anthropology food culture writing essay -1

User Generated

znttvrznttvr

Writing

Description

Total word count: 650

The writing requirement is post in the attached file, please check it and answer all part 1 and part 2.

For part 1, reading analysis, the first reading "Child MalnutritionandFamine in the NigerienSahel,Catherine Panter-Brick, Rachel Casiday, Katherine Hampshire, and Kate Kilpatrick." I really can't find this article, but I attached the rest of them, please find online for this one. Thanks a lot.

For Part 2: I want to explore about the Japanese food cultures and its influences to USA.

Unformatted Attachment Preview

ANTHROPOLOGY 365 Week 2 DiscussionAssignment Summer 2018 Session 2 CRN 40159 This second assignment covers what would normally be three weeks of work in a fall, winter or spring term, so check grading protocols in the syllabus to find out what constitutes a C, a B or an A. Students on average lose more points for not following directions or not doing all parts of a prompt than for quality and for any other reason, so be sure that you answer each part of the prompt and be sure to follow directions. (It's more fun for us if we can give you the good grade that you probably want.) You can help yourself by looking at the feedback from Hailay on the first assignment and by asking him or Dr. O'Bryan questions if you're not sure. Again, ask Dr. O’Bryan or Hailay if you have questions, especially if the directions are not clear to you. Because this is an online class, emailing us questions is like coming up after class and asking the professor or the GE, so take advantage of our availability. There are 3 parts of this assignment— readings analysis, project assignment and response to one or more of your colleagues’ entries. I. Readings analysis: In 'Food of Sorrow,' Carolyn Dunn discusses Agamben’s concept of “bare life” in her exploration of “the problem of nothingness” for Ossetians. 1. Briefly explain “bare life” and the “problem of nothingness” as discussed in Dunn’s chapter. Then, 2. Summarize all the following readings in relation to the chapter by Dunn. What do the populations in these readings have in common? (All the readings.) In NA: Child Malnutrition and Famine in the Nigerien Sahel, Catherine Panter-Brick, Rachel Casiday, Katherine Hampshire, and Kate Kilpatrick. On Canvas: Want Amid Plenty: from Hunger to Inequality Janet Poppendieck. On Canvas: Airriess, Christopher A., and David L. Clawson. "Vietnamese market gardens in New Orleans." Geographical Review (1994): 16-31. N Canvas: Stephen, Lynn. 2003. Cultural citizenship and farmworkers. Human Organization 62(1):27-38. Week 2 Assignment ANTH 365 p. 2 3. Using examples from these readings, explain how the problem of nothingness is both biological and cultural. Draw also from readings and lectures in other modules for your analysis. (For example, “bare life" looks like a cultural concept at first, but what would "bare life" be in nutritional terms--how might you relate such a concept to Seckler's "small- but -healthy" hypothesis? Is a "bare life" diet nutritionally adequate?) For this exercise, try to put the readings in conversation with each other. How—in what ways—are they responding to the same kinds of questions and what do they say to each other? II. Project Assignment: 1. Interview/observation. If you have not done so already conduct your interview or observation and draft-- DRAFT--a short discussion or summary of it. 2. Put together two narrated—only 2--practice slides for your presentation. (Directions for creating narrated slides are posted under Research Project module.) Don't worry about getting this perfect. Part of the point is for you to think about the presentation early but also for us to debug/troubleshoot any possible problems. You can eliminate the vast majority of problems if you start by using PowerPoint from the beginning. If you are unsure about how to organize your presentation, one suggested (but only suggested) format for the final presentation could be Slide 1. Introduce your topic slide 2. Provide some background to the topic--but only foot is necessary for your students/colleagues to know to understand your project. Slide 3. Summarize and discuss 2-3 main points that you took away from your interview or observation. Slide 4. Analyze how your interview or observation offers some insight into the topic you chose. Typically, and analysis can contain 2-5 points of analysis. Slide 5. Summarize or provide some conclusions about your research. For this exercise, you only need to submit two slides. The idea is simply to find out what works and doesn't work about the process of putting together your presentation, so if you have difficulty incorporating narration or doing any other part of this process, this is important information and is the point of the exercise, so ask for help. III. Respond to 1 or more of your colleagues. As before, respond to at least one of your colleagues’ discussion entries—someone who doesn’t already have some comments. More than one is better because you will see more of your colleagues’ work and get more ideas. Responses should do more than say “awesome” or “amazing.” Offer ideas, observations about what works and what doesn’t, informative links that you know about and so forth. Treat these response requirements as part of workshopping each other’s work as if we were in class together and sharing our work and asking for input about it. The Food of Sorrow: Humanitarian Aid to Displaced People Elizabeth Cullen Dunn This Photo by Unknown Author On a frosty day in January 2009, I first walked into Tsmindatsqali settlement. Composed of hundreds of identical small white cottages lined up along un-paved gravel roads, Tsmindatsqali was one of thirty-six new settlements meant to house more than twenty-eight thousand people, mostly ethnic Georgians, who were driven out of their homes in the breakaway province of South Ossetia during the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia. Once South Ossetia had declared independence and closed the unofficial border between South Ossetia and Georgia proper, Russian and Ossetian forces bombed, looted, burned, and, in some cases, bulldozed the Georgians’ houses to ensure they could never return. The Government of Georgia officially classified these victims of ethnic cleansing as internally displaced people (IDPs), and, with the help of international donors, built the new settlements as a base from which the IDPs could reintegrate into Georgian society and rebuild their lives. Guram, the first person I met in Tsmindatsqali, had been violently ejected from his village during the war. His youngest son and his son’s wife had both been killed during the bombing of Gori, and a photograph of his two sons, the eldest cradling the dead body of the youngest in front of a building in flames, had become the defining image of the war. Guram’s losses were enormous; the grief and emptiness in his life was only temporarily filled by becoming blind drunk, which he did often. Yet, on that first day, it was not the destruction of his family or the loss of his home that seemed to bother him most. It was the food-aid package that had been delivered to him in his new home. “It’s New Year’s! The most important day of the year; the day when we hold our biggest supra [ritual banquet]. But they just gave us some macaroni. That’s it! Macaroni, and beyond that, nothing!” Indeed, the World Food Program gave each IDP—man, woman, or child—one-and-a-half kilograms of macaroni in a food package, along with other staples, throughout the first year of displacement. It was enough for every person to have macaroni every day. Yet in over a year of fieldwork, although I saw macaroni piled up under beds, stacked in boxes, and sold in black markets, I almost never saw anybody eating it. Given that IDPs had lost nearly everything, why wouldn’t they eat free macaroni? How is it that instead of being something, a gift from benevolent donors, macaroni came to symbolize nothing, the wrenching absence of all that had been lost in the war? What can the nothingness symbolized by donated macaroni show about the experience of displacement and the effects of humanitarian aid? These are important questions, despite how trivial Dunn Food of Sorrow p. 2 mere pasta might seem. There are over thirty-five million displaced people in the world today, many of whom live in limbo in camps and settlements and are dependent on humanitarian aid for their survival. Understanding how humanitarian projects make nothing instead of something—foster passivity, highlight absence, and exacerbate loss—is an important means of understanding the barriers that keep displaced people from reintegrating socially, politically, and economically. Macaroni: The Anti-Food In the wake of the war, over $3.7 billion in foreign aid poured into Georgia. Under the auspices of the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), more than ninety-six nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) began providing relief to the displaced. Within months, most of the IDPs were resettled in one of the hastily constructed new settlements, where each family was given a small cottage or an apartment, furniture, clothing, hygiene kits, food deliveries from the World Food Program, and more. Yet despite this outpouring of aid, nearly every interview I had in the IDP settlements began with the same plaintive litany: “The government is not helping us; they do nothing for us. We are getting nothing from the NGOs, just little things that don’t help much. We are alone, we are abandoned, nobody will help us, and we have nothing.” For IDPs, having nothing obviously stems from the violence of displacement. “Having nothing” was more than “never having had” something. Instead, it was the nostalgia for things they once had, and had lost. Many IDPs described their former homes to me in loving detail, from when each of the furnishings was acquired to the layout of the garden and the orchard. This way of having nothing was encapsulated in a gesture made by Tamuna, a teenager living in one of the cottages near Gori. Making coffee, she reached into a cabinet and her hand closed on nothing. “Oh!” she said, “I was reaching for the green coffee pot. But of course, it’s gone now.” Nothing, here, was really a “having had something.” If the problem of nothing was the fact that people used to have things, and now they didn’t, it would follow that getting new things—including food—would mean they no longer had nothing. But surprisingly, as humanitarian agencies rushed to fill the property void with distributions of material goods, the problem of nothingness became paradoxically more acute. People got houses, but the grids of white, identical cottages seemed stark and bare. Inside, they were minimally furnished with twin beds, a table and backless stools, a television, and little else. All the aid that was given seemed only to point out how much had been lost: plastic washbuckets constantly reminded women of their washing machines now looted by the Ossetians; donated secondhand clothes made people think of their own clothes left behind in closets; backless stools called up images of ornately carved dining chairs gone up in smoke as houses burned. Material humanitarian relief was an anti-artifact, something that didn’t symbolize itself, but instead the lost things it replaced. Donated objects were thus nothing, markers that constantly pointed out what wasn’t there and therefore made it impossible for IDPs to feel they had anything regardless of how much was given. Macaroni soon became the quintessential anti-artifact. As part of humanitarian food packages offered by the World Food Program, the macaroni was not intended to provide essential nutrients, but to ensure that each IDP received 2,240 calories per day, thought to be the minimum for sustaining life. But in the context of Georgian cuisine, which is highly elaborate and full of spices, walnuts, pomegranates, fresh vegetables, and meats, macaroni is hardly food at all. It is not a staple starch, as bread or corn is, and it isn’t served in the beautiful and complex dishes that typify Georgian cuisine. It’s usually just boiled or fried, served in soup or sprinkled with sugar. Macaroni is just calories, something that only the poorest of the poor eat. “Look, it’s UN help; it’s to keep you alive,” said one woman. “But there’s no comfort in it.” Macaroni would have been humiliating to serve to guests, much less at a ritual supra banquet, so the fact that people only had macaroni made it difficult for them to invite friends and relatives to meals. This made it much more difficult to reestablish the all-important relationships of Dunn Food of Sorrow p. 3 extended kinship and neighborliness that define people’s places in Georgian society; without the ability to be hospitable, it was difficult to rebuild the social ties that had been blown apart when people from a single village had been scattered among the settlements. This was one critical way that humanitarian macaroni was thus anti-food: food that existed, materially, that supported the essential functions of physical life, but that actively destroyed social meaning and kept people from reassuming their roles in their own extended families and village society. Food from Nowhere and Nobody Everything about the donated macaroni made it symbolize the nothingness of displacement. In the first place, it was food that came from nowhere. For the people from South Ossetia, like Georgians in general, food usually came with a tie to a distinct landscape. Like the French, Georgians have a concept of terroir, although one that is less well articulated. They believe that the specific environment where a food is grown—the slope of the land, the amount of rainfall, the way the sunshine falls on a particular segment of mountain or gorge, and particularly the unique taste of the water—all endow foods with unique tastes. People from each place in South Ossetia extolled the virtues of their home village: water that was particularly sweet or soil that gave grapes a pleasant mineral taste. Individual families told me even about the food from particular fields. The apples from Merab’s orchard tasted different than those from Nona’s; the bees that feasted on nectar from Dito’s tkemali (sour plum) trees gave honey with an aroma distinct from that of the honey made by Tamuna’s bees, who lived in a peach orchard. Each meal became a kind of ritualized geography, in which food linked the people who were eating it to the places where it was grown. Macaroni was the absolute antithesis of this place-linked food. It came with only the barest of labels: “Made in Turkey,” “World Food Program,” or sometimes “A Gift from the American People.” The labels were written in Latin letters, which most people could not read, and in English, which nobody spoke. Arriving in big plastic bags in unmarked trucks, the macaroni seemed as if it came from nowhere at all. It was the very epitome of displacement, taken in the literal sense of something removed from its place: food from no place for people who had lost their places. Macaroni was also deeply anonymous. In the first place, it was food that came from nobody: It wasn’t made by anybody that the IDPs knew personally, and they did not even know who had donated the food. While much of the feeding program had been financially supported by the United States Agency for International Development, the IDPs had no idea who that was, nor what the World Food Program was. Although the World Food Program had contracted with the NGO World Vision to distribute the food, and World Vision had hired Georgians to manage the distributions, none of the IDPs knew the young Georgians who handed out the food, and the name “World Vision” meant nothing to them. When I asked my friends in the settlement who was giving out the food, they would shrug and say either mtavroba (the government) or gaero (the United Nations). The food arrived as if from another planet, given out by people who ignored the fundamental ways food in Georgian society creates enduring bonds of reciprocity and exchange. This was food made by nobody and given out by nobody, food that arrived without the context of hospitality and which could never be repaid in kind. This was again a strong contrast with the food the IDPs had eaten before the war. Since the demise of the USSR in 1991, most Georgians had come to depend heavily on homepreserved foods. As the Soviet economy collapsed, Georgia’s fruit and vegetable canneries, which had once produced food for the entire Eastern Bloc, shut down. For most Georgians, this meant that few people could acquire industrially canned foods, since all of them had to be imported. Instead, women grew and canned their own food for their families, hundreds of jars per year. Poached pears, adjapsandali (a Georgian version of ratatouille), stuffed peppers, tomatoes preserved in water, tkemali (plum sauce), and every imaginable flavor of jam were all preserved as each fruit or vegetable was harvested. Given the enormous shortage of cash that most rural farming families faced, all this canning Dunn Food of Sorrow p. 4 was economically essential. With little hope of affording the fresh produce grown in greenhouses or imported from Turkey in the winter, most families depended on the jars in their basements to feed them throughout the winter. This dependence had become even more pronounced in the years leading up to the war. In 2006, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili shut down the Eredvi bazaar, the main market in South Ossetia. In retaliation, the Russian government banned the import of almost all agricultural goods from Georgia. This stranded farmers in South Ossetia, who depended on selling apples and other fruit in Russia in order to gain the cash to buy Russian imported goods in the Eredvi bazaar. With trade almost shut down, homemade foods became even more economically important. Most of the food that the people in South Ossetian villages ate, then, was food grown and prepared on land they knew, by people they knew. It wasn’t just that people ate food prepared in their own families: Food also circulated along lines of kinship, friendship, and neighborliness. After enjoying meals at somebody’s house, guests almost always left with big bags of fruit, plastic soda bottles full of milk, or jars of tkemali and jam. Mothers, daughters, and sisters varied their families’ food stores by trading products with one another. Because both ethnic Georgians and ethnic Ossetians practiced village exogamy, in which daughters from one village would marry into other villages, food flowed along these bonds of kinship from village to village. In a fundamental way, being a person in the villages of South Ossetia meant being from a place, growing food in that place, exchanging food with people affectionately regarded, and eating food made by specific others in specific places. Food embedded people in a topography not only of gardens and orchards and barns, but in a carefully noted topography of social relations. Lost Labor When the war came in August, it destroyed not only people’s homes, but the harvest. The apple orchards that had provided most of the ethnically Georgian farmers with their only source of cash income were full of unexploded ordnance and stood behind borders zealously guarded by Ossetian militia. Fields full of ripe vegetables were mined, and even those people who dared sneak in past the border guards were too afraid to go into the fields to harvest. Crops died in the August heat, and fruit rotted off the trees for lack of anyone to pick it. Worst of all, many women had already begun preserving fruits and vegetables that had come into season throughout the summer. When the houses were bombed and burned, most of that food was destroyed, or left in basements underneath the charred hulls of brick houses. For the IDPs I knew in the settlements, the loss of the jars was one of the bitterest losses. It symbolized the loss of their homes, and hours of hot, sweaty labor in the fields and in the kitchens gone to waste. The loss of the glass jars themselves was economically significant. With new jars costing 1 to 3 lari each, families living on the government’s subsidy to IDPs, only about 125 lari (roughly eighty dollars) for a family of five, couldn’t afford to buy the hundreds of jars they would need to can for the next year. The jars were so important in both economic and symbolic terms that some people went to great lengths to try and recover them. My friend Manana Kordadze, for example, once got me to borrow a small Russian jeep and drive her to the village of Mereti, which sat right on the South Ossetian border. The trip took hours, since we had to explain to armed guards at all three checkpoints on the Georgian side of the border what we were doing. With an automatic rifle at the ready, each guard in his camouflage uniform would carefully scrutinize my passport, and the car, which had diplomatic license plates. “Why are you going to Mereti? To get jars? No, really, why are you here?” they would demand, looking skeptical as I described our plan to make jam. When we finally made it to the Ossetian border, Manana and I had lunch with her cousins, and then she disappeared, reappearing later with a huge bag of empty glass jars on her back. “Where on earth did you get those?” I asked her. “From my house!” she crowed, proud that she’d been able to scavenge them from the wreckage. As the long story unfolded, the lengths to which Manana and her husband had gone to get Dunn Food of Sorrow p. 5 the jars became clear: Her husband had risked his life to cross the border on a fake Russian passport, dug through the rubble of the house, and then, in partnership with an Ossetian friend, slipped across the border under the noses of the Russian FSB (formerly the KGB), who were guarding the Ossetian side of the border, to leave them in Mereti. Doing Nothing Manana’s overwhelming desire to get her jars back highlighted another problem caused by macaroni and the other donated food. It wasn’t just that macaroni showed that the IDPs had nothing, but that it exacerbated the problem of doing nothing. In the Georgian villages in South Ossetia, most people had been very busy. Farming is hard, physical work, and even those people who had jobs outside farming (such as teachers, doctors, and skilled tradesmen) also worked on their family’s farm evenings and weekends. There were fields to tend, and most of the work beyond plowing, such as weeding, spraying, and harvesting, had to be done by hand. Orchards required pruning, bees had to have their hives tended, cows had to be taken to pasture and milked twice a day, eggs had to be gathered, and chickens had to be fed. Once the food was grown, it had to be processed. Apples were sliced and dried, strawberries were cooked into jam, cherries were made into compote and stored in jars, and chickens were slaughtered, plucked, and roasted. Once meals were made—from scratch, three times a day—food scraps had to be carried out to the pigs. Except in the dead of winter, most people worked long days. In the IDP settlements, though, inactivity and boredom was a constant problem. Living as they were on donated food and never-ending macaroni, the work of growing and cooking food had been dramatically reduced. In the first winter of displacement, men had no need to tend the small garden plots the IDPs had been allocated, and women had no food to preserve or store. Even the work of making meals was truncated: There was no meat to butcher or cook, since most people couldn’t afford it; no cakes to bake since nobody donated ovens and everything had to be cooked on a gas burner; and in settlements where factory bread was delivered, no need to bake bread. In the absence of chores, hour after hour was spent doing nothing at all. People watched endless hours of television on the sets donated to them by the Georgian government. Men played cards listlessly in tents set up by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for food distribution, or they stood on the corner in birzhas (exchanges) and talked aimlessly. Some men drank heavily. Many people slept most of the day away, not because they were tired but as a means of alleviating boredom. There were few supras or communal meals, which once had taken days to make. The donated macaroni, which was easy to cook, fast to eat if somebody felt like eating it for the hundredth time, and every bit as bland as the days in the settlement, thus came to represent doing nothing as well as having nothing and being nobody. When people from surrounding villages began coming into the settlements a few months after the IDPs arrived, offering to trade their homegrown produce for the other staples in the World Food Program packages, people leapt at the chance. Just after dawn, the still air of the settlements would be broken by the crunch of tires on the gravel roads and a voice calling, “Rze! Rze! Rze vqidi!” (“Milk! Milk! I’m selling milk!”) or, “Kartopili! Kartopili!” (“Potatoes! Potatoes!”), and women would spill out of the cottages holding bags of macaroni to trade for whatever was in the trunk of the car passing through. The ratio was decidedly not in the IDPs’ favor, since a kilo of macaroni never bought a kilo of carrots or apples, but the people in the settlements seemed not to care. Anything was better than more macaroni. That spring, a few people discovered how to transform the loathed macaroni, that symbol of nothingness, into something to do. In February, each IDP had received a “winterization payment” of one hundred lari for each member of the family. It was meant to buy winter coats and boots, which the IDPs had obviously left without when they’d been displaced the previous August. But some families did not buy coats, choosing to make do by layering donated sweaters or just to remain cold. With the money, they instead bought chickens or piglets, and Dunn Food of Sorrow p. 6 began raising them in pens in the small yards around the cottages. Of course, there was no way that any of the IDPs could afford commercial animal feed. Instead, they fed the livestock food scraps and boiled macaroni. While raising livestock was difficult and smelly, given that the animals had to live almost touching the houses, the activity gave people a vestige of their old livelihoods back, and, for a few brief moments, something to do. Boomerang Food If macaroni symbolized nothingness and the bitterness of loss, and if it could not replace the jars of food and all the ties to place and to people that they represented, there was one kind of food that could fill in the empty spaces. It was a food that was socially nourishing as well as physically nourishing, that rebuilt the links between family members and friends and reattached displaced people to their places of origin. This was what I call “boomerang food,” food that came back. I learned about boomerang food in Aleko Mentashvili’s cottage in Skra, an IDP settlement not far from Tsmindatsqali. In lieu of sitting on a sofa, I was perched on a twin bed shoved against the wall, eating off the wobbly table that he’d been given as humanitarian aid. As we drank ch’a ch’a (homemade moonshine), we ate terrible bread made by Aleko’s wife from flour given out by the World Food Program. There was something wrong with the flour, and the bread would not rise, so everyone in the settlement was stuck eating bread that sat in the stomach like a lump of concrete. “It’s not fit for animals,” Aleko complained as we got progressively more drunk. But then, with a flash of an idea, Aleko rose unsteadily and wobbled into the kitchen. Returning with a small jar and a spoon, he said, “Taste this!” It was honey, sweet May honey fragrant with plum blossoms and fresh-cut grass. “Where’d you get that?” I asked, knowing that honey was twenty-five lari a kilo, far out of Aleko’s budget. “It’s mine! It’s from my bees!” I was utterly confused, since Aleko’s house was in the village of Tamarasheni, which had been utterly destroyed. Aleko, a veterinarian, had been famous all over the Didi Liakhvi gorge as the “Bee Guy,” the man who had more hives and made more honey than anybody else in the region. His honey was, in large measure, the crystallized form of his identity, the product that defined him in local society more than even his profession. He once took great pleasure in giving jars of his honey to friends and relatives. So, when Aleko was displaced, and the bees were lost, his relatives from villages inside Georgia proper, where they were able to return after the war, made the kindest gesture they could think of: They brought his honey back to him. As we drank on that cold day, we ate the honey by the spoonful. At the bottom of the jar, Aleko scraped up one last spoonful and held it out to me. “This is the last honey from Tamarasheni,” he said, his eyes overflowing with sadness and drink. I declined it, and Aleko ate it slowly, savoring the last taste of his land. It was as if his displacement had not been complete, as long as the honey remained, but with the last of it gone, he became truly unmoored in space, a person who was now from nowhere. Eating these boomerang foods—honey, jam, bottled fruit, and even homemade “white lightning”—became a ritual in many of the IDPs’ cottages I visited. Almost always, the foods were accompanied by beautiful, idealized, and elegiac descriptions of the house and the land they had come from. Judging from similar villages on the Georgian side of the border, the villages in South Ossetia were probably not much to look at from the outside: ramshackle brick houses, scraggly gardens, unpaved rutted dirt roads, and un-mowed clumps of tall grass everywhere. But to those who had lost them, the houses and the land were paradise lost. As we ate the food that had been returned to those who made it, I listened to people recount the numbers of peach and cherry trees they had, describe the places where they’d hung rope hammocks out to rest and swing in, talk about the seemingly huge numbers of cows and chickens they’d raised, and tell me about the cheeses stacked up in their cellars. Boomerang foods were the opposite of anti-artifacts. Where macaroni, a hollow tube around a center of nothingness, could only trace the outlines of what had been lost and point to the space it once occupied, boomerang foods truly filled the holes left by what had Dunn Food of Sorrow p. 7 been lost, if only for a moment. As they circulated back to their makers, the returning jars and bottles called up memories of place and reconnected people to them emotionally, while closing the loop of reciprocity that connected givers and receivers. Conclusion It might be easy to argue that in planning for emergency humanitarian aid, the cultural meanings that people endow food with are not important. After all, in the midst of a war or in the aftermath of massive displacement, it is difficult for aid agencies to factor in the complexity of local cuisines and symbolic systems. The food that is given out as aid needs to be cheap to buy, easy to store and move, and easy to distribute. If the mission is to keep people from starving, the argument goes, it doesn’t have to taste good or make people feel good or help bring people together again. It only has to provide the brute calories needed to keep them alive. From this utilitarian perspective, macaroni is an ideal food. It doesn’t require refrigeration or a lot of complex equipment to prepare, and as a simple starch, it provides a lot of calories in a small package. This perspective, one focused purely on the biological survival of the displaced, comes from a focus on what philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called “bare life,” human beings taken only as physiological organisms that humanitarians must struggle to keep alive. In this minimalist view, the cultures, languages, cuisines, politics, and social ties of displaced people do not matter. All that matters is sustaining their physical lives. In the last few years, though, humanitarian agencies have moved away from this focus on sustaining bare life. Realizing that displaced people can be trapped in the limbo of refugee camps without much attention given to the complex ways that they interact with the communities where they resettle, humanitarian agencies such as UNHCR, and the International Organization for Migration, CARE International, and World Vision have all begun to push for “social reintegration” programs for the displaced. Under the framework of social integration, these agencies have begun making concerted efforts to help displaced people find jobs, start businesses, send their children to local schools, and participate in community organizations. The goal is to remake the displaced into full, functioning social beings, something far beyond bare life. If social reintegration is the goal for the displaced, though, their cultural practices and beliefs, their emotional states and their social worlds matter. If they are supposed to start businesses and get jobs, for example, having strong social networks is the key to raising capital, finding customers, and advertising via word of mouth. If they are supposed to parent well and provide communities that will discourage militarism and ethnic hatred (two things that often fester in refugee camps), staving off depression and hopelessness is important. And if the displaced are supposed to create community organizations to articulate their needs to the authorities, strong communal bonds are essential. In Georgia, where food, eating, and the supra banquet are the building blocks of social life, having food that reminded people of loss and discouraged sociality only posed barriers to social reintegration. Yet, outside the framework of humanitarian aid, the food that enabled those bonds circulated, in small quantities of precious foods from home that made their way through the webs of kinship and friendship to return to their owners. The sweet taste of home, for many IDPs, was the beginning of making their own food again, and attaching to their new homes. As spring came to Tsmindatsqali, as people planted and tended gardens, and then harvested fruit and vegetables in the late summer, they began eating more of their familiar foods. People from different villages, now neighbors in the settlements, began to get to know one another, at first over sunflower seeds and other snacks shared outside, and then later over meals in each others’ cottages. There were even supras again—less lavish than before the war, to be sure, but important occasions nonetheless. Late in the summer of 2009, I was invited to the first wedding thrown by the people from the village of Ksuisi since the war. The banquet hall was full with over three hundred people. The bride floated in on a haze of white tulle and silver tinsel, gliding on the arm of her new husband, who had met her while randomly Dunn Food of Sorrow p. 8 dialing telephone numbers and waiting for girls to answer. As the band played and the wine flowed, we got up to dance the lezginka, a traditional dance of the Caucasus performed with arms high in the air. And when we returned to the long banquet tables, exhausted and giddy from the dance, we saw the tables laden with literally hundreds of dishes full of fish and fruit, spinach and eggplant pkhali, chunks of boiled meat and cones of fresh cheese, and dozens of tiny cakes glittering in frosting. There was not a plate of macaroni to be seen. Dunn, Carolyn. 2012. The Food Sorrow: Humanitarian Aid to Displaced People. Coleman, Leo (ed.). Food: Ethnographic Encounters (Encounters Experience and Anthropological Knowledge) (Kindle Locations 2998-3216). Berg Publishers. Kindle Edition. Title: Want amid plenty: From hunger to inequality. By: Poppendieck, Janet, Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, 00270520, Jul/Aug98, Vol. 50, Issue 3 Database: Academic Search Premier WANT AMID PLENTY: FROM HUNGER TO INEQUALITY Contents 1. 2. 3. 4. Hunger Has a "Cure" The Seductions of Hunger The Case Against Hunger Where To? "Scouting has some unacceptables," the Executive Director of the Jersey Shore Council of the Boy Scouts of America told me, "and one of them is hunger." We were talking in the entrance to the Ciba Geigy company cafeteria in Toms River, New Jersey, where several hundred Boy Scouts, their parents, grandparents, siblings, and neighbors were sorting and packing the 280,000 pounds of canned goods that the scouts of this Council had netted in their 1994 Scouting For Food drive. The food would be stored on the Ciba Geigy corporate campus, where downsizing had left a number of buildings empty, and redistributed to local food pantries to be passed along to the hungry. The scouting executive was one of several hundred people I interviewed as part of a study of charitable food programs -- so called "emergency food" -- in the United States. In the years since the early 1980s, literally millions of Americans have been drawn into such projects: soup kitchens and food pantries on the front lines, and canned goods drives, food banks, and "food rescue" projects that supply them. Hunger Has a "Cure" What makes hunger in America unacceptable, to Boy Scouts and to the rest of us, is the extraordinary abundance produced by American agriculture. There is no shortage of food here, and everybody knows it. In fact, for much of this century, national agricultural policy has been preoccupied with surplus, and individual Americans have been preoccupied with avoiding, losing, or hiding the corporeal effects of overeating. Collectively, and for the most part individually, we have too much food, not too little. To make matters worse, we waste food in spectacular quantities. A study recently released by USDA estimates that between production and end use, more than a quarter of the food produced in the U.S. goes to waste, from fields planted but not harvested to the bread molding on top of my refrigerator or the lettuce wilting at the back of the vegetable bin. Farm waste, transport waste, processor waste, wholesaler waste, supermarket waste, institutional waste, household waste, plate waste; together in 1995 they totaled a startling 96 billion pounds, or 365 pounds-a pound a day -- for every person in the nation. The connection between abundant production and food waste on the one hand, and hunger on the other, is not merely abstract and philosophical. Both public and private food assistance efforts in this country have been shaped by efforts to find acceptable outlets for food that would otherwise go to waste. These include the wheat surpluses stockpiled by Herbert Hoover's Federal Farm Board and belatedly given to the Red Cross for distribution to the unemployed, the martyred piglets of New Deal agricultural adjustment (which led to the establishment of federal surplus commodity distribution), and the cheese that Ronald Reagan finally donated to the needy to quell the criticism of mounting storage costs. Accumulation of large supplies of food in public hands, especially in times of economic distress and privation, has repeatedly resulted in the creation of public programs to distribute the surplus to the hungry. And in the private sphere as well, a great deal of the food that supplies today's soup kitchens and food pantries is food that would otherwise end up as waste: corporate over-production or labeling errors donated to the food bank, farm and orchard extras gleaned by volunteers after the commercial harvest, and the vast quantities of leftovers generated by hospital, school, government and corporate cafeterias, and caterers and restaurants. All of this is food that is now rescued and recycled through the type of food recovery programs urged by Vice President Al Gore and Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman at their 1997 National Summit on Food Recovery and Gleaning. "There is simply no excuse for hunger in the most agriculturally abundant country in the world," said Glickman, who urged a 33 percent increase in food recovery by the year 2000 that would enable social service agencies to feed an additional 450,000 Americans each day. For Americans reared as members of the "clean plate club" and socialized to associate our own uneaten food with hunger in faraway places, such programs have enormous appeal. They provide a sort of moral relief from the discomfort that ensues when we are confronted with images of hunger in our midst, or when we are reminded of the excesses of consumption that characterize our culture. They offer what appear to be old-fashioned moral absolutes in a sea of shifting values and ethical uncertainties. Many of the volunteers I interviewed for my study told me that they felt that their work at the soup kitchen or food pantry was the one unequivocally good thing in their lives, the one point in the week in which they felt sure they were on the side of the angels. Furthermore, they perceive hunger as one problem that is solvable --precisely because of the abundant production -- one problem about which they can do something concrete and meaningful. "Hunger has a cure," is the new slogan developed by the Ad Council for Second Harvest, the National Network of Foodbanks. It is not surprising, then, that hunger in America has demonstrated an enormous capacity to mobilize both public and private action. There are fourteen separate federal food assistance programs, numerous state and local programs, and thousands upon thousands of local, private charitable feeding projects which elicit millions of hours of volunteer time as well as enormous quantities of donated funds and food. In one random survey in the early 1990s, nearly four fifths of respondents indicated that they, personally, had done something to alleviate hunger in their communities in the previous year. The Seductions of Hunger Progressives have not been immune to the lure of hunger-as-the-problem. We have been drawn into the anti-hunger crusade for several reasons. First, hunger in America shows with great clarity the absurdity of our distribution system, of capitalism's approach to meeting basic human needs. Poor people routinely suffer for want of things that are produced in abundance in this country, things that gather dust in warehouses and inventories, but the bicycles and personal computers that people desire and could use are not perishable and hence are not rotting in front of their eyes in defiance of their bellies. The Great Depression of the 1930s, with its startling contrasts of agricultural surpluses and widespread hunger, made this terrible irony excruciatingly clear, and many people were able to perceive the underlying economic madness: "A breadline knee-deep in wheat," observed commentator James Crowther, "is surely the handiwork of foolish men." Progressives are attracted to hunger as an issue because it reveals in so powerful a way the fundamental shortcomings of unbridled reliance on markets. Second, progressives are drawn to hunger as a cause by its emotional salience, its capacity to arouse sympathy and mobilize action. Hunger is, as George McGovern once pointed out, "the cutting edge of poverty," the form of privation that is at once the easiest to imagine, the most immediately painful, and the most far-reaching in its damaging consequences. McGovern was writing in the aftermath of the dramatic rediscovery of hunger in America that occurred in the late 1960s when a Senate subcommittee, holding hearings on anti-poverty programs in Mississippi, encountered the harsh realities of economic and political deprivation in the form of empty cupboards and malnourished children in the Mississippi Delta. Hunger was in the news, and journalist Nick Kotz reports that a coalition of civil rights and anti-poverty activists made a conscious decision to keep it there. They perceived in hunger "the one problem to which the public might respond. They reasoned that `hunger' made a higher moral claim than any of the other problems of poverty." The anti-hunger movement -- or "hunger lobby" that they initiated -- was successful in enlisting Congressional support for a major expansion of food assistance and the gradual creation of a food entitlement through food stamps, the closest thing to a guaranteed income that we have ever had in this country. The broad appeal of the hunger issue and its ability to evoke action are also visible in the more recent proliferation of emergency food programs. "I think the reason ... that you get the whole spectrum of people involved in this is because it's something that is real basic for people to relate to. You know, you're busy, you skip lunch, you feel hungry. On certain levels, everyone has experienced feeling hungry at some point in the day or the year," explained Ellen Teller, an attorney with the Food Research and Action Center whose work brings her into frequent contact with both emergency food providers and anti-hunger policy advocates. The food program staff and volunteers I interviewed recognized the difference between their own, essentially voluntary and temporary hunger and hunger that is externally imposed and of unpredictable duration, but the reservoir of common human experience is there. Hunger is not exotic and hard to imagine; it stems from the failure to meet a basic and incontrovertible need that we all share. Furthermore, the failure to eliminate hunger has enormous consequences. As the research on the link between nutrition and cognition mounts, the social costs of failing to ensure adequate nutrition for pregnant women and young children become starkly obvious. And this, too, contributes to the broad spectrum that Ellen Teller mentioned. There is something for everyone here -- a prudent investment in human capital for those concerned about the productivity of the labor force of tomorrow, a prevention of suffering for the tender hearted, a unifying concern for would-be organizers, a blatant injustice for critics of our social structure. Many anti-hunger organizations with relatively sophisticated critiques of the structural roots of hunger in America have engaged with the "feeding movement," the soup kitchens and the food pantries, in the belief that, as the Bread for the World Institute once put it, "Hunger can be the `door' through which people enter an introduction to larger problems of poverty, powerlessness, and distorted public values." For those progressives seeking common ground with a wider range of American opinion, hunger is an attractive issue precisely because of the breadth of the political spectrum of people who are moved by it. Third, progressives have been drawn into the hunger lobby by the utility of hunger as a means of resisting, or at least documenting the effects of, government cuts in entitlements. In the early 1980s, especially, when Ronald Reagan began his presidential assault on the nation's meager safety net of entitlement programs for the poor, progressives of all sorts pointed to the lengthening soup kitchen lines as evidence that the cuts in income supports, housing subsidies, food assistance, and a host of other public programs were cuts that neither the poor nor the society could afford. While Reagan and his team claimed that they were simply stripping away waste and fat from bloated programs, critics on the left kept track of mounting use of emergency food programs as a means of documenting the suffering caused by the erosion of the welfare state. The scenario is being replayed, this time amid an expanding economy, as soup kitchens and food pantries register the effects of "the end of welfare as we know it." Finally, of course, progressives are drawn to the hunger issue by a sense of solidarity with those in need. Most of us became progressives in the first place because we cared about people and wanted a fairer society that would produce less suffering. Few of us can stomach an argument that says that we should leave the hungry to suffer without aid while we work for a more just future. "People don't eat in the long run," Franklin Roosevelt's relief czar Harry Hopkins is reported to have said; "they eat every day." Many of the more activist and progressive people I interviewed in the course of my emergency food study articulated similar sentiments. A woman who worked in the early eighties helping churches and community groups in southern California set up soup kitchens and food pantries to cope with the fallout from the budget cuts in Washington recalled the dilemma as she had experienced it. "As far as I was concerned, the people in Washington had blood on their hands ... but I wasn't going to stand by and watch people suffer just to make a political point." As one long-time left activist in Santa Cruz put it when questioned about her work as a member of the local food bank board, "There are numbers of people who are very compatible with my radical philosophy who also feel that foodbanking is very important, because the reality is that there are ever increasing homeless and poor, including working poor, who need to be fed ... the need for food has increased and the resources for providing it haven't. And if there weren't foodbanks, I think a lot of people would starve." It is easy to see why progressive people have been drawn into anti-hunger activity in large numbers, and why they have been attracted to the soup kitchens, food pantries, and food banks, despite misgivings about these private charitable projects. I, personally, have counted myself an anti-hunger activist since the nation rediscovered hunger in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, after three decades in the "hunger lobby," and nearly a decade of observing and interviewing in soup kitchens, food pantries, food banks, and food recovery projects, I would like to offer a caution about defining hunger as the central issue. The Case Against Hunger The very emotional response that makes hunger a good organizing issue, and the felt absurdity of such want amid massive waste, makes our society vulnerable to token solutions -- solutions that simply link together complementary symptoms without disturbing the underlying structural problems. The New Deal surplus commodity distribution program, which laid the political and administrative groundwork for most subsequent federal food programs, purchased surplus agricultural commodities from impoverished farmers in danger of going on relief and distributed them to the unemployed already receiving public help. It responded to what Walter Lippmann once called the "sensational and the intolerable paradox of want in the midst of abundance," by using a portion of the surplus to help some of the needy, without fundamentally changing the basis for access to food. As Norman Thomas put it in 1936, "We have not had a reorganization of production and a redistribution of income to end near starvation in the midst of potential plenty. If we do not have such obvious `breadlines knee deep in wheat' as under the Hoover administration, it is because we have done more to reduce the wheat and systematize the giving of crusts than to end hunger." For the general public, however, the surplus commodity programs were "common sense," and they made well fed people feel better. Few asked how much of the surplus was being transferred to the hungry, or how much of their hunger was thus relieved. As the New York Times predicted in an editorial welcoming the program: "It will relieve our minds of the distressing paradox." And with the moral pressure relieved, with consciences eased, the opportunity for more fundamental action evaporated. Thus the token program served to preserve the underlying status quo. Something very similar appears to be happening with the private food rescue, gleaning, and other surplus transfer programs that have expanded and proliferated to supply emergency food programs since the early 1980s. The constant fund-raising and food drives that characterize such programs keep them in the public eye, and few people ask whether the scale of the effort is proportional to the scale of the need. With the Boy Scouts collecting in the fall and the letter carriers in the spring, with the convenient barrel at the grocery store door and the opportunity to "check out hunger" at the checkout counter, with the Taste of the Nation and the enormous array of other hunger-related fundraisers, with the Vice President and the Secretary of Agriculture assuring us that we can simultaneously feed more people and reduce waste through food recovery, with all this highly visible activity, it is easy to assume that the problem is under control. The double whammy, the moral bargain of feeding the hungry and preventing waste, makes us feel better, thus reducing the discomfort that might motivate more fundamental action. The same emotional salience that makes hunger so popular a cause in the first place makes us quick to relieve our own discomfort by settling for token solutions. In the contemporary situation, the danger of such tokenism is even more acute. There is more at stake than the radicalizing potential of the contradictions of waste amid want. The whole fragile commitment to public income supports and entitlements is in jeopardy. Food programs not only make the well fed feel better, they reassure us that no one will starve, even if the nation ends welfare and cuts gaping holes in the food stamp safety net. By creating an image of vast, decentralized, kind-hearted effort, an image that is fueled by every fund-raising letter or event, every canned goods drive, every hunger walk, run, bike, swim, or golf-a-thon, every concert or screening or play where a can of food reduces the price of admission, we allow the right wing to destroy the meager protections of the welfare state and undo the New Deal. Ironically, these public appeals have the effect of creating such comforting assurances even for those who do not contribute. Promoting hunger as a public issue, of course, does not necessarily imply support for the private, voluntary approach. There are undoubtedly social democrats and other progressives who support expanded food entitlements without endorsing the emergency food phenomenon. Unfortunately, however, much of the public makes little distinction. If we raise the issue of hunger, we have no control over just how people will choose to respond. As the network of food banks, food rescue organizations, food pantries, and soup kitchens has grown, so have the chances that people confronted with evidence of hunger in their midst will turn to such programs in an effort to help. Many private food charities make a point of asserting that they are not a substitute for public food assistance programs and entitlements. Nearly every food banker and food pantry director I interviewed made some such claim, and the national organizations that coordinate such projects, Second Harvest, Food Chain, Catholic Charities, even the Salvation Army, are on record opposing cuts in public food assistance and specifying their own role as supplementary. When it is time to raise funds, however, such organizations, from the lowliest food pantry in the church basement to national organizations with highpowered fund raising consultants or departments, tend to compare themselves with public programs in ways that reinforce the ideology of privatization. You simply cannot stress the low overhead, efficiency, and cost effectiveness of using donated time to distribute donated food without feeding into the rightwing critique of public programs in general and entitlements in particular. The same fund-raising appeals that reassure the public that no one will starve, even if public assistance is destroyed, convince many that substitution of charitable food programs for public entitlements might be a good idea. Furthermore, as the programs themselves have invested in infrastructure-in walk-in freezers and refrigerated trucks, in institutional stoves and office equipment, in pension plans and health insurance -their stake in the continuation of their efforts has grown as well, and with it, their need for continuous fund raising, and thus for the perpetuation of hunger as an issue. While many food bankers and food recovery staff argue that there would be a role for their organizations even if this society succeeded in eliminating hunger, that their products also go to improve the meal quality at senior citizen centers or lower the cost of day care and rehabilitation programs, they clearly realize that they need hunger as an issue in order to raise their funds. Cost effectiveness and efficient service delivery, even the prevention of waste, simply do not have the same ability to elicit contributions. Hunger is, in effect, their bread and butter. The result is a degree of hoopla, of attention getting activity, that I sometimes think of as the commodification of hunger. As Laura DeLind pointed out in her insightful article entitled "Celebrating Hunger in Michigan," the hunger industry has become extraordinarily useful to major corporate interests, but even without such public relations and other benefits to corporate food and financial donors, hunger has become a "product" that enables its purveyors to compete successfully for funds in a sort of social issues marketplace. It does not require identification with despised groups --as does AIDS, for example. Its remedy is not far off, obscure, or difficult to imagine -- like the cure for cancer. The emotional salience discussed above, and the broad spectrum of people who have been recruited to this cause in one way or another, make hunger -- especially the soup kitchen, food pantry, food recycling version of hunger -- a prime commodity in the fund-raising industry, and a handy, inoffensive outlet for the do-gooding efforts of high school community service programs and corporate public relations offices, of synagogues and churches, of the Boy Scouts and the Letter Carriers, of the Rotarians and the Junior League: the taming of hunger. As we institutionalize and expand the response, of course, we also institutionalize and reinforce the problem definition that underlies it. Sociologists have long argued that the definitional stage is the crucial period in the career of a social problem. Competing definitions vie for attention, and the winners shape the solutions and garner the resources. It is important, therefore, to understand the competing definitions of the situation that "hunger" crowds out. What is lost from public view, from our operant consciousness, as we work to end hunger? In short, defining the problem as hunger contributes to the obfuscation of the underlying problems of poverty and inequality. Many poor people are indeed hungry, but hunger, like homelessness and a host of other problems, is a symptom, not a cause, of poverty. And poverty, in turn, in an affluent society like our own, is fundamentally a product of inequality. Defining the problem as hunger ignores a whole host of other needs. Poor people need food, but they also need housing, transportation, clothing, medical care, meaningful work, opportunities for civic and political participation, and recreation. By focusing on hunger, we imply that the food portion of this complex web of human needs can be met independently of the rest, can be exempted or protected from the overall household budget deficit. As anyone who has ever tried to get by on a tight budget can tell you, however, life is not so compartmentalized. Poor people are generally engaged in a daily struggle to stretch inadequate resources over a range of competing demands. The "heat-or-eat" dilemma that arises in the winter months, or the situation reported by many elderly citizens of a constant necessity to choose between food and medications are common manifestations of this reality. In this situation, if we make food assistance easier to obtain than other forms of aid-help with the rent, for example, or the heating bill-then people will devise a variety of strategies to use food assistance to meet other needs. It is not really difficult to convert food stamps to cash: pick up a few items at the store for a neighbor, pay with your stamps, collect from her in cash. Some landlords will accept them, at a discounted rate of course, then convert them through a friend or relative who owns a grocery store. Drug dealers will also accept them, again at lower than face value, and you can resell the drugs for cash. The list goes on and on. Converting soup kitchen meals is almost impossible, but there are items in many pantry bags that can be resold. In either case, eating at the soup kitchen or collecting a bag from the food pantry frees up cash for other needs, not only the rent, but also a birthday present for a child or a new pair of shoes. By offering help with food, but refusing help with other urgent needs, we are setting up a situation in which poor people are almost required to take steps to convert food assistance to cash. Conservative critics of entitlements will then seize on these behaviors to argue that poor people are "not really hungry." If they were really hungry, the argument goes, they would not resell items from the pantry bag or convert their food stamps. Such behavioral evidence fits into a whole ideologically driven perception that programs for poor people are bloated, too generous, and full of fraud and abuse; it allows conservatives to cut programs while asserting that they are preserving a safety net for the "truly needy." Progressives meanwhile are forced into a defensive position in which we argue that people are indeed "really hungry," thereby giving tacit assent to the idea that the elimination of hunger is the appropriate goal. In a society as wealthy as ours, however, aiming simply to eliminate hunger is aiming too low. We not only want a society in which no one suffers acute hunger or fails to take full advantage of educational and work opportunities due to inadequate nutrition. We want a society in which no one is excluded, by virtue of poverty, from full participation, in which no one is too poor to provide a decent life for their children, no one is too poor to pursue happiness. By defining the problem as "hunger," we set too low a standard for ourselves. Where To? The question of where we should direct our organizational efforts is inextricably tied up with the underlying issue of inequality. Above some absolute level of food and shelter, need is a thoroughly relative phenomenon. In an affluent society, the quality of life available at a given level of income has everything to do with how far from the mainstream that level is, with the extent to which any given income can provide a life that looks and feels "normal" to its occupants. In many warm parts of the world, children routinely go barefoot, and no mother would feel driven to convert food resources into cash to buy a pair of shoes, or to demean herself by seeking a charity handout to provide them. In the United States, where children are bombarded with hours of television advertising daily, and where apparel manufacturers trade on "coolness," a mother may well make the rounds of local food pantries, swallowing her pride and subsisting on handouts, to buy not just a pair of shoes, but a particular name brand that her child has been convinced is essential for social acceptance at the junior high school. In this context, the issue is not whether people have enough to survive, but how far they are from the median and the mainstream, and that is a matter of how unequal our society has become. By every measure, inequality has increased in the United States, dramatically, since the early 1970s, with a small group at the top garnering an ever increasing share of net marketable worth, and the bottom doing less and less well. And it is this growing inequality which explains the crying need for soup kitchens and food banks today, even at a relatively high level of employment that reflects the current peak in the business cycle. Unfortunately, however, a concept like hunger is far easier to understand, despite its ambiguities of definition, than an abstraction like inequality. Furthermore, Americans have not generally been trained to understand the language of inequality nor the tools with which it is measured. Just what is net marketable worth, and do I have any? As the statistics roll off the press, eyes glaze over, and the kindhearted turn to doing something concrete, to addressing a problem they know they can do something about: hunger. Once they begin, and get caught up in the engrossing practical challenges of transferring food to the hungry and the substantial emotional gratifications of doing so, they lose sight of the larger issue of inequality. The gratifications inherent in "feeding the hungry" give people a stake in maintaining the definition of the problem as hunger; the problem definition comes to be driven by the available and visible response in a sort of double helix. Meanwhile, with anti-hunger activists diverted by the demands of ever larger emergency food systems, the ascendant conservatives are freer than ever to dismantle the fragile income protections that remain and to adjust the tax system to concentrate ever greater resources at the top. The people who want more inequality are getting it, and well-meaning people are responding to the resulting deprivation by handing out more and more pantry bags, and dishing up more and more soup. It is time to find ways to shift the discourse from undernutrition to unfairness, from hunger to inequality. ~~~~~~~~ By JANET POPPENDIECK Janet Poppendieck, professor of Sociology at Hunter College of CUNY, is the Director of the Center for the Study of Family Policy. She is the author of Sweet Charity: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement (forthcoming, Viking Press). Copyright of Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine is the property of Monthly Review Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. Wiley American Geographical Society Vietnamese Market Gardens in New Orleans Author(s): Christopher A. Airriess and David L. Clawson Source: Geographical Review, Vol. 84, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), pp. 16-31 Published by: American Geographical Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/215778 Accessed: 19-10-2015 16:40 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Wiley and American Geographical Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Geographical Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 16:40:55 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions VIETNAMESE MARKET GARDENS IN NEW ORLEANS* CHRISTOPHER A. AIRRIESS and DAVID L. CLAWSON Market gardens in an enclave of New Orleans produce foodstuffs that perpetuate traditional folkways of the Vietnamese immigrants who reside there, especially of the elderly of the community who tend these gardens. This type of market gardening is analyzed from ecological and spatial perspectives. Differences in garden location and size influence crop diversity, composition, and technological inputs. A three-garden typology is the framework for examining these ecological relationships. ABSTRACT. SINCE 1975 approximately 600,000 Vietnamese refugees have emigrated to the United States. The great majority have settled in predominantly urban centers such as the New Orleans metropolitan area, where some 12,000 Vietnamese currently reside. The largest single concentration of Vietnamese in the city and, indeed, the United States is the Versailles enclave on the easternmost edge of the city. Approximately five thousand ethnic Vietnamese residing in this enclave have created a landscape that reflects their socioeconomic heritage: they were overwhelmingly agrarian and poor in Vietnam (Airriess and Clawson 1991). Perhaps the most conspicuous evidence of the persistence of ruraltraditions in the enclave landscape is the vegetable and herb gardens. The New Orleans enclave is not the only example of a market-gardening landscape associated with Indochinese refugees in the United States; other examples are found in diverse environments such as Fresno, California, and St. Paul, Minnesota (Myers 1986). The purpose of this article is to examine the ecological basis of this market gardening by concentrating on three specific, but interlinked, objectives. The first objective is to identify the distinct spring, summer, and fall crop assemblages, each of which comprises primarily plant species common to the tropics. Genetic diversity at both individual and aggregate field scales is noted. On the basis of spatial variations in cropping scale and composition, a typology of garden layout is offered. The second objective is twofold: to describe the agricultural cycle of planting and harvesting the cultivars and the dietary roles of the principal crops. The third objective is to examine garden operations, with specific attention to equipment, water, fertilizers, and pesticides. Research results are based on two surveys during May, June, August, and December 1991 and on field observations in 1991 and 1992. The first survey was administered to gardeners in their homes and focused on their * We acknowledge the financial support of the Office of Academic Research and Sponsored Programs, Ball State University and the field assistanceof Tony Tranand Julie Mai. * DR. AIRRIESS is an assistant professor of geography Indiana 47306. DR. CLAWSON is a professor of geography New Orleans, Louisiana 70148. at Ball State University, Muncie, at the University of New Orleans, Copyright ?) 1994 by the American GeographicalSociety of New York This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 16:40:55 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 17 MARKET GARDENS IN NEW ORLEANS FIG. 1-Oblique northwardview of backyardgardens. (Photographby authors) socioeconomic background and their past and present agricultural activities. Of the total gardening households, fourteen, or 35 percent, were surveyed. All but two households surveyed included both a husband and a wife. The surveyed households were divided equally into backyard gardeners and levee gardeners. The second survey inventoried plants and mapped individual gardens. When possible and appropriate, informal discussions were held with gardeners concerning inconsistencies and problems observed in the initial survey. Of the fifty-one gardens, eighteen, or 35 percent, were surveyed. Although an almost complete overlap of gardeners and gardens was achieved, a small number of surveyed households' gardens were not inven- toried, and the initial survey was not administered to a few garden owners. EvOLUTION OF THE MARKET-GARDEN LANDSCAPE Two groups of location-based gardeners were surveyed. One was persons who cultivated backyard gardens immediately behind the single-family and duplex dwellings of Versailles Gardens; the other was persons who tended levee gardens a short distance from the Versailles Arms apartment complex. Although the amount of land under cultivation in Versailles is gradually increasing, the backyard and levee plots still account for most of the agricultural land and are the longest-established plots. The backyard gardens are essentially the transformed lawns of property owners who have chosen to cultivate vegetables and herbs rather than grass (Fig. 1). Most of these gardeners increased the size of their gardens This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 16:40:55 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions by squat- THE GEOGRAPHICALREVIEW 18 t~~~~~~~~~~~~~~_ O_L L e. a S U r FIG. 2-Oblique westward view of levee gardens. Photograph was taken in July, and severe flooding explains the absence of a full crop cover. (Photograph by authors) ting on and cultivating a public-utility easement between their property line and the canal. Most have further expanded the cultivated area by reclaiming the shallow, gently sloping bank of the canal. Adhering to the suburban custom of planting grass in front yards, the backyard gardeners have not extended their activities from the housefronts to the streets. The average size of a backyard garden is 167 square meters; the range is from 117 to 199 square meters. The evolution of the levee plots is far more complex (Fig. 2). In the late 1970s apartment dwellers began to cultivate the lawns around apartment blocks near a large levee, but because of the "unsightliness" of the gardens in the well-ordered landscape of the subsidized apartment project, management terminated the gardening. Some residents then began to cultivate open space next to an adjacent artificial lake, but the owner also deemed this unattractive. Because of the great demand for agricultural space by the apartment dwellers, New Orleans Inc., the Louisiana Cooperative Extension Service, and Associated Catholic Charities formalized an agreement in 1981 to clear a forested parcel of land between the artificial levee and Bayou Pratt batture for use by the apartment gardeners. The cleared land was originally subdivided into forty-six plots, each measuring 111 square meters, but consolidation has gradually increased garden size. The levee gardens now average 212 square meters, with the smallest being 88 square meters and the largest, 379 square meters. This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 16:40:55 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions MARKET GARDENS IN NEW ORLEANS SOCIOECONOMIC FACTORS AND GARDENING 19 ACTIVITY The basic explanation for the gardening activity, be it backyard or levee, may simply be that it is preadaptive behavior transported from the Old World. Because the enclave residents were rural folk in Vietnam, rural activities persist in their new environment, which is amenable to the cultivation of tropical crops. The Versailles gardeners are overwhelmingly from agrarian and village backgrounds. Twelve of the fourteen surveyed households came from villages: eight had lived in villages immediately before they fled South Vietnam, and four had lived in North Vietnamese villages before the communist revolution in 1954. Only two households had no sustained experience in village life before they arrived in the United States. Ten households categorized themselves as possessing farming backgrounds: four had been farmers until they fled South Vietnam; four had been North Vietnamese farmers who became fisherfolk in South Vietnam; and two had engaged in both fishing and farming in South Vietnam. The remaining four households comprised fisherfolk, a fish-sauce maker, a salt maker, and an urban transport worker. The notion of socioeconomic preadaptation may explain gardening activity, but cultural heritage does not explain why gardening in this ethnic enclave is the exclusive activity of the elderly. The average age of the gardeners is approximately sixty-six years, with the youngest being fifty-six and the oldest, eighty-one. Because vegetable and herb cultivation is the monopoly of the elderly, we examine the challenges and opportunities specific to that segment of the Versailles population. Although all refugees experience psychological problems associated with adaptation to an alien environment, these problems are compounded among the elderly segment of the population (Matsuoka 1990). Lack of facility in English, absence of marketable job skills, overdependence on children, lack of mobility, and breakdown of extended family contribute to a substantial loss of self-esteem (Montero 1979, 31). A resultant sense of powerlessness often leads to mental-health problems (Rumbaut 1985). As numerous studies have demonstrated, the psychological well-being of the elderly is much improved through gardening or hortitherapy (Kaplan 1973; Riordan and Williams 1988). Not only does the re-creation of a garden landscape reminiscent of rural Vietnam represent a familiar past environment in the tangible present, but because the cultivation of plants requires daily attention, a sense of responsibility, commitment, and accomplishment, gardening also heightens self-esteem. The elderly are thus afforded an opportunity to create order in a new socioeconomic environment over which they otherwise have little control. The notion of hortitherapy as an explanation of gardening activity is instructive because the overwhelming responses of gardeners to the question "Why do you garden?" were "For exercise" and "It's something to do." The poignant comment of a highly productive gardener was, "If I stay home, I'll get sick and spend even more money on medicine." This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 16:40:55 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 20 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW Intimately linked to the psychological adjustments of the elderly are parallel adjustments in dietary habits. For any immigrant group, traditional foods represent a connection to the past, function to maintain ethnic identity, and assist in reducing the effects of acculturation (Kalcik 1984). As is the case in other Southeast Asian refugee communities in the United States, persistence of traditional dietary practices is greatest among adults. Younger segments of the Versailles population increasingly prefer American foods (Crane and Green 1980; Story and Harris 1989). The cultivation of a wide variety of vegetables and herbs by the elderly is a purposeful strategy to maintain traditional dietary habits by that segment of the enclave population least able to adjust to popular American food tastes. The elderly are also knowledgeable about the curative role of plants, so cultivating many herbs and some vegetables is an expression of the persistence of folk medicinal traditions. The large-scale, complex nature of market gardening in Versailles exceeds what might normally be attributed to hortitherapy, so economic satisfaction associated with the cultivation of crops is another important component of the psychological adjustment of the elderly. Because they are otherwise economically redundant and more welfare-dependent than are the younger segments of the enclave community, gardening increases their sense of economic self-worth. By providing an almost full complement of vegetables, herbs, and root crops that are basic to the traditional Vietnamese diet, the elderly substantially reduce household food expenditures. Any crops that the household does not need are sold to other enclave residents or through the Saturday wet, or fresh-produce, market and to enclave restaurants and grocery stores. These economic factors help account for the prominent role of gardening in the community and also influence gardeners' decisions about crop composition and commercial specialization. In sum, gardening gives the elderly population of Versailles emotional well-being and economic empowerment. PLANT ASSEMBLAGES AND CROPPING SYSTEMS The diversity of plants cultivated by Versailles market gardeners is impressive. The forty-three cultivars that were identified include tubers, cucurbits, condiments and herbs, leafy greens and vegetables, legumes, medicinal plants, and fruit (Table I). With the exception of a few condiments and herbs and vegetables, most of the cultivars are not common in the Western diet (Herklots 1972). The plants are propagated from seeds obtained directly from Vietnam or purchased from enclave stores, as well as from cuttings received from friends and relatives. Once gardens are established, seeds and cuttings from the previous year's crop are stored. The cropping system of Versailles gardens is a form of polyculture, in which a variety of cultivars is simultaneously raised on a plot. In this mixed cropping, individual patches and strips of cultivars occupy discrete sections of a single plot. The soil, sunlight, and terrain conditions under which each This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 16:40:55 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 21 MARKET GARDENS IN NEW ORLEANS cultivar patch is produced are uniform. Boundaries between the patches are discernible, often a narrow path of bare soil. These gardens resemble, albeit at a far grander scale, the dooryard or kitchen gardens commonly found in villages throughout Southeast Asia where paddy is the primary crop (Terra 1954). In Vietnam fruit and vegetables grown for household consumption TABLE I-FREQUENCY OF CULTIVATION OF CULTIVARS BY GARDEN TYPE (%) SUPPLEMENTAL LEVEE 86 57 29 14 14 57 14 28 14 71 43 28 0 43 TOTAL BACKYARD ORIGINAL LEVEE Taro (khoai sap Imon) Bitter cucumber (muop dang) Lemon grass (xa) Water spinach (rau muong) Malabar nightshade (mong toi) Ginger (rieng) Jew's mallow (rau day) Spearmint (hung chui) Smooth luffa (muop) Greater yam (cu nga) Sweet potato (khoai lang) Eggplant (ca phao) Beefsteak (tia to) Corn (bap) 83 83 66 50 50 50 44 44 44 38 33 33 33 33 60 80 60 100 100 20 66 80 80 0 0 20 80 20 100 100 83 50 50 83 83 33 66 33 50 50 33 33 Sweet basil (hung cho) 27 60 16 0 Tumeric (nghe) Vietnamese coriander (rau ram) Chinese celery (rau can) Cassava (cu mi san) Groundnut (dau lac) Red pepper (ot) 27 27 27 22 22 22 20 80 60 0 0 20 33 16 33 50 33 50 28 0 0 28 28 0 Tuberless taro (roc mung, bac ha) Bottle gourd (bau) 22 16 60 0 16 16 0 0 Chinese CULTIVARa chive (he) 16 20 33 0 Thorny coriander (ngo gai) Black bean (dau den) (Diep ca) 16 16 16 40 0 20 16 66 33 0 0 0 Arrowroot (cu dong) Edible canna (cu ngai) 11 11 20 0 0 33 28 0 Mustard green (cai cuc) Tomato (ca chua) 11 11 20 20 16 16 0 0 Asparagus bean (dau dua) 11 40 0 0 (La mo) Banana (chuoi) 11 11 20 0 16 16 0 0 Onion (hanh) Oriental melon (dua bo) Sugar cane (mia) Collard green (cai ngot) Turnip root (cai cu, rau ma) (La lot) 11 5 5 5 5 5 40 0 0 7 7 0 0 16 0 0 0 16 0 0 14 0 0 0 0 (Kinh gioi) 5 0 16 Gherkin 5 20 0 0 5 20 16 0 (dua leo) Squash/gourd (bi xanh) aVietnamese names in parentheses. are generally of secondary importance but provide welcome diversity of taste and nutrition in the monotonous rice-based meals. Some 70 percent of Versailles gardeners who grew vegetables and fruits in Vietnam did so exclusively for household consumption. However, because of economic demands by the nonagricultural enclave population, the Versailles gardens represent This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 16:40:55 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 22 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW a transition from subsistence to commercially oriented market gardens. Versailles gardening displays subsistence ecological traits of small-scale operation, crop diversity, rainfed supplemental irrigation, and low technology, but it also has a commercial orientation (Capistrano and Marten 1986, 9-10). Thrust into a new socioeconomic environment, the elderly Vietnamese refugees emulate the ethnic Chinese of Southeast Asia who dominate the traditional periurban market-garden economy (Hill 1982). One difference between the Versailles gardens and most Southeast Asian polycultural plots is that the Versailles Vietnamese cultivate crops in two vertical layers, not three or four (Igbozurike 1971; Clawson 1985). Common combinations include a ground layer of beefsteak or mint condiment under an arbor of smooth luffa, sweet-potato vines running under bushy cassava branches, and taro growing in the shade of a yam vine twined around the makeshift fencing that separates the individual gardens. The Versailles single- and double-layer cropping pattern is dictated primarily by the custom of cultivating vegetables of relatively uniform height, which does not lend itself readily to intensive vertical layering. It may also result from the New Orleans winters, which are not conducive to the mature growth of the bananas that commonly function as a fourth-story crop. Third-story crops such as cassava, maize, and sugar cane are not widely cultivated in the Versailles gardens. The mixed-crop character of market gardening in Versailles is pronounced, with an average of twelve plants a year. A total of 38 percent of the gardens contain sixteen or more cultivars. Taro, bitter cucumber, lemon grass, water spinach, malabar nightshade, and ginger are the most commonly cultivated plants. All are found in at least 50 percent of the plots in our sample. Sharing the advantage of harvest security that is characteristic of intertillage polyculture, Versailles gardeners place great importance on variety in the diet, because each of the four main cultivar groups is represented in the most commonly cultivated plant category: one tuber, one cucurbit, two herbs, and two vegetables. Dietary variety is also afforded in the second and third most commonly cultivated plant categories, for each of the four cultivar groups is equally represented. GARDEN TYPOLOGY Market gardens in Versailles may be assigned to three idealized types: backyard, original levee, and supplemental levee (Figs. 3, 4, and 5). This three-garden typology is based on variations in size, on morphology, and, most importantly, on differences in crop diversity and composition. Supplemental-levee gardens are plots whose usufruct has passed, on the death or physical disability of their original developers, to gardeners who continue to work their original-levee holdings as well. The supplemental-levee gardens represents a continuum from intensively to extensively cultivated space and a parallel progression from greater to lesser cultivar diversity. After a brief This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 16:40:55 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 23 MARKET GARDENS IN NEW ORLEANS Sh green vegetablesI~~ILeafy water spinachdominant .. H11 ____ Condiments!herbsbeefsteak, ~~~~~~~~~spearmint, sweet basil dominant ~~~~and ______________ Easement Individualedge _______ cultivars-taro, beefsteak, lemon grassand tuberlesstaro Smoothluffaand bitter cucumberarbor Chinesecelery supporting Fencingarend cro iversitfy composition. 1/1_lized the idea_ tyes 1// we anlz / 111Inegrn / / dL7 /bitrc ..................... f//p as lowsa ............. ......../ ...thooth ..................... f t X .................... ....... --.-..-.-.-. . . -.-..... .......-. . - um e nd bathe cucumber ~~~~buffer . *... ..*J///o th draX #ina| Igecana. Athough supplementar garensarmibe smaler nre than bacyardgarens, leee gardeershav aceswtetetair doriinal ndt leastone suppementar adn ihls rat utvt,bcyr adn lev litl saeutizd, exep fo a,eta at n h seodr perpendi/,cula /////f.wlkwy tha separate brad row o,beef cos. Te ucliated wid/sac/ btwenth/bckar an th cn leprton ss ofd th indviua bre s th riag lev litl pepniua who caal spc Although untlzd ntr supe exep fo wak ys tatseartebra suppementallevee als cultivte a gardes centa pat are Z smle an th in area __._ secondary*|z*w row*sB* hucltivated ites= and ofcrp. hmalest amogl teelve levwIde sh gre.Teandag is no backyard tantial: bacyd sizegarden ss supprorw san aragteno gardens 167squae ana porstions individua eecky spacealietwed garenes wop WorkSolyapinleplt as the enter stri mofrpheotloitycomal dfeeasesment and gagrdenstfuncritions thanallyze crop idiveriduabandckyards.ithen itraess asreepedestrianthoroughfae amompare of unutvthedbopen-spaed is greatanulr intso the levee gardens.,h difesrenceiin divtersity ofd culivrshobetween backyardne ofkyr uadnuse levee in the cltaretedae andoriginalspardefrnting agrgthe proorio spaesis plosrwrkewb whodalsog culiana.tlhog supplemental-lve sitees and smallestamnthe areve thardnbcyrsdh workdens,levee siglreer haeacestoteiorgia.ada wide differec prprino nsdlevee gardce betweenth ndvriyo aa and utvrbackyard otinfteindividal- or is largestbinttheplots workedrb gardens uprnaeaersf This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 16:40:55 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ._SS 24 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW i/ S |Eggplant or sweet potato ____ l7~3 //X XLeafy green vegetables- water spinach dominant /////.:Condiments/herbsspearmint, 0 beefsteak, sweet basildominant Smooth luffa,bittercucumber and bottle gourd arbor TiliRed pepper LIII /'Lemon / v XF[1 grass and glinger lndivdual edge cultivars- taro, lemon grass diominant 11 111 111 ~ 1 ?l-!lh1~ 1 111 - Fencing supporting bitter .....................:.... FIG. 4-Idealized original-levee garden. The average size of this type is 272 square meters. fourteen crops, one fewer than the average for original-levee gardens. However, significant variation in crop composition exists between the backyard and original-levee gardens in terms of size and growth habits of crops. With productive area limited, backyard gardeners focus their energies on cultivars such as water spinach, malabar nightshade, spearmint, and beefsteak, which require the least amount of space and are capable of generating the greatest economic return. Although original-levee gardens also produce these, more of their area is used for space-demanding cultivars, including taro, ginger, sweet potato, yam, and eggplant. Substantial differences between backyard and original levee plots do not exist in the frequency of cultivation of important cultivars such as taro, eggplant, tumeric, and red pepper. Nevertheless, backyard gardeners grow only enough for domestic consumption, whereas levee gardeners raise extensive patches of these cultivars for commercial purposes as well. The degree of commercial specialization in specific crops varies, depending on how much land is available for cultivation. The space requirements of individual crops also account for the variations in the use of edge and fence space between backyard and original-levee gardens. Backyardgardens are characterized by the relative absence of crops This content downloaded from 128.223.86.31 on Mon, 19 Oct 2015 16:40:55 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 25 MARKET GARDENS IN NEW ORLEANS X/ X
Purchase answer to see full attachment
User generated content is uploaded by users for the purposes of learning and should be used following Studypool's honor code & terms of service.

Explanation & Answer

Hey buddy, This is what I have done. I have really tried to search for the article but I did not get it. If you could get it, I will be here to help you with edits. Please get back to me with your insights.

Surname 1
Institutional Affiliation:
Student’s Name:
Course Code:
Date:
Anthropology Food Culture
Part I
The concept of “bare life” within the discussion of “The problem of Nothingnes” in In 'Food
of Sorrow' by Carolyn Dunn
“Bare life” is one of the infamous minimalist approaches to human life which aims at
sustaining lives only. In other words, the only concern under the “bare life” concept is to
ensure that the people live to see the next day without having regard to their quality of life.
For instance, the displaced persons after the Georgia and Russia war received macaroni as
food to provide them with enough energy “to sustain life.”
The “problem of nothingness” is an evident theme under Carolyn Dunn’s ‘Food for
...


Anonymous
Awesome! Perfect study aid.

Studypool
4.7
Trustpilot
4.5
Sitejabber
4.4

Related Tags