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Readings analysis: An underlying theme for this last week’s lectures is network. Whether it is explicit or implicit, the idea of network is present in almost every reading. Sometimes it is present in the intersection of issues, like the relationship of the gut biome to human immune function. Other examples are the discussion of mycorrhizae in this week’s lectures, in the commodity chain in how sushi went Global, and the intersectional relationship of the four domains in the Tappers’ article on commensality.

a. Briefly explain how network is implicit or explicit in the 3 readings for this week and then

b. Discuss how the concept of network is present in your own research for this course (you’re welcome to email me if you are in a hurry and not feeling the connection).

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How Sushi Went Global Theodore C. Bestor Foreign Policy, No. 121. (Nov. - Dec., 2000), pp. 54-63. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0015-7228%28200011%2F12%290%3A121%3C54%3AHSWG%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F Foreign Policy is currently published by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/ceip.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Sun Dec 23 10:25:42 2007 G L O B A L I IZ A T I O N AT W O R K ] Went Global A 500-pound tuna is caught off the coast of New England or Spain, flown thousands of miles to Tokyo, soldfor tens of thousands of dollars to Japanese buyers. . .and sh+ped to cheji in New York and Hong Kbng? That's the manic logic ofglobal sushi. I By Theodore C. Bestor 40-minute drive from Bath, Maine, down a winding two-lane highway, the last mile on a dirt road, a ramshackle wooden fish pier stands beside an empty parking lot. At 6:00 p.m. nothing much is happening. Three bluefin tuna sit in a huge tub of ice on the loading dock. Between 6:45 and 7:00, the parking lot fills up with cars and trucks with license plates from New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. Twenty tuna buyers clamber out, half of them Japanese. The three bluefin, ranging from 270 to 610 pounds, are winched out of the tub, and buyers crowd around them, extracting tiny core samples to examine their color, fingering the flesh to assess the fat content, sizing up the curve of the body. After about 20 minutes of eyeing the goods, many of the buyers return to their trucks to call Japan by Theodore C. Bestor is professor of anthropology and associate director of the East Asia Program at Cornell University. Tuna rolls. A worker speeds slabs of tuna through Tokyo's Tsukiji fish cellphone and get the morning prices from Tokyo's Tsukiji market-the fishing industry's answer to Wall Street-where the daily tuna auctions have just concluded. The buyers look over the tuna one last time and give written bids to the dock manager, who passes the top bid for each fish to the crew that landed it. The auction bids are secret. Each bid is examined anxiously by a cluster of young men, some with a father or uncle looking on to give advice, others with a young woman and a couple of toddlers trying to see Daddy's fish. Fragments of concerned conversation float above the parking lot: "That's all?" "Couldn't we do better if we shipped it ourselves?" "Yeah, but my pickup needs a new transmission now!" After a few minutes, deals are closed and the fish are quickly market, where 60,000 traders will move more than 2.4 million kilograms of seafood in one 12-hour shift. loaded onto the backs of trucks in crates of crushed ice, known in the trade as "tuna coffins." As rapidly as they arrived, the flotilla of buyers sails out of the parking lot-three bound for New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, where their tuna will be airfreighted to Tokyo for sale the day after next. Bluefin tuna may seem at first an unlikely case study in globalization. But as the world rearranges itself-around silicon chips, Starbucks coffee, or sashimi-gradetuna-new channels for global flows of capital and commodities link far-flung individuals and communities in unexpected new relationships. The tuna trade is a prime example of the globalization of a regional industry, with intense international competition and thorny environmental regulations; centuries-old practices combined with high technology; realignments of labor and capital in response to international regulation; shifting markets; and the diffusion of culinary culture as tastes for sushi, and bluefin tuna, spread worldwide. G R O W I N G APPETITES Tuna doesn't require much promotion among ~ a ~ a n ese consumers. It is consistently Japan's most popular seafood, and demand is high throughout the year. When the Federation of Japan Tuna' Fisheries Cooperative (known as Nikkatsuren)runs ad campaigns for tuna, they tend to be low-key and whimsical, rather like the "Got Milk?" advertising in the United States. L How Sushi Went Global Pokimon-have increasingly saturated North American and indeed the entire world's consumption and popular culture. Against all odds, so too has sushi. In 1929, the Ladies' Home Journal introduced Japanese cooking to North American women, but discreetly skirted the subject of raw fish: "There have been purposely omitted.. .any recipes using the delicate and raw tuna fish which is sliced wafer thin and served iced with attractive garnishes. mese] ...might not sound so entirely delicious as they are in reality." Fromanexotic, almost unpalatableethnicspecialty, ~ i t t l e m e n t i o n o f a n ~ ~ a ~ a n e s e f o o d appeared in U.S. media until well after World War 11. BY the I ~ ~ O S , then to haute cuisine of the most rarefied sort, articles on sushi began to show up in lifestyle magazines like Holiday and sushi has become not just cool, but popular. Sunset. But the recipes they suggested were canapis like cooked shrimp orates the date that tuna first appeared in Japanese on caraway rye bread, rather than raw fish on rice. literature, in the eighth-centurycollection of imperiA decade lateq howeveq sushi was growing in popa1 court poetry known as the Man'yoshu--one of the ularity throughout North America, turning into a towering classics of Japanese literature. The neat sign of class and educational standing. In 1972, the twist is that October 10 today is a national holiday, N e w York Times covered the opening of a sushi bar in the elite sanctum of Sports Day. Goro-kun, New York's Harvard the sporty tuna, scores a Club. Esquire explained promotional hat trick, the fare in an article titled suggesting intimate con"Wake up Little Sushi!" nections among national Restaurant reviewers culture, healthy food for guided readers to Manactive lives, and the famhattan's sushi scene, ily holiday meal. including innovators like Outside of Japan, Shalom Sushi, a kosher tuna, especially raw tuna, sushi bar in SoHo. hasn't always had it so Japan's emergence on good. Sushi isn't an easy the global economic concept t o sell t o the scene in the 1970s as the uninitiated. And besides, business destination du North Americans tend to jour, coupled with a think of cultural influence rejection of hearty, redas flowing from West to meat American fare in East: James Dean, basefavor of healthy cuisine ball, Coca-Cola, McDonlike rice, fish, and vegald's, and Disneyland etables, and the appeal have all gone over big in of the high-concept aesTokyo. Yet Japanese culthetics of Japanese design tural motifs and materiall prepared the world al-from Kurosawa's The for a sushi fad. And so, Seven Samurai to Yoda's from an exotic, almost Zen and Darth Vader's armor, from Issey unpalatable ethnic spe'5 cialty, then to haute cuiMiyake's fashions to Ninsine of the most rarefied tendo, Playstation, and A dash of civilizations Recently, the federation launched "Tuna Day" (Maguro no hi), providing retailers with posters and recipe cards for recipes more complicated than "slice and serve chilled." Tuna Day's mascot is Goro-kun, a colorful cartoon tuna swimming the Australian crawl. Despite the playful contemporary tone of the mascot, the date selected for Tuna Day carries much heavier freight. October 10, it turns out, commem- B sort, sushi has become not just cool, but popular. The painted window of a Cambridge, Massachusetts, coffee shop advertises "espresso, cappuccino, carrot juice, lasagna, and sushi." Mashed potatoes with wasabi (horseradish), sushi-ginger relish, and seared sashimi-grade tuna steaks show Japan's growing cultural influence on upscale nouvelle cuisine throughout North America, Europe, and Latin America. Sushi has even become the stuff of fashion, from "sushi" lip gloss, colored the deep red of raw tuna, to "wasabi" nail polish, a soft avocado green. ANGLING FOR NEW CONSUMERS Japan remains the world's primary market for fresh tuna for sushi and sashimi; demand in other countries is a product of Japanese influence and the creation of new markets by domestic producers looking to expand their reach. Perhaps not surprisingly, sushi's Sfateless Fish A s the bluefin business grows ever more lucrative, the risk of overfishing has become ever more real. The question of who profits from the world's demand for sushi makes for battles among fishers, regulators, and conservationists. Bluefin t u n a have been clocked at 50 miles per hour, and tagged fish have crossed the Atlantic in about two months. Since bluefin swim across multiple national jurisdictions, international regulations must impose political order on stateless fish. Charged with writing those regulations is the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), which assigns quotas for bluefin tuna and related species in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean and directs catch reporting, trade monitoring, and population assessments. Based in Madrid since its founding in 1969, ICCAT now has 28 mem- global popu131-ityas an emblem of a sophisticated, cosmopolitan consumer class more or less coincided with a profound transformation in the international role of the Japanese fishing industry. From the 1970s onward, the expansion of 200-mile fishing limits around the world excluded foreign fleets from the prime fishing grounds of many coastal nations. And international environmental campaigns forced many countries, Japan among them, to scale back their distant water fleets. With their fishing operations curtailed and their yen for sushi still growing, Japanese had to turn to foreign suppliers. Jumbo jets brought New England's bluefin tuna into easy reach of Tokyo, just as Japan's consumer economy-a byproduct of the now disparaged "bubble" years-went into hyperdrive. The sushi business boomed. During the 1980s, total Japanese imports of fresh bluefin tuna worldwide increased from 957 metric tons (531 from the United States) in 1984 to bers, including Atlantic and Mediterranean fishing countries and three global fishing powers: South Korea, China, and Japan. In recent years, conservation groups have criticized ICCAT for not regulating more aggressively to prevent or reverse an apparent bluefin population decline in the Western Atlantic. Some activists have campaigned to have bluefin tuna protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES. At least in part to keep that from happening, Japan and ICCAT have implemented new systems t o track and regulate trade; "undocumented fish" from nations that fail to comply with ICCAT regulations are n o w banned from Japanese markets. Regulations, though, are complicated by how far and fast these fish can travel: No one can say for certain whether there is one bluefin population in the Atlantic or several. ICCAT, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the National Audubon - - Society, and industry groups disagree over how many bluefin migrate across the Atlantic, and whether or not they are all part of the same breeding stock. What's the big deal? If there are two (or more) stocks, as ICCAT maintains, then conservation efforts can vary from one side of the Atlantic to the other. When ICCAT registered a dramatic decline in bluefin catches off North America, it imposed stringent quotas on North America's mainly small-scale fishing outfits. On the European side of the Atlantic, however, industrial-strength fishing efforts continued. American fishers, not surprisingly, point to evidence of cross-Atlantic migration and genetic studies of intermingling to argue that Europeans need to conserve bluefin more strenuously as well. ICCAT'S regulations, they argue, protect bluefin at America's expense only, and ultimately, fishers from other countries pocket Japanese yen. -T C.B. 3 How Sushi Went Global ] 5,235 metric tons (857 from the United States) in 1993. The average wholesale price peaked in 1990 at 4,900 yen (U.S.$34) per kilogram, bones and all, which k e d out to approximatelyU.S.$33 wholesale per edible pound. Not surprisingly, Japanese demand for prime bluefin tuna-which yields a firm red meat,-lightly marbled with veins of fat, highly prized (and priced) in Japanese cuisine-created a gold-rush mentality on fishing grounds across the globe wherever bluefin tuna could be found. But in the early 1990s, as the U.S. bluefin industry was taking off, the Japanese economy went into a stall, then a slump, then a dive. U.S. producers suffered as their high-end export market collapsed. Fortunately for them, the North American sushi craze took up the I 58 slack. U.S. businesses may have written off Japan, but Americans' taste for sushi stuck. An industry founded exclusively on Japanese demand survived because of Americans' newly trained palates and a booming U.S. economy. A TRANSATLANTIC TUSSLE Atlantic bluefin tuna ("ABT" in the trade) are a highly migratory species that ranges from the equator to Newfoundland, from Turkey to the Gulf of Mexico. Bluefin can be huge fish; the record is 1,496 pounds. In more normal ranges, 600-pound tuna, 10 feet in length, are not extraordinary, and 250- to 300-pound bluefin, six feet long, are commercial mainstays. Free-rangesushi. Fishermen off the coast of Favignana, Sicib haul a tuna from their nets. Many such outffts are backd by Japanese capital. FOREIGN POLICY Harley-Davidsons dash under the boat, barely visiBefore bluefin became a commercial species in ble until, with a flash of silver and blue, they wheel New England, before Japanese buyers discovered the stock, before the 747, bluefin were primarily sports around to snatch a drifting morsel. The nets, lines, and buoys are part of an fish, caught with fighting tackle by trophy hunters out of harbors like Montauk, Hyannis, and Kenneb- almadraba, a huge fish trap used in Spain as well as unkport. Commercial fishers, if they caught bluefin at Sicily, Tunisia, and Morocco. The almadraba consists of miles of nets anchored to the channel floor susall, sold them for cat food when they could and trucked them to town dumps when they couldn't. Japanese pended from thousands of buoys, all laid out to cut buyers changed all of that. Since the 1970s, commer- across the migration routes of bluefin tuna leaving cial Atlantic bluefin tuna fisheries have been almost the strait. This almadraba remains in place for about exclusively focused on Japanese markets like Tsukiji. six weeks in June and July to intercept tuna leaving the Mediterranean after their spawning season is In New England waters, most bluefin are taken over. Those tuna that lose themselves in the maze end one fish at a time, by rod and reel, by hand line, or up in a huge pen, roughly the size of a football field. by harpoon-techniques of a small-scale fisher, not of By the end of the tuna run through the strait, about a factory fleet. On the European side of the Atlantic, the industry operates under entirely different condi- 200 bluefin are in the pen. tions. Rather than rod and reel or harpooning, the typical gear is industrial-the purse seiner (a fishing vessel closing a large net around a Japanese demand for prime bluefin tuna created a goldschool of fish) or the long line (which catches fish on baited hooks strung rush mentality on fishing grounds across the globe. along lines played out for many miles behind a swift vessel). The techniques may differ from boat to boat and from Two hundred fish may not sound like a lot, but country to country, but these fishers are all angling for if the fish survive the next six months, if the fish hit a share of the same Tsukiji yen-and in many cases, their target weights, if the fish hit the market at the some biologists argue, a share of the same tuna stock. target price, these 200 bluefin may be worth $1.6 milFishing communities often think of themselves as lion dollars. In November and December, after the close-knit and proudly parochial; but the sudden bluefin season in New England and Canada is well globalization of this industry has brought fishers into over, the tuna are harvested and shipped by air to contact-and often into conflict-with customers, Tokyo in time for the end-of-the-year holiday spike governments, regulators, and environmentalists in seafood consumption. around the world [see sidebar on page 571. The pens, huge feed lots for tuna, are relatively Two miles off the beach in Barbate, Spain, a huge new, but almadraba are not. A couple of miles down maze of nets snakes several miles out into Spanish the coast from Barbate is the evocatively named setwaters near the Strait of Gibraltar. A high-speed, tlement of Zahara de 10s Atunes (Zahara of the Japanese-made workboat heads out to the nets. On Tunas) where Cervantes lived briefly in the late 16th board are five Spanish hands, a Japanese supervisor, century. The centerpiece of the village is a huge stone 2,500 kilograms of frozen herring and mackerel compound that housed the men and nets of Zahara's imported from Norway and Holland, and two Amer- almadraba in Cervantes's day, when the port was only ican researchers. The boat is making one of its twice- a seasonally occupied tuna outpost (occupied by daily trips to Spanish nets, which contain captured scoundrels, according to Cervantes). Along the Costa Mediterranean tuna being raised under Japanese de la Luz, the three or four almadraba that remain supervision for harvest and export to Tsukiji. still operate under the control of local fishing bossBehind the guard boats that stand watch over the es who hold the customary fishing rights, the nets, the nets 24 hours a day, the headlands of Morocco are workers, the boats, and the locally embedded cultural a hazy purple in the distance. Just off Barbate's capital to make the almadraba work-albeit for diswhite cliffs to the northwest, the light at the Cape tant markets and in collaboration with small-scale of Trafalgar blinks on and off. For 20 minutes, the Japanese fishing firms. men toss herring and mackerel over the gunwales of Inside the Strait of Gibraltar, off the coast of the workboat while tuna the size (and speed) of Cartagena, another series of tuna farms operates u 1 1 =[ H O W Sushi Went Global ] under entirely different auspices, utilizing neither local skills nor traditional technology. The Cartagena farms rely on French purse seiners to tow captured tuna to their pens, where joint ventures between Japanese trading firms and large-scale Spanish fishing companies have set up farms using the latest in Japanese fishing technology. The waters and the workers are Spanish, but almost everything else is part of a global flow of techniques and capital: financing from major Japanese trading companies; Japanese vessels to tend the nets; aquacultural techniques developed in Australia; vitamin supplements from European pharmaceutical giants packed into frozen herring from Holland to be heaved over the gunwales for the tuna; plus computer models of feeding schedules, weight T o ~ 'Pantry s J , sukiji, Tokyo's massive wholesale seafood market, is the center of the global trade in t u n a . Here, 60,000 traders come each day to buy and sell seafood for Tokyo's 27 million mouths, moving more than 2.4 million kilograms of it in less than 1 2 hours. Boosters encourage the homey view that Tsukiji is Tokyo no daidokoroTokyo's pantry-but it is a pantry where almost $6 billion worth of fish change hands each year. New York City's Fulton Fish Market, the largest market in North America, handles only about $1 billion worth, and only about 1 3 percent of the tonnage of Tsukiji's catch. Tuna are sold at a "moving a u c t i o n . " T h e auctioneer, flanked by assistants who record prices and fill out invoice slips at lightning speed, strides across the floor just above rows and rows of fish, moving quickly from one footstool to the next without missing a beat, or a bid. In little more than half an hour, teams of auctioneers from five J gains, and target market prices developed by Japanese technicians and fishery scientists. These "Spanish" farms compete with operations throughout the Mediterranean that rely on similar high-tech, high-capital approaches to the fish business. In the Adriatic Sea, for example, Croatia is emerging as a formidable tuna producer. In Croatia's case, the technology and the capital were transplanted by emigre Croatians who returned to the country from Australia after Croatia achieved independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. Australia, for its part, has developed a major aquacultural industry for southern bluefin tuna, a species closely related to the Atlantic bluefin of the North Atlantic and Mediterranean and almost equally desired in Japanese markets. auction houses sell several hundred (some days severa1 thousand) tuna. Successful buyers whip out their cellphones, calling chefs to tell them what they've got. Meanwhile, faxes with critical information on prices and other market conditions alert fishers in distant ports to the results of Tsukiji's morning auctions. In return, Tsukiji is fed a constant supply of information on tuna conditions off Montauk, Cape Cod, Cartagena, Barbate, and scores of other fishing grounds around the world. Tsukiji is the command post for a global seafood trade. In value, foreign seafood f a r exceeds domestic Japanese products on the auction block. (Tsukiji traders joke that Japan's leading fishing port is Tokyo's Narita International Airport.) .On Tsukiji's slippery auction floor, tuna from Massachusetts may sell at auction for over $30,000 apiece, near octopus from Senegal, eel from Guangzhou, crab from Sakhalin, salmon from British Columbia and Hokkaido, snapper from Kyushu, and abalone from California. Given the sheer volume of global trade, Tsukiji effectively sets the world's tuna prices. Last time I checked, the record price was over $200,000 for a particularly spectacular f i s h from Turkey-a sale noteworthy enough to make the front pages of Tokyo's daily papers. But spectacular prices are just the tip of Tsukiji's influence. The auction system and the commodity chains that flow in and out of the market integrate fishers, firms, and restaurants worldwide in a complex network of local and translocal economies. As an undisputed hub of the fishing world, Tsukiji creates and deploys enormous amounts of Japanese cultural capital around the world. Its control of information, its enormous r o l e in o r c h e s t r a t i n g a n d responding to Japanese culinary tastes, and its almost hegemonic definitions of supply and demand allow it the unassailable privilege of imposing its own standards of quality-standards that producers worldwide must heed. -7: C. B. CULTURE SPLASH lust because sushi is available, in some form or anothel; in exclusive Fifth Avenue restaurants, in baseball stadiums in Los Angeles, at airport snack carts in Amsterdam, at an apartment in Madrid (delivered by motorcycle), or in Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, or Moscow, doesn't mean that sushi has lost its status as Japanese cultural property. Globalization doesn't necessarily homogenize cultural differences nor erase the salience of cultural labels. Quite the contrary, it grows the franchise. In the global economy of consumption, the brand equity of sushi as Japanese cultural property adds to the cachet of both the country and the cuisine. A Texan Chinese-Americanrestauranteur told me, for example, that he had converted his chain of restaurants from Chinese to Japanese cuisine because the prestige factor of the latter meant he could charge a premium; his clients couldn't distinguish between Chinese and Japanese employees (and often failed to notice that some of the chefs behind his sushi bars were Latinos). The brand equity is sustained by complicated flows of labor and ethnic biases. Outside of Japan, having Japanese hands (or a reasonable facsimile) is sufficient warrant for sushi competence. Guidebooks for the current generation of Japanese global wandervogel sometimes advise young Japanese looking for a job in a distant city to work as a sushi chef; U.S. consular offices in Japan grant more than 1,000 visas a year to sushi chefs, tuna buyers, and other workers in the global sushi business. A trade school in Tokyo, operating under the name Sushi Daigaku (SushiUniversity) offers short courses in sushi preparation so "students" can impress prospective employerswith an imposing certificate. Even without papers, howevel; sushi remains firmly linked in the minds of Japanese and foreigners alike with Japanese cultural identity. Throughout the world, sushi restaurants operated by Koreans, Chinese, or Vietnamese maintain Japanese identities. In sushi bars from Boston to Valencia, a customer's simple greeting in Japanese can throw chefs into a panic (or drive them to the far end of the counter). On the docks, too, Japanese cultural control of sushi remains unquestioned. Japanese buyers and "tuna techs" sent from Tsukiji to work seasonally on the docks of New England laboriously instruct foreign fishers on the proper techniques for catching, handling, and packing tuna for export. A bluefin tuna must approximate the appropriate kata, or "ideal form," of color, texture, fat content, body shape, and so forth, all prescribed by Japanese specifications. Processing requires proper attention as well. Special paper is sent from Japan for wrapping the fish before burying them 1 Liquid assets: A diver ropes a bluefin tuna caught in a net. N O V E M B E1 R DECEMBE 2000 R 61 7 How Sushi Went Global in crushed ice. Despite high shipping costs and the fact that 50 percent of the gross weight of a tuna is unusable, tuna is sent to Japan whole, not sliced into salable portions. Spoilage is one reason for this, but form is another. Everyone in the trade agrees that Japanese workers are much more skilled in cutting and trimming tuna than Americans, and no one would want to risk sending botched cuts to Japan. Not to impugn the quality of the fish sold in the United States, but on the New England docks, the first determination of tuna buyers is whether they are looking at a "domestic" fish or an "export" fish. On that Down-home cooking judgment hangs several dollars a pound for the fisher; and the supply of sashimi-gradetuna for fishmongers, sushi bars, and seafood restaurants up and down the Eastern seaboard. Some of the best tuna from New England may make it to New York or Los Angeles, but by way of Tokyo-validated as top quality (and top price) by the decision to ship it to Japan by air for sale at Tsukiji, where it may be purchased by one of the handful of Tsukiji sushi exporters who supply premier expatriate sushi chefs in the world's leading cities. PLAYING T H E MARKET The tuna auction at Yankee Co-op in Seabrook, New Hampshire, is about to begin on the second-to-last day of the 1999 season. The weather is stormy, few boats are out. Only three bluefin, none of them terribly good, are up for sale today, and the half-dozen buyers at the auction, three Americans and three Japanese, gloomily discuss the impending end of a lousy season. In July, the bluefin market collapsed just as the U.S. fishing season was starting. In a stunning miscalculation, Japanese purse seiners operating out of Kesennuma in northern Japan managed to land their entire year's quota from that fishery in only three days. The oversupply sent tuna prices at Tsukiji through the floor, and they never really recovered. Today, the news from Spain is not good. The day before, faxes and e-mails from Tokyo brought word that a Spanish fish farm had suffered a disaster. Odd tidal conditions near Cartagena led to a sudden and unexpected depletion of oxygen in the inlet where one of the great tuna nets was anchored. Overnight, 800 fish suffocated. Divers hauled out the tuna. The fish were quickly processed, several months before their expected prime, and shipped off to Tokyo. For the Tapanese corporation and its Spanish partners, a har- auctions in New Hampshire know they will suffer as well. Whatever fish turn up today and tomorrow, they will arrive at Tsukiji in the wake of an enormous glut of hastily exported Spanish tuna. Fishing is rooted in local communities and local economies--even for fishers dipping their lines (or nets) in the same body of wateq a couple hundred miles can be worlds away. Now, a Massachusetts fisher's livelihood can be transformed in a matter of hours by a spike in market prices halfway around the globe or by a disaster at a fish farm across the Atlantic. Giant fishing conglomerates in one part of the world sell their catch alongside family outfits from another. Environmental organizations on one continent rail against distant industry regulations implemented an ocean away. Such instances of convergence are common in a globalizing world. What is surprising, and perhaps more profound, in the case of today's tuna fishers, is the complex interplay between industry and culture, as an esoteric cuisine from an insular part of the world has become a global fad in the span of a generation, driving, and driven by, a new kind of fishing business. Many New England fishers, whose traditional livelihood now depends on unfamiliar tastes and distant markets, turn to a kind of armchair anthropology to explain Japan's ability to transform tuna from trash into treasure around the world. For some, the quick answer is simply national symbolism. The deep red of tuna served as sashimi or sushi contrasts with the stark white rice, evoking the red and white of the Japanese national flag. Others know that red and white is an auspicious color combination in Japanese ritual life (lobster tails are popular at Japanese weddings for just this reason). Still others think the cultural prize is a fighting spirit, pure machismo, both their own and the tuna's. Taken by rod and reel, a tuna may battle the fisher for four or five hours. Some tuna literally fight to the death. For some fishers, the meaning of tuna-the equation of tuna with Japanese identity-is simple: Tuna is nothing less than the samurai fish! Of course, such mystification of a distant market's motivations for desiring a local commodity is not unique. For decades, anthropologists have written of "cargo cults" and "commodity fetishism" from New Guinea to Bolivia. But the ability of fishers today to visualize Japanese culture and the place of tuna within its demanding culinary tradition is constantly shaped and reshaped by the flow of cultural images that now travel around the globe in all directions simultaneously, bumping into each other in airports, fishing ports, bistros, bodegas, and markets everywhere. In the [ newly rewired circuitry of global cultural and economic affairs, Japan is the core, and the Atlantic seaboard, the Adriatic, and the Australian coast are all distant peripheries. Topsy-turvy as Gilbert and Sullivan never imagined it. Japan is plugged into the popular North American imagination as the sometimes inscrutable superpower, precise and delicate in its culinary tastes, feudal in its cultural symbolism, and insatiable in its appetites. Were Japan not a prominent player in so much of the daily life of North Americans, the fishers outside of Bath or in Seabrook would have less to think about in constructing their Japan. As it is, they struggle with unfamiliar exchange rates for cultural capital that compounds in a foreign currency. And they get ready for next season. El W a n t t o K n o w More?}] Theodore C. Bestor is the author of a new book, Tokyo's Marketplace (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), an ethnography of the auctions at Tsukiji market. The Book of Sushi, by Kinjiro Omae and Yuzuru Tachibana (New York: Kodansha International, 1981), is an authoritative (and well-illustrated) introduction to the fundamentals of sushi appreciation. Donald Richie's A Taste ofJapan (New York: Kodansha International, 1985), offers elegant vignettes on sushi and its cultural and historical milieus. Richard Hosking's A Dictionaly ofJapanese Food (Rutland: Tuttle, 1996) is an entertaining and essential reference on the cultural background of Japanese culinary ingredients. Giant Bluefin, by Douglas Whynott (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995),follows tuna fishers from the Gulf of Maine to Cape Cod. In early 2001, Giant Bluefin Tuna, a documentary produced by Natio~zalGeographic, will air on CNBC'S Natio~zalGeographic Explorer. At the New England Aquarium, Dr. Molly Lutcavage studies the population biology of bluefin tuna in collaboration with fishing groups in New England. Details of her research are posted on the aquarium's Web site. The Tuna Research and Conservation Center is jointly sponsored by the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station. Its Web site links to several research projects on tagging and tracking bluefin and raising them in captivity. The Tsukiji wholesale seafood market in Tokyo has an English-language Web site with basic information about the marketplace and links to some of the major trading companies involved in the tuna auctions. Fish is O u r Life!, a video documentary by Peregrine Beckman, focuses on the working lives of Tsukiji's auctioneers and fishmongers. The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) maintains a Web site with technical information on fishing quotas and regulations. TRAFFIC, a Web collaboration between the World Wide Fund for Nature and the World Conservation Union, publishes information on trade in endangered species. TRAFFIC also posts occasional reports on the activities of ICCAT. >>For links to relevant Web sites, as well as a comprehensive index of related FOREIGN POLICY articles, access www.foreignpolicy.com. See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269333208 Anthropological perspectives on the global food crisis Chapter · January 2013 CITATION READS 1 624 3 authors: David A Himmelgreen Nancy Romero-Daza University of South Florida University of South Florida 82 PUBLICATIONS 1,443 CITATIONS 58 PUBLICATIONS 610 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Charlotte A Noble University of South Florida 13 PUBLICATIONS 38 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: The Last Mile View project Teaching Documents View project All content following this page was uploaded by Charlotte A Noble on 26 August 2016. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. View publication stats DONALD M. NONINI University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The local-food movement and the anthropology of global systems A B S T R A C T Today’s wrenching worldwide social and cultural instability calls for more adequate theorization. Through an examination of the local-food movement in the United States, I consider one such theorization, Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedman’s anthropology of global systems. The Friedmans set out an original conceptualization of transformations in the political economy of commercial civilizations and processes of identity formation in periods of hegemonic decline. I present data on the local-food movement in North Carolina and on differences in identity orientations between “sustainable-agriculture” and “food-security” activists to evaluate this conceptualization. [global systems, identity formation, hegemonic decline, nation-state, local-food movement, United States] e are in a time of rapid and wrenching transition that is difficult to analytically capture. As we search for more adequate theorizations of the current conjuncture, Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedman’s work (2008a, 2008b) is particularly helpful. The Friedmans see the present period of economic crisis in the West (and, through its reverberations, in the rest of the world economy), with its onset in 2008, as but the most recent manifestation of a hegemonic decline in the commercial civilization of Western industrial capitalism that has been underway since about the mid-1970s (Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008a, 2008b; Jonathan Friedman, personal communication, 2002). If they are correct, episodes of economic volatility and recession in the United States and western Europe, the transnational offshoring of capital and industrial production to Asia, the hypergrowth of the financial sector and speculation, and the drastic increase in indebtedness among Western populations definitively mark off the last three decades as a period of hegemonic decline within the current Western center of capital accumulation. Ekholm Friedman and Friedman (2008a, 2008b) take the view of the longue durée to argue that globalization, migration of people, and the transnationalization of capital, production, and commodity trade have been recurrent features of periods of hegemonic decline in the histories of commercial civilizations. Given this perspective, their theorization of global systems is particularly relevant to a critical anthropology of the contemporary period. Their work is based in a series of original analyses of recurrent systemic shifts over time associated with imperial and commercial centralization and consolidation during periods of hegemony and subsequent periods of decline and fragmentation.Their historical analyses of global systems are generative of new understandings of the North American world, where most anthropologists still reside, and of the phenomenon of direct concern in this essay—the local-food movement in the United States. An understanding of the Friedmans’ analytical framework helps us see why this phenomenon may not be a social movement at all but, rather, an assemblage of localist and millenarian activist practices and discourses that not only responds to neoliberal globalization and the foods it produces but also rejects in large part the modernist project of the nation-state. W AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 267–275, ISSN 0094-0496, online C 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. ISSN 1548-1425.  DOI: 10.1111/amet.12019 American Ethnologist  Volume 40 Number 2 May 2013 In The Anthropology of Global Systems, Ekholm Friedman and Friedman (2008a, 2008b) present a series of comparative civilizational analyses carried out with theoretical insight and persistence over the last three decades. Their capacity to predict the current crisis is, thus, a tour de force in historical analysis and spatial–political pattern recognition (see Kalb, this issue). Their successful predictions are not only about recent changes in political economy but also about the most fundamental cultural transformations that have taken place over this period. These cultural changes are what I address in this essay through an ethnography of the local-food movement in the United States. Cultural transformation in periods of hegemonic decline How do the Friedmans conceptualize cultural transformation under the conditions of hegemonic decline? Briefly, they associate the orientations of “modernity” not only with the last 400–500 years, the period of the rise and consolidation of Euro-American industrial capitalism and the modern nation-state, but also, consistent with their structuralist premises, with recurrent features of commercial civilizations undergoing expansion, a rise to dominance, consolidation, and decline as centers of imperial systems. Thus, the orientations of modernity—consisting of the two contrast sets of modernism–postmodernism and traditionalism–primitivism—characterize commercial civilizations as diverse as those centered in the past on Greece, Rome, North Africa, the Netherlands, and Great Britain, prior to the ascendance of the current hegemon, the United States (Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008a:203–225). Modernism, for the Friedmans, is the orientation associated with the period of hegemonic expansion and domination and is “based on the model of supersession, of growth and development as a general process for individuals and societies” (Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008a:207). Put another way, modernism is the optimistic vision of an orientation by citizens toward an increasingly prosperous and “developed” commercial and productive order made possible by a state that is predictably expansive and increasingly inclusive in its provision of goods (e.g., welfare, plunder, sinecures) to the population of the nation, however the latter is defined. The modernist orientation varies culturally in terms of the relationship between the citizenry, the nation, and the state; the nation-state associated with commercial civilizations can range “from the more formal citizenship model of individualist modernism, in which voluntary identification and an instrumental view of the state is dominant, to an ethnified version, in which the nation is dominant, where the nation-state is converted from a contractual to a familistic-ascriptive field” (Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008a:206–207). The Friedmans refer to European na- 268 tions, with the exception of Britain, as “ethnic states,” while the United States, whose citizens express an ethnicity based on their time of descent from original immigrants, is not a state based on the ethnic nation as such. In the United States, in contrast to Europe, national identity “is very much about the state itself—the flag, international success, democracy, and opportunity” (Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008a:207). In short, in the United States, the modernist orientation by citizens is individualist, instrumental with respect to the resources of the state, and activated and reinforced by a sense of the nation as defined by the state itself and its symbols—the flag, patriotism, land of opportunity, democracy, the military and its soldiers, technological prowess, and adventures abroad. However, the collective modernist orientations toward the state associated with the labor, Civil Rights, and women’s movements are not only instrumental but also ethical; that they have significantly transformed the U.S. state during its period of hegemony goes unnoted in the Friedmans’ work. The state policies and collective identities arising from these social movements around policies of workers’ rights and of social justice must be noted, however, for they are still present, although currently under serious challenge and great stress, and in the United States have come to represent what Raymond Williams (1977) referred to as “the residual.” I return to this point in my conclusion. Some conceptual implications of this lacuna in the Friedmans’ work are discussed by Don Kalb (this issue). According to the Friedmans, in periods of hegemonic decline like the present, the other three alternatives in the identity space of modernity come to the fore— postmodernism, traditionalism, and primitivism: Modernism reigns supreme in the hegemonic realms of the modern world system, but when hegemony declines, it is a difficult project to maintain. The concomitant of declining modernist identity is an increase in narcissistic tendencies . . . It is in such conditions that roots, ethnicity, religion and postmodernism become increasingly dominant and that individualism is replaced increasingly by what is sometimes referred to as a new tribalism . . . not only in its ethnic form, but as a form of social organization in which a fragmented public sphere becomes increasingly divided into clientelistic hierarchies. [Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008a:208] Deindustrialization and the decentralization (transnationalization) of capital away from the preexisting urban centers toward investment in the periphery generates chaos in these centers abandoned by capital—widespread unemployment and downward mobility of the population. This, in turn, leads to a period of active cultural transformation: “Economic crisis generates serious identity problems. The decline of modernism is closely related to the The local-food movement and the anthropology of global systems impossibility of maintaining a future orientation based on liberation from the past” (Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008a:215–216). There is, consequently, a “turn to roots, ethnicity and other collective identities,” which can take several major forms—“indigenization,” “nationalization” (i.e., emergence of xenophobic nationalism), “regionalism” that asserts identities around subnational regions, and “immigrant ethnification” (the appearance of diasporas; Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008a:217–218). In this essay, I reflect on the Friedmans’ characterization of the nonmodernist alternatives within the identity space of modernity in the case of the local-food movement in the contemporary United States. The United States in hegemonic decline Consistent with the Friedmans’ views about the transnationalization of capital, neoliberal globalization has arisen within the process of economic and political crisis in North America, Great Britain, western Europe, and Japan. This crisis arises from falling capitalist profits and the overaccumulation of capital in these regions (Arrighi 1994, 2007; Harvey 2005; Reyna n.d.). Anglo-American neoliberalism as ruling discourse, economic doctrine, and political rhetoric has been the Western corporate and political elites’ response to economic decline since the 1970s and articulates the new agendas of states in the declining centers of the West: “globalization,” “free trade,” “free capital movement,” privatization, deindustrialization, deunionization (Arrighi 2007; Dicken 2007; Harvey 2005; Kalb 2005). The U.S. version of neoliberalism, which first came into political prominence in the early 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan, has, 30 years on, become institutionalized as the commonsense discourse and practices of the “Schumpeterian competition state” (Jessop 2002)— the dominant political discursive formation and disciplinary regime of governance within the United States— characterized by “market rule” (Holland et al. 2007). Over the last three decades, the distinctively U.S. version of neoliberalism has been successfully installed as a (Gramscian) hegemony, a new governance regime with all its tensions and contradictions. Market rule has been marked by the privatization of heretofore public (i.e., state) functions to corporations, by emergence of “public–private partnerships” at local, state, and federal levels (Holland et al. 2007), and by “deregulation” of corporate practices that sap labor union strength and lessen environmental accountability. The local-food movement in the United States and North Carolina During the last two decades, the same period of the sharpening of this crisis, there has been increasing public interest in the United States around the issues of sustainable agriculture, “eating local,” and “eating organic,”  American Ethnologist witnessed in the proliferation of related media, including books on nutritional food and cookbooks, Iron Chef and similar programs on television’s Food Channel, and speakers tours by celebrity authors, organic farmers, chefs, and “food activists” such as Michael Pollan of the New York Times; Joel Salatin, author and proprietor of Polyface Farms; chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse; and Will Allen, African American urban gardener–organizer from Milwaukee and MacArthur award winner. Increased public demand for “organic,” “fresh,” “natural,” and “local” food has led to the rise of national corporations such as Whole Foods to service upper-middle-class consumers, and Wal-Mart has become the largest supplier of U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) certified “organic” produce (sourced, however, globally) for lower-income consumers—processes reinforced by corporate campaigns that brand companies’ “organic” and “sustainable” products, including not only produce but also livestock, fish, bleach, and paper towels. Thousands of people have become urban gardeners; hundreds of new farmers markets have been established throughout the country; “community supported agriculture” (CSA) and even “community supported fisheries” arrangements have proliferated, with thousands of new consumers joining them as a way of gaining access to the foods they raise or harvest. A growing scholarly literature in the new field of critical food and agriculture studies has sought to document these changes while linking them to the emergence of specific movements around food (Allen 2004; Allen et al. 2003; Beus and Dunlap 1990; Dahlberg 1991; Guthman 2008; Guthman and DuPuis 2006; Hassanein 2003; Vallianatos et al. 2004; Wekerle 2004). This new field has its own journal, Agriculture and Human Values, and has specific sites of theoretical specialization, such as the University of California Santa Cruz Agro-Food Studies Research Group. North Carolina cities and towns are on the tour circuits of the celebrities mentioned above; have increasing numbers of residents seeking organic, fresh, natural, and local produce and meats; and have been the sites of rapidly growing numbers of farmers markets, urban gardens, periurban small farms, and CSA arrangements. New local, regional, and statewide organizations service growing numbers of farmers, nonprofit activists, and students and are increasingly active in promoting sustainable agriculture (e.g., incubator farms for “young farmers”), marketing organic foods, starting urban “community gardens,” initiating buy-local and farmto-school campaigns, building local-food processing stations, and cultivating new niche crops (e.g., shiitake mushrooms), among other activities. Since July 2010, several colleagues and I have participated in a collaborative ethnographic project to study the local-food movement of North Carolina in four different sites.1 Two of the sites are rural, one in the mountains of western North Carolina and the other in the 269 American Ethnologist  Volume 40 Number 2 May 2013 impoverished northeastern region of the state, and two are urban, one a large city in the western region and the other a smaller regional city in the state’s central Piedmont. Members of the research group have interviewed leaders, activists, and volunteers working in nonprofit organizations committed to sustainable agriculture and to food access for food-insecure populations; farmers; permaculturalists; small-scale food entrepreneurs and vendors; farmers market managers; “community gardeners”; clergy, food-bank managers, and food pantry and “community kitchen” operators providing “emergency food”; agricultural extension agents, nutritionists, and urban planners; and many others. Members of the research group have also visited farms and farmers markets; attended and participated in meetings held by nonprofit organizations, church groups, gardening groups, farmers market boards, food-security councils, nutritional educators, regional farming organizations, and national “community food-security” organizations; and observed and participated in work in community gardens and related sites. At this point, ethnographic data collection has ended, and researchers are several months into the initial data analysis. How do the very preliminary findings of this research project bear on the Friedmans’ conceptualization of hegemonic decline and the fragmentation and proliferation of subnational, ethnic, and regional identities that, they claim, result from it? New localist and traditionalist identities and the millenarian moment of the local-food movement As the above initial characterization of the local-food movement suggests, in some respects it is a misnomer to call it a “social movement” at all. To begin with, there is no national local-food movement. There has been one national organization, the Community Food Security Coalition, the organizational node of a loosely structured alliance of more than 400 nonprofit organizations (farmers’ organizations, food banks, environmental-justice organizations, churches, city and county governments, food-workers’ unions, etc.) and activists (Allen 2004; Community Food Security Coalition 2009). Established in 1994, it had little success organizing as the core of a national movement around a combined agenda of food-access justice and sustainable agriculture and ceased operations in August 2012 because of lack of funding. In North Carolina, there are few translocal or regional organizations, and those that do exist, for instance, the Center for Environmental Farming Systems and the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association (which spans North and South Carolina), are only loosely articulated through personal networks with activist local groups and individuals and have relatively few resources to allocate through their translocal connections to local groups. In crucial respects, “the movement” appears to be primarily a response to market demand by upper-middle- 270 class, professional, and entrepreneurial consumers for an expanded market in fresh, organic, and “natural” produce— one of the emergent niche markets that David Harvey (1989) showed to be characteristic of postmodern cultural politics, given post-Fordist capitalist market conditions. There has been an elaboration of the cultural processes of branding, labeling, and certifying of commodities whose consumption is associated with the status distinctions made by a highly mobile and relatively new elite seeking to capture access to the latest cultural experiences of the global sensorium. There is much to be said for this view, particularly given the rapid growth of Whole Foods and similar retail firms in major urban areas where such elites are concentrated, which appear to appeal or even pander to such elites and the distinctions they make. In their role as consumers with high levels of disposable income and, unlike the vast majority of the rest of the population, able to afford the latest certified free-range poultry, local and organic produce, and sustainably harvested seafood, many of them may represent the cosmopolitan globalizing elites committed to hybridity and consumeroriented multiculturalism that, according to the Friedmans, occupy the postmodern identity position within the identity space of modernity (Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008a:16–20, 218–219). However, neither this group nor the stores, restaurants, and other food-related institutions its members frequent were subjects of the ethnography carried out by our research group. Leaving aside the upper-middle-class clientele of the new and highly corporatized organic foods industry, it may make more sense to speak of the “local-food movement” less as a social movement and more as what David Hess (2007) refers to as an “alternative pathway” toward social transformation. By “alternative pathway,” Hess refers to an assortment of “organizations that have social-change goals as well as organizations that do not have an explicit or selfconscious goal of fundamentally changing society,” such as “alternative businesses, household activities and nonprofit organizations” (2007:4). Hess seeks to widen the analytical attention of social scientists to look to phenomena beyond mere social movements defined by their “contentious politics.” According to Hess (2007:4), contentious politics need not be particularly visible or articulated in alternative pathways, or they may only episodically or marginally emerge in those pathways’ histories. This is consistent with much of what our research group has observed in the case of the North Carolina local-food movement in the four sites we studied. One of the findings of our research project is that there is no organized participation by North Carolina residents in the major political protests around food at the national level (e.g., agitation over renewal of the Farm Bill). Moreover, there is little national or even regional organizational coordination among groups in North The local-food movement and the anthropology of global systems Carolina and almost no formal articulation by these groups of movement ideologies, knowledges, or organizational strategies aimed at national or regional transformation. Instead, sustainable-agriculture activists displayed an impatience with, and some even an antagonism toward, the focus on broad social issues related to food that bring up forms of injustice or seek social redress for harm done to poor people and racial minorities, which have been features of the U.S. national agenda since the Civil Rights movement. In its place, these activists have a commitment to specific, localized projects that promote “local food” and “small farmers,” that improve the “community” and “local economy.” However, I would argue that the contentious politics in question—around such issues as the food security of marginalized and stigmatized low-income and specific racial populations—cannot be conceptually conjured away. They are not absent but are “siloed,” that is, articulated within groups segregated from others by ethnoracial divisions, and they emerge in relatively separate but loosely linked localist formations. Thus, the local-food movement consists of a congeries of trends involving a combination of market-oriented and nonprofit organizations connected through some minimal social mobilization, loose networking, and so on, but structured in ways that, if not isolating, work to separate localist institutions and organizations from one another and reinforce class and race privilege through a localist mien. Through such siloing, contentious politics within the local-food movement are deeply misrecognized. Before returning to this issue, I set out the cultural characteristics of the activists of the local-food movement that our ethnography discovered in North Carolina. Anxieties about globalization and the global food system One recurrent finding from our interviews is that those who are sustainable-agriculture activists within the movement are committed to “building a local food system” because of their distrust of the globally sourced, agroindustrial system that currently provides food for the tables of most Americans. The “supermarket” is the site in which most consumers or eaters come into contact with that system, which, according to these activists, places their health, their economic, mental, and spiritual well-being, and even the biological survival of the human population over time at risk. Activists say that consumers in supermarkets lack information about the conditions under which the foods available there are grown and processed; distant government certification programs such as those for organic foods are untrustworthy; consumers lack control over conditions of production, which usually occurs hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from the supermarket shelves foods are purchased from; and the fossil-fuel-driven, industrialized food production and transport system is “unsustainable.” For these activists, the system cannot be trusted because it is too big,  American Ethnologist too complex, too fragile, and too vulnerable to the disruptions that arise from its dependencies on fossil fuels, the labor of unknown immigrant workers, fertilizers and pesticides applied to crops in massive, unregulated quantities, and logistical and transport structures that are under stress and overextended. Instead, it is the familiar—the local “community” and the people who belong to it—that can be trusted, and therefore one of the most common shibboleths of the movement is “know your local farmer.” The establishment of personal relationships, face-to-face, is seen as essential. However, the response by North Carolina sustainablefarming activists is not to directly protest or challenge the global system but to “get busy,” “stop spending so much time talking,” and engage in what they see as the practical projects of “building the local food system.” In this sense, their response is passive, even quietist. In the views of many activists, “talk” is cheap; it is “action” that matters— cultivating land for a new small farm in a suburban area, starting a new urban garden, establishing a new farmers market—these activities make the difference. It is noteworthy that the vast majority of such activists are white, come from middle-class backgrounds, and often turn to food activism as part of a second career after long professional employment or are university students or retirees. More men than women tend to become involved in such activism. They are well educated and, on the whole, have not themselves experienced hunger as children or as adults. The turn to localism: Suspicion of the nation-state and the national The skepticism by sustainable-agriculture activists toward the global food system is one manifestation of their suspicion of “the national,” especially as embodied by the U.S. federal government.2 In one of our urban sites, one farmers market manager exclaimed to Sarah Johnson, a project ethnographer, “Government—I’m a child of the 60s, and when I hear things the government is doing, I just go, oh, I don’t want to hear anymore, I’ve had enough. I definitely don’t watch national news.” In another interview, however, she pointed out that U.S. federal government food stamps and Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program vouchers represented “growth, and it supports the market, and it supports people who need help. And I’m really anti-government to be talking up all this (laughs).” The turn among sustainable-agriculture activists, instead, is toward the local. At one project meeting during our analysis period in February 2012 in Chapel Hill, Jen Walker, the project’s ethnographer in two mountainous counties in western North Carolina, summarized what her informants told her about their lack of confidence in “the national”: The national is the problem, according to local food activists. In my site at least, because it seems it was a local 271 American Ethnologist  Volume 40 Number 2 May 2013 movement, about the local food, they saw it as local, and therefore people who would otherwise have connected their political or moral lives to larger cultural and national stuff . . . were not connecting, were not talking about a larger discourse or a larger food system, outside of their immediate county-wide or twocounty area, partly because it was local . . . it was like they were so focused on the local aspects of the local food movement, they surely believed that there were no other examples out there, there was nothing that was relevant, there is no sense in connecting to the national age or the larger discourse because that was what they were against. Instead, as this quote suggests, the activists’ focus is, by necessity, “the local.” Two of our ethnographers discussed the conundrum of the local food movement: Patrick Linder: It was intended to be hyper-local. If you intend to look at local conditions as the driving force, then you’ve really weakened the extent to which a kind of a larger scale outreach [can occur]. Sarah Johnson: How do you generate a national local movement? Comfortable millenarianism: Surviving through the local The practicalities of organizing people to work together on local projects—cultivating urban gardens, starting farmers markets, starting small farms outside the city, adopting the cultivation of niche crops—confers what could be called a “working optimism in orientation” on the sustainableagriculture activists we studied. Nonetheless, on the edges of these everyday activities, the talk of activists takes a radically more pessimistic turn toward visions of a future rupture in the normal workings of the mainstream food system and of U.S. society as a whole. The nature of the anticipated rupture may be specific or vague: peak oil, floods that cut off major transportation lanes, or, more commonly, a general catastrophic time “when the big one comes” or “when the system falls apart.” As Sarah Johnson observed, “People discuss this after their first or second glass of wine after the meeting.” She put it in even more dramatic terms later in our conversation during the project meeting: I do see it informally in, not in groups that are explicitly about this millennial outlook, but in a lot of people that I talk to about their personal reasons for being involved with local foods, it came up again and again: “I think that civilization is going to fall apart, for one reason or another within the next 1–20 years, when that happens, I know that I will be able to survive, because I have these resources at my disposal that are not through the system, that are through my personal relationships” . . . It’s not [discussed] in groups because it’s about personal relationships. 272 The “local,” then, is more than the vantage point from which the “national” and even the “regional” are defined; it will be the secure base on which to rely at that future ruptural cataclysmic moment, when one can only depend on the people one knows—the “local farmer”—and on other local resources. For some activists, these resources include “the gun and the cow” that they envision will stand between them and disaster, including threats posed by other people. Ethnification: Who can afford to be anxious about the global food system and who cannot? The sustainable-agriculture activists I have discussed to this point are very different from other activists we interviewed, many of whom are committed to national social change and, more specifically, to “social justice.” Most “food-security” activists, for instance, are not engaged in a “practical” withdrawal from the global food economy by participating in the local projects of the sustainablefarming activists.3 They are, instead, focused on providing food access to the large numbers of poor (“low-income”) people and racial minorities who face various levels of “food insecurity” and whose needs overwhelm those engaged in meeting them through an alternative food system, the “emergency food system.” These activists live in a world quite different from that of the neotraditionalist projects of sustainable-farming activists. Theirs is a world populated by a congeries of state and quasi-state institutions, practices, and artifacts, such as food banks, food pantries, community kitchens, food stamps (i.e., the USDA Supplementary Nutritional Assistance Program and its Electronic Benefits Transaction system), WIC vouchers, school lunch programs, weekly food-bag distributions to those who qualify, food drives, daily meals cooked for the hungry, emergency shelter programs, volunteers, and official federal and state regulations regarding who qualifies for “emergency food” and who does not. Among these activists, the global food system is usually not an object of overt critique, and, in fact, overt criticism is pretty much “off the table” because so much “surplus food” comes from food distribution and retailing conglomerates like ConAgra, SYSCO, Monsanto, and Harris Teeter, which play central roles in the globally sourced agroindustrial food system. Nonetheless, there is an uneasy relationship between these activists and their organizations, on one hand, and the food banks that receive the tax-deductible contributions of these corporations, on the other, as for example, when food-bank managers’ obsessions with the quantity of food delivered to food pantries become evident to food-pantry workers concerned with the nutritional quality, and not only the quantity, of food provided to their foodinsecure clients. In North Carolina, at least, this tension has to do with the new institutional division of labor brought about by The local-food movement and the anthropology of global systems market rule under neoliberal conditions of governance in the United States, which creates the (inaccurate) perception that most “emergency food” no longer comes primarily from the state but from the “charitable” sector of public– private partnerships between local charities and other nonprofit organizations and local and state governments. Although federal food stamp, WIC voucher, and school meal programs pay for most of the costs of foods provided to the emergency food system nationally (e.g., in 2006, $48 billion; Joel Berg, personal communication, 2009), food security activists and volunteers, not government employees, serve as the frontline providers of food to hungry people within the “community-oriented public-private partnerships” wrought by neoliberalism (Holland et al. 2007). Food-security activists are therefore constrained not only by state bureaucratic regulations (e.g., that define who can receive surplus food and under what conditions) but also by the differing “moral logics” they accept from the partnering organizations with whom they work.4 While some provide food to the hungry out of a sense of social justice, others do so as paternalist Christian charity; some seek to promote “self-esteem” in recipients by teaching them to meet their own needs by cultivating gardens or working as volunteers in food pantries; yet others see themselves as “giving back to the community” through their activism. Still, the institutions of the charitable section, particularly churches, are the most productive sites of discourses around social justice and the need to “provide for all,” discourses that are tamped down among activists working in organizations engaged in providing poor people with food. In contrast to sustainable-agriculture activists, these food-security activists as a group are multiethnic; whites are in the majority, but more African Americans (and to a lesser extent other racial minorities) are represented, particularly in the two urban sites. On average, they come from less wealthy backgrounds, and more of them are women than is the case for the sustainable-agriculture activists. A small but significant percentage of them have in the past been recipients of emergency food from the providers they now work for. The populations they serve are, by legal definition, “low income.” The majority of emergency food recipients in North Carolina are poor whites, although a large percentage is made up of poor racial minorities. Nevertheless, in the views of most of the nonpoor racial majority, such recipients are either minorities or whites who are not quite white (or “deserving”) enough. The sociocultural characteristics of both emergency-food-system workers and their clients, viewed within the semiotics of social positioning over race and class in the United States today, assign the emergency food sector to the status of a charitable paternalism undertaken by white women toward poor people of color— despite the prevailing demography of the recipients. In significant respects, food-security activists and the emergency food institutions they work within in North  American Ethnologist Carolina show a distinctive orientation from that of sustainable-agriculture activists. Not only are the former more oriented toward national issues of social justice as these touch on food but they are also committed to a national project of meeting people’s needs for food access, irrespective of where those in need live, or of their consumer preferences, or of their relationship (for the most part) to local projects of food growing and provisioning. This project, although originating in the postwar USDA “surplus food” program that created food stamps, has its most recent impetus in the national antihunger movement in the 1990s (Berg 2008). In their work as poorly paid managers and staff members of nonprofit organizations, or as volunteers, food-security activists are far more entangled in the difficult and troublesome problems of allocation of national wealth, which falls within the “political” domain of “welfare” associated with the U.S. nation-state, than are the sustainableagriculture activists, who have adopted the stance of active withdrawal into the “local,” as I have shown. Under the current conditions of market rule, majority dismay at the nation-state and support for neoliberal austerity policies and programs directed against poor people and racial minorities place food-security activists in a position of articulating unsettled demands and an unsettling critique of the national. That so many of the leaders in the food-security movement are members of the clergy allows a discreet but nonetheless persistent critique of the national from within the national. These leaders represent those who articulate a residual modernist position: Hunger is an injustice, and it is an injustice to a population of citizens—an injustice that is simultaneously national and local. This position was most evident among food-security activists in the northeastern site for our research project, consisting of three of the poorest counties in North Carolina, and, indeed, in the United States. Here I turn not to the future calamities fantasized by localists but, instead, to the present-day calamity being visited on poor people in rural North Carolina by the austerity programs of revanchist conservative majorities in the U.S. Congress and the North Carolina State Assembly. Willie Wright, our ethnographer for the northeastern site, told us during the project meeting in which our discussion of millenarian discourse came up, I don’t know if it’s an anti-national movement, but I think there’s this understanding at least in my region if anything is going to be done, it’s going to have to come from within, like within our county, or within our state . . . Like I went to the town hall meeting [in a nearby city] where all the council members were there, and [Representative] Angela Bryant was there, she was talking about what was going on in Raleigh with all the bills and stuff, that are being put forward and being passed, and I remember there is one thing that she was telling everybody, brace yourself for a new normal, that’s what she was telling everybody in the 273 American Ethnologist  Volume 40 Number 2 May 2013 audience . . . don’t expect for anything to come from Raleigh on down, don’t expect anything to trickle on down from the federal government, you know. If you are used to getting certain grants and this and that and the other, then expect for things to change. In the case of emergency food provision for poor people of color, who form majorities in this impoverished region of northeastern North Carolina, this will mean less funding from the state and local governments for installing food-stamp electronic benefits systems, for school lunch programs, and much more. Nonetheless, as Willie observed during the project meeting, activists articulated a persistent discourse assuming the existence of the national and what people have a right to expect from the nation-state, and they expressed dismay at the “new normal” of national austerity. Conclusion The Friedmans contend that a condition of hegemonic decline in the United States is characterized by the repudiation of a modernist majority identity oriented toward the nation-state as the bearer of democracy and development and by the proliferation in its place of nonmodernist identities around indigenism, regionalism, nationalist xenophobia, and immigrant disasporization. According to the Friedmans, hegemonic decline more broadly leads to the ethnification of the population along antagonistic lines, as preexisting modernist state projects falter and are reformed under the sign of neoliberal “globalization” in ways that stratify the population in terms of access to declining nation-state resources, and it leads to the appearance of conflict along ethnoracial lines. In the case of the local-food movement described here, the analyses of the Friedmans are largely validated. Neotraditional localist and millenarian orientations are clearly crucial to the identities of sustainable-agriculture activists, who are largely coded as members of the white ethnoracial majority. Many of the upscale consumers who support the high-end local and organic food markets may belong to what the Friedmans refer to as the new global “cosmopolitan” elites, who are enthusiastic about and benefit from “globalization,” but this needs further study. However, contrary to what one might expect from the Friedmans’ analysis, a national orientation is still present among foodsecurity activists who, while working within the local and regional public–private partnerships that sanctify the administration of food provision to the poor by charities that operate the food pantries, community kitchens, and homeless shelters, still show national impulses to seek redress for injustices against poor people and marginalized racial minorities. These activists have therefore become coded either as nonwhites or “liberals” who should remember—but all too often forget—the humiliation functions of “charity” 274 within a society committed to the “free market.” This suggests that the Friedmans’ omission of modernist collectivist movements around class and racial justice issues and identities vis-à-vis the state needs to be addressed, because the achievements of these movements, although under challenge, still represent a residual hegemony among certain groups within the population, such as those from which food-security activists come. More generally, different segments of the population form distinctive levels and intensities of attachment—and detachment—with respect to the nation-state, and some, such as sustainable-agriculture activists, more readily than others segue from the national to occupy new localist identity positions—that is, “being or desiring to be what one is not” as per the “Walter Mitty principle” (Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008a:205) within the possibilities of the modernity identity space. Even so, the Friedmans’ analysis goes far to illuminate the causes of the stresses and contradictions within the contemporary local-food movement—to point to why it increasingly may make no sense to refer to it as a social movement at all. Notes 1. The research project, Research on Food and Farming for All (ROFFA), was funded by the Cultural Anthropology Program of the National Science Foundation, Grant # 0922229. The research group consisted of the author and Dorothy Holland (principal investigators) and Sarah Johnson, Patrick Linder, Kevin McDonough, Jen Walker, and Willie Wright (research associates). All members of this group, especially the research associates, who served as site ethnographers, have contributed to the collection and analysis of the data discussed here. 2. One anonymous reviewer of this article suggested that the local-food activism discussed here appears to be ideologically connected to an anarchic state and antistate dynamic. In historical terms, there is merit to this suggestion, as there have been recurring political–cultural movements in periods of crisis in the United States since its founding that have invoked individualism and local autonomy in calls for “state’s rights,” “Jeffersonian democracy,” the “people’s right to bear arms,” and, more recently, from the 1990s onward, “devolution.” The U.S. federal system since 1783 has complicated the rhetorical situation: For example, “states’ rights” during the U.S. Civil War period framed local and regional struggles against the “federal” state. Nonetheless, there have been localist precedents for the food activism described here. (On the most recent period of supposed “devolution” and decentralization, see Holland et al. 2007:107–129.) 3. The minority of food-security activists who “cross over” into the domain of sustainable agriculture tend to do so with community garden projects in ways that are politically innovative, for example, that seek to provide more food security to poor urban neighborhood residents, the unemployed, youth of color, ex-convicts, and others, but that, more often than not, gain little respect or recognition from sustainable-agriculture activists. 4. By a “moral logic,” I mean a culturally specific set of discursive claims and embodied practices stating what the relations between individuals, community, and those in power should be with respect to some perceived value—for example, food, water, employment, or health care—as a life necessity, a medium of identity, and a cultural good. The local-food movement and the anthropology of global systems References cited Allen, Patricia 2004 Together at the Table: Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System. 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Hess, David J. 2007 Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry: Activism, Innovation, and the Environment in an Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Holland, Dorothy, Donald M. Nonini, Catherine Lutz, Lesley Bartlett, Marla Frederick-McGlathery, Thaddeus C. Guldbrandsen, and Enrique G. Murillo Jr. 2007 Local Democracy under Siege: Activism, Public Interests, and Private Politics. New York: New York University Press. Jessop, Bob 2002 The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kalb, Don 2005 From Flows to Violence: Politics and Knowledge in the Debates on Globalization and Empire. Anthropological Theory 5(2):176–204. Reyna, Stephen N.d. Perpetual Peace? Contradictions, Reproductive Fixes, and Global Warring in the Fields of Contemporary Empire. Unpublished MS, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany. Vallianatos, Mark, Robert Gottlieb, and Margaret Ann A. Haase 2004 Farm-to-School: Strategies for Urban Health, Combating Sprawl, and Establishing a Community Food Systems Approach. Journal of Planning Education and Research 23(4):414–423. Wekerle, Gerda R. 2004 Food Justice Movements: Policy, Planning, and Networks. Journal of Planning Education and Research 23(4):378–386. Williams, Raymond 1977 Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Donald M. Nonini Department of Anthropology University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 301 Alumni Building, CB #3115 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3115 dnonini@email.unc.edu 275
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