How Sushi Went Global
Theodore C. Bestor
Foreign Policy, No. 121. (Nov. - Dec., 2000), pp. 54-63.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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