rather study people’s practices and narratives, the social norms and cultural customs, ideas about food or related sensual experiences. I myself looked at the multiple feeding – eating relations and negotiations. Some researchers, however, look at the living organisms which create food, such as bacteria, and ascribe agency to food (e.g. West 2013, Tsing 2014). These are certainly exciting and innovative projects, which move us further in our understanding of food and its multiple connections with people. But it is still worth exploring the ways in which food is used in social relations during research, both by us and by our interlocutors; how it shapes our positionality and how we and our interlocutors react to it, bodily and mentally. Food certainly provided another layer to my research.

References:

Bent Hamer, dir. 2003. Kitchen Stories (org. Salmer fra kjøkkenet). 95 min. BOB Film Sweden AB. Bulbul Films. Svenska Filminstitutet (SFI).

Boni, Zofia. 2014. Contested Interactions: School Shops, Children and Food in Warsaw. International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food 21 (3): 309 – 325. Available from: http://www.ijsaf.org/archive/21/3/boni.pdf.

Hurn, Samantha. 2013. Confessions of a vegan anthropologist: Exploring the trans-biopolitics of eating in the field. In Why We Eat, How We Eat: Contemporary Encounters Between Foods and Bodies. Anna Lavis and Emma-Jane Abbots, eds. Pp: 219 – 236. London: Ashgate Publishing.

James, Allison. 1979. Confections, Concoctions and Conceptions. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 10 (2): 83 – 95.

Mol, Annemarie. 2008. I Eat an Apple. On Theorizing Subjectivities. Subjectivity 22: 28 – 37. DOI: 10.1057/sub.2008.2. Available from: http://www.palgrave-journals.com./

Sutton, David. 1997. The Vegetarian Anthropologist. Anthropology Today 13 (1): 5 – 8.

Tsing, Anna. 2014. Strathern Beyond the Human: Testimony of a Spore. Theory, Culture and Society 31 (2/3): 221 – 241.

Wacquant, Loic. 2011. Habitus as Topic and Tool: Reflections on Becoming a Prizefighter. Qualitative Research in Psychology 8: 81 – 92. DOI: 10.1080/14780887.2010.544176.

West, Harry G. 2013. Thinking Like a Cheese: Towards an Ecological Understanding of the Reproduction of Knowledge in Contemporary Artisan Cheesemaking. In: Understanding Cultural Transmission in Anthropology: A Critical Synthesis. Ellen Roy Stephen Lycett and  Sarah Johns, eds. Pp: 320 – 345. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Right now, I am on a farm in rural New England where hundreds of meat chickens and turkeys are being raised. About a mile down the road is a dairy where a couple dozen cows are milked twice daily. I study animal agriculture in the United States. This summer I am conducting preliminary fieldwork. Animal agriculture is not new to Anthropology. Steven Striffler’s Chicken, Timothy Patchirat’s Every Twelve Seconds, and Alex Blanchette’s article, “Herding Species”, in a recent issue of Cultural Anthropology, are all worth checking out if one is interested in how the majority of meat in America is industrially produced. However, these studies do not look at small-scale production. It is the smaller scale operations that I am most familiar with, having worked as a killer on a small organic chicken farm. But before I discuss, that I will provide a bit of background to flesh out where I am coming from. A good place to begin is vegetarianism.

As a teenager, I was introduced to vegetarianism through punk bands like Propagandi, and was an on and off again vegetarian throughout my twenties. Without punk I probably would have never seriously thought about what I put on my plate and in my mouth. In this I am not alone, for punk seems at least partially responsible for the diets, politics and worldviews of many of my peers. At DIY punk shows there would occasionally be food and it was always vegetarian. To do otherwise would be taboo or heretical. There are a number of great songs about animal rights, animal liberation and vegetarianism/veganism by punk and hardcore bands. My personal favorites are Mob 47’s “Animal Liberation” and “Stop the Slaughter”.

My first serious leap into fully fledged foodie-ism was with Food Not Bombs (FNB), an organization that highlights the connections between war and hunger by serving free vegetarian meals in public. In the late 2000s, FNB in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, was over ten years old and consisted of whoever showed up to cook, eat or grab groceries: mostly punks, anarchists, university students and senior citizens living on social assistance. Meals were served twice a week outside local libraries: once in the North End and once downtown. Extra meals were often held at anti-war demonstrations and other activist events. We cooked and ate a lot of root vegetables, kale, tofu sandwiches and apple crisp. This was around the same time I also threw myself into dumpster diving.

The idea that I could eat for free and save money for booze was a profound revelation. I lived down the street from a Lebanese bakery that threw out bags of pita bread. Slices of pizza and donuts could be found in compost bins and the local organic grocery had good trash a few times a week. And, if you were feeling particularly adventurous, you could always grab bolt cutters and break into a bigger grocery store’s trash compactor and wade through a noxious swamp of rotten vegetables and cold cuts looking for edibles. Free food can and will be found.

Eating, and thinking about eating, wanting to meet my meat, eventually lead to two years working on an organic farm in Maine. My first year farming I worked mostly with poultry, thousands of Cornish Cross broilers (meat chickens), pigs, and vegetables. My second season, I milked. I found raising thousands of chickens in a ramshackle system nauseating. Thousands of birds living together means thousands of pissing and shitting bodies. It smells terrible and feels overwhelming. No amount of bedding seemed to soak up the stench. The indoor phase of raising broilers was a sensory overload. However, I am currently raising hundreds of chickens and this experience is much more reasonable. The difference between raising three hundred birds in a brooder and a thousand is tremendous.

Scale and infrastructure are key in shaping the agricultural production of animal life. The number of birds and the particular materiality of the housing situation can produce a number of different multi-species encounters. Some set ups seem to collapse before they even take off and you find yourself constantly chasing escaped chicks into corners and the clutter of cobwebby contraptions. Others are stable almost static in comparison. There are no escapees and all you have to do is supply grain, grit, and water.

Once the birds were big enough, at approximately four weeks, batches of ninety were put into chicken-tractors and moved to new grass daily. A chicken tractor is a wood and corrugated tin box that the chickens live in and that is dragged onto new grass once or twice a day. This ensures the chickens get some sun, some fresh air, and that pasture is fertilized. When the chickens hit four or five pounds, and before they died of a heart attack or were eaten by foxes or raptors, they were captured and taken to slaughter. This was done by crawling around in a chicken-tractor the morning of a killing day with a hook, snaring the birds by the legs, and putting them into plastic crates. This was a chaotic process that terrified the birds. It is easier and calmer to catch birds at night when they are asleep. Particular human practices such as how birds are caught can either amplify or dampen the affective intensity of the multi-species encounter.

I have killed around 1,500 chickens, maybe 40 turkeys, and a handful of ducks. I really dislike killing ducks. There is something about the way their long necks move as they bleed out that I find distressing. Killing turkeys is not particularly enjoyable either. Chasing down a bird that weighs up to thirty pounds in a livestock trailer, give it a bear hug, flip it upside down, shove it into a cone and saw through its thick scaly neck is different than quickly pulling a four or five pound chicken out of a crate. I have never been hurt killing chickens, but I have been kicked in the face by a turkey in the midst of the death shakes. Killing is messy business: lots of blood and shit. Once a chicken was placed in a cone it was quickly dispatched with one or two strokes from a very sharp knife.

The killing knife was always sharpened before killing and occasionally during a lull in the slaughter. After eight birds have been killed the first four are decapitated with a quick tug or two. These four are then placed into a scalder where they are rotated in hot water, which makes them easier to pluck. I would then kill four more birds, remove the birds from the scalder and put them into the plucker—a spinning cylinder with rubber fingers. The birds bounce about in the plucker for a few minutes and are fished out when featherless. If all is going well there are always birds in the cones, scalder and plucker. After the birds are plucked they are processed in a retrofitted trailer that was initially used for clam processing. I almost always just killed. The evisceration, cooling and bagging process is largely unknown to me. After all the birds were killed, their wet feathers, heads, guts, feet and congealed jelly-like blood were collected in the bucket of a skidsteer and taken to a compost pile where they were mixed with sawdust and manure. This process is very different than the kind of animal slaughter explored in recent ethnographies of industrialized meat production.

Over the last few years, a number of ethnographies have taken us inside slaughterhouses and factory farms (confined animal feeding operations, CAFOs), paragons of rationalization and mechanization. In this agricultural world farmers are often drowning in debt, while slaughterhouses employ illegal immigrants, taking advantage of their socio-economic and legal vulnerabilities. It is a dystopian world of backbreaking labor, blood, brutality, biopower, and biocapitalism. Here human and non-human life is reduced to an industrial input. It is a world where Marx, Foucault, and Agamben are our guides. However, this world is not completely hegemonic. For example, I have taken pigs and cattle to a local abattoir where cows are not killed every twelve seconds. They probably kill about twelve cows a day. They are a small mom-and-pop shop. Animal slaughter on a non-industrial scale still occurs in the United States, and it is worth examining ethnographically. However, this research cannot simply mimic accounts of industrial killing, to do so would erase them multiple forms of multi-species entanglement found in American agriculture.