Food Between the Country and the City: Ethnographies of a Changing Global Foodscape 9780857857286

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction: Approaching Food and Foodways between the Country and the City through the Work of Raymond Williams
Section I: Of the Country and Its Food
1 Conflicting Wine Narratives: “Pleasing Prospects” and the Struggles in the Construction of Alentejo
2 Embodying Country-City Relations: The Chola Cuencana in Highland Ecuador
3 Bringing the City to the Country: Supermarket Expansion, Food Practices, and Aesthetics in Rural South Africa
4 Bringing It All Back Home: Reconnecting the Country and the City through Heritage Food Tourism in the French Auvergne
Section II: Of the City and Its Food
5 Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture: A Self-Critique
6 Urban Hunger and the Home Village: How Lilongwe’s Migrant Poor Stay Food Secure
7 Perceptions of the Country through the Migration of City-grown Crops: Guinean Food in Bissau and in Lisbon
Section III: Of the Nation and Its Food
8 The Country, the Nation, and the Region in Representations of Portuguese Food and Cuisine
9 Hazz al-Quhuf: An Urban Satire on Peasant Life and Food from Seventeenth-century Egypt
10 Reflecting Authenticity: “Grandmother’s Yogurt” between Bulgaria and Japan
11 Unpacking the Mediterranean Diet: Agriculture, Food, and Health
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Food Between the Country and the City

Food Between the Country and the City Ethnographies of a Changing Global Foodscape Edited by Nuno Domingos, José Manuel Sobral, and Harry G. West

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Nuno Domingos, José Manuel Sobral, and Harry G. West, 2014 Nuno Domingos, José Manuel Sobral, and Harry G. West have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ePDF: 978-0-85785-728-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Contributors

xi

Introduction: Approaching Food and Foodways between the Country and the City through the Work of Raymond Williams Nuno Domingos, José Manuel Sobral, and Harry G. West

1

Section I: Of the Country and Its Food 1

2

3

4

Conflicting Wine Narratives: “Pleasing Prospects” and the Struggles in the Construction of Alentejo Nuno Domingos

21

Embodying Country-City Relations: The Chola Cuencana in Highland Ecuador Emma-Jayne Abbots

41

Bringing the City to the Country: Supermarket Expansion, Food Practices, and Aesthetics in Rural South Africa Elizabeth Hull

59

Bringing It All Back Home: Reconnecting the Country and the City through Heritage Food Tourism in the French Auvergne Harry G. West

73

Section II: Of the City and Its Food 5

Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture: A Self-Critique Laura B. DeLind

6

Urban Hunger and the Home Village: How Lilongwe’s Migrant Poor Stay Food Secure Johan Pottier

–v–

91

107

vi • Contents 7

Perceptions of the Country through the Migration of City-grown Crops: Guinean Food in Bissau and in Lisbon Maria Abranches

127

Section III: Of the Nation and Its Food 8

9

The Country, the Nation, and the Region in Representations of Portuguese Food and Cuisine José Manuel Sobral

145

Hazz al-Quhuf: An Urban Satire on Peasant Life and Food from Seventeenth-century Egypt Sami Zubaida

161

10 Reflecting Authenticity: “Grandmother’s Yogurt” between Bulgaria and Japan Maria Yotova

175

11 Unpacking the Mediterranean Diet: Agriculture, Food, and Health Monica Truninger and Dulce Freire

191

Notes

207

References

217

Index

243

List of Illustrations Figures 1.1 1.2

Alentejo wines at the 2011 Lisbon wine fair. Facilities of the UCP Esquerda Vencerá in Pias, today used by the local parish. 1.3 Manuel Vitória at a tavern in Pias with Guilhermino Ramos, the tavern’s owner. 1.4 Pias’s abandoned train station. 11.1 New Mediterranean diet pyramid. 11.2 Average production of olive oil in Portugal from harvest years 1940–1941 to 2009–2010. 11.3 Total area devoted to olive groves in the main producing regions of Portugal.

22 27 35 38 197 201 202

Tables 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

Population of Lilongwe, 1966–2008. Typical lunches (and suppers) in Ntsiliza and Chinsapo. Migrant households farming in their home villages. Migrant households farming in Lilongwe.

– vii –

111 115 119 121

Acknowledgments The editors thank the Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS), Universidade de Lisboa, and the Food Studies Centre, SOAS, University of London, for supporting the symposium “Food and Foodways in the Country and the City” (held at the ICS in Lisbon on November 7–8, 2011), upon which this volume is based.

– ix –

Contributors Emma-Jayne Abbots is a lecturer in social/cultural anthropology and heritage at the School of Archaeology, History, and Anthropology, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, United Kingdom, and a research associate at the Food Studies Centre, SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom. Maria Abranches is a part-time lecturer and associate tutor in cultural studies at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. Laura B. DeLind is a senior academic specialist emeritus in the Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University, United States. Nuno Domingos is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, and a research associate at the Food Studies Centre, SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom. Dulce Freire is a research fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal. Elizabeth Hull is a lecturer in anthropology and a member of the Food Studies Centre at SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom. Johan Pottier is an emeritus professor of African anthropology and a professorial research associate of the Food Studies Centre at SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom. José Manuel Sobral is a senior research fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, where he is currently the director of the Ph.D. program in social anthropology. Monica Truninger is a senior research fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal.

– xi –

xii • Contributors Harry G. West is a professor of anthropology and chair of the Food Studies Centre, SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom. Maria Yotova is a visiting researcher at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan. Sami Zubaida is an emeritus professor of politics and sociology at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a professorial research associate at the Food Studies Centre, SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom.

Introduction: Approaching Food and Foodways between the Country and the City through the Work of Raymond Williams Nuno Domingos, José Manuel Sobral, and Harry G. West

“ ‘Country’ and ‘city’ are very powerful words, and this is not surprising when we remember how much they seem to stand for in the experience of human communities,” Raymond Williams tells us in the opening lines of his classic work, The Country and the City: On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. (Williams 1973: 1)

What Williams says of these two words in general is certainly true of their use in reference to food and foodways, both historically and in the present. The notion that the most refined foodways are to be found in the city, where wealth is concentrated and tastes are purportedly more sophisticated, is one with deep historical roots. Such was the idea, for example, in late-eighteenth-century France according to Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, who paraphrases urban ethnographer Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s account that “ ‘[a] hundred thousand men’ scour the country to supply Parisian markets with the most succulent of fare, fish, and pheasant, even the exotic pineapple,” before concluding that “this variety of foodstuffs signals the extraordinary abundance that made Paris a gourmand’s paradise” (Ferguson 2004: 44). Depictions of the superiority of urban foodways have often entailed unfavorable comparison with rural foodways. Stephen Mennell reports such views, also from postrevolutionary France: The social role of the gastronome is essentially “urban” in character because it is at the opposite pole from the spirit of traditional rural self-sufficiency, eating the product of

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2 • Food Between the Country and the City one’s own land and taking it as it comes. More self-evidently, the gastronomic spirit is rare among those whose poverty allows them little choice. There must be food in abundance and variety, and of course variety and subtlety in cookery to permit gastronomes to select some things and reject others. (Mennell 1985: 273; see also Drouard 2007; Mintz 1996)

Condemnations of rural food and foodways have often been more scathing. Massimo Montanari reports that “in [Medieval European] literary representations, as well as in a certain type of scientific production [medical treatises], the peasant diet takes on coarse and wretched characteristics, on the edge of bestiality” (Montanari 2002: 111–12, our translation). A fourteenth-century song, described by Paul Freedman, mocks peasants involved in an insurrection in Flanders by disparaging their unrefined foodways: “Curdled milk, rye bread, porridge, and cheese are all they really need. Anything more refined would merely further dull their already insufficient wits” (Freedman 2008: 3–4). But aspersions have long been cast on urban foodways as well. The eighteenthcentury novelist Tobias Smollet described milk in London as “the produce of faded cabbage leaves and sour draff, lowered with hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot and tobacco quids from foot-passengers, overflowings from mud-carts . . . dirt and trash chucked into it by rogueish boys for the joke’s sake . . . and finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of maid-milk” (quoted in Steel 2013: 70). And accounts of the horrors of food and foodways in the city have often involved the celebration of the rural foods and foodways with which they have been compared. As Bee Wilson notes, Smollett “[compared] the foul and debased foods of London . . . to the bucolic simplicity of the country where the chickens are free, the game are fresh from the moors and the vegetables, herbs and salads are picked straight from the garden” (Wilson 2008: 5). Indeed, the notion that the countryside harbors the purest, most authentic foodstuffs also has deep roots. Igor De Garine asserts that “[p]raising Nature, natural people, natural food and advocating temperance occurred in all ancient civilizations,” and he reminds us that Rousseau— writing just before the French Revolution—“contributed to rehabilitating the simple and wholesome foods obtained in the countryside” (De Garine 2001: 501; see also Drouard 2007: 268; Rauch 2008). Much has changed in the country and in the city since these various passages were written. Whereas only 30 percent of the world population resided in cities as recently as 1950, in 2007, the global urban population eclipsed the rural, and forecasters predict that 60 percent of people worldwide will live in cites by 2030 (Department of Economic and Social Affairs—Population Division 2011: 4). At the same time, the global development of transportation infrastructure and media networks, as well as the neoliberal integration of the post-Cold War global economy, have not only

Introduction • 3 increased connectivity between urban and rural spaces, but also blurred the divide between them—with the countryside often becoming more developed and city-like, and the city sometimes becoming greener and more country-like—making it difficult even to define the country or the city today (Lehtola et al. 2009; Lynch 2004; Murdoch and Pratt 1993). These transformations have had significant effects on food and foodways around the world. The industrial intensification of farming has gone hand in hand with the modernization of diets, not only in the developed countries of the Global North, but also in the Global South—including, particularly, emergent economies such as China, India, and Brazil—as greater production is required to feed not only a growing human population, but also the growing numbers of livestock consumed in greater proportion in the global diet (Millstone and Lang 2003: 34–35). As growing towns and cities have displaced farmers from once-productive lands, intensive farming methods—exacerbated in many places by climate change—have also exhausted arable land, leading to the opening of new farmland in less-productive and/or more fragile ecosystems (Kimbrell 2002). The liberalization of global trade in agricultural commodities has rendered farmers, and the rural economies to which they are essential, increasingly vulnerable to forces beyond their horizons—forces generally perceived to be concentrated in capital cities and global financial centers such as New York, London, and Hong Kong (Madeley 2000; Rosset 2006). These factors, coupled with drought, the rising use of staple crops such as maize for the production of biofuels, and market speculation in food commodities (touched off by the global financial crisis beginning in 2007), have greatly increased food price volatility in recent years, sparking demonstrations and riots around the world, especially in cities where people lack direct access to the means to grow their own food (Clapp and Cohen 2009). These developments have given rise to profound questions regarding food and foodways worldwide: How will an increasingly urban global population be fed, and what will people eat? Must the country feed the city, or might cities feed themselves? How will depopulating countrysides sustain themselves—by feeding cities or by other means—if at all? What will food cost in the future, and how will its cost be met? What will be the environmental implications of changing patterns of food production and consumption, and are these patterns sustainable? And what are the implications of urbanization, and the attendant transformations of the production and processing of foodstuffs, for the quality of food, including its safety for consumption, its nutritional value, and its organoleptic properties? Notwithstanding such dramatic historical changes, the use of country and city as key tropes in the discussion of food-related issues persists, even if their respective constellations of meanings have partially shifted over time. For some, the countryside— including not only peasant farmers in the Global South, but also farmers using traditional methods (and their advocates) in the Global North—remains the locus of crude resistance to new technologies and to the rationalized use of ever-scarcer resources, as evidenced by enduring global poverty and recurrent famine (Schurman

4 • Food Between the Country and the City and Munro 2010). Helena Norberg-Hodge and colleagues write: “The sense of despair in many rural communities is exacerbated by a barrage of media and advertising images emphasizing the glories of modern life and sending the message that rural ways have no place in a future that will be, above all else, thoroughly high-tech” (NorbergHodge et al. 2002: 82–83). Such images are often a preamble to calls for greater industrialization of agriculture and the food industries, as well as greater integration of the world’s myriad countrysides into a global food system—mostly managed from urban centers—in order to feed a population projected to reach 9 billion by 2050 and to ensure accessibility everywhere to foods grown anywhere in the world (Paul and Steinbrecher 2003; Weis 2007). For others, cities—and more generally, urbanized, industrialized nations—are, in the wake of a “nutrition transition,” the locus of unhealthy diets (including energy-rich, nutrient-poor processed foods), producing chronic diseases, whether among an overindulgent elite or among impoverished classes living in food deserts (Lang and Heasman 2004). What is more, such diets are symbolic of the consumption of the countryside and its resources by insatiable cities, jeopardizing the delicate ecological balance of the planet (Buckland 2004). Those painting such pictures often call for a delinking of the global food system and a reconfiguration of food sheds around countryside producers or urban gardeners, growing more traditional, more “authentic,” and/or more sustainable foods (Cockrall-King 2012; Desmarais et al. 2011; Jarosz 2008; Kneafsey et al. 2008; Lyson 2004; Norberg-Hodge et al. 2002). David Bell and Gill Valentine observe: “The processes of urbanisation, which have impacted profoundly on culinary cultures, have created among many city populations a nostalgia for the countryside, and for the ‘plain fare’ associated with rural life,” before noting, ironically, that “‘country food’ is provided for city folk, while those who produce it make do with urban-industrial staples” (Bell and Valentine 1997: 142–43). In any case, notwithstanding profound differences in these competing views, tropes identified by Williams—whether of urban enlightenment and rural ignorance or of rural idyll and urban malaise—are readily discerned in each of them.

Raymond Williams and the Critical Reading of Myths of the Country and the City Raymond Williams, of course, warned his readers against taking such tropes at face value. The idea of metropolitan utopia may have emboldened rural reformers in the contexts that he studied, and the romanticizing of the rural may have served as a heuristic device in the critique of the city, but in Williams’s view, such tropes were ultimately “myth[s] functioning as [memories]” (Williams 1973: 43). Williams himself grew up betwixt and between the country and the city. He came of age in the Welsh village of Pandy just as the railroad linked this rural area to urban, industrial South Wales. Rural-urban connectivity defined his household: his father, the son of farmworkers, cultivated his own vegetable plot and kept bees but earned

Introduction • 5 his living as a railroad signalman. The dynamic interaction of country and city imprinted itself on Williams’s psyche. He would later write: “The only landscape I ever see, in dreams, is the Black Mountain village in which I was born” (Williams 1973: 84). In his published work, Williams explored and theorized this dynamic interaction. He wrote: “The division and opposition of city and country, industry and agriculture, in their modern forms, are the critical culmination of the division and specialization of labour which, though it did not begin with capitalism, was developed under it to an extraordinary and transforming degree” (Williams 1973: 304). By Williams’s reading, the tropes of country and city endured on landscapes of profound social change associated with the development of capitalism and the attendant reorganization of relations between urban and rural spaces and social practices, including the largescale displacement of rural people from their land and their migration into urban areas in search of work in growing industries, as well as the reorganization of social and economic hierarchies within urban and rural spaces and communities. Images of country and city therefore persisted, in his view, in the midst of dramatic transformations through which the country and the city actually coproduced and profoundly reshaped one another. Unsatisfied with the simple association of the country with the past and of the city with the future, which failed altogether to address a complex present that he and his natal community—at once rural and urban, at once traditional and modern—experienced with deep ambivalence (Williams 1988: 75), Williams sought to better understand the present in its own terms (Williams 1973: 297). Even if the persistent tropes of country and city glossed more complex realities— in fact, precisely because they did so—Williams did not dismiss them but, instead, scrutinized them more closely. For him, understanding these tropes depended upon seeking to understand the sociohistorical contexts in which they were developed and deployed. At the same time, his critical analysis of these terms constituted an attempt to better understand the cultural, political, and economic processes in which their (re)production was embedded—processes that were not only reflected in them, but also partly (re)shaped by their usages. If country and city could each carry a wide range of positive and negative connotations, the valence of particular usages depended, for Williams, upon the historical moments of their (re)production and the orientations of those who (re)produced them. Here, it is necessary to understand Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling.” Williams defined structures of feeling as “social experiences in solution,” differentiating them from the more formal concepts of worldview and ideology. Through this concept, he sought to get at “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt,” or “thought as felt and feeling as thought” (Williams 1977: 133–34). He argued that the relationship between structures of feeling and social classes was complex and socially variable: “At times the emergence of a new structure of feeling is best related to the rise of a class . . . ; at other times to contradiction, fracture, or mutation within a class . . . , when a formation appears to break away from its class

6 • Food Between the Country and the City norms, though it retains its substantial affiliation, and the tension is at once lived and articulated in radically new semantic figures” (Williams 1977: 134–35). In any case, structures of feeling conveyed the conditions and experiences of particular groups of people in particular moments in time, and differing structures of feeling fostered differing usages of words such as country and city. In Williams’s view, the inflection of terms such as country and city inevitably involved processes of selection from among extant meanings—and often the (re)combination of elements of previous readings and/or the creation of new meanings. His discussion of the broader concept of tradition illuminates this dynamic: “From a whole possible area of past and present, in a particular culture, certain meanings and practices are selected for emphasis and certain other meanings and practices are neglected and excluded” (Williams 1977: 115). What is more, for Williams, particular meanings and practices not only reflected the world they described, but also constituted an “actively shaping force” within it (Williams 1977: 115). How they did so varied. Through the selection of particular meanings and practices—for example, in the inflection of words such as country and city—people might reinforce extant forms of power. In Williams’s view, imagining the nation (also denoted in English by the word country) often involved the imagination of a bucolic countryside by those living in cities and controlling the institutions of national power based within them—an imaginary that often obscured rural poverty and the expropriation of land and labor by urban compatriots and/or that justified the remaking of the countryside in the image of the city, to the benefit of those controlling this transformation. But in Williams’s view, tropes could also be deployed to challenge extant social relations and hierarchies. In order to effectively bolster power, particular interpretations of words such as country and city had constantly to be reproduced and to circulate, not only among those who deployed them, but also within society more generally. This circulation afforded opportunities for particular meanings and practices to be accepted—or to be contested. Williams’s understanding of the Gramscian notion of hegemony is crucial here. He wrote: “A lived hegemony is always a process. . . . [I]t does not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own” (Williams 1977: 112). Accordingly, in the moments of their reproduction and circulation, the meanings of terms such as country and city were, for Williams, inherently unstable and vulnerable to transformation. What is more, their instability might not only reflect changing power dynamics, but also contribute to them. Williams concluded: “The reality of any hegemony, in the extended political and cultural sense, is that, while by definition it is always dominant, it is never either total or exclusive. At any time, forms of alternative or directly oppositional politics and culture exist as significant elements in the society.” To this he added: ‘[A]lternative political and cultural emphases, and the many forms of opposition and struggle, are important not only in themselves but as indicative features of what the hegemonic

Introduction • 7 process has in practice had to control” (Williams 1977: 113). It follows from this that a close reading of the ever-changing landscape of meanings associated with tropes such as country and city may reveal not only the dynamics of power in a particular social setting, but also the pressures on and limits to various forces, potentially contributing to the very forms of contestation that such a reading identifies. And this is precisely what Williams sought to achieve in The Country and the City.

Building upon Raymond Williams in the Ethnographic Exploration of Food and Foodways In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams explored the use of these tropes in English literature dating as far back as the sixteenth century. Williams’s work, however, transcends the genre of literary criticism, as well as the English context. Insofar as his approach uses the study of common tropes and the structures of feeling related to their variable usage as windows through which to analyze the complexity of social relations and the variability of social experience, it may be adapted to the study of other forms of expression in other places and times, not to mention the study of other human concerns. This certainly includes the study of food and foodways. Consider, for example, Friedrich Engels’s mid-nineteenth-century description of working-class food in Manchester: “The potatoes which the workers buy are usually poor, the vegetables wilted, the cheese old and of poor quality, the bacon rancid, the meat lean, tough, taken from old, often diseased cattle, or such as have died a natural death, and not fresh even then, often half decayed . . . but having bought it, they must use it” (quoted in Mennell 1985: 225). This passage not only contrasts with celebrations of cities as gastronomic centers, but it also calls attention—in the service of a particular political agenda—to the differential food-related experiences of social classes living within the same city (or the same countryside, for that matter). Engels tells us: “[T]he poor, the working-people, to whom a couple of farthings are important, who must buy many things with little money, who cannot afford to inquire too closely into the quality of their purchase, and cannot do so in any case because they have had no opportunity of cultivating their taste—to their share fall all the adulterated, poisoned provisions” (Mennell 1985: 225; see also Bourdieu 1984; Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Goody 1982). Diana Wylie’s study of nutritional science and food policy in apartheid South Africa not only highlights how other social categories, such as race, may also give rise to differential experiences of shared places (whether rural or urban), but also shows how representations of the relationship between cultural identities and practices may either challenge or reinforce disparities between social groups and their foodways (Wylie 2001). Whereas apartheid scientists and policy makers intent upon improving—that is, “modernizing”—rural black South Africans’ diets generally

8 • Food Between the Country and the City blamed the defects of African culture for rural blacks’ impoverished foodways while ignoring the causes and constraints of their poverty (Wylie 2001: 5), Ken Albala suggests that, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, European elites generally came to consider porridges such as barley, beans, and lentils as appropriate foods for the peasantry, veal as appropriate for those better-off, and game as appropriate for the aristocracy. Albala concludes: “[T]his idea of rustic simplicity and health appears akin to the pastoral genre that idealizes country life as a way of ignoring or rationalizing harsh reality” (Albala 2002: 184–98, 200; see also Montanari 2002). These examples are suggestive of the possibilities—in fact, the necessity—of adapting Williams’s approach to the study of food and foodways. Notwithstanding the dramatic contemporary transformations discussed above—urban sprawl, rural development, the emergence of a global food system—the terms country and city remain prominent in contemporary conceptions of food and foodways, whether as elements of policy discourse, as marketing devices, as descriptors in the media, or as folk categories in common parlance. As ethnographers, we follow Williams in our study of these terms by grounding our analysis in the empirical examination of cultural expressions of lived experience, including the language and the “key words” (to adapt Williams’s term) used by those among whom we conduct research. Moving beyond debate over definitions of these terms, or over their analytical purchase in a rapidly changing world, we take these terms themselves as objects of study, seeking to discern the complex dynamics animating their variable and changing usages while asking what might be learned by an appreciation of the tensions, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies of which such usages give evidence. Such an approach is not only familiar to anthropologists and other social scientists using ethnographic or interpretative methods more generally, but has also been prominent in the study of food in particular, from Mary Douglas’s study of Jewish ideas of the edible and inedible (Douglas 1966), to Elisa Sobo’s analysis of the meaning of “fat” in Jamaica (Sobo 1994), to Eivind Jacobsen’s examination of the tropes of nature, commodity, and culture in relation to food more broadly (Jacobsen 2004). To date, however, scarce attention has been paid to the usage of the tropes country and city in relation to food, despite the centrality of these terms to the lived experience of food, historically as well as today. In addressing this lacuna, contributors to this volume show how the country/city dichotomy is entwined with other dichotomous pairs on the contemporary global foodscape. Their critical readings of these terms reveal that—whether categorized as rural or urban, as traditional or modern, as peasant/artisanal or industrial, as local or foreign/global, or simply as good or bad—food and foodways around the world today have all been shaped by, and have in turn shaped, historical processes through which the country, the city, and the relationship between them have been dramatically transformed. To this end, the authors ask how variable ideas about food and foodways in the country and the city, as well as other key concepts with which they are bound up, both conceal and reveal the very dynamics reproducing and reshaping

Introduction • 9 countrysides and cities, along with the food grown and eaten within them. Following Williams, they seek, through the analysis of these words and ideas, to get at the lived experiences that trouble conceptual divides not only between the country and the city, but also between, for example, sustenance and pleasure, production and consumption, earning a living and making a profit, migration and staying at home, authenticity and innovation, and social identity and national heritage. The authors undertake this in reference to a wide range of contexts: from peasant homesteads in the Global South to family farms in the Global North; from community gardens, to small family-run businesses, to state food industries; from petty traders to transnational supermarkets; from local food festivals and urban planning offices to regional tourist boards and state ministries concerned with agriculture and food; and from North and South America, to Western and Eastern Europe, to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Their implicitly comparative approach—fundamental to anthropology for more than a century—allows them collectively to take measure of similarities and differences in the experience of food around the world at a time when globalization of the trade in food and of the transmission of food-related technologies and ideologies is said to be homogenizing food and foodways worldwide. Ultimately, the contributors show how foodways today continue to be shaped by relations of power, as the country and the city give way, or give birth, to new spatial configurations, new relationships of scale, and new hierarchies—in short, new centers and peripheries, whether literal or virtual. Common themes, and a range of revealing comparisons, emerge from these contributions. To begin with, associations of particular foods and/or foodways with the country or with the city are often intended as testaments to their superior quality. Tellingly, assertions that foods are better, or tastier, or cleaner, or purer, or more healthful are made by linking them to the country (often invoking simplicity, a more profound connection to nature, and/or honesty or integrity), but these assertions are also made by linking foods to the city (invoking superior technology, more stringent standards, and/or greater transparency). In other words, both country and city can be made to mean “good food.” These apparently conflicting associations may even target the same audience—or be “bought by” the same consumers. Similarly, the tropes of country and city may each be invoked in linking a food, or a method of food production, to better livelihoods, to healthier communities, and/ or to greater environmental sustainability. Connecting peasant or artisan foodways to the countryside may associate them with cohesive family or village life and/or ecological stewardship, but such images vie with alternative conceptions of rural regional development, of the generation of skilled employment opportunities, and of scientifically- informed management of the environment associated with urban-led interventions in agriculture and the production of food. Once again, in practice, such apparently divergent associations may, in fact, coexist. While the tropes of country and city are often deployed to suggest that a food or foodway is good for others, or contributes to the greater good, such associations generally work—or are, at least, intended to work—in the interests of those who make

10 • Food Between the Country and the City them. Agents in the use of such tropes may be individuals (for example, producers or vendors of particular foods), but they may also be businesses (small or large), communities (of various sorts and sizes), or governments (at various levels). Any of these entities may deploy the tropes of country or city to make or capture profits— from peasant/artisan producers and market-stall vendors seeking to earn a living to transnational corporations hoping to increase sales, and from local governments to transnational bodies such as the European Union seeking to stimulate economic growth and increase tax revenues. Such tropes may also be used to produce or capture various forms of symbolic capital, such as the prestige associated with making a high-quality and/or authentic product or associated with having one’s local, regional, or national culinary heritage recognized by an international body such as UNESCO. The brute exercise of power may also be at play in the deployment of such tropes, as actors seek to enter or consolidate markets, to secure access to scarce resources, or to exercise influence or control over people. In practice, various interests and agendas may be interpolated with one another through the invocation of country or city in association with a particular food or foodway, as concrete social relations play out in the register of symbolic representations and transactions. As images of the country or the city are used to market commodities or assert ideologies, complex alliances may be formed between various cultural, political, and economic actors and entities—alliances that may be shaped by, as well as give shape to, such images. Through such social formations, the tropes of country and city may work to bind together people sharing a particular place or identity and/or people of disparate geographical or social origins. They may also consolidate or institutionalize the power of one or more actors over others, whether along lines of class, gender, race, ethnicity, region, or nationality. Of course, not all invocations of the country or the city work. In some cases, their intended audience may simply ignore such associations or may disagree with but feel helpless to contest them. In other cases, such visions may be met with alternative invocations of country or city in relation to particular foods and/or foodways that not only signal conflicting views and interests, but also potentially serve as vehicles for the pursuit of alternative aims. In some cases, investment in such alternative associations of food and/or foodways with the country or the city may prove problematic for those making them, as, for example, in cases where a peasant identity may slot people into subordinate positions within extant hierarchies even as it affords them tangible benefits. In any case, the contributors to this volume collectively show that in the selective association of food and foodways with the country or the city, and/or in response to such associations made by others, people generally reflect upon the cultural, political, and economic institutions mediating their relationship with the foods they produce and/or consume and ask themselves not only whether or not these are good, but also if they might be better. Through reflecting on the meanings of such key terms as country and city in relation to food and foodways, and on the values created and/or

Introduction • 11 captured through these associations, people generally seek to exercise or consolidate some form of autonomy, not only over the foods they grow and/or eat, but also, through this, over their bodies, their livelihoods, and their relationships with other people and/or the environments (both human-made and natural) in which they reside.

An Overview of the Volume In Chapter 1, Nuno Domingos critically examines images of the countryside in the marketing materials of winemakers in the Alentejo region of Portugal, as well as in promotional campaigns supporting gastro-tourism in the region today. Drawing on Williams, Domingos suggests that, through the combined use of stylized images of modern technology and coats of arms evoking deep historical roots for vintners and their vineyards, these narratives express a structure of feeling celebrating Alentejo as a place of rugged natural beauty and harmonious social relations— and celebrating its winemakers as bearers of timeless traditions. But such idyllic images, Domingos argues, are part and parcel of dramatic transformations over recent decades, in which urban-based investors have acquired land and created a capital-intensive wine industry whose intended global consumers read the association of food or drink with a particular region and its traditions as a mark of superior quality justifying a higher price. Domingos then shows how the capture of profits from the making of “quality” wines, and from other forms of regional development, has fomented a counter-pastoral structure of feeling among remaining small-scale winemakers and other long-standing local residents, echoing the experiences of the forebears of today’s economically marginalized, namely landless laborers living a life of misery and injustice on the latifúndio estates of prerevolutionary Alentejo. According to this view, Alentejo’s new wine is different from its former wine not only because modern technologies yield a wine that no longer lingers in the mouth, but also because this new wine is produced not for consumption in local taverns, but instead for distant consumers—and to increase the wealth of an absentee elite. This counter-narrative, Domingos concludes, casts a troubling shadow over the new pastoral images produced by Alentejo’s emerging gastro-elite. In the following chapter, Emma-Jayne Abbots shows how, in the Ecuadorian province of Azuay, the countryside and its foods are celebrated through the folkloric figure of the chola—a mixed-race woman, wearing brightly colored pollera skirts and a Panama hat, often seen selling produce in the region’s urban markets. For expatriates and for wealthier residents of the provincial capital, Cuenca, the chola represents an uncorrupted countryside. Her foods are seen as fresher, cleaner, and more local than those sold in urban supermarkets. But like Domingos, Abbots suggests that all is not as it seems. Following Williams, she reveals the multiple—at times, contradictory— meanings associated with the chola and the countryside from which she purportedly comes. The chola, she reminds us, is a product of colonialism—polleras reflecting

12 • Food Between the Country and the City eighteenth-century Spanish influence and Panama hats being artifacts of a local industry intended to make peasants more productive—as well as of postcolonial Ecuadorian nationalism that has glossed racial hierarchy with a mestizaje narrative of social mixing and harmony. What is more, as rural residents derive ever more of their income through remittances from migrant kin, the region’s rural women have become increasingly ambivalent about the chola identity. While the stereotypical chola has long been an entrepreneur—brokering the sale of countryside produce in the city—enterprising peasant women today are increasingly abandoning both the chola costume and the production of food and are seeking to incorporate desired elements of urban modernity into their own lives. Their changing practices give rise to ambivalence among modern, urban Cuencanas as well, reflected in government attempts to preserve the ideal chola by keeping her in her place—prescribing, or proscribing, her behavior in both urban and rural settings—ultimately, in order to keep country and city in their places. But ironically, Abbots concludes, aspirational peasant women themselves contribute to the reproduction of hierarchies they seek to overturn by distancing themselves from poorer peasant women and the chola identity. The rural residents of KwaZulu-Natal among whom Elizabeth Hull has conducted fieldwork also struggle with negative stereotypes of themselves and the countryside in which they live. During apartheid, the region served as a labor pool, supplying workers for the mines and urban industries of South Africa. Only the young, the old, and the infirm remained in the region—long considered a site of reproduction rather than proper production and consumption. Economic stagnation continued in the region following apartheid, but a rising number of residents have become recipients of government welfare, including pensions for the elderly and grants for children and the disabled. Although the appearance of supermarkets and fast-food chains has allowed urban-centered consumer industries to begin to reshape this rural region in the image of the city, limited employment opportunities and uneven access to welfare has meant that consumption of modern goods remains uneven. While traditional foodways are still considered problematic by many—echoing apartheid-era scientists’ and policy makers’ descriptions of them as degenerate—the people Hull has worked with not only express desires for modern foods, but they also characterize Zulu food as more healthful than modern, processed foods and fast foods. Hull was told that “rich” kids, who ate modern foods, were picked last—if at all—to play football (soccer), because they grew tired more quickly than kids who ate traditional Zulu fare. Through such (re)conceptualizations of the foods of the country and the city, Hull argues, poorer residents have sought to reverse stereotypes (echoing the stereotypes studied by Williams) associating the countryside with the static reproduction of tradition and the city with the dynamism of production and consumption. In so doing, they have attempted to recast the countryside as a vibrant site of cultural creativity and inventiveness and to recast their foods as valued objects—whether for their own consumption or for sale to the growing number of tourists showing momentary interest in “authentic” Zulu customs.

Introduction • 13 The members of the cheesemaking family in the Auvergne region of France who are at the center of Harry G. West’s chapter have resisted stereotypes casting them as bearers of a timeless tradition; they have, like Hull’s KwaZulu-Natal residents, crafted an alternative image of, and for, themselves—in this case, as producers of an ever-changing living tradition. By contrast with the ex-cholas Abbots describes, West’s cheesemakers have embraced a peasant identity, even as they have selectively adopted modern productive technologies and made of their farm and cheese room a museum to attract tourists, who then buy their cheeses on site. Whereas critics might describe this rural family’s performance of tradition as a Disneyesque simulacrum— a portrayal of authentic rural life ironically displaced by the portrayal itself—West conceives of this family’s re-creation of itself, its work, and its products as a creative response to the economic pressures created by the industrialization of agriculture in France following World War II and the subsequent collapse of rural communities, as residents moved into cities and industrial jobs. West asserts that this family has faced this historical transformation “in its own terms” (to use Williams’s language), or rather, family members have faced it on their own terms, doing what they can to craft a new relationship between the countryside they continue to call home and the city folk they now welcome onto their farm—people with whom they often form lasting connections. By reconnecting, through innovative marketing strategies, with those who have moved from country to city—or with those in the city who feel themselves to be historically disconnected from the countryside—this family has been able to make a living of their living tradition, according to West, preserving the family farm along with “the countryside” and its foodways, even while reinventing each of these. Although many commentators see the countryside as an enduring locus of better food and foodways, as increasing urban migration has occurred, some commentators have begun to celebrate the relocation of the countryside itself into the city. Through reflexive criticism of a project that she has co-organized, Laura B. DeLind challenges, in the first chapter in Section II, the romanticizing, among contemporary food activists, of the greening of the city through urban agriculture. Proponents see urban agriculture as a means of solving many of the problems plaguing cities today. Replacement of vacant lots with productive gardens is said to improve neighborhood aesthetics while generating income for underemployed people, increasing access to affordable, nutritious food for residents of urban food deserts, and allowing young people to see how food is grown. DeLind sees a more complex reality within such win-win scenarios, however. The farm she writes about is located on a floodplain in Lansing, Michigan, and local government has sought to protect residents—or to decrease public liability—by limiting investment and government support for improvements in existing residents’ homes, by demolishing foreclosed properties in poor condition, by prohibiting new building, and by granting urban agriculture projects such as DeLind’s easy access to unused land. While residents are rarely involved in decisions about their neighborhood, government policies often exacerbate poverty and isolation among intended beneficiaries, DeLind suggests, by reducing access

14 • Food Between the Country and the City to affordable housing while driving down the value of existing residents’ homes, as well as by eliminating empty spaces in which children play and that harbor cherished memories for many residents. Rather than condemning urban agriculture altogether, DeLind concludes (as Williams himself might have) that better understanding of the dynamics underlying both urban decay and the subsequent greening of cities should lead us to acknowledge the struggles of urban residents for self-determination and to recognize and facilitate their wishes in the making of their places—whether through growing food in their neighborhoods or not. In Chapter 6, Johan Pottier informs us that international institutions such as the World Bank, as well as other nongovernmental organizations of varying types and sizes, have begun to celebrate urban agriculture in Africa as a means of shortening food chains while shoring up food security and reducing the cost of food for urban residents in the face of a volatile global food supply. Pottier argues that such visions, in fact, contradict growing calls by analysts to conceive of food systems as operating along continua between rural and urban areas, which (in harmony with Williams’s idea that the country and the city coproduce one another) is precisely how Pottier sees contemporary Malawi. While migration from rural Malawi to the capital city of Lilongwe was held in check until 1994 under President Hastings Kamuzu Banda, his successor, Elson Bakili Muluzi, allowed urban migration. Early migrants often planted maize in the spaces between residential areas, but land is now scarce in the city. Therefore, migrants have continued, over the years, to maintain ties with their villages of origin. Many return home during peak agricultural seasons, investing labor (and money) in growing food to supplement insufficient urban resources. Over time, migrants may lose claims to land in the village, Pottier tells us, but most continue to invest in the agricultural production of village kin—and sometimes employ rural relatives to work for them in the city outside of peak farming season, effectively subsidizing their rural family’s food consumption as well. While urban Malawians continue to engage with the countryside, however, few romanticize it. According to Pottier, with the passage of time and with the birth of new generations in the city, the idea of returning home becomes increasingly unimaginable to migrants, for whom rural life (especially since the dismantling of state agricultural subsidies) is even less secure than urban life (following the dismantling of state food subsidies), albeit a necessary complement. Next, Maria Abranches asks what happens when international migration stretches the distance between new urban homes and rural origins; she examines the multiple meanings of the country and its foods for migrants from Guinea-Bissau to the Portuguese capital, Lisbon. According to Abranches, lines between country and city have long been blurred for Bissau-Guineans, despite Portuguese colonial attempts to police a divide between the traditional, indigenous, nonmonetized countryside, and modern, “civilized,” monetized cities. Whereas during the late colonial period, agricultural goods crossed borders between the rural and the urban—as well as between Guinea-Bissau and its neighbors—postcolonial economic liberalization (without much corresponding investment in the countryside) and, subsequently, civil war led

Introduction • 15 to large-scale outmigration from rural areas into the nation’s cities and beyond. With the dramatic expansion of agriculture on the periphery of the capital city, Bissau, the countryside has increasingly been woven into a ruralized city. This has also made possible the daily shipment of produce from Bissau to markets serving overseas migrants. For Bissau-Guineans in Lisbon, fresh produce from one’s region of origin may be difficult to obtain due to poor roadways connecting Bissau to its hinterlands. But according to Abranches, migrants nonetheless long for foods from their country of origin—from their nation, even if from the city rather than the countryside—not only because these foods, or their vendors, are familiar, but also because these foods come from “the same land” as they do and are, therefore, “better” for them, both corporally and cosmologically. Migrants also consider these foods more natural— grown without chemicals and/or less processed—than Portuguese foods. Abranches points out, however, that those remaining in Guinea-Bissau, who toil for smaller rewards than their migrant compatriots, are often less enamored of the traditional methods by which they continue to grow food today and, as Williams would suggest, of the social hierarchies holding country and city together. To begin Section III, José Manuel Sobral situates present-day celebrations of country food and foodways in broader geographical and historical perspectives. He observes that initiatives to recognize and preserve local, traditional foodways are commonplace today—from local food festivals, to governmental promotion of gastro-tourism, to trade agreements protecting appellations and other indications of origin. While such initiatives may respond to the global expansion of Americanstyle fast food and the corresponding threat of culinary homogenization, Sobral informs us—using Portugal as his example—that they, and the concerns that motivate them, are not without precedents. From the mid-nineteenth-century, Portuguese writers—including authors of genres as diverse as cookbooks, novels, and ethnographies—have defended Portuguese culinary traditions, thereby inventing and re-creating vernacular cuisine. Prior to World War II, Sobral tells us, the celebration of Portuguese foodways addressed itself to another gastro-hegemon, namely French cuisine, which predominated in restaurants and on banquet tables in Portugal (as in much of Europe). Ironically, the elite status of French cuisine was itself consolidated and (re)produced through the concerted defense of French food and agriculture by French food industries and the French government, in the face of the threat posed by more industrial food and agriculture sectors emerging in the New World. Thus, Portuguese gastro-nationalism imitated French gastro-nationalism even while challenging it. Through a detailed account of the history of Portuguese interest in regional and national culinary traditions, Sobral builds on Williams to remind us that celebration of the foods of any country is shaped not only by the city it challenges (in the case of Paris, “city” connoting another nation, or another “country”), but also by the cities in which, and through which, this challenge is expressed (in this case, Lisbon and smaller regional Portuguese cities) and by the (relatively) powerful voices emanating from within these cities in defense of urban, albeit provincial, interests.

16 • Food Between the Country and the City In Chapter 9, Sami Zubaida concurs that, historically, most images of the countryside have been produced by urban literati. While he traces the romanticizing, in Europe, of rurality and the natural simplicity of peasant foodways to the writings of eighteenth-century Physiocrats, he also identifies contrasting perspectives, such as the work of Karl Marx, who cast the peasantry as living a life of rural idiocy. Zubaida compares the former to contemporary, nationalist celebrations of peasant foodways in the Middle East, but the latter to the writings of Yusuf Al-Shirbini, a seventeenthcentury religious scholar from Dimyat, in the Nile Delta of Egypt, who studied in Cairo. Zubaida analyzes Al-Shirbini’s book, entitled in translation Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded—a satire describing the impoverished foodways of peasants along the small tributaries and marshes of the Nile hinterlands, written in the voice of a wretched peasant hungering for the foods of Cairo that the book describes in comparison. In contrast to works analyzed by Sobral, Al-Shirbini ridicules the peasantry’s unrefined and disgusting foods—punctuating accounts of rural foodways with praise to God for sparing city dwellers such horrors—even though, as Zubaida points out, the principal differences between rural and urban foods were the animal proteins, fats, and spices that city folk could afford and country folk could not. Notwithstanding its acerbic tone, Al-Shirbini’s portrait of the countryside, produced in the city, fostered a shared sense of identity among readers—mostly the Ottoman Empire’s Turkish elite—just as Portuguese authors’ more celebratory accounts of nineteenth-century rural foodways consolidated a sense of shared identity among a readership only marginally more inclusive. Echoing Williams, Zubaida concludes that, however rural people—especially the poor—have been depicted, they have not themselves generally painted these portraits, nor determined their tone. Following this, Maria Yotova examines the dynamic interplay of pastoral images, on the one hand, and the transformative technologies of the city and the state, on the other, in the historical development of yogurt as a Bulgarian national food. She recounts how the Socialist state built upon the ideas of Russian Nobel laureate Elie Metchnikoff—who attributed Bulgarian peasants’ good health and longevity to the lactobacilli in their yogurt—in making yogurt a working-class staple through distribution in factory canteens, schools, and hospitals. While celebrating peasant yogurt-making traditions, however, the Socialist regime also heralded the role of the state dairy industry in developing pure starter cultures that rendered yogurt safe for urban consumers. Ironically, while state-led industrialization undermined peasant yogurt making, state dairies depended upon peasant producers to (re)produce a diversity of robust starters that could be adapted to industrial use in order to make yogurt from a poor-quality national milk supply. Furthermore, the industry’s largest export market, Japan, embraced Bulgarian yogurt in response to branding emphasizing the Bulgarian rural idyll rather than superior Bulgarian technology. Yotova argues that the dynamic between these two discourses affords insights into the socioeconomic tensions defining Bulgaria to this day, as the nation seeks legitimacy in the European Union through both viable industries (including yogurt production) and

Introduction • 17 expressions of distinctive cultural identity (including peasant foodways). Although the use of peasant imagery (even by the largest industrial producers) in representations of yogurt as essential to Bulgarian national identity casts a dark shadow over an ever-more-marginalized peasantry, Yotova tells us, rural Bulgarians themselves participate in such mythmaking (to use Williams’s terminology)—grandmothers sell their homemade products in earthenware pots at regional yogurt festivals—as this affords them scarce opportunities to bolster self-esteem and to themselves inflect, albeit in small measure, a national identity to which they purportedly remain central. The volume concludes with Monica Truninger and Dulce Freire’s examination of representations of rural Mediterranean society and foodways in debates, over recent decades, about the Mediterranean diet. Advanced by nutritionists from the mid-1940s as a remedy for chronic illnesses associated with Northern European and North American diets, the Mediterranean diet—by definition composed largely of grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, olive oil, small portions of fish and meat, and wine and associated with convivial consumption—was inscribed by UNESCO in 2010 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. While the Mediterranean diet celebrates the foodways of relatively more rural Southern European, Middle Eastern, and North African countries often otherwise negatively compared with more productive, more prosperous, more urban neighbors to the north—and has consequently been embraced by some whose foodways it purportedly describes—the authors argue that the Mediterranean diet is mostly the discursive production of those beyond the region now seeking to appropriate it. Furthermore, Truninger and Freire tell us, whereas many in the Mediterranean countryside historically struggled to eat together regularly, owing to the demands of earning a living, and suffered from hunger and malnutrition, the industrialization of Mediterranean agriculture in recent years to meet the fastgrowing global demand for healthful Mediterranean foods poses new challenges to the countryside, concentrating wealth and undermining social systems and ecosystems in which the Mediterranean diet is ostensibly embedded. At the same time, the Mediterranean diet imposes a new homogeneity on urban consumers far and wide. Truninger and Freire’s account thus draws the volume’s key themes together not only by showing how images of the country and its relationship to cities, nations, regions, and the broader world are the product of interrelationships between these sites and scales (including those who broker and contest these), but also by highlighting (as Williams’s work encourages us to do) the roles these images potentially play in reshaping all of these sites—depending upon one’s perspective, either for good or for ill.

Acknowledgments The authors thank Catherine Peters for her assistance with bibliographic research for this introduction, as well as Elizabeth Hull and Emma-Jayne Abbots for their commentaries on an earlier draft.

Section I Of the Country and Its Food

–1– Conflicting Wine Narratives: “Pleasing Prospects” and the Struggles in the Construction of Alentejo Nuno Domingos

Since 2009, the Comissão Vitivinícola Regional Alentejana (CVRA, Regional Commission for Alentejo wine) has organized an annual fair in Lisbon, one of the major markets for wines from the southern Portuguese region of Alentejo. According to Dora Simões, the president of the CVRA, events such as this reinforce the place of Alentejo wines in domestic markets and give producers an opportunity to understand the evolution of urban tastes and trends.1 Similar fairs have also been held in core foreign markets, such as Angola and Brazil. I had the opportunity to attend the 2010 and 2011 Lisbon wine fairs. Producers and government institutions not only were selling wine in the city, but also were staging a particular representation of the region from which the wine came. The 2011 fair took place in a large temporary tent located on the premises of one of the capital’s main cultural centers, the Centro Cultural de Belém. Among the posters and advertisements that announced the permanent and new exhibitions at the center, no reference was made to the wine fair, as if this kind of event were beyond the purpose of a cultural center. However, inside the tent, the atmosphere was arty and sophisticated. Jazz music and special lighting conveyed a feeling of intimacy. Dozens of winemakers offered their wine brands and chatted with costumers. For the urban middle-class and upper-middle-class visitors, the event was the equivalent of going to a fashionable restaurant on a Friday evening. The event also attracted wine-tasting professionals, wine writers, and businesspeople. Around the central area, white sofas and small tables with table lamps helped to reproduce a comfortable middle-class living room. Known for its dry climate, hot summers, and yellow wheat field landscapes, the region of Alentejo was represented by several large photographs of modern vineyards, as well as by images of greener landscapes and lakes created by the large Alqueva dam. Producers and government institutions in the wine and tourism sectors also had their own brochures and promotional materials. These posters and leaflets were part of broader marketing strategies, which included advertisements in national and international newspapers and magazines, promotion on

– 21 –

22 • Food Between the Country and the City

Figure 1.1 Alentejo wines at the 2011 Lisbon wine fair. Photo by the author.

websites, promotional books sold with newspapers, and participation in other private and institutional campaigns. All these materials reinforced particular representations of Alentejo for urban consumers. *** In 1988, the first five geographical subregions of origin for Alentejo wines were created. Since then, wine production in Alentejo has increased dramatically, and the region’s wines have become known for certified quality. The recent history of Alentejo wine is a narrative of triumph. Wine production in the region grew thanks to cooperation between producers2 and government agencies whose economic plans were developed in accordance with specific European Union policies. Marketing was a key element of this commercial success. The establishment of regional “quality markers,” a dimension of European agricultural policies since the 1960s, helped to turn the designation Alentejo into a successful brand. After decades of feeble product differentiation, when price was almost the only quality indicator available for common wine—fortified wines being the most notable exception—Portuguese wine went through a process of certification involving diverse quality markers: geographical indications, wine varietal indication, winemaking expertise, and the whole array of more subtle meanings created by marketing, advertising, and other promotional

Conflicting Wine Narratives • 23 activities. In 1998, wine from the demarcated areas in Alentejo became identified by the general brand Alentejo.3 The region’s long-standing cereal-based latifúndio agricultural system adapted swiftly to the logic of capitalist wine production, matching a productive model typical of many areas that produce so-called New World wines, such as in the Americas and Australia. Businesses bought land that had been devoted to other crops and were allowed to convert the fields into modern vineyards (Simões 2006: 180). While some of the new landowners had previous experience in Alentejo’s network of cooperative cellars, most of the new winemakers came from outside the region to join an agricultural boom based on wine (Simões 2006: 180). In 2003, ViniPortugal, a private association created in 1997 that specialized in the promotion of Portuguese wines and whose members included the major business interests in the wine sector, named a commission responsible for evaluating the Portuguese wine industry and planning the main lines for its development. The commission’s report concluded that wine policies should focus on a few key areas: increasing exports, producing “quality wines,” limiting production by restraining the activities of small producers, investing in technological advances in the production phase, in wine tourism, and making a large investment in marketing and advertising (Monitor Group 2003). Alentejo is the region where these policies were the most successful.

The “New Pastoral” of Alentejo Wine In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams used English literature to uncover multiple and contrasting images of country and city that were shaped through centuries of social and economic change (Williams 1973). Such representations were the result of “structures of feeling” translated through the literary form. Williams argues that these structures of feeling, emerging as the result of particular power relationships, express specific perspectives on a social and historical situation. Visions of the countryside produced pastoral and counterpastoral images of country life. Presented differently throughout Williams’s work, from Preface to Film (1954) to Politics and Letters (1979), the ill-defined concept of structures of feeling aimed to go beyond the restrictions posed by static concepts in their attempt to capture the “lived experience and the feeling of ‘being in space’ ” (Pred 1983: 56). For Williams, art was always a primordial means to capture the structure of feeling of an era, a generation, a nation, or a class, as well as the emergence of historical and social change. As cultural oeuvres were linked with the social location where the work was produced, a work’s interpretation always had to be related to its specific conditions of production. Other sources and social forms are active and acknowledgeable as media through which the “structure of feeling” of a nation, class, generation, or gender can be translated. Promotional wine discourses and narratives, such as the ones advertising Alentejo wines, express particular structures of feeling, while at the same time sparking

24 • Food Between the Country and the City the collective imagination. In the case of Alentejo wine, this process is deeply associated with a “market relation” that connects the country, as a particular site where a commodity that has multiple meanings is produced, with the expectations of urban classes of consumers targeted by marketing strategies. This particular market relation is a vehicle for the creation of what could be called “banal regionalism.”4 Geographical indications, among other quality markers that emphasize regional identity, introduce a specific communication channel with consumers. Producers, not necessarily local, as the Alentejo case shows, use regional certification to add a symbolic value to their products that they hope will be turned into economic revenue. Quality markers promoted by European agricultural policies use local and regional cultural identities and local history as resources to single out specific commodities within a large and differentiated market. At the same time, these products shape a regional identity attractive to extra-local visitors, thereby promoting the tourism business. Cuisine is a crucial component of such strategies of local development, since the act of consuming a regional product is filled with symbolic values. As stated by Jacinthe Bessière: “[E]ating is the integration or adoption of the qualities of the food you eat. On the other hand, the eater becomes part of the culture” (Bessière 1998: 24). But what culture are we referring to? The meanings produced by this specific market exchange are not simply fair descriptors of an existing reality but have a crucial role in the definition of the local culture. According to Rosemary J. Coombe and Nicole Aylwin, regional indications and other quality markers can “reify, objectify, and socially construct cultural differences, rather than merely reflect a world of traditions” (Coombe and Aylwin 2011: 2029). The use of quality markers often tends to have the effect of encapsulating “place-based qualities within products, or constructing a new territorial identity for promoting tourism and investment” (Coombe and Aylwin 2011: 2030). Despite this pessimistic assessment, the authors argue that quality markers can provide counterhegemonic possibilities, since markets “are terrains of communicative exchange” (Coombe and Aylwin 2011: 2038) that can give small players chances to survive in a competitive world. These chances nevertheless depend on the intricate political economy of the practical and symbolic construction of a region, as some case studies have shown (Gade 2004; West and Domingos 2012). Despite their specific discourse and practice, counterhegemonic conceptions of local culture still depend on the market relationship between country and city, even if their networks of target consumers represent particular strata of the urban population, whose imagination of tradition might be in some ways distinct. By creating representations of history and society, commoditized uses of history and culture take part in wider struggles for regional construction (Bourdieu 1991) in which large- and medium-scale agricultural businesses and national and European policies are dominant forces. Therefore, the symbolic meanings produced by these images and discourses need to be interpreted against the background of a broader political economy. Focusing on the case of Alentejo wine, this chapter analyzes how wine discourses and narratives stemming from promotional materials targeted

Conflicting Wine Narratives • 25 at urban costumers consolidate a particular representation of Alentejo and how they convey a specific regional identity. It is the adjustment between marketing strategies and the imagination and expectation of urban consumers, an idealized type of structure of feeling, that becomes the power behind regional construction. Images and texts shown in private and governmental promotional campaigns tell a narrative of history and society and propose worldviews and categories that lead consumers to create their interpretations of local life. I argue that these wine discourses are partly responsible for a “new pastoral” that has become hegemonic. This new pastoral does not originate in artistic fields, nor does it express the talent of a writer, a painter, or a photographer or the program of an artistic movement; rather, it is the symbolic translation of broad economic and governmental projects that have the ability to shape social life. The material and symbolic conditions of expression of narratives and representations about Alentejo are today greatly unequal. The hegemonic pastoral is in stark contrast to other perspectives about the history and society of Alentejo, which can be considered as counterpastorals. I will look briefly for contrasting worldviews in academic research, novel plots, and oral testimony.

Wine in the Latifúndio Consolidated in the eighteenth century, the modern lafitúndio system is “a large agricultural and cattle-raising agricultural unit, made of one or (typically) several large farms (herdades) managed together as an economic unit, regionally termed lavoura. Given the large size and concentration of land holding, we can define this agrarian structure as a farming oligopoly” (Santos 2004: 23). In late-nineteenth-century Alentejo, cereal production and livestock breeding dominated the agricultural system. Vineyards, cultivated along with olive trees, occupied the poor soils of the Alentejo herdades (Picão 1983: 17; Roque do Vale et al. 1996: 13). Landowners typically hired rural workers or rented small tracts of the land to tenants (seareiros). The phylloxera and oidium crisis of the beginning of the twentieth century,5 as well as the “wheat campaign” of the 1930s—the effort, under dictator António de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo (new state) program, to achieve grain self-sufficiency—contributed to diminishing the amount of land in Alentejo devoted to vineyards (Roque do Vale et. al. 1996: 51) From the mid-1930s on, the Estado Novo intervened intensively in the wine sector, namely through the experts of the Junta Nacional do Vinho (JNV), created in 1936 and entrusted with improving the conditions of production and transforming the wine industry across the country. Overall, JNV policies not only had poor results, but they also mostly benefited large producers (Baptista 1993, Freire 2011). Through cooperative cellars, the government introduced measures to homogenize production, which ultimately resulted in the reduction of the diversity of local varieties of wine but failed to increase the overall quality or contribute to market differentiation (Simões 2006: 77). However, in the Alentejo region, the organization of cooperative

26 • Food Between the Country and the City cellars from the mid-1950s on introduced an innovative and decisive element for the further development of local wine production.6 Under the latifúndio system, wine was generally produced for household consumption and to supply taverns in local towns, but a few important production centers already existed. The village of Pias in the county of Serpa (part of the Alentejo region), where I conducted fieldwork, was one of the areas where there was some specialization in wine production. Pias wine was locally known for its quality. Alentejo’s rural workers, especially men, consumed wine on a daily basis, mainly after work, but wine was not part of their salaries as in other Portuguese regions (O’Neill 1984: 98). In 1960, rural workers made up to 83 percent of the working population of Baixo Alentejo (lower Alentejo) (Carvalho and Gomes 1973: 15). Wine was an important element in their diets, providing nutritional value that was important for their working activities. In 1960, a comparison between local diets and United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization nutrition charts showed that workers in five councils in Baixo Alentejo failed to consume the number of calories needed for the type of work that they did. Moreover, the workers’ diets were severely lacking in animal protein, calcium, and vitamins B2 and A. Based on bread, olive oil, and onions, local diets were nutritionally insufficient, and famine was a common and recurrent problem (Carvalho and Gomes 1973: 33–34). The latifúndio system started to change dramatically in the 1960s, when part of the working population left the Alentejo region to find jobs, in Portugal’s larger cities or abroad, in industry and services. This exodus put crucial pressure on the local production system (Baptista 2010: 55–56), and some landowners, the vanguard of capitalist agriculture, invested in mechanization. In the wine sector, the creation of large cooperative cellars reflected a certain specialization of production, as well as a degree of autonomy from the big latifúndios. Despite the exodus, in 1970, Alentejo’s three districts (Évora, Beja, and Portalegre) had almost 100,000 agricultural workers, more than 80 percent of the districts’ working population; three-quarters of the agricultural laborers were temporary workers (Baptista 2010: 113). The precarious experience of the temporary workers was the basis of a grassroots culture of social resistance that flourished in Alentejo. After the April 25, 1974, revolution, which brought down the Estado Novo regime, the region experienced what has been termed an agrarian reform. Workers occupied many of the herdades, which became collective farms. In 1975, 1,140,800 hectares of land were occupied and managed by 550 collective production units (Unidades Colectivas de Produção, or UCPs) that employed 72,000 workers (Carvalho 2004: 78). In the land occupied by UCPs, the number of permanent employees rose from 11,000 to 44,100 between 1975 and 1976 (Baptista 2010: 145). The UCP system eroded steadily after 1977, following the end of the so-called revolutionary period and the establishment of a stable demo-liberal state and the enactment of laws that allowed the restitution of land to former owners. Some UCPs struggled to maintain production levels due to a lack of land and technical expertise.7

Conflicting Wine Narratives • 27

Figure 1.2 Facilities of the UCP Esquerda Vencerá in Pias, today used by the local parish. Photo by the author.

The village of Pias had its own collective production unit. The UCP Esquerda Vencerá (the left will win) employed more than 600 workers on occupied lands. This was a significant portion of the local workforce, since Pias, like most towns in Alentejo, had already lost part of its population to Lisbon and its industrialized outskirts or to foreign countries. António Cachola,8 a local rural worker and winemaker who had worked on large herdades since the 1950s, remembers that the UCP once produced more than 3 million liters of wine, sold in barrels or casks, unbottled and undifferentiated, without the certification value given by the quality markers developed in the following decades in the region. Alentejo migrants, such as those from Pias, took their food habits to the city, especially to Lisbon’s outskirts, and they helped to spread awareness of Pias wine. These links between country and city increased exposure to Alentejo wine, but outside the middle-class circles that later would make the brand Alentejo widely known and advertised. Like most of the UCPs in Alentejo, the one in Pias was closed down in 1994. When António Cachola remembers that period when the UCPs were disbanded, he still says “when the Left was over.”

News Visions of the Old Latifúndio The representations of Alentejo in the promotional materials for local wines are not only images aimed at selling a beverage and promoting tourism. The dissemination of a new pastoral, a symbol of a new system of labor and social relations entailed by

28 • Food Between the Country and the City some of the government-sponsored and business-sponsored development plans for Alentejo, is a powerful agent for the naturalization of a specific perspective on history, culture, and society, producing visions of the past and present. Although the majority of the new medium- and large-scale wine producers come from outside Alentejo, a strong representation of an old local order based on family, property, and the natural landscape pervades the discourses and narratives of wine advertising. Despite recent attempts to modernize and sophisticate wine names and labels, a large percentage of Alentejo wine-label names relate to a universe of kings, marquesses, counts, barons, big landowners, church officials, and the like or refer to the large private estates where the wines are produced (montes, herdades9).10 Alentejo producers have followed a common strategy of communication, best exemplified by the châteaus of the Bordeaux region of France—a strategy intended to bring the distinction of the noble and ancient history of big manor houses and their surrounding lands to the wine business. For market purposes, an old, noble, and religious nomenclature was projected upon the geography of Alentejo. Most of the estates have coats of arms, recovered from the past, reinvented, or recently invented as a brand, a sign of quality. The appropriation of a genealogic memory (Gade 2004: 855–56; Sobral 1999: 274) is a noteworthy dimension of the marketing strategies. Wine tourist routes—widely advertised by private associations and government agencies in the tourism and local development sectors, working at the regional, national, and international levels—propose paths that conform to a specific representation of space and society. Though nomenclatures that invoke the past are common in the world wine market, the fact that in Alentejo a system of large properties prevailed lends a very particular symbolic constellation of meanings to this memory of history and society. Some wine advertisements depict manor houses and other surrounding structures. In the herdades and the montes, these manors were main elements of the modern latifúndio system. Most of the pictures in the wine-promotion discourses discussed in this chapter show a human-modified natural landscape, filled with beautifully organized vineyards and impressive cellars. Indeed, apart from the naturalization of the past, through which the countryside becomes a living and disciplined museum, these narratives are filled with images of modernity, technology, and capital. This can be seen through the particular attention given in wine promotional materials to different types of machines (bolting machines, filling machines, stalk-removing and crusher/stemmer machines, capping machines, filters, monoblocs, corking machines, labeling machines, and winepresses). Despite recurring references to symbols of an ancient era, the wine businessperson is a modern capitalist, not an old aristocrat. In these images of a new countryside, there is a strong representation of technological power and capital strength, which was able to change and organize the landscape. The wine businessperson organized landscape, the modern buildings erected—sometimes designed by renowned architects—as well as the technical expertise provided by enologists, who are occasionally portrayed as the wine’s “authors,” also translate this

Conflicting Wine Narratives • 29 new representation. In the case of Herdade Mayor, the new winemaking project of a major coffee producer in Campomaior, in northern Alentejo, authorship is the main link between product and purchaser. Álvaro Siza, the top international modernist architect who designed the cellar; Paulo Laureano, the enologist; and Rui Nabeiro, the entrepreneur, are symbols of the personalization of quality aimed at certain market segments. However, the region is always the key wine author. “Alentejo” emerges indisputably as the quality marker that establishes the connection with urban tastes and expectations: a peaceful land and an ancient terroir that is also a place of modern technology. Representations of modernity don’t harm the commoditized construction of tradition and popular culture. On the contrary, they sophisticate tradition. The countryside keeps its natural attributions (“wild,” “savage”), but it is also safe and hygienic. Such representations are translated into a discourse on wine as culture and culture as society. For instance, the discourse on Alentejo’s terroir produced by the regional commission for Alentejo wine not only mentions Alentejo’s topography, the diversity of soils and local wine varietals, but also creates an ideal image of a region that is known today for “its wine producers, the gastronomy, the natural and edified patrimony, the landscapes, the tranquility, and by its peaceful people.”11 Private wine traders use similar wordings: “All that is said about the Alentejo is true: light, unrelenting sun, dryness, endless undulating plains, cork trees and holm-oaks, wine and olive oil, bread sauces and lamb stews, coriander and purslane, big modern wines and old clay-pot fermented reds; good, hospitable folk.”12 Recently, in a specialized book on Alentejo wines distributed with a daily newspaper, the discourse on wine routes assumed the perspective of urban inhabitants; it is through their eyes and senses that the region is contemplated, expressing their “wish to find a region, to be in communion with nature, to find a form of tourism with a strong sensorial motivation. . . . Collecting direct and privileged information about wine, from the production methods to gastronomy, it is the point of departure to journeys of flavors and fragrances, adding to knowledge of regional history, culture, and traditions” (Cadernos do Vinho: Alentejo 2012: 41–42). In The Country and the City (1973: 121–126), Raymond Williams shows how eighteenth-century English painters eliminated peasants—and, more broadly, labor— from their representations of the countryside landscape. This conformed to the structures of feeling of the classes who were rationalizing the agricultural work. In the hegemonic representation of Alentejo winemaking, the local population is scarcely represented, and laborers are reduced to iconic images. Women wearing traditional clothing become an iconic local symbol, portraying a happy workforce harmonically integrated into the local society. Brochures show a modern and wealthy society, in which workers are mainly absent from the iconography or are represented as part of “tradition,” as part of the landscape. During their working hours but in their leisure time as well, workers are, in these images, performers of tradition, elements of a certain regional identity that is now a quality marker of a brand. The faces of the women

30 • Food Between the Country and the City are not shown in these pictures, as if the facial embodiment of their social belonging was harmful to a touristic perspective of the countryside The new pastoral created by wine discourses and narratives, in accordance with the economic aims of promoting Portuguese wines and tourism, thus tends to put out of sight the complexity of local lives, narrowing the existence of the different strata of the population and reducing them into a crystallized image of rural life and local culture. As Emma-Jayne Abbots shows in her chapter in this volume on Ecuador’s Chola Cuencana, there is much life and density behind the motionless image of an iconic representation. Aside from a specific role in the general portrait of Alentejo, all other elements of the workers’ existence seem to be superfluous or even harmful to this symbolic depiction. An emblematic facade hides the experience of the majority of the population of Alentejo. It is possible to partially access that particular experience through means of expression that produce alternative narratives to this hegemonic discourse. These counternarratives live in different forms; these include the crude representation given by statistics (unemployment rates, decreasing population) but also vivid oral accounts, local popular culture, literary works, scientific oeuvres, and all of the mediations that are able to represent the violence of a process of social and economic transformation and the way this was translated into structures of feeling.

Counternarratives Behind the hegemonic regional narrative, contrasting historical and contemporary representations of Alentejo reveal different experiences and structures of feeling that can be interpreted as counterpastoral visions of regional history and identity. Contrary to the serene tone of the new pastoral narratives that are key aspects of marketing strategies, Alentejo has a history of lasting social conflicts, namely conflicts over land between landowners and rural workers in the context of the latifúndio system’s social iniquity. From this unequal power structure rose very specific senses of place, which are at the heart of what we can call local culture. These counterpastoral visions come into view in different fields of activity, which determine their scale of expansion and the networks of people who share and enact them. These fields of activity include the research on the history of Alentejo and rural societies conducted, beginning in the 1930s, by a group of agronomists under the aegis of the Instituto Superior Agrário,13 as well as José Cutileiro’s pioneering ethnography of an Alentejo village (Cutileiro 1971) that portrayed a dramatically unequal world, a counterpastoral to the more idyllic countryside visions portrayed in the works of other prominent Portuguese researchers (Leal 2006).14 Popular culture was also an axis of these counterpastoral images. Oral traditions, songs, and poetry reproduced feelings and conditions. Cultural narratives were disseminated more swiftly through technology that allowed the mechanical reproduction of the works. The writers and singers of

Conflicting Wine Narratives • 31 protest songs helped to create cultural symbols of resistance, and the Alentejo case was depicted as an important example of defiance to fascism. The lyrics to the song that symbolically announced the 1974 revolution, “Grândola Vila Morena” by José Afonso, tell the story of the town of Grândola in Alentejo, where “the people rule.” This song is part of a wider cultural movement, notably close to the Portuguese Communist Party, which helped create a heroic vision of the struggles of the people of Alentejo, both before and after the revolution. In this post-revolutionary period, such narratives, which were enmeshed in urban popular culture, became hegemonic in the large field of media popular culture. Literature, in particular the novels written in the context of the Portuguese neorealistic movement, approximately from the late thirties to the late fifties, is probably the area where counterpastoral representations have been most influential. In these novels, which were commonly accompanied by images created by neorealist painters and illustrators such as Lima de Freitas and Manuel Ribeiro de Pavia, Alentejo’s natural landscape often inherits the properties of the social situation; it is, therefore, a literary device meant to translate the experiences of local populations, especially those at the bottom of the social scale. Descriptions of nature—land, trees, and pathways—are embedded with historical commentary. In Manuel da Fonseca’s 1958 novel Seara de Vento (harvest of wind), the way the wind blows through the harvest, rather than revealing a harmonious landscape, is a constant reminder that something is wrong and must be changed. Contrary to the image of the landscape as a place of leisure and consumption, these novels show the experiences and feelings of the people who were hostages of the land. Economically dependent and without a formal means of political expression, laborers, in these works, view the landscape as a landscape of serfdom. Although not a neorealist novel, José Saramago’s 1980 work Levantado do Chão (later published in English as Raised from the Ground; Saramago 2012) gives a compelling view of the latifúndio, portrayed as a kind of Goffmanian total institution (Goffman 1968). The book begins: “There’s never been any shortage of landscape in the world” (Saramago 2012: 1). However, as the narrative quickly makes clear, the land comes with people, and the people belonged to the land, as if it was God’s wish or, more precisely, as if it was the latifúndio system’s demand: “God’s wisdom, beloved children, is infinite: there is the latifúndio and those who will work it, go forth and multiply. Go forth and multiply me, says the latifúndio” (Saramago 2012: 4). The novel goes on to tell the story of a workforce raised and reproduced in the latifúndio system and trapped in it, people whose only chance of moving was from herdade to herdade. In the process of creating counterpastoral images, engaged authors, regardless of their literary merits, chose to focus on inequalities and struggles, an option that sometimes narrowed the variety of local experiences and the diversity of structures of feeling and their connections to place. However, novels and other accounts gave voice to perspectives and memories of history and society that are absent from contemporary hegemonic discourses such as the ones given in wine and tourist historical narratives. The fictional approach to

32 • Food Between the Country and the City the lived experience of the lower strata of the population of Alentejo, by far the vast majority of the region’s people, helps to create an alternative locus from which history can be told. In contrast to the static representation of society present in contemporary wine-related discourses on history and on current Alentejo society, people in these literary visions are active: they suffer, they work, they struggle, and they disagree. Like the pastoral literary modalities identified by Williams in The Country and the City, which were created by writers whose experience of the countryside did not include working the land, this new pastoral of Alentejo omits lived experiences and structures of feeling from its image of tradition and local culture. The images of rural workers (mostly women) used in wine-industry promotional materials, which depict them as a domesticated workforce in a peaceful society, contrast significantly with those included in neorealist novels and other cultural forms set in the period of the Estado Novo and in the descriptions of the agrarian-reform process that followed the revolution of April 25, 1974. A set of expectations and a particular worldview emerged from rural workers’ common experience, paradigmatically exemplified by the precarious experience of the temporary worker, that seemed to be fulfilled by the postrevolutionary agricultural changes. Rural workers wished for a more egalitarian existence, free of the leash of bosses and foremen, and left-wing political organizations built upon these grassroots. The postrevolutionary agrarian reforms had an impact not only on working conditions, but also on the appropriation of the local space, which included new uses for rural lands, as well as villages and cities (Baptista 2010: 150). These changes were then strengthened by local and national government intervention, which allowed the construction of infrastructure and public equipments (Baptista 2010: 152).

Tavern Narratives Counterpastoral narratives on Alentejo history and society can also be found in the interviews I conducted in Pias with former rural workers. These people shared not only their memories of working and leisure times, but also a particular vision of Alentejo. Taverns were central in both neorealist novels, where they often had a leading role, and some of the workers’ memories. Traditionally, foremen headed to taverns when they needed to hire workers or to negotiate labor conditions with them (Picão 1983: 62). In towns with few public spaces, taverns were places where workers had the opportunity to gather and talk and to develop their own narratives on history and society. Drinking wine also helped them to create memories of work and social life (given the inebriant character of wine). Sites of controlled sociability, taverns were an element of the latifúndio social system, places where the money landlords spent on labor was returned to them twice, first when the was wine bought and second when the nutritional value of the wine consumed gave workers more strength to do their jobs.

Conflicting Wine Narratives • 33 Despite the fact that wine consumption (if carried to excess) could be potentially harmful in the long-term for workers’ health, ability to work, and family life, drinking wine was promoted by the policies of the Estado Novo, as part of the regime’s protection of the agricultural and industrial economic interests behind the wine business. But if the consumption of alcohol was economically important, the contexts of drinking were potentially harmful. Alcohol was the reason behind social gatherings, but it could also lead to political subversion. A world of manly complicity and political encounters, taverns were also reported to be a focus of alcoholic perdition. In neorealist novels, authors sometimes adopted a moralistic view of taverns, with alcohol seen as a hindrance to political struggle and to work efficiency. My interviewees in Pias had, on the contrary, a rather nostalgic and hedonistic point of view about taverns and the camaraderie to be found there. In the 1950s, Guilhermino Ramos, also known as Pica-chouriços (Chorizochopper),15 inherited his father’s tavern in the village of Pias. Currently run by Guilhermino’s son, it is one of three surviving taverns in a village that once had more than forty. Guilhermino, himself a rural worker who helped in the family business upon returning from the herdades, was a privileged witness to the social life of Pias during the latifúndio days. Normally open from after work until 10:30 P.M., the tavern, he recalls, was generally visited by workers after dinner, and sometimes the police had to force them to leave at closing time. Taverns were under constant surveillance, even more so after the creation of the first rural companies of the new National Republican Guard in 1911. These rural companies were established in Alentejo with the clear goal of controlling the fields and protecting the latifúndio system (Cerezales 2011: 221). After the establishment of the Estado Novo regime, the Republican Guard was a key force defending the property of large landowners. Fearing Republican Guard action, tavern owners in Pias tried to avoid any discussions in their taverns about politics. Collective discussions in public spaces were not allowed, including outside taverns. Manuel Vitória, a Pias rural worker who migrated to Switzerland in the 1960s, remembers the time he spent in the taverns, a ritual of local mobility that was part of daily life, as were all the activities that sustained a radically unequal social system.16 The political situation worsened in the 1960s when the political police (the Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado, or PIDE) was pursuing members of the Communist Party. As mentioned by Manuel Vitória: “They were always looking for propaganda pamphlets, despite the fact that most people were illiterate.” What kinds of narratives were told in the taverns during drinking times? Guilhermino remembers discussions about work and working conditions, the violence and surveillance of rural foremen, the bad pay for most jobs, the precarious present, and the lack of future prospects. But he also remembers discussions about the “art” of the rural work—about how local knowledge was essential to perform certain tasks in the fields. In addition, rural workers often expressed their own views about all the natural, human, and material features that conditioned their work and determined, to a large extent, their experience of place. And of course, as Guilhermino mentioned,

34 • Food Between the Country and the City taverns were places where men drank “until they dropped,” as “there was nothing else to do. In those times people would seriously drink. Some guys would drink a liter and a half at night. They wouldn’t drink more because the salaries were low. They paid at the end of the week, usually on Saturday, when they got paid. Part of the salary went to taverns.” For the rural workers with whom I talked, beautiful and organized landscapes and a peaceful society were replaced by social geographies of misery and injustice. Despite the intrinsic violence of the productive framework, these narratives show other features of a local structure of feeling, namely the process through which the workers developed their understanding of the local world, something that was inherently related to the development of working abilities. Representations of the local space were intrinsically linked to labor necessities; only marginally were they constructed as leisure settings. Landscapes and pathways, the rhythm of the seasons, perceptions of weather changes and how they impact on the scenery were interlinked for workers with the necessities of finding a job that would allow them to survive. So visibly distinct from the pathways proposed to urban dwellers by contemporary wine and gastronomic tourist routes, workers’ itineraries were mostly working itineraries, from herdade to herdade. Former rural laborers with whom I spoke in Pias discussed the surrounding areas in terms of the old herdades, the landowners (who were mainly absentee), the surveillance system created by the foremen, their own memories of work, their specific knowledge about rural work, and the time they spent in taverns, the taverns being focal points in these local itineraries.

Contemporary Counternarratives The representations of well-being in promotional wine-related discourses and narratives do not seem to be shared by most of the people living in Alentejo. Their sense of one’s place seems to be at odds with the portrait of local community and local culture imposed by the commoditization of a regional representation. In recent decades, a large percentage of the population has chosen to leave. Demographic and economic data show a rapid decrease in population. Alentejo had 819,337 inhabitants in 1981 and 757,190 in 2011 (Instituto Nacional de Estatística 2011: 7). It is the Portuguese region with the fastest decrease in population in that time period, and the region with the highest proportion of the population (24.3 percent) over the age of 65 (Instituto Nacional de Estatística 2011: 10). Despite the population decline, unemployment rates continue to rise. As Guilhermino Ramos recalled, taverns began to close when people migrated to Switzerland, France, and Germany in the 1960s. More recently, the bureaucratic “siege” created by national and European Union laws was fatal for most of the few remaining family businesses. This siege—increasing paperwork, new taxes, and new sanitary procedures—was beyond what these businesses could handle. The president of Pias’s parish council is pessimistic about the town’s future. He is saddened

Conflicting Wine Narratives • 35 by the fact that Pias had 8,000 inhabitants in 1950s, but today there are fewer than 3,000. More than half of the local population is retired and depends on state pensions; 40 percent of the working population is unemployed. As in the 1960s, emigration to France, Switzerland, and other European countries is increasing. In most of Pias’s streets, as in many other Alentejo villages, a significant number of houses are for sale, while other are abandoned and falling into decay. Other recent case studies show a similar situation (Carmo 2007): high unemployment, an aging population, migration and sharp rural population declines, low levels of education, and a concentration of the population in the biggest local urban centers, especially those in which public services are concentrated. The gradual disappearance of taverns became a metaphor for the end of the latifúndio system, recently replaced by a new productive structure that is highly mechanized and not labor intensive. Taverns depended on the rhythms of a productive system that framed the rhythms of life. Nowadays, rural workers are only a minority of the local working population.17 They are no longer the main consumers of wine, and wine is no longer a key element of the population’s diet. Although vineyards and olive plantations produce the main crops in the area around Pias, only a small number of workers is needed. Major winemakers need only seven to ten permanent employees, and during harvest time, they hire around twenty

Figure 1.3 Manuel Vitória at a tavern in Pias with Guilhermino Ramos, the tavern’s owner. Photo by the author.

36 • Food Between the Country and the City temporary workers for a period of one to three months. For Pias’s young workforce, especially the best educated, rural work is below their social aspirations. The president of the parish council feels there is nothing he can do about this situation. Maria Palma, a retired rural employee, said that there is no future for Pias. “Of course, things are better now than before the 25th of April,” she acknowledged, “when we labored under continuous surveillance” as foremen would be constantly monitoring workers’ productivity. Maria told me about her son, who was forced to move to the nearby city of Moura to pursue his studies because schools had been closed down, and then left permanently for Lisbon when he was sixteen. “He became a locksmith, married there, and now doesn’t want to know about this life.” Maria Palma showed great concern for local young women: “The girls jump from their studies to the olive work. They have degrees but earn a mere pittance.”18 The village earns little from the wine industry. Today, machines and the capital to buy machines are at the heart of wine production. Capital is also crucial to national and international marketing strategies. The Sociedade Agrícola de Pias, Pias’ largest producer, is investing heavily in marketing and advertising, as the son of the owner admitted, in an attempt to adapt its traditional image to the aesthetic tastes of urban consumers. Sales abroad have increased, including in China. The local large producers seem to share the idea that local markets are exhausted.19 The second-largest winemaker in Pias (Monte da Capela) is mainly focused on foreign markets; more than half of its production goes abroad, Angola and Brazil being the most important destinations. The disconnect between the production sites and villages such as Pias is also visible in the social distance between wine businesspeople and the village. There is hardly any interaction between these landholders and the local populations, or any overlap in their habits and lifestyles. The type of wine drunk and the environment that involves wine consumption are fair indicators of the prevalent class differences. The agronomist and rural historian Fernando Oliveira Baptista has accurately demonstrated the ongoing separation between the country and agricultural work in Portugal and the multiplication of interdependencies between country and city (Baptista 1996; Baptista 2010: 13). Rural society became largely autonomous from agricultural work and more dependent on urban consumers. In Alentejo, with its new capitalist agriculture, large private landholdings survived. However, mechanization and the new division of labor made old forms of local agricultural knowledge obsolete. Baptista shows how the arts and the mysteries of winemaking in Portugal, which relied on bodily contact with the grapes, were replaced by the logic of the machine (Baptista 1996: 44). Villages such as Pias, in the past sites of the reproduction of a rural proletariat, survive economically largely on the basis of government pensions and precarious, but still effective, social-welfare benefits, as well as some employment by government bodies, such as the local councils. Mechanization was only one dimension of the rationalization of production. The rationalization of work has included the hiring of immigrants during the harvest season; some of them, not in the country legally,

Conflicting Wine Narratives • 37 accept very low wages. The miserable working and living conditions of Romanian migrants working for olive businesses in Pias (a lack of food, among other things) are included in local contemporary narratives by parish council members and the former rural workers.

The Logic of Markets Costa, Candeias e Godinho is one of the oldest wine cellars in Pias. It is located in the town’s center. For decades, it has been producing for the local market, but because it owned only a small tract of land, grapes were bought from smaller producers. Manuel Candeias, who has worked in wine production for more than forty years, since the sixties, is one of the partners in Costa, Candeias e Godinho. He remembers that “people would come after the olive works to have a glass of wine. In the sixties, the firm produced 200 carboys per day for the taverns.”20 Guilhermino Ramos, the tavern owner, told me he remembers selling Costa, Candeias e Godinho’s wine. In those times, the winemaker was named Silvestre, after the firm’s founder. When I asked Águeda Palma, Costa, Candeias e Godinho’s chief administrative officer, about the future of the business, she predicted that it would probably not last for many more years.21 The reasons for this prediction are easy to guess. Dependent on local markets and on some small groceries and restaurants in the urban areas to which people from Alentejo migrate to, producers such as Costa, Candeias e Godinho are unable to deal with the decrease in population and also with changing habits of consumption, as beer has replaced wine as the most-consumed alcoholic beverage. More importantly, they are unable to access the large supermarkets that are major players in the wine business. Access to major retailers’ store shelves requires a scale of production large enough to allow the price levels demanded by urban supermarkets. At the same time, smaller producers lack the knowledge and capital to add to their wines the quality markers demanded by the differentiation of consumption or to apply for European Union funds. Paradoxically, it seems that the local entrepreneurs, whose families either came from Pias or had been in the village for decades, are absent from the local culture and the local community as represented in wineindustry promotional wine discourses. They are certainly outsiders in the context of new economic projects for the region. Manuel Candeias talks quietly about the inevitable decline of his firm. At the same time, he remembers the old traditional ways of production, which are disappearing. Today, he says, technology can manipulate everything, and it is impossible to return to the old local wine, which was sweeter and had a higher alcohol content— the concrete effects of Alentejo’s hot, long, and dry summers. Guilhermino also stated that today the wine is different, it “doesn’t have the time to be properly flavored. Everything is done by the machine. It loses a lot. In those times, the flavor stayed in your mouth. Today everything is filtered.” António Cachola, the rural worker who

38 • Food Between the Country and the City

Figure 1.4 Pias’s abandoned train station. Photo by the author.

became a specialist in winemaking working on the properties of Pias’s biggest landowner, agreed with these statements and concluded: “The wine is not the same.” Even local knowledge and tastes seem at odds with local culture as embodied in the new wine pastoral.

Conclusion Rural workers’ structures of feeling convey what Goffman labeled a “sense of one’s place” (Goffman 1959: 17), a powerful dimension of what Williams referred to as “living experience,” the “whole way of life” (Williams 1965: 63–65). This practical consciousness, this habitus, should be at the heart of any definition of local culture, but it is absent from the new pastoral, whose logic excludes memories and past or present experiences. The structure of feeling of a large proportion of Alentejo’s population was historically embedded in a social and cultural space, where power relations gave a particular meaning to daily experience: working paths, objects, food consumption, affective relations, and family ties. The new pastoral that arises from the representation of Alentejo in wine-marketing strategies is a sign of the new interdependencies between country and city, but it is

Conflicting Wine Narratives • 39 also a powerful agent of a broad economic transformation. Villages such as Pias, centers of important wine-producing areas, have suffered not only from a dramatic population decrease, but also from the disappearance of public services—schools, health centers, administrative services, and the like—some of them gained only after the 1974 revolution. Retired rural workers still think that life is better now than before the revolution, because now, as one of them told me, they have don’t have a boss. Youngsters in Alentejo, however, will have to face unemployment and either migrate or struggle for rare job opportunities, mostly in unskilled jobs—as domestic servants or masons. There are many conflicting representations of Alentejo. In the 1930s, the Estado Novo created the portrait of Alentejo as Portugal’s barn, after the wheat campaign launched in 1929 aimed to achieve national self-sufficiency in grain production. The political opposition, organized around the Communist Party, while accepting this productive image, demanded a new social organization. An agrarian reform was then claimed after the 1974 revolution—the collectivization of land would be the first step for change, and the political imagery of this new Alentejo is described in both written words and images. The large Alqueva dam, which allowed for widespread irrigation after it was completed in the late 1990s, became one of the iconic symbols of the desired social change; its construction was historically requested as an axis of a new productive system. The neorealist movement gave a different tone to the image of an unequal society, and in the 1980s, José Saramago’s Raised from the Ground portrayed the latifúndio system as a Goffmanian total institution that produces people and frames all their lives. The sense of social inequality is also present in some of the works on the history of Alentejo, such as José Cutileiro’s A Portuguese Rural Society. The social consequences of the recent process of change, which determines the emergence of a rural capitalism in Alentejo, is less well covered by literature or other representations. Unlike the rural proletariat, today’s masons, housecleaners, and migrants fail to offer the political left a proper image of a revolutionary political subject and fail to provide artists with a proper background for their works. Politically, the claim for a new agrarian reform is today very hesitant. However, a new image of a wealthy society in southern Portugal is widely promoted by tourism campaigns and by the wine industry. From these representations emerge the naturalization of the past and the invention of a new society to be sold to urban consumers. The emptiness of the southern fields, a characteristic that is so present in the wine-related discourses and narratives on Alentejo, is the translation of an idealized urban structure of feeling, common to certain urban social strata for whom the expectations of leisure are based on escape from city life. Locally, for the larger part of the population, such emptiness is a sign of the prevalence of big properties, a closed landscape, an absence of jobs, and ultimately, an absence of local people, who have been attracted by the city and are superfluous to the construction of a new local culture.

–2– Embodying Country-City Relations: The Chola Cuencana in Highland Ecuador Emma-Jayne Abbots

The people from the campo [countryside] have simple hearts, and now they have this one opportunity to do something big, something different. But I don’t want the same things. I’m from Cuenca, from the city; there is a big difference between the campo and the city—a very big difference.–Luisa1

The Chola Cuencana is the most-celebrated folkloric figure in the greater Cuenca region of the southern Ecuadorian Andes. Seemingly originating in the countryside but ever-present in the city, the Chola Cuencana embodies relationships between the two sites, where her romanticized image—and real-life counterparts—are instantly recognized by their uniform of polleras (brightly colored skirts), Panama hats, and plaited hair and by their baskets of fresh produce. In this chapter, I explore the tensions between idealized representations of the Chola Cuencana and the lived experience of rural women, and I ask how the reproduction, in both the country and the city, of the ideal type model can inform our understanding of social relations—not only between urbanites and the peasantry, but also within the country itself. In particular, I am interested in examining how these representations are being challenged and/ or reinforced by the changing food, dress, and labor practices of real-life cholas, as well as the effect of these changing practices on established social hierarchies premised not only on country-city relations, but also on class, race, and gender. Hence, I am treating the chola as a mechanism through which to understand how ruralness is imagined in both the city and the country, and my aim is to tease out how both domains are relationally constructed, invoked, and (re)produced. Cholas, wearing traditional dress and with wheelbarrows and stalls piled high with vegetables and fruits, are viewed by urban-dwelling expatriates and middle-class professionals alike as living, breathing embodiments of rural simplicity. For expatriates particularly, many of whom have migrated to Cuenca in search of a simple life (Abbots 2013), cholas indicate that their aspirations for “simple food” are being realized: “Isn’t it great?” Quentin exclaimed, “The peasant women with the baskets and the wheelbarrows of fruit—it’s like going back to the old days, you know, when you bought food directly off the people who grew it.” He was not alone in making these

– 41 –

42 • Food Between the Country and the City remarks, and in other conversations about “good” food, my attention was consistently drawn to “those women who come in from the country and sell the stuff straight off their land.” Furthermore, cholas were commonly invoked as material evidence of the abundant availability of fresh, clean produce in the city and discursively constructed as purveyors of homegrown, simple foods. As such, the chola is a marker of food quality in the city, and as I discuss below, her dress and produce suggest a campo “authenticity” that not only adds value to her wares, but also (re)situates her in the rural domain; food and costume thereby mutually reinforce each other in semiotically reaffirming an imagined countryside. However, these symbols do not circulate of their own accord; they are mediated through, and overlaid onto, the bodies of lower-class rural women, who are further positioned within a broader framework of purity and pollution (Douglas 2002). Purveyors of simple food, then, not only come from a purer and simpler place, but they also come from one that is “othered” by being situated further back in time than the self (Fabian 1983)—a process suggested by Quentin’s reference to “going back to the old days.” As such, I demonstrate how small-scale food production and the chola become entangled within, and embody, an imagining of the countryside as a clean, traditional, noncomplex and nonindustrial place that is produced in dialogue and juxtaposed against constructions of the city as modern and complex.

The Chola Cuencana as a Regional Icon: Embodying Mestizaje In Ecuador, as in other parts of Latin America, the noun cholo (chola in the feminine form) literally refers to a racial category that describes a person of both Spanish and indigenous heritage (Roitman 2009: 120; Weismantel 2001: xxv). In this sense, cholo is synonymous with mestizo (mixed race), yet the expression is also relative. Roitman (2009: 123) notes that it takes on “severely different meanings,” which can carry both negative and positive connotations, and Meisch (1998: 254) explains that cholo is an insulting term across most of the Andes but less so in Azuay (the province in which Cuenca is located), where it refers more to cultural practices than race. Cholo, then, is neither politically nor morally neutral, and its meaning is context-specific and spatially informed. It is also gendered, and when applied to women across Bolivia, Peru, and the Ecuadorian Andes, it commonly designates mestiza market traders.2 These women not only are located in the real world, selling agricultural and artisanal produce, but also appear as stock characters in an array of regional narratives, from folklore and literature to tourist brochures and commodified souvenirs (Weismantel 2001: xxi). However, while there are parallels and synergies between chola narratives across and within nations, the cholas in each narrative have their own political economy and historical trajectories, as well as their distinct symbolism, and the Chola Cuencana is no exception. In Cuenca, the female

Embodying Country-City Relations • 43 mixed-race market trader is an iconic regional symbol. But she is also situated within broader processes of nation-building and mestizaje (racial and cultural blending) and is, hence, not only embedded into, and produced by, the dynamics of regional and national politics, but also entangled within city-country, gendered, and ethnic relations. The feminized image of the Chola Cuencana dominates popular culture in the greater Cuenca region. Schoolchildren learn the words to the poem “Chola Cuencana, Mi Chola,” penned by the national poet Ricardo Darquea Granda in 1947, and can recite verbatim from a young age its romantic lines, which include: “With your elegance and grace you evoke Andalucía; But in all your senses Cuenca’s culture flowers.” Versions of the popular song set to Darquea Granda’s words are also seemingly constantly played in homes, shops, bars, restaurants, buses, and taxis. Likewise, music videos, which range from professional recordings to shaky, handheld captures of intimate gatherings, are produced and uploaded to an array of websites, such as YouTube. Material representations of the Chola Cuencana also reside in the city. A large Chola Cuencana statue sits on a major thoroughfare, and a diorama in the city museum depicts these “typical” chola women. The Chola Cuencana is also commodified, fetishized, and marketed. Chola Cuencana images circulate on postcards, tourist websites, and a seemingly infinite array of souvenirs and artifacts, including fabric dolls, ceramics, key rings, woven bags, wall hangings, cushions, clocks, paintings, and wall plaques. Finally, the chola is enacted: brought to life in the beauty pageants that take place in rural communities and culminate in the final contest in Cuenca, as well as by dance groups that perform in the national theater and are, on occasion, bused out to community events and cultural fiestas for the entertainment of locals and tourists alike. Yet, although ostensibly timeless and traditional, and purportedly reflective of the physical appearance and cultural practices of mixed-race, lower-class women in the region, the Chola Cuencana figure also comes to us as a modern invention (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), albeit one that has its roots in her real-life counterparts and their social histories. Consequently, rather than using the concept of invention to describe the processes through which the Chola Cuencana is constructed as traditional, I prefer to invoke Raymond Williams’s (1977) concept of “ selection,” as it draws attention to the ways traditions are constructed from existing cultural and social formations, as well as showing us that traditions are those practices and meanings selected for emphasis at the cost of excluding and diminishing others. Moreover, challenging the neglect of tradition in Marxist thought, Williams further argues that tradition is “an actively shaping force” and the “most evident expression of the dominant and hegemonic pressures and limits” (Williams 1977: 115) and, as such, indicates the power dynamics of the selection process. This argument is crystallized by Mary J. Weismantel, who states that “folkloric figures such as the Chola Cuencana may claim premodern and popular roots, but their current incarnations are modern artifacts, promulgated by the bourgeoisie for their own ends” (Weismantel 2003: 327).

44 • Food Between the Country and the City A closer historical investigation of the objects in which the chola is dressed does indeed start to illuminate the processes of selection, as well as the social values and relations on which it is premised. Ann Pollard Rowe (1998: 281) explains that pollera skirts are of eighteenth-century Spanish origin and argues that their prevalence indicates a greater susceptibility to the influence of Spanish costume than is found in other regions. However, the skirt is not a static import, and Weismantel (2001: 106) notes that although it is a traditional item, “the pollera is highly susceptible to trends and fashion fads.” Moreover, the iconic Panama hat, which signals Cuenca’s place at the center of a once-flourishing hatmaking industry, does not derive from an organic development of rural artisan skills and commerce. Rather, hat production stems from a nineteenth-century social reformist agenda aimed at molding the impoverished, “immoral,” and increasingly rebellious peasant class into economically productive—and socially docile—citizens (Pribilsky 2007). As Jason Pribilsky explains, the Cuencana Panama hat industry is intrinsically entangled in the liberal revolution of 1895 and the construction of the modern nation-state. It is at this historical juncture that “the great leap of modernization of the state and society” (Ayala Mora 2005: 123) is understood to have occurred; thus, Panama hats, in contrast to their traditional connotations today, were symbolic of modernity, industry, and advancement. The initiation of hat production thereby reflects both urban anxieties and the “deliberate social engineering of the new liberal state” (Pribilsky 2007: 59). Further entwined with these national and, to some degree, pan-Latin American processes are regional tensions, as the political elites of Cuenca, fearful of the rising power of the capital, Quito, and concerned about being drawn into a homogenous nation, sought to assert a distinct Cuencano identity (Weismantel 2001: 25). It is not solely the Chola Cuencana’s dress that is the product of Spanish colonialism, Ecuadorian nationalism, and regional politics. Her mestiza body is also emblematic of a nation-building process and its “racialized imaginative geographies” (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996: 111). As Ronald Stutzman (1981) notes, miscegenation has always been the foundation stone of the nation, and following the rise of a revolutionary nationalist government in 1972, the state consciously embarked on building a mestizo nation, of which incorporation and acculturation were central tenets. Yet, white supremacy masqueraded under this inclusive culture of ethnic homogenization (Whitten 1981: 15), and a state-sponsored culture of blanqueamiento (cultural whitening) relegated the indigenous and “noncivilized” to the rural margins, while the white population was brought into the “civilized” urban core. Across the Andes, cities and civility have long been associated with Europe (Weismantel 2001: 19). Echoing the arguments of Williams (1973), this city-country dynamic was underpinned by a clear teleology, in which it was envisioned that the indigenous rural classes would desirably, and inevitably, progress from a backward condition to one of dynamic modernity, as they were drawn from the peripheries into the white urban center of the nation (Stutzman 1981). The result, as Sarah Radcliffe and Sallie

Embodying Country-City Relations • 45 Westwood explain, is a “commonsense” understanding that rural life is indigenous and backward whereas city life is white and educated. Race is consequently spacialized and temporalized, and space and time are racialized (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996: 111; see also Salomon 1981). Straddling the country and the city, the mixed-race Chola Cuencana crystallizes these topographical imaginations, in that she embodies the modern, progressive mestizo nation (the city) and provides a reminder of the dangers of the precolonial indigenous domain (the country). She is, thus, an inherently paradoxical figure, in that she simultaneously symbolizes a vision for the future while also being firmly rooted in the past. As Weismantel concludes (2003: 331): “[P]opular and elite, white, indigenous and black Ecuador all jostled together in one iconic body, which was always threatening to come apart at the seams.” The Chola Cuencana consequently appears to come to us a product of the urban imagination (Williams 1973). Yet, Williams further highlights the multiple, often contradictory, values laid over the country and city; conceptions of the city as modern and the country as backward are Janus-faced. As I aim to demonstrate, cities can be envisioned as clean and sterile, but they can also be experienced as crowded, unsafe, dangerous, and polluting. From this vantage point, the country is constructed as simple and pure. As indicated by Quentin’s comment above, anxieties over rural backwardness can readily be transformed into nostalgia for a lost and simple past. Throughout the rest of the chapter, I look to draw out these tensions, as I explore the ways in which the country and city are subjected to multiple, often contradictory, valuations by both urbanites and rural dwellers. The Chola Cuencana, I suggest, brings out the best and worst of both sites; she is romantically constructed in narratives as pure and simple, but these valued characteristics quickly become dirty and backward when she moves out of place. Neither indigenous nor white, rural dweller nor urbanite, she occupies an ambiguous space on the margins. In some respects, it may be tempting to consign the Chola Cuencana to the folkloric domain from whence she came and to regard my untangling of her imagery as a somewhat semantic exercise. Yet, her imagery continues to be politically salient: folkloric images have an uncanny habit of refusing to remain hermetically sealed within self-contained historical narratives and their material representations. Rather, as Deborah Poole (1997) has demonstrated, visual images, particularly those that are racially inscribed, are instrumental in informing power relations between social groups, and the image world and the real world should not be regarded as distinct entities but as mutually constituent. Moreover, Michael Kearney (1996) has illuminated the interplay between the nominal and the political, arguing that symbolic representations of the peasantry—if accepted, validated, and, in turn, naturalized— create a mold through which members of this social group are viewed. Thus, images and narratives are broken out of their folkloric domains and projected onto people in the form of stereotypes, to which specific social actors are expected to perform. The question of which actors are projecting and which are subject to the projections takes

46 • Food Between the Country and the City us back to Williams’s assertion that tradition, and its associated images and narratives, serves the interests of the dominant class (Williams 1977: 116). I also look to build on Weismantel’s argument that the Chola Cuencana narrative “is promulgated by the bourgeoisie for their own ends” (2003: 327), by exploring the ways in which this elite and state-instigated discourse is both popularly upheld and transformed. Both performing and rejecting the Chola Cuencana role can bring economic and political disadvantages to rural women, and I first turn to address the ways these idealized representations are mobilized in everyday relations between actors within the city.

The Chola Cuencana in the City: A Symbol of Purity and Pollution Discursive representations of the Chola Cuencana permeate the very fabric of Cuenca as the city is experienced in everyday life. The display of postcards, art, and souvenirs; the blaring out of “Chola Cuencana, Mi Chola”; the dazzling array of brightly colored polleras and Panama hats framing shop doors and windows; and the dioramas of the Museo de Pumapungo all serve to embed the iconic regional emblem within the bustling cityscape. Yet, these fragments do not remain stationary and without form; rather, they are given coherence and animation by the practices and movements of lower-class mestiza women who sell their produce in markets and move through the streets with wheelbarrows and baskets of fresh produce. In both her imaginary and real-life forms, the Chola Cuencana, then, appears to be a central presence. Yet, this centrality is illusory. For although the imagined and commodified chola is critical to the economic and political machinations of the city, her living counterpart remains located on the social margins. She may bring a taste of the country into the city, but this association is double-edged and is potentially as polluting as it is purifying. Unlike their imagined, folkloric sisters, living cholas cannot be contained in their prescribed spaces, and while they bring “simple” foods seemingly untouched by industrial production methods, their rural, indigenous backwardness is also a threat to the cultured, white modernity of the city. In their place, situated within the context of city food markets, cholas evidently embody and signify “good food,” particularly among the Cuencano middle and upper classes and the expatriate population. Quentin retired to Cuenca because, like many of his expatriate peers, he was in search of a “good life” that involved the consumption of “fresh,” “clean,” and “local” foods simply produced, without the use of pesticides or industrial processes.3 Middle-class Cuencanos presented a similar perspective. Luisa, for example, opined that people in the campo eat better than those in the city, and she told me that the peasantry “raise their own cows, sheep, chickens, and pigs; all the animals just eat the grass and live outside, they don’t add

Embodying Country-City Relations • 47 anything; so it’s much healthier.” She explained that she always purchased her food from the market and was rather disparaging of her fellow urbanites who “sometimes don’t know better and buy their food in Supermaxi,” the national supermarket chain. “Those chickens [from supermaxi] are full of hormones—all their children are getting ill because of it, and they don’t realize—they don’t eat as well as the people in the campo; it’s more natural, food from the campo.” Born into a semirural community, but now working and living as a teacher in the city, Luisa draws on her experience of both sites and positions herself as a somewhat more knowledgeable actor in comparison to other Cuencanos “who don’t know any better.” But her position is not unique among city dwellers, many of whom also told me, in interviews, that the freshest and best-quality food could always be found in markets. As Janela put it: “Don’t go to Supermaxi; the food there isn’t good. The market is better; it’s because they bring it straight from the country—from the ground—so it’s much fresher.” As Luisa’s commentary highlights, the clean food of the Chola Cuencana is contrasted to the polluting and damaging foods of large-scale producers and the supermarket. The time politics and racialized geographies noted by Radcliffe and Westwood (1996), for example, are also at play here; food from the country, produced by the peasantry, is conceptualized as simple, natural, and synchronic in comparison to the products of the modern food system found in city complexes. There are, however, a number of ironies and paradoxes in this urban discourse. First, the Chola Cuencana does not come to us from the distant mists of time but is a (relatively) recent urban construction rooted in economic development and political modernization. Second, as Weismantel has elucidated, there is also some dispute as to whether the Chola Cuencana is a rural or urban figure. Weismantel explains that, historically, many cholas were skilled and successful merchants who lived and worked in the city and whose primary contact with the country was through the importation of fresh produce—a point, she further shows, that is recognized by female Ecuadorian scholars but less so by their male peers (Weismantel 2001: 35–36; 2003: 335–36). Finally, while some of the fruits and vegetables marketed by Chola Cuencanas do come from smallholdings, the organization of the agricultural sector in Ecuador is such that much of the produce has either originated or passed through the hands of agro-industry (Abbots 2013). Nevertheless, as the commentaries above indicate, the imagery of a timeless rural domain remains ever-present in the romanticized imagination of the country and its female inhabitants, and the Chola Cuencana appears to flit seamlessly between the two sites—the country as producer and the city as purveyor. Moreover, discourses of folkloric and real cholas suggest the narrative, while a construction of the state, is also circulated and upheld by urban actors. According to Williams (1977), it is precisely this circulation, or (in his term) self-generation, that ensures tradition cannot be reduced to an ideological state apparatus; rather, it extends beyond formal institutions to the socialized lives of its subjects, and it is more effective, and

48 • Food Between the Country and the City vulnerable, because of that. This conception allows for contradiction and conflict within a broader hegemonic framework, and I will elucidate these processes further below. But first, I wish to explore how notions of purity and pollution are invoked when the Chola Cuencana attempts to move out from the margins. While the Chola Cuencana may be celebrated as the embodiment of untainted and timeless simplicity, it is also important, for Cuencanos and expatriates alike, that she remains in her place—temporally, spatially, and socially. For despite the political gains achieved by Ecuadorian indigenous rights organizations in recent years (Espinosa 2000; Whitten 2003) and the resulting professed abandonment of mestizaje/ blanqueamiento project (Ayala Mora 2005), being visibly indigenous or a member of the mixed-race peasantry remains socially disadvantageous. This is particularly pronounced in Cuenca, the whitest and most Spanish of the Ecuadorian cities, where the color-class system remains deeply entrenched (Miles 2004), although it is being challenged by the mobility and new prosperity of lower-class households in which working-age males migrate to the United States and send money (remittances) back home (Abbots 2012). Thus, women who are instantly recognizable as cholas due to their dress and practices, not to mention the color of their skin, continue to suffer discrimination in their everyday lives, both institutionally and in their transactions with urbanites. This has led many lower-class women to abandon the pollera, a change that can be, as Ann Miles (2004) sympathetically describes and I have observed among my own research participants, emotionally stressful. The Chola Cuencana may be a celebrated and possibly alluring (Weismantel 2001; 2003) figure, but the reality for the women who physically resemble her image is a life tainted by prejudice and social inequity. As Weismantel (2003: 334–35) surmises, while many Cuencano families would tolerate their son’s having a casual relationship with a chola, they would not want him to marry one—the implication being that cholas should not be brought into the urban home.4 This structurally enforced social distancing indicates that the less socially desirable attributes of the chola and, by association, the countryside are never far from the surface. Tradition and simplicity can easily slide into backward, dirty, and polluting. These concerns, and the associated aspiration to create a clean city, are further illustrated by the significant urban renewal and municipal construction projects taking place in Cuenca; in addition to creating and enhancing civic spaces, the provincial government is “cleaning up” markets. In some cases, this process has involved the (often-contested) relocation of market sites and stalls, but even the city’s fixed markets have found themselves subject to increased regulation, fines, temporary trading suspensions, and mandatory training for vendors. The requirements are purportedly concerned with hygiene, with vendors having to wear gloves, dispose of waste in an appropriate manner, and maintain an orderly and clean environment (El Tiempo 2010a; 2010b; 2010c). In light of the commentaries above suggesting that signs of rural authenticity help sell and add value to food, this modernization project seems to be a counterproductive effort by the provincial government. However, a distinction

Embodying Country-City Relations • 49 between discourse and practice needs to be made, and valuing the produce of a chola is not tantamount to purchasing and eating it. As I have demonstrated elsewhere (Abbots 2013), there is a disconnect between the words and the shopping habits of expatriates, with the majority avoiding the markets and street vendors because they cannot trust the food, fearing it will be polluting to their body and detrimental to their health. Similarly, Weismantel (2001) relays an anecdote in which an upperclass woman stays locked in her car on the edge of a market while her domestic worker negotiates the transactions with female vendors. A fear of the rural is not uncommon among Andean urbanites (Weismantel 2001: 5), and by expressing this fear by keeping their distance, middle- and upper-class Cuencanos are upholding the hegemonic narrative of the state; they are denying the chola’s mobility and establishing her otherness. Yet, in this market context, cholas are not moving into clean city spaces. Rather, the city is encroaching on their space, and urban sensibilities regarding cleanliness and modern spaces are taking precedence; the city is laying claim to the market. By seemingly remaining still, in both time and place, cholas have thereby fallen out of step and have become out of time and place. From the vantage point of the city, the Chola Cuencana, as a symbol of the rural, has become an anomaly in this newly sterilized city-space; in order to fit in, she must be cleansed and stripped of the vestiges of the country. Her perceived timelessness and tradition have become less causes for celebration and more problems that require intervention; her perceived purity, so highly valued when she is imagined to be embedded in the country, has been transformed into pollution.

The Chola in the Country: Class Tensions, Tourism, and Stereotypes The cleanup of the urban markets throws the ambiguous position of the chola into sharp relief, but these ambiguities do not occur just in the city. As Williams (1973) shows us, although urban imaginations construct the rural as timeless and continuous, the country does not remain static. In Cuenca, this is illustrated by the processes of city encroachment that started in the physical and socially marginal space of the markets but that continues and extends toward the country. Cholas may embody citycountry relationships and occupy the spaces between the two sites, but urbanites, too, are mobile and carry their preconceptions of the country, and its residents, with them. Yet, city dwellers are not the only actors in this story; cholas are also actively involved in introducing their own urban elements and eradicating vestiges of ruralness. The rural community of Jima is approximately two hours by road from Cuenca, and it is well served by regular buses and by camionetas (small truck-like taxis) that ply the predominantly unsurfaced roads that traverse the Andean slopes. Many Jimeños make the journey to Cuenca frequently, leaving early in the morning to spend

50 • Food Between the Country and the City the day in the city, where they will collect money orders, manage their personal affairs, shop in the markets, mail packages to migrants, and visit friends and kin. But Jimeños are not the only ones traveling this route, and the early buses that arrive in Jima discharge the professionals—teachers, health-care workers, and lawyers—who commute from Cuenca and its suburbs on a daily basis. Some, but not all, of these commuters have social and affective ties to the village that extend beyond their professional lives, and a number have taken an interest in the development of the village’s economic and social well-being, initiating a raft of projects that promote community relations, tradition, and economic development. These activities commonly occur under the auspices of the Jima Tourist Foundation, which was set up in collaboration with the Peace Corps and a select group of villagers, with the aim of promoting community-based, rural tourism. In the attempts to market Jima and lure tourists—and their dollars—away from the confines of the city, the Chola Cuencana, in all her seemingly authentic rural glory, plays a starring role. Promotional material from the Jima Tourist Foundation urges tourists to “come learn about and participate in the agricultural activities” of the village, to “enjoy an authentic traditional fiesta,” and to watch the “election of the Cholita of Jima” (Jima Tourist Foundation 2010). Moreover, homestays and participatory activities are promoted, but those women who do not conform to the Chola Cuencana model are unable to economically benefit from these activities. Sonia is a newly prosperous member of the “peasant” class and has rejected smallholding, preferring instead to conspicuously spend the remittances she receives from her migrated kin on consumer goods, domestic workers, and building and furnishing her extensive home. At the time of our meeting, she had been embroiled for some time in a dispute with the Tourist Foundation, in which she wanted to participate, and she had written a series of letters outlining her reasons why she was best placed to offer services to tourists; the crux of her argument was that she had the biggest house in the village, which— with its spacious bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, hot and cold running water, and luxurious kitchen—was also one of the most modern. Heightening her irritation was the foundation’s engagement of Conchetta—a mestiza who lived with her children in a modest adobe house and earned her living subsistence farming a small plot of land and selling meals in a makeshift restaurant—to serve traditional food to tourists and give them a taste of agricultural life. The differences between the two women, and their circumstances and lifestyles, are striking. Soft-spoken, deferential, and commonly dressed in a pollera and Panama hat, Conchetta embodies the urbanite image of the Chola Cuencana in both practices and dress, whereas Sonia, with her jeans, baseball cap, modern house, and coarse mannerisms, does not. Sonia’s exclusion from the community tourism project may be due to a range of professional and personal reasons, but it also points to the politics around and the economic salience of the Chola Cuencana, especially when viewed alongside the ways the tourism industry across the greater Cuenca region utilizes the chola image to market the uniqueness of the region, as typified by her presence on souvenirs

Embodying Country-City Relations • 51 and postcards. As Weismantel confirms (2001: 27): “Cuenca wants tourists, and it believes that cholas will bring them.” Yet, as in the city, the foundation’s determination of the most appropriate female actors to be involved in the selling of Jima (as a traditional agricultural community) involves the projection of a folkloric image onto real women, with those not conforming to the model being excluded. Neither a professional urbanite nor a rural chola, Sonia’s place in the country—and her position in the social order—is uncertain and she is consequently rendered invisible by those who look to construct, and market, the country as timeless and traditional. Moreover, by making Conchetta visible to tourists, the foundation not only reinforces the synchronic representation of the country, but in so doing, it also reiterates, and valorizes, her own chola-ness. This valorization does not, however, make Conchetta a political equal; she was not appointed as a member of the decision-making board; rather, she was engaged as a representative of a traditional rural livelihood. As such, the distinctions—social, cultural, and spatial—between lower-class rural women and professional city dwellers are reinforced. It is, therefore, not only from the confines of the city that the chola is imagined; she is also constructed and marketed within the country by actors who, although engaging with, rather than keeping their physical distance from, lower-class rural women, enact their relations through the lens of urban, middle-class sensibilities. It is, then, not only geographical distance between the country and the city, but also social distance that dichotomizes country-city relations and facilitates the performance of urban-ness in the country. Middle-class professionals moving between the two sites are not the only actors who bring city values into the country: lower-class rural women, with an eye on social mobility and the avoidance of discrimination, are bringing elements of the urban into the rural domain and continue to defy the stereotypes urbanites project upon them. As Sonia’s household typifies, sustained male migration and the resultant influx of remittances into “peasant” households have transformed the lifestyles and livelihoods of those living within the greater Cuenca region (Whitten 2003). This process is made particularly manifest in architectural practices, which blur the physical boundaries between country and city by creating a unique urban-rural sprawl in the ever-expanding suburbs (Miles 2004). In the country, remittanceprosperous families are introducing urban elements into their extensive homeexpansion and construction activities; industrial, modern materials—tinted glass, concrete and cement, wrought iron, and colored tiles—are replacing adobe mud bricks and timber, and agricultural lands are being transformed into leisure gardens. Moreover, many lower-class rural women are rejecting all visible vestiges of chola-ness, including outward displays of labor and traditional dress, and as I have documented elsewhere (Abbots 2012), they are channeling remittances into the employment of domestic workers and into conspicuous consumption. As a result of these changes, Sonia is now, in many ways, more typical of lower-class rural women than Conchetta, and “peasant” women are more commonly seen in the

52 • Food Between the Country and the City uniform of USA-emblazoned tracksuits and baseball caps than in polleras, plaits, and Panama hats. The consequences of these changes in rural women’s practices on small-scale agricultural production and retailing are telling; while the majority of households with whom I conducted research look to maintain small plots of culturally significant maize, this is for their own consumption rather than for the market.5 The potential for remittances to stimulate agricultural production has been the subject of considerable debate (Jokisch 1998; 2002; see also Durand and Massey 1992), and Brad D. Jokisch’s (2002) assessment concludes that households in the southern Ecuadorian provinces of Azuay and Cañar take a middle path in that, while they do not invest remittances in agriculture, they also do not completely reject smallholding. In Jima, I argue that migration has had a greater tendency to facilitate the rejection of smallscale agricultural production for the market; plots diminish in size to allow for home construction and expansion, and although some domestic production remains, this has been transformed in the sense that plots are now more likely to be farmed by a hired worker. Remittance-prosperous peasant households are thereby increasingly becoming new members of an emerging leisure class (Veblen 1994; see also Abbots 2012 and Colleredo-Mansfield 1999), and would-be cholas are now far more likely to set up their own business in the service industry, dress “Western style,” buy themselves out of communal labor obligations, purchase imported foods, dine out in global fast-food chains, and have their daily meals prepared by a waged domestic worker than they are likely to participate in agricultural and artisanal production. These changes in rural practices, livelihoods, and the landscape parallel a shift in economic power, with prosperity no longer remaining in the hands of the “nobles” and the city,6 but also being accessible to a previously impoverished peasantry. Cholas, then, are rapidly becoming an economic force and are using their recent prosperity to bring elements of the city into the country—transforming it and creating their own distinct city-country hybrid in the process. They are consequently moving themselves—spatially, symbolically, and socially—into the domain of the urban, and they no longer “know their place.” The rural margins are rising, and while it would be overreaching to argue that the country is becoming the new center and challenging the place of the city, primarily due to the ways in which the city continues to be symbolically valued as the site of modernity, the economic resources of the cholas and the ways they are being utilized are, I suggest, significantly reshaping country-city relations. Yet, as Bourdieu (1984) has shown us, economic capital is not always tantamount to social and political capital. While, on the one hand, the mobility of cholas appears to challenge the invisible barriers that look to contain them on the margins, on the other hand, middle-class urbanites are responding through governance and regulatory paradigms. At times, these are explicit; discussions over the expansion of planning laws in the country are prevalent, as architects and members of local councils and municipal governments look to control “modern” buildings and preserve the

Embodying Country-City Relations • 53 agricultural landscape. On other occasions, this regulation is more implicit, as suggested by Sonia’s exclusion from the Jima Tourist Foundation. However, throughout these processes, clearly defined and idealized models of what the country, and the actors living within it, should be like are circulated and mobilized. There is a cruel irony here, and one that throws country-city relations into sharp relief. Increased governance, instigated by the city and supported by the state, is required to keep the country natural and static by controlling unwanted urban elements, whereas regulation in the city, as illustrated by the market cleanup projects, is instigated with the intention of eradicating the unwanted elements of the country from the city. Matter, it appears, needs to be kept in its place (Douglas 2002). In both contexts, however, lower-class rural women are the primary subjects of this governance; they carry the burden of bourgeois urban models of the rural. While regulating the materials used for the construction of rural homes, undertaking community rural development projects, and creating ordered urban markets are ostensibly oriented toward the control of defined city and country spaces, these policies also regulate and discipline rural women. Moreover, the current renewed celebration and marketing of the chola image can, perhaps, be regarded as a response to the current mobility of this social group. As cholas disappear from the urban and rural landscape, so does their economic potential to attract tourist revenues, and the unique selling point of the greater Cuenca region diminishes. In the language of Williams, the selected tradition has thus become vulnerable to “contemporary pressures and limits” and alternative formations (Williams 1977: 117). Provincial politicians, tourism-industry players, and the middle classes, in a process that resonates with the original establishment of the Chola Cuencana image, look to reassert Cuenca’s distinct heritage and, in so doing, their own hegemony.

Upholding the Chola Cuencana: Popular Regionalism, Projection, and Mimicry Thus far, my discussion has centered on the ways in which middle- and upper-class actors from the city construct, mobilize, and project stereotypes of lower-class rural women, within both the country and the city, through the folkloric image of the Chola Cuencana. Yet, the chola does not just belong to the urbanites and the chattering classes. As Radcliffe and Westwood (1996) note, national and regional identities are built not solely by the elite discourses that emanate from the center, but also by popular imaginations that are (re)produced and transformed on the margins. This process is evident in Jima, where “peasant” women’s refusal to perform to stereotypes and their rejection of the accoutrements of chola-ness should not be regarded as synonymous with their wholesale rejection of the folkloric imagery and feminized narrative of the country. Rather, on one level, lower-class rural women uphold the Chola Cuencana discourse, particularly through the use of song and poetry. It was in

54 • Food Between the Country and the City the country that I was painstakingly taught the words of “Chola Cuencana, Mi Chola” by members of a peasant household, and its importance in constructing Cuencano personhood was made clear. As Susana, one of my rural Jimena participants, told me: “You must learn the words, it will make you one of us, like my husband in the United States, he had to learn the national anthem there, and you will learn these words here.” Moreover, the same women who are enjoying recent remittance-based prosperity also project the chola stereotype onto other, less economically fortunate, women through the practice of mimicry. Carmen and Felicia are two sisters who have recently rejected all public expressions of chola-ness. They no longer wear the uniform of the pollera, Panama hat, and plaits. They prefer instead imported jeans, leisure wear, and baseball caps, and their hair is worn in shorter and looser styles. They visibly lead lives of leisure—employing waged workers to discharge their communal labor obligations, farm their small plot of land, and maintain their large urban-style houses. On our first meeting, both women confidently told me, “We are modern now,” a refrain I heard consistently during our numerous subsequent encounters, as they looked to explain their changing actions and practices. When asked about their dress, they, together with a number of their female peers, met the notion of “dressing like a chola” with absolute derision—even though their recently deceased mother, in terms of her livelihood, dress, and food practices, had epitomized chola-ness, having been a smallscale farmer and retailer and having worn polleras all her life. Yet, the concept of wearing polleras is not alien to Carmen and Felicia. They had both been brought up working the land dressed in polleras, and their “modern” and prosperous lifestyle has been freshly acquired following the migration of Carmen’s husband and elder sons to the United States. The family’s social mobility, then, is a relatively recent experience, but when the women spoke of polleras, they situated the objects firmly in bygone times, associating that form of dress with their mother and the older generation, rather than with their own historical practices. These conversations were often tinged with nostalgia; Carmen and Felicia would refer to the beauty of the skirts and the material, while at the same time reasserting that they had no desire to wear polleras “as we are modern now.” It is through these narratives, I suggest, that Carmen and Felicia create social and temporal distance between their own everyday lives and chola-ness; the dress of the chola becomes valued for its aesthetic qualities and is viewed and admired as an object of the past—an estranged relic—from a position of modernity. As such, while they may be closer—in both time and class—to the dress and practices of the Chola Cuencana, lower-class women in the country, by estranging themselves from visible symbols of chola-ness, also shift the chola into the realm of folklore. This distancing is exacerbated by the practice of dressing up (disfrazarse) as a chola during private fiestas, especially when the polleras and Panama hats are temporarily borrowed from women who wear them every day and who are also commonly in the employ of more prosperous women. It was during one of these private

Embodying Country-City Relations • 55 parties that Carmen procured skirts from Rosa, one of her domestic workers, and proceeded to dance and parade around her guests, who responded with mocking laughs. “Look at me,” Carmen joked, swishing her skirts in an exaggerated manner. “I’m a little cholita—don’t I look funny!” The attention then turned to me: “We should dress Emita up.” “Yes!” came the response from Felicia, “as a chola; you’d look very lovely (lindisima) wearing a pollera.” “And we could put you on a pony as well!” Carmen exclaimed, before the two women descended into fits of laughter. Cholas thereby become figures of fun, and their forms of dress become novelties. It is in these scenarios that the social distance between those who visibly appear to be cholas and those who have recently rejected chola-ness are reiterated and brought into sharp relief. The narrative here is different from learning the words of “Chola Cuencana, Mi Chola” to become Cuencano. None of the assorted guests suggested that, by dressing in a pollera, either Carmen or I would be reinforcing our performed regional citizenship. Rather, by dressing up temporarily, as a novelty for the amusement of our audience, we would be reiterating that the dress and practices of the chola are not part of our everyday lives. By choosing to play the chola, then, Carmen looks to make it clear that she is no longer a member of the rural lower classes. As such, the practice of dressing up enables her to place considerable distance between her current social position and her peasant background. Yet, this practice is relational, and Carmen’s reaffirmation of her new, chola-less subjectivity also serves to “other” those women for whom chola-ness remains part of their everyday existence. I consequently suggest that it is through the very rejection of being a chola that the model becomes reproduced and upheld by the more prosperous group of rural lower-class women. Not all women have the economic resources, wherewithal, or desire to reject the imagery and livelihood of the chola, and although generational divisions can be observed, these distinctions are not clearcut; some younger women also continue to embody the image. In their refusal to present themselves as cholas, the more socially mobile women not only become visibly different from those other women who were previously their peers, but they also—by situating chola-ness in a traditional, nonmodern domain—other cholas in time (Fabian 1983), as well as in dress and practice. Women such as Carmen and Felicia consequently shift the burden of conforming to the role to other, less economically fortunate women (such as Rosa), thereby creating a new mode of social distinction and hierarchy within the country. As such, the shifting practices of rural women do not appear to be challenging the idyllic model of the Chola Cuencana as it is constructed from the city; on the contrary, they reinforce it. The projection of the folkloric image onto the most marginalized women is practiced not only by citydwellers, but also by members of the peasantry. With new social divisions emerging within the country, the lower-class women who have rejected chola-ness appear to be shifting towards the center and adopting social sensibilities that are more akin to those in the city. In everyday life, this can be seen as empowering for the many women who have suffered significant

56 • Food Between the Country and the City discrimination at the hands of urban elites, as they enter new spaces and roles and attempt to move away from their previously marginalized social position. Yet, unlike agricultural producers in other contexts who are able to reaffirm their peasantness (see Harry G. West’s essay in Chapter 4 of this volume), the women of Jima are not on solid enough social and political territory to reclaim and express their rural origins. Surrounded by the trappings of modernity and prosperity, Carmen may dress up as a chola while in the country, where she will be viewed only by her kin, her peers, and those less socially mobile than she is, but she cannot do so when she moves into the city, for fear of being seen, through the eyes of urbanites, as a chola. The irony here is that Carmen and Felicia, in their attempts to become urban and socially mobile, are unable to speak the symbolic language of the city and do not have the requisite social capital and tastes (Bourdieu 1984). Hence, although they may understand themselves to be culturally closer to the city than their chola peers, they are, as far as the upper-class city is concerned, still very much rooted in the country—spatially, socially, and temporally. In the politically stratified context of Cuenca, transforming the self into a white, cultured, urbanite is a far more challenging task than simply changing one’s style of dress, refusing to participate in manual or agricultural labor, and making a livelihood from remittances rather than from the sale of food. Since more-mobile rural women do not conform to the urban stereotype of “civilized” (read educated and white), their behavior and practices consequently continue to be judged by urbanites against the city’s romanticized image of the Chola Cuencana. Yet, they no longer perform to this model. They are, thus, found wanting on both counts. This places socially mobile rural women in an anomalous position. At best, they become the subject of the city’s social mockery and derision; at worst, they are politically and socially excluded. In swapping one rural for another nouveau riche stereotype—which is equally, if not more, subject to discrimination and censure— the chola becomes increasingly out of place.

Conclusion The city’s romanticized celebration of the country and its foodways, as embodied by the Chola Cuencana, constructs an ideal type of female food producer and retailer that is reproduced in both the city and the country—and, in turn, projected onto rural lower-class women by the bourgeoisie and a socially mobile peasant class. This celebration does not, however, from the subject position of real-life cholas, translate into any significant change to their common representations as backward and static. As I hope to have demonstrated, cholas are cause for celebration only when they remain in their place, performing their socially prescribed role: in the country, producing food, or in the city, selling food. Yet, their places are often conceived as marginal to the “civilized” urban core, and the threat of pollution they present to urbanites results in cholas, and the spaces they inhabit, being subjected to increasing

Embodying Country-City Relations • 57 governance and regulation, as in the case of market cleanups. To be socially mobile, then, is to throw off the shackles of the rural—in terms of dress, livelihoods, and practices—and move toward the urban center. However, by doing so, socially mobile rural women echo the discourse of the state and those above them in the social order, pushing their less-mobile counterparts back in time and space—into the realm of the timeless country—in the process of attempting, somewhat misguidedly from the vantage point of urbanites, to constitute themselves as modern and urban. Viewed through the lens of mestizaje, cultural whitening, and the state’s modernity policies, the rejection of any public articulation of being from the country by women such as Carmen and Felicia can be seen as conforming to the dominant ideological discourse of the state and the upper classes—an ideology that, I have argued, continues to place the white city at its heart.

–3– Bringing the City to the Country: Supermarket Expansion, Food Practices, and Aesthetics in Rural South Africa Elizabeth Hull

One day during fieldwork, I sat waiting for a friend in a large grass-roofed rondavel that was one of a group of buildings clustered on a hillside in a village located in the north of the province of KwaZulu-Natal.1 These houses were occupied by between thirty-five and forty-five family members, depending on who was away at any given time. While I waited for Thandeka, her daughter sent a child hurriedly with some coins to buy a drink from a neighboring house. He returned with a cold bottle of Sprite, which the daughter placed with an empty glass on a tray next to me.2 Thandeka’s two-year-old granddaughter climbed restlessly over her mother while we spoke. A few minutes later, Thandeka appeared with a plate of two sweet potatoes, which had been boiled in salted water. I peeled them and began to eat. She apologized that there wasn’t more to eat today, explaining that, at the moment, the family didn’t have much food, only the staple maize meal and whatever vegetables she reaped from the garden. The pension money that they usually spent on food was being used for travel and other expenses as some family members were looking for work. As we chatted, Thandeka began eagerly to encourage me to come and spend more time with them, instead of staying around the place where I lived, some thirty minutes’ walk along a dirt road up to the long ridge that carved out a flat mountaintop. She said to me that here I would learn many things, and especially how to cook ukudla kwesiZulu (Zulu food). Her comment was not a response to my research interest in food, which I had not told her about. Rather, she frequently spoke about food, not only because food was ever-present—whether being grown, prepared, or eaten—but also because she seemed automatically to assume that this was what most interested me. She added that, up there at the place where I lived, people ate only izicoficofi. Realizing that I didn’t understand, she grinned widely and spat the word out again a couple more times: izicoficofi! The sound of the word, with the repetition of clicks (signified by the letter “c”) and the drawn out “o” vowel, leant itself easily to emphasis. She began to laugh, and I asked what it meant. Her daughter explained, it’s ukudla kumnandi (delicious food) and gave some examples: amakhekhe, amaswidi, KFC (cakes,

– 59 –

60 • Food Between the Country and the City sweets, Kentucky Fried Chicken). Thandeka interrupted her daughter eagerly, repeating what she had said before—that here I would learn about Zulu food—and she gave some examples, including imifino, a green plant, and isinambathi, a porridge of maize meal and pumpkin boiled together. Adding further fuel to her argument—and probably following my failure to recognize the word izicoficofi—she said that here they knew only Zulu, so I would improve quickly, whereas with the family who were hosting me, she felt sure, I would speak only English. Though Thandeka and I had become friends over the course of several years, I was aware of a pragmatic motive in her encouraging my visits, because I often brought with me gifts of food or other items. Thandeka was familiar with the tourist appeal of the area, not least because a khaki-colored, canvas-roofed safari bus from a nearby hotel passed through the village several times a week, taking its customers on “cultural tours.” The bus stopped at a neighboring homestead on its way, so that tourists could meet locals and familiarize themselves with the “Zulu way of life.” Perhaps in an effort to authenticate tourists’ own preconceptions, the homestead at which the bus stopped consisted mainly of old, characteristically rural buildings, made of branches, stones, and mud, rather than the less-distinctive rectangular concrete homes that many people now occupied. One of the family members at the homestead was well positioned to receive these visitors: his English was almost fluent, and he was familiar with the tourist milieu, having worked in the same nearby hotel, first as a chef and then as an entertainer after he formed a Zulu dance group that performed at various hotels and functions in the area. He was thus adept in the performance of culture and would no doubt have smoothed and disguised the translation process more successfully than the middle-aged, white tour operator. Here, culture was being mobilized in the service of economic gain, an example of what John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (2009) describe as the marketing and incorporation of identity that has become global in an era of entrenched unemployment. It was not, therefore, surprising that Thandeka should see her relationship with me partly in strategic terms, especially in a chronically resource-poor setting. Her comments, however, also signified a struggle to defend particular features of rural existence. To allude to certain food practices as authentically Zulu was a positive slant on what might otherwise be interpreted negatively as impoverished or deprived. Here, Thandeka was trying to influence the interpretations made by an onlooker, a point I grasped most vividly by her reluctance to allow me to photograph her in the ordinary pursuits of cooking, child care, or relaxation, in contrast to her enthusiasm about being photographed while engaged in what she deemed to be culturally distinctive activities. These included times when she was cooking umqombothi (homemade beer) in the traditional three-legged cooking pot or was dressed in the clothes that she wore when working as an isangoma (spirit medium). For Thandeka, food was the key artifact for creating this self-portrait. But the connotations of food changed, so that, in times of shortage, its status as a valued cultural symbol was distorted, and it became associated with material dearth—hence,

Bringing the City to the Country • 61 Thandeka’s apology about the quantity of food being inadequate. The inverse of this, however, was that food associated with material plenty—what Thandeka referred to as izicoficofi—could signify cultural deficiency. This was implied by her suggestion that I would learn more from her than from people who ate izicoficofi. While her comments alluded to the stark economic inequality that characterizes South Africa, it also hinted at a struggle to redraw lines of inclusion and exclusion and to stake a claim in defining what was to be deemed valuable, while rejecting the typical signifiers of money and wealth. In this geographical heartland of Zulu language and identity, given impetus by the twentieth-century emergence of Zulu ethnic nationalism and of more recent revivals of traditionalism, these comments suggested that rural dwellers’ daily food practices were part of a wider struggle over the meanings of the countryside in contemporary South Africa. This was especially the case in a context of changing diets and ever-increasing availability of a range of foods, including desirable and expensive processed items that Thandeka referred to as izicoficofi.

The Place of Food in Rural and Urban Landscapes The expansion of retailing is the driving factor behind changing consumption practices in rural areas around the world. The early to mid-1990s witnessed a steady increase in the number of retail businesses in rural areas of South Africa. This was partly a result of the removal of restrictions that, during apartheid, had prevented capital belonging to nonblack South Africans from entering the homelands; in addition, a sizable rural African elite—incubated under the bantustan system—formed a reliable market for commercial products.3 The post-apartheid expansion of redistributive state welfare, including old-age pensions, disability grants, and child grants, also ensured that a majority of families increasingly purchased much of their food, thus securing solid demand for supermarkets. For instance, Thandeka grows some of her own food, but she buys the family’s supply of the main staple, maize, using her pension. Two key themes can be discerned in the growing literature on the global spread of supermarkets. The first focuses on its economic impact on local producers and retailers. In Kenya, for instance, where supermarket sales are growing at 18 percent annually, supermarkets source food from medium-sized, fast-increasing commercial farms, and they consequently alienate small, rain-fed farms (Neven et al. 2009). Similar concerns are raised elsewhere in Africa (Weatherspoon and Reardon 2003), in Latin America (Reardon and Berdegué 2002), and in Central and Eastern Europe (Dries et al. 2004). The same trend has been shown in South Africa, where the dominance of large-scale farms has influenced the food procurement strategies of supermarkets, to the detriment it is argued, of small-scale farmers. Other researchers have focused on the exclusionary effects of supermarkets on other retailers, showing that the low prices available at supermarkets create stiff competition for local stores (D’Haese and

62 • Food Between the Country and the City Van Huylenbroeck 2005; Minten and Reardon 2008). Some scholars challenge the idea of a full-scale supermarket revolution, suggesting that the effects of supermarkets are far from absolute and that avenues for resistance are being carved out, both by local retailers (Abrahams 2010) and by supermarket employees (Miller 2005). The second strand in the literature documents the nutritional outcomes of increased availability of certain foodstuffs, mostly demonstrating the link between increased access to cheap, nutrient-poor, and processed foods and a rise in obesity and degenerative diseases worldwide (Popkin 2006). The potential dietary benefits have also been noted, as supermarkets offer the possibility for increased diversity in the diet (Hawkes 2008). Conclusions, however, are overwhelmingly negative. In Africa, the process is perceived overall as an ever-increasing penetration of supermarkets throughout the continent, leading to ubiquitous food habits and a rise in obesity. Beyond the narrow concern with nutritional intake, little attention is paid to the impact of this retail transformation on consumption practices more generally, their changing social meanings and the range of motivations that drive different forms of consumption in rural areas.4 This omission may be related, in part, to the ways in which the rural is imagined in contrast to urban spaces, as sites of production rather than of consumption. In South Africa, this dualism has played a central role in popular and academic conceptions of the relationship between village and town. The city was frequently identified as the site of cultural production, of change, of modernization, and of consumption. The rural, in contrast, was conceived as a place of (re)production—of tradition, of kinship, and of petty agriculture often to serve mundane subsistence needs. Consumption as a sociologically notable practice, a symbolic process in the shaping of new identities, has often been associated with city life. Food and drink were an important part of this, beer being perhaps the most prominent example. The notorious township beer halls described by Paul La Hausse, though stigmatized and criminalized by the government, became during the 1950s places that nurtured “a new spirit,” a hospitality and warmth that contrasted with the hardships of daily life, and sites for the cultural production of music and politics, all enabled by the sociality of drinking (La Hausse 1988: 55). Consumption in this form was inventive and creative—and distinctively urban. In contrast, apartheid’s policy makers and scientists conceived of the food practices of rural South Africa as degenerate, repeatedly constructing rural populations as a problem. With appalling and widespread malnutrition occurring particularly in rural regions, public discourse during apartheid attributed this endemic health and nutrition crisis to rural African culture and ignorance, rather than to the economic and institutional structures that gave rise to inequalities and that had been responsible for the expulsion of thousands of black people to poorly resourced rural homelands. Even severe outbreaks of scurvy among urban workers were sometimes blamed on the degenerate habits of the rural areas from which these workers had originated (Wylie 2001: 131–32).

Bringing the City to the Country • 63 Some scholarship challenged these stigmatizing characterizations and the rural/ urban dualism that accompanied them, revealing a dialectical process in which rural and urban areas were forming and altering one another. Cyclical labor migration was the vital medium through which these processes took place, and the migrant became the prototype for the tensions and contradictions inherent in the merging of a rural/urban divide that, at the same time, was persistently reinforced by the economic, symbolic, and legislative mechanisms of apartheid. The visual and social landscape itself defied the notion of a distinct divide between the rural and the urban: rapidly populating bantustans resembled urban townships despite their status as rural homelands, in a process described by Colin Murray as displaced urbanization (1987). Following the dismantling of the homelands and their assimilation into nine newly demarcated provinces of South Africa in 1994, the newly elected African National Congress government encouraged retail expansion as a cornerstone of economic development in rural areas; this retail expansion was perceived as bringing the fruits of urban life to the previously deprived countryside. Besides the two areas of literature described above—on the impact of retailing on local commerce and on nutrition intake—supermarkets have had other, less documented effects. They have contributed to the growth of small towns and have intensified patterns of movement to and from towns. They have influenced the rhythms of daily life, linking rural and urban areas not only by increased flows of goods, but also by the activities of shoppers and the changing visual landscape. Paradoxically, they provide choice to consumers, while at the same time homogenizing the food consumed in rural and urban households. Moreover, as the opening example suggested, their products have been incorporated into the symbolic terrain of changing class composition. In these respects, they represent an integration of rural and urban regions. But this retail transformation has also reinforced distinctions between rural and urban areas in the post-apartheid context, with giant shopping malls such as Century City in Cape Town emerging as potent symbols of a wealthy urban elite. These mega-constructions—replicated in similarly glitzy and ostentatious developments in Johannesburg and Durban—represent the fragmentation and quasi-privatization of urban space. “Sealed from the realities of everyday life, these escapist cocoons, palaces of desire, have become the new public realm, racially mixed meeting places of the new South African middle classes” (Marks and Bezzoli 2001: 37). In an alternative take on the post-apartheid city, Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall (2004) appeal for attention to the alluring, creative, and novel character of African cities, rather than an emphasis on the exclusionary, fragmented, distorted, dysfunctional, or discriminatory geographies of urban landscapes; the latter view, they claim, has penetrated scholarship disproportionately. For Mbembe and Nuttall, the concern is with how the African city is being represented: “Forgetting that the city always also operates as a site of fantasy, desire, and imagination, recent South African historiography tends to privilege a reading of the urban as a theater of capitalist

64 • Food Between the Country and the City accumulation and exploitation” (2004: 355–56). In contrast, they treat the city as “an expression of aesthetic vision” (2004: 353). Just as Mbembe and Nuttall have appealed for attention to the inventive and artistic elements of city life, a corresponding shift in anthropological literature about the countryside has diverted the focus away from rural poverty and vulnerable livelihoods to the emergence of new and distinctive forms of social expression and the making of rural identities. This recent scholarship is often focused on the resurgence of ethnic identity or traditional forms of authority. Welcoming this reorientation, William Beinart emphasizes a need to acknowledge rural South Africa not as peripheral and disadvantaged, but as “the socio-geographical heartlands of distinct and dynamic identities, cultures and languages” (2012: 19). In all of these struggles to define the rural and the urban, there emerges (albeit in varying forms and often implicit) a locally mediated version of the contrasting images that Raymond Williams evokes so vividly in the opening pages of his classic text, quoted in the introduction to this volume, in which both the country and the city are the objects of contradictory positive and negative valuations (Williams 1973: 1). In the public narratives of government, in the rowdy chatter of beer halls, in the aisles and queues of supermarkets, and in the pages of newspapers and research reports, similarly contrasting values associated with the country and the city have been crafted, challenged, and redrawn. Indeed, Williams’s two opposing images of the rural emerge in Thandeka’s own struggle to present her lifestyle and food habits as traditional rather than impoverished, as creative expression rather than material dearth. The point of this article is to show that struggles to define the rural and urban are not only being fought in the city, or in academic debate for that matter, but also in rural areas themselves. Thandeka’s evocation of an authentic Zulu way of life can be understood in the context of a rural setting in which notions of tradition have been appropriated and refashioned profoundly. This former homeland of KwaZulu, since its formation, has been celebrated as the original heartland of the amaZulu (Zulu people) (Harries 1993). Zulu ethnic nationalism became a powerful movement led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP); alongside the consolidation of symbols of Zulu identity, equally important to this movement were spatial configurations in attempts to secure a Zulu nation. The homeland of KwaZulu consisted of chunks of land, separated from each other, carved out of the countryside. In the early 1990s, the area was steeped in violence, as the IFP and the United Democratic Front (UDF), an ally of the leading anti-apartheid organization, the African National Congress, fought for power. As apartheid drew to a close and the homelands were finally dismantled in 1994, the freedom of movement and trade and the expansion of retailing signaled an era of new opportunities. This is a context, then, in which idioms of tradition and Zulu culture have been appropriated and put to use politically.5 In former homelands today, Beinart argues, people are seeking ways, partly through the items they consume, of “recapturing dynamic identities from the straightjacket imposed by the Bantu Authorities and the homogenising effects of

Bringing the City to the Country • 65 the ‘homeland’ states” (2012: 19). This process has to do, he argues, with both a resurgence of traditionalism and new forms of consumerism. Rather than viewing these creative idioms of social and aesthetic expression through a different analytical lens from that concerned with poverty and unequal economic relations, a focus on daily food practices offers a vantage point from which to consider them together. Thandeka’s comments in the opening section of this article revealed her attempts to recast poverty both as moral worth and as cultural authenticity, while at the same time, they conveyed her desire for the goods formerly associated with the urban rich. Here, discourses of cultural authenticity compete with the exclusionary effects of economic inequality and class formation, making a claim to social distinctiveness (Beinart 2012) rather than marginality. Such perceptions are affected by an increasing commodification of lifestyles that may signal affiliations with national or global idioms beyond the rural context or may, at times—as in Thandeka’s comments—be devalued for competing with local/ ethnic identities. Thandeka’s reference to izicoficofi highlighted the wealth differences in the village and the privileged access that wealthier members have to ukudla kumnandi (delicious food), while at the same time drawing on idioms of Zulu ethnic identity—ukudla kwesiZulu (Zulu food)—to construct an image of the wealthy as deficient. In this struggle over what is and should be deemed valuable, Thandeka’s purpose was neither to deny nor to exaggerate her situation of poverty vis-à-vis others in the village, but rather to attempt to influence the meanings and interpretations of particular ways of living in contemporary South Africa.

Changing Food Practices in Rural KwaZulu-Natal The rural area where I began fieldwork in 2006 is located in Umkhanyakude district in the far north of KwaZulu-Natal. Homes are scattered mostly along a dirt road that winds its way up to the top of a mountain and along the edge of a jagged ridge that marks the border of the former homeland of KwaZulu. Over the ridge and far below can be seen the large circles of green, irrigated land owned by a white commercial farmer, and beyond them is Jozini dam, a symbol for many of the nearby resources that this area lacks. The main problem that is proclaimed ubiquitously by residents is the absence of water infrastructure. Residents walk to boreholes and rivers for water, or if they have a car or money to pay a driver, they fill containers at a tap some fifteen- or twenty-minutes drive away. The area in which data for this paper were collected consists of about 150 households, which are dispersed across the mountainside, rather than forming a discrete village. The region is characterized by high unemployment and health problems. The majority of formal jobs available to residents are in the public sector, as teachers, police officers, nurses, or other employees at the nearby hospital. A small number of people are employed by private businesses, working as shop assistants or security

66 • Food Between the Country and the City guards in the nearby town. Some people have part-time jobs doing road maintenance or cutting grass, as part of the national government’s public works program aimed at promoting job creation. A large majority of households rely on one or more government grants. Some households receive remittances from family members who work in the cities. In addition, a diverse range of activities are carried out to earn cash. These include selling various items—sweets, soft drinks, bottled and home-brewed beer, frozen chickens, mobile phone credit, fruits, vegetables, firewood, grass for roofing, or homemade baskets and mats—providing transportation to town or to school, doing carpentry, sewing and mending clothes, washing cars, shopping for food and collecting water for elderly people, and accompanying children to and from school, as well as money lending and petty crime. Many households engage in some form of subsistence farming, but this is usually minimal, and it rarely provides more than a small proportion of household food. A handful of people have benefited from the government’s tender system, which many see as the only avenue to enrichment. In this area, where formal jobs are few and far between, those in formal employment, such as nurses or teachers, are distinguished from their neighbors in terms of economic security and material well-being. The family with whom I lived—and at whom Thandeka’s comments about izicoficofi were directed—is one example. The family lives predominantly off the pension of a 68-year-old woman, which is about 3,900 rand (about $400) per month—considerably larger than most pensions because she worked as a teacher in the nearby primary school for about forty years. In addition, the family receives regular contributions of food from her two daughters who live away from home and both work as teachers, as well as regular support from two of the children’s fathers. By South African standards, the family is not wealthy. It struggles to afford general household maintenance, beyond paying regular bills and paying for food. Nor is it consistently financially secure. In 2011, the family was threatened with a service cutoff by Eskom—South Africa’s electricity supplier—for being unable to pay its electricity bills. But in local terms, the family enjoys a degree of financial security that surpasses that of many of its neighbors. This local economy can be viewed in the broader South African context, which is characterized by “the entrenchment of inequality between a stable, permanent urban working class and a set of marginal classes, some precariously employed, most unemployed” (Seekings and Nattrass 2005: 33). Inequality is also expressed in the health profile of the area, in which diseases associated with malnutrition coexist alongside those of overweight and obesity. Most families cook one large meal per day. As in other parts of Africa, this core meal consists of a starch food—either maize or rice—accompanied by a sauce called isishebo that can contain potatoes, vegetables, beans, and/or fish or meat, usually chicken. For poorer families, the isishebo frequently contains only one of these items, often beans, and less meat is consumed overall. Wealthier families may increase the variety of the meal by adding one or two items alongside the main components of the meal, such as mashed butternut squash, cabbage, beetroot, or mayonnaise. Breakfast

Bringing the City to the Country • 67 consists variously of maize porridge or sliced bread, eaten alone or with margarine, eggs, or sausages. As with the main meal, it is often the diversity of foods consumed that distinguishes wealthier from poorer families. In addition to these two meals, further items are consumed throughout the day in some households, such as fruit, potato chips, soft drinks, and bread with margarine or cold sliced meat. Given the considerable wealth differentials in the area, the extent to which these additional items are consumed varies a great deal. Soft drinks such as Coca-Cola—known locally as “cool drink”—are important in the ongoing creation of social solidarities, because they are typically offered to guests and are, therefore, a recognizable stamp of hospitality. People buy these items even during periods of financial or food insecurity because of the pressure to conform to social expectations—for instance, in the opening story, on my arrival at Thandeka’s house, I was immediately given a cool drink. Incorporated into local patterns of exchange and hospitality, cool drinks are, at once, a signal of status and the stuff of social relations. Thus, despite the prevalence of food insecurity and the profound income constraints faced by some households, a generalized commodification of lifestyles is taking place. Examining everyday food practices highlights the role of consumption as a process in the ongoing shaping of social relations and the significance of scarcity, as well as of abundance, for understanding consumption practices (Trentmann 2004: 380). Food consumption may, at times, be suggestive of a heightened consumerism in which individual and autonomous acquisition is emphasized, but in other respects, it is intensely social, signifying the enactment of struggles over how to live under very unequal economic conditions. Furthermore, consumerist behavior in this context does not merely express a desire for an urban lifestyle—an “imitation of worldliness,” in Mbembe’s words (2004: 374)—but equally has to do with defining and shaping experiences that are distinctively and self-consciously rural. The journey of food and drink products beyond the moment of acquisition provides a hint at the ways they are becoming incorporated into rural aesthetic or stylistic expressions. For example, some young people build flowerbed borders outside their homes using empty cool-drink and beer bottles. This both demonstrates one’s access to luxury items and carries a hint of defiance against the strictures of local custom that render alcohol a taboo item. The traditional Zulu mats called amacansi, made with long reeds of grass sewn together in parallel lines, are often adorned with potato chip packages, which are wrapped around individual reeds to create a bright and shiny patchwork of color; these colorful mats frequently are used for display in people’s homes, while the plainer ones are used for their original purpose as mats for sitting on. The language of contemporary food practice may also be mobilized, such as when young people refer to an umsebenzi, a traditional celebration centered on the slaughter and consumption of a cow or other animal, as a braai—the popular South African word for a barbeque. Fragments of aesthetic expression that combine traditional and modern elements can also be found in architecture—in stylized rondavels

68 • Food Between the Country and the City that retain the round shape and grass roof but have porches and columns built into the front, with a gated front door and windows—or in dance, as in the case of a young man at a party who combined contemporary dance style with a partial imitation of the distinctive Zulu dance in which one leg is raised above the shoulder and stamped rhythmically on the ground. He stretched his arms out wide, looking to the ground and holding his body in suspense, in imitation of the dramatic hesitation that is typical of the Zulu dance. But instead of following through with the high kick, he lunged forward transforming his dance into the current style of his peers that suited the heavy bass and rhythms of the local house music blaring from the speakers, in a creative fusion of genres that was met with bright-eyed grins and laughter by his fellow dancers. These fragments represent instances of imaginative expression, self-consciously adapting reified Zulu cultural traits and reinventing them not in their familiar form, but as part of a search for new and novel identities. At times, this can create tensions, given the constraints imposed by material conditions—for instance, when cool drinks are unaffordable even though guests wait expectantly or when beef, a food of cultural significance, cannot be purchased except by wealthier people. Pressures to conform to local expectations of food provision (often involving the slaughter of valuable livestock), among other major expenses at key life-cycle events such as funerals, can have a disastrous impact on the finances of poorer households. In these instances, efforts at defending aspects of rural life, whether through the symbolism of the traditional or the modern, are intercepted and exposed by class differences. These tensions give rise to processes of “othering,” as described above, in which a struggle over values ensues. Advertisements for certain food products also make use of these tensions, and demonstrate some of the ways in which ambivalent and contradictory values are reappropriated within wider popular and media discourses in contemporary South Africa. The is shown vividly in two advertisements for the product Aromat—a flavoring that is used on savory foods of all sorts, usually as a substitute for salt, and that, in the past few years, has gained almost ubiquitous presence in households throughout the area. One advertisement for this product begins with a still shot of a kitchen, bland and spare apart from two uncooked mealies (maize to be boiled and eaten straight from the cob) in a basket. The image is motionless for a couple of seconds, and then the screen goes black so that nothing is visible, as though the lights in the kitchen have been turned off, and a brief conversation begins between the two mealies in exaggerated African accents. Male voice: “Uch, I’m sick of these power cuts.” Female voice: “I’m sick of you.” This is followed by a voice-over: “Mealies are horrible, but with Aromat, it’s unbelievable!” The word “unbelievable” leaps onto the screen in big yellow letters, followed by bright flashes of color, while several hands shake Aromat onto a vibrating plate of cooked mealies. The advertisement, then, evokes the boredom of food and resource scarcity, the dialogue between the two mealies hinting at the strained family relationships that result from this

Bringing the City to the Country • 69 tedium, with the product itself offering a solution through relieving the monotony of repetitive and limited food supply. The second, more recent advertisement for this product takes as its theme a completely different set of images. It begins with a party shot: a sunny barbeque on a city rooftop. Stylish young people stand and sit around, talking and laughing with one another. A few seconds later, a woman knocks an Aromat bottle with her elbow. As it falls to the floor, it’s caught on the foot by a guy who flicks it up as though it were a soccer ball. He does a couple of moves and kicks it on, and it is caught by another young guy, who spins it with his right hand, shaking some of the contents onto the barbeque, and passes it on. The advertisement continues like this, the bottle passing from one man to the next, evoking a sports theme in the lead-up to South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 World Cup. Eventually, the bottle is caught by a guy who is sitting at the edge of a balcony. He passes it to a woman whose appearance is distinctive and unexpected because she is older than the others and wearing a white pearl necklace and the distinctive, traditional headscarf typically worn by rural women. She shakes some Aromat onto her plate of meat before spinning the bottle out of her hand and back toward him. He fumbles it, knocks the bottle with his shoulder, and is unable to catch it as it tumbles down to the street below. The two of them look at each other and smile. One further party shot ends with a view of the length of the street, where energetic urban life continues far below the tall buildings lining each side of the street. This second advertisement portrays an idealized picture of post-apartheid South Africa: young, multiracial, trendy, pleasure-seeking, party-going, and urban. The older woman in the final scene—probably intended to appeal to older female consumers who are often responsible for household food purchasing—is drawn into a scene of urban, youthful sociability. Her ability playfully to catch the young guy by surprise gives her a kind of social mastery over this urban context, despite her unmistakably traditional and rural attire. Thus, older female consumers are positioned in a space that overlaps with a younger, urban generation in a way that positively reinforces traditional generational hierarchies in relation to them. Far from having the negative tone of the first advertisement, the second one positively evokes the aspirations of young people while subtly reaffirming the generational hierarchies associated with rural family life. Once again, Williams’s opposing representations emerge, in yet another guise, in these two advertisements, one of marginality and the other of inventiveness. Taken together, the two advertisements promise escape from economic marginalization and scarcity, as well as entry into urban sociability, but the latter is combined subtly with an image of traditionalism, so that, rather than pitting them against one another, a fusion between the two is suggested. The themes of culture vis-à-vis attractive youth-oriented lifestyles, rural visà-vis urban, and economic hardship vis-à-vis social inclusion are combined to invite a feeling of inclusion rather than of marginality. In these advertisements, we find that the ideas that rural residents form about themselves are reflected in, and shaped by, wider public discourses. Food is a symbolic medium for traversing these domains.

70 • Food Between the Country and the City In the final section to follow, I consider these ideas again by returning to the village where we began.

Izicoficofi and the Politics of Inclusion I didn’t hear the word izicoficofi again for some time, and I eventually asked a friend—a 26-year-old who grew up in the same area—what the word meant to him. He frowned slightly and looked at me, seeming to pause for thought. “To me,” he said, “this word means those sweet, sweet foods, like chocolates.” He explained that he hadn’t heard the word for a long time, which is why he had hesitated. The last time that he used it was as a child: “As we grew up, we used to differentiate [between] poor and rich, you see? We said [that] rich people’s children eat a lot of these things, which we only eat on special occasions.” Christmas Day was the only day of the year, he explained, when his family ate items such as sweet biscuits, chocolates, and fried chicken. He laughed, shaking his head, and with a smile, he told me the following story: When we were playing soccer, we would not include a boy who was from a rich family in the team because we would say, “no, this one will not run as fast as we do because he is used to eating izicoficofi and so he gets tired!” . . . If this boy wanted to join, we told him either to pay because your parents are rich, or simply don’t join, because you can’t run like us because of all those eggs and coffee with milk. I mean, these things were really things that we never had. We didn’t eat these things. But they were eating them every day. This was izicoficofi.

This story confirmed what was implicit in my earlier conversation with Thandeka, that izicoficofi was a word that signaled a relationship between people and expressed the desires and cravings produced by the perceived differences among them. In my friend’s words: “We didn’t want to associate ourselves with them because we did not eat what they eat. They were better than us.” When I asked why he no longer used the word, he gave two explanations. First, izicoficofi was a term of mockery and therefore was typically used by children rather than adults: “We used to use it, but not seriously, only while we were playing, mocking those people that I’ve explained. . . . To use it was a part of joking.” Second, the word was no longer in use, he thought, because of the considerably greater availability of the types of food to which izicoficofi referred: “Kids now are growing up with all that they want,” he said. Such comments are a further indication that the efficacy of the word lay not in the food items that it signified—for, as he pointed out, these are abundantly available today—but rather in its use as a device for highlighting inequality between families. That he believed the word no longer to be in use because children have “all that they want” signaled poignantly the hidden character of food insecurity even among those living in the immediate area.

Bringing the City to the Country • 71 Both in this example and in the opening scene in Thandeka’s home, not only did the word izicoficofi identify the “other”—the people who were better-off—but the word was also used defensively, seeming to stake a claim. The process of “othering” involved an implicit struggle over what was deemed valuable, using language that marked out lines of exclusion. In the second story, it was membership in the soccer team that identified a boy as valuable among his peers, and izicoficofi became a device for excluding children who belonged to well-off families. In Thandeka’s use of the word, reference to a group was implicit but vividly conveyed nonetheless: this was an imagined community whose members were the bearers of Zulu culture, identifiable by their consumption of ukudla kwesiZulu rather than izicoficofi. In both stories, people who were associated with izicoficofi emerged as vacuous or even impoverished, not in material terms but because they lacked the qualities deemed necessary for inclusion within a particular group. In both cases, assumptions about the marginality of the poor vis-à-vis the rich were inverted, so that the wealthy instead were constructed discursively as peripheral.

Conclusion Prior to the recent proliferation of retail stores in the countryside, which has been a catalyst for diverse consumption practices, rural South Africans have long been novel consumers of goods. Indeed, in the mid-nineteenth century, as Robert Ross’s work on the London Missionary Society’s activities in the Cape Colony shows, changing styles of food and dress in response to missionary encounters took place initially in rural settings (Ross 1999). This infusion of aesthetic idioms was accompanied by the emergence of values of respectability that would later form the ideological substance of emerging urban class-based distinctions. In this paper, I have shown that in contemporary South Africa, too, “expressions of an aesthetic vision” (Mbembe 2004) are not the exclusive domain of the city but are being forged in rural contexts, as well. In the opening example, Thandeka’s concern to present an attractive image of authentic ethnic food culture suggests that the ambivalent meanings associated with food resonate with a wider ideological struggle over how the rural should be defined in a former homeland area that has been the location both of sustained economic and social marginalization under successive colonial and apartheid governments and of a powerful movement of Zulu ethnic nationalism. In the past twenty years, the expansion of retail stores and of access to media, music, and food genres that were previously more limited has fueled a growing diversity of consumption practices. The capacity of residents to reinforce and enact certain aspects of rural life is often limited by material constraints and—contrary to the often-evoked image of the rural as a site of generalized poverty—is also subjected to the relational dynamics of extreme economic inequality. In this respect, the word

72 • Food Between the Country and the City izicoficofi—which represents the fragmentation of rural society along class lines, as expressed in daily food practices—mirrors the symbolism of the city shopping mall that has come to represent the exclusivity of an elite urban lifestyle. Thandeka’s comments, and the other examples presented in this article, serve as both fragments and microcosms of this wider struggle over the meanings of the rural and the urban in contemporary South Africa.

Acknowledgments This work has been partly supported by the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH) of the London International Development Centre. The research costs were provided by the British Academy.

–4– Bringing It All Back Home: Reconnecting the Country and the City through Heritage Food Tourism in the French Auvergne Harry G. West

Soon after I came to know Alphonse Bellonte—who, along with numerous members of his family, lives and produces Saint-Nectaire cheese in the hamlet of Farges (located in the commune of Saint-Nectaire, in the department of Puy-de-Dôme, in the Auvergne region of France)—he told me the story of how he had been asked by a local branch of one of the national supermarket chains to dress up in nineteenthcentury peasant costume and sell his cheese in the store (not the industrial version of Saint-Nectaire typically sold in supermarkets but, instead, his raw-milk, farmstead product). He declined the offer, but not for lack of interest in the history of the cheese that he made or the people who have made it over centuries. As we shall see, Alphonse Bellonte is greatly interested in the history of the Saint-Nectaire commune, its environs, and its eponymous cheese, and he considers himself among the contemporary guardians of regional heritage. Nor did he take umbrage at the term “peasant.” As we shall also see, Alphonse enthusiastically embraces his identity as a paysan of the Auvergne. In fact, Alphonse is not one to shy away from donning a good costume. At a fête gauloise (Gallic festival) that he organized in 2007, Alphonse happily dressed like Obélix from the bande dessinée (cartoon) series Astérix le Gaulois. Alphonse explained to me his choice not to dress up to sell cheese in the supermarket by saying that the work that he and his family do as cheesemakers is not a thing of the past but, rather, a thing of the present. Although they and their work embody tradition, he, his family, and their cheeses are not relics. They are, in Alphonse’s words, “living traditions.” Alphonse is not alone among cheesemakers with whom I have worked in feeling uneasy about the ways in which traditional foods—also often termed artisan foods or heritage foods—and their makers are frequently cast. While such products are often celebrated for their superior organoleptic qualities and—along with their producers— for their authenticity, their romanticization creates expectations that many producers neither can nor wish to fulfill. I am reminded of a visit Alphonse arranged for me with the Vergnols, another cheesemaking family. They lived in the Puy-de-Dôme

– 73 –

74 • Food Between the Country and the City commune of Avéze and had recently started making Fourme d’Ambert—a cheese that had long been made exclusively by large cooperatives—on their farm, as many in the region had done decades ago. They told me that a journalist from the French illustrated review Geo had visited them in order to write an article about the rebirth of traditional farmstead Fourme d’Ambert. After traveling several hours from Paris, however, the journalist left within minutes of arrival, put off by the sight of stainless steel vats in what he had hoped would be a more traditional-looking farmhouse cheese room. Like the Bellontes, this cheesemaking family conceived of itself as, at once, traditional and modern—and was simply bemused that anyone could expect to find the past, in unreconstructed form, residing in the present. Raymond Williams provides a useful framework through which to examine the predicaments faced today by the Bellontes and many other artisan cheesemakers, as well as the ways in which they navigate them. As mentioned in the introduction to this volume, Williams argued in The Country and the City that the rural idyll was a recurrent trope in English literature—“a myth functioning as a memory” (Williams 1973: 43) in an ever-more-urban, industrialized England. Williams warned that a romanticized countryside may have served various writers as a powerful heuristic tool in the critique of the city but that such tropes fail to expose—and indeed obscure— deeper historical dynamics whereby the country and the city have actually been produced and reproduced in interrelation with one another. Williams’s insights are particularly salient with reference to the way in which the countryside is romanticized today as a place of good, local, and/or artisinal food, often in comparison with an ever-more-urban world associated with bad, “placeless” (Coles 2013), and/ or industrial food. In fact, whether “good” or “bad,” whether “local” or “placeless,” whether “artisanal” or “industrial,” the foods eaten around the world today have all been shaped by, and have in turn shaped, historical processes that have dramatically transformed the country, the city, and the relationship between them. In what follows, I will echo Alphonse Bellonte in arguing that, far from being relics of a more traditional, rural world that has come under siege and survives in ever-smaller patches in an otherwise modernizing, urbanizing world, Alphonse and his family’s cheese are very much the products of and—to the extent that they have been able— the producers of a changing relationship between the country and the city.

Keeping the Family on the Farm The oldest member of the Bellonte family with whom I conversed while conducting ethnographic research in Farges was Alphonse’s father, Emile Bellonte.1 When Emile was born in 1929, Farges had only “a dozen hearths”—to use Emile’s words—and, in total, around 60 residents. At that time, Emile’s father, Antoine, owned and, together with Emile’s uncle, Marcel, farmed 24 hectares of land that had been in the Bellonte family for at least five generations before them. Farm activities were diverse.

Bringing It All Back Home • 75 The Bellontes cultivated fields, tended vines, and grazed a herd of twenty cows on pasturelands. They made wine from the grapes they harvested, and butter and cheese from their cows’ milk. “For the cheese, nothing was mechanized,” Emile remembered. “It was pressed by hand, in wooden molds, with a wooden lid.” The family members themselves aged some of the cheeses they made, but only what they would themselves eat. They sold the rest—the better part of what they made—en blanc (meaning, before it was aged) at markets in the nearby towns of Murol and Le VernetSainte-Marguerite. Emile remembered how, each week, someone from the family took 20 kilograms of cheese by horse-drawn cart down the hill into Saint-Nectaire to catch a bus to Murol: “And when I say bus, you have to imagine the old type of public transportation that stopped at every path along the road to take on other peasants and their cargo, including chickens! I don’t know how long it took the bus to make the 6-kilometer journey between Saint-Nectaire and Murol. At least two hours!” When World War II began, Antoine and Marcel were called to serve in the military, but after the Maginot Line “debacle”—as Emile called it—they returned home, dispirited.2 They were subsequently drawn into the local Resistance network, but when one of its members was captured and tortured, he gave up the names of his compatriots, and they were taken prisoner. The hamlet of Farges was also bombed in reprisal by German troops, killing one resident and one of the cows in the Bellonte herd. Antoine and Marcel survived the concentration camps and returned home after the war. In their absence, the population of Farges had dwindled to 48. Emile was sent to boarding school after the war, but he quit after a year and returned home to work on the farm. Soon thereafter, in 1948, Antoine purchased 10 hectares of land from a cousin. In combination with land he had bought from a neighbor before the war—because the 24 hectares he had inherited from his father was un peu juste (a bit too small)—Antoine now owned 37 hectares. Also in 1948, the Bellonte herd was expanded to 28 cows. Emile remembered that milking took even longer than before—in fact, too long. “It wasn’t that we were afraid to get blisters on our hands from taking the cows’ udders, but we came to have time for nothing else.” So, for Christmas in 1948, Antoine spent 240,000 francs on a pneumatic milking machine that milked three cows at a time. In 1951, Emile married Bernadette, the daughter of the baker in Le Vernet-SainteMarguerite, and she took up cheesemaking alongside her mother-in-law, Emile’s mother, Leontine. In 1959, Emile took over from his father as head of the farm. Over the next fifteen years, he worked not only his own farm but also the farms of neighbors, in some cases sharecropping (métayage) and in other cases farming rented land (fermage). In Emile’s words, “To understand this, one must see it within the context of the reconstruction of France in the years after the war and of the need for labor in the factories. In fact, these lands that I took on little by little, renting or sharecropping, coincided with the aging of the inhabitants of Farges and the departure of young people who preferred to leave to work in the factories in the towns, where they were better paid and where the work was less punishing.”3

76 • Food Between the Country and the City Emile’s account indexes dramatic changes taking place in postwar France. In the aftermath of the war, and with substantial assistance from the United States through the Marshall Plan, France experienced rapid industrialization, giving rise to high demand for labor and increasing standards of living in fast-expanding cities throughout the country. Substantial out-migration from rural areas in this period was accompanied by the increasing industrialization of French agriculture, as well. Beginning in the early 1960s, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)—established by the European Union’s precursor, the European Economic Community (EEC)—greatly contributed to agricultural intensification and rural-to-urban migration in France, as elsewhere. Defined by an array of often-conflicting objectives, the CAP produced an array of often-conflicting effects (Herman and Kuper 2003; Hill 2011). The war had not only damaged agricultural infrastructure, it had also dramatically heightened anxieties about food security in Europe. Member states hoped, through the CAP, to facilitate the recovery and growth of European agriculture by creating investment incentives for farmers of varying sizes. Indeed, the protection of rural society—seen by many as essential to the stability of a postwar European culture of democracy— figured among the original aims of the CAP (Gray 2000). However, whereas price supports, import duties, and export subsidies effectively attracted investment into European agriculture, these measures also exacerbated the trend toward agricultural intensification (Herman and Kuper 2003). With CAP support, agricultural risk factors were diminished, so that the more one invested, the more profits one made. Agricultural overproduction depressed commodity prices, but the CAP prevented prices from falling low enough to hold production in check. European surpluses were exported—often dumped below cost in less-developed countries at European taxpayers’ expense. The ballooning cost of the CAP led, in time, to calls for a reduction in the size of the agricultural sector, which generally translated into attempts to force smaller, supposedly less-efficient farmers out of business. At the same time, lower profit margins favored larger agricultural interests over small farmers, further contributing to the consolidation of land in the hands of fewer and fewer farmers and to the growth of corporate agro-businesses. The story of rural France—as well as much of rural Europe—in the second half of the twentieth century was, therefore, one of large-scale exodus and the collapse of once-vibrant rural communities. This story played out in microcosm in the hamlet of Farges, where, one after another, the Bellontes’ neighbors gave up farming, with many moving to the city of Clermont-Ferrand to work at the Michelin plant there. As others sought better fortunes elsewhere, however, Emile saw new possibilities at home. As opportunities arose, Emile bought land from neighbors who no longer wanted to farm—in many instances, after Emile had worked the same land for years as a tenant or sharecropper. As his holdings increased in size, so too did his family. By 1974, three of his children—Bernard, aged 23, Marie-France, aged 20, and Pierrot, aged 19—had finished school and expressed their wishes to stay in Farges and to continue working on the farm. Emile’s youngest child—Alphonse, aged 14—helped out eagerly with

Bringing It All Back Home • 77 the herd. So Emile decided to establish a Groupement Agricole d’Exploitation en Commun (GAEC)—a legal partnership allowing each child to become part-owner of the farm and making the farm eligible, as a start-up enterprise, for government aid. By this time, there were forty cows and eighteen heifers in the family herd. With more animals came more milk for cheesemaking. To help his mother, Leontine, and his wife, Bernadette, meet the demands of processing more milk, Emile bought an electric cheese press. In 1978, the farm took a loan of 520,000 francs to build a new stable and to fill it to capacity with 115 cows. Emile also bought a new tractor and a manure spreader. Emile considered all of these investments, on credit, to be sacrés risques, albeit necessary ones. The Bellonte family was continuing to grow at a fast pace. In 1975, Bernard married Annie, and two years later, Pierrot married Bernadette (distinguished from her mother-in-law by her nickname, Doudoune). In coming years, Annie and Doudoune each had three children, as did Marie-France after she married. But along with more mouths to feed came more hands to work. Soon after joining the family, Annie and Doudoune each began working in the cheese room, learning from Bernadette and, in time, taking on more and more of the work. Indeed, their joining the family in Farges—rather than Bernard and Pierrot’s leaving to live and work elsewhere—secured the continuity of the Bellonte family farm into the next generation. In time, Alphonse, too, became a member of the GAEC and an active contributor to the running of the farm. Alphonse and his siblings were the only young people of their generation to remain in Farges, but by 2004—when I first visited the farm—the next generation of Bellontes had come of age and had also begun to work on the farm, which now included 474 hectares. Emile boasted: “I am very proud of [my grandchildren] because it is said everywhere that young people no longer want to do this kind of work, but they have pulled up their socks like their parents, and gotten on with it, without shirking any burdens.” While the Bellontes’ farm, and their investment in it, grew along with the Bellonte family in the postwar years, growth alone was not sufficient to ensure the survival of the Bellonte family on the farm. Even as Emile invested in the farm, dairy farming was becoming less and less viable in the region, just as family farming of any kind was becoming less and less viable throughout Europe. A productivist logic— prioritizing growth of production over all other objectives and all other measures of success—took hold of the European dairy industry in the postwar period, just as it did other kinds of farming, and prices paid to dairy farmers were driven lower and lower, making it virtually impossible for small-scale farmers to make a living selling liquid milk. The Bellontes, like many small-scale farmers, had to (continue to) make cheese, and they had to make more of it, in order to add value to the products of their labor and to pay off loans. Of course, the same productivist logic soon came to define the postwar market in cheese, too, as emergent industrial manufacturers—some of them making pasteurized Saint-Nectaire in the region—began to capture an everexpanding share of the market, driving prices down and driving out small producers unable to survive on tiny margins. Complicating matters for artisan producers,

78 • Food Between the Country and the City the expansion of supermarket chains (which favored industrial producers that could meet large orders) drove the vast majority of fromageries in France (retailers better suited for the trade in artisan cheeses) out of business.4 The fact that the original Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) for Saint-Nectaire—granted in 1955— defined the cheese as a raw-milk product and that a subappellation continued to protect Saint-Nectaire Fermier (farmstead Saint-Nectaire) after a parallel subappellation was created in 1964 for Saint-Nectaire Laitier (industrial, or “dairy,” Saint-Nectaire) helped to safeguard a market niche for producers such as the Bellontes. But although thousands of family farms in the region stopped making Saint-Nectaire in the second half of the twentieth century, many of the remaining few hundred increased production (as the Bellontes did) in order to survive, meaning that the Bellontes faced stiff competition from other cheesemakers in the ever-contracting market for farmstead Saint-Nectaire. Like other farmstead producers, the Bellontes sought secure relationships with reliable consumers, but the postwar rural-to-urban migration that symbolized the decline of family farming and artisan cheesemaking also posed concrete and fundamental problems. Along with farmers departing the region in the postwar era, other rural residents—from cobblers and coopers to masons and mechanics— also left, meaning that fewer and fewer residents remained who might purchase and consume cheese. Migrants from the Auvergne to French cities may have continued to buy Saint-Nectaire cheese, but at such distances, they relied on retail networks that, over time, came to be dominated by national supermarket chains that mostly sold industrial Saint-Nectaire to them (as well as to migrants from other regions and to longer-standing urban residents). By the early 1990s, the Bellontes needed rather desperately to find a way to (re)connect with consumers—whether migrants who had actually left the Auvergne in the previous decades or a broader French nation that had, both literally and figuratively, abandoned the countryside for the city. But how?

A Journey through Time, Ending at the Cheese Counter It was Emile’s youngest son, Alphonse, who charted the course that the Bellontes would follow in order to (re)connect with those who would buy their cheeses. By 1991, Alphonse had graduated from an agricultural school in the region and returned home to work on the farm. In conversation with me, Alphonse remembered the year for the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines and, with it, “the eruption of an idea in [his] head.” Pinatubo was no mere metaphor in this case, for Alphonse’s idea was linked to the volcanoes of the Auvergne region that had given birth to the Massif Central mountain range defining the landscape of central France. In fact, an eruption of one of the region’s approximately 450 now-extinct volcanoes had produced the landscape on which the Bellonte farm was located—farmland that included a complex of caves on one of the parcels of land that Emile had acquired decades earlier from a departing neighbor. Together with an archaeologist

Bringing It All Back Home • 79 friend, Dominique Allios, Alphonse discovered that the caves were hewn from rock produced by the eruption of the Monts-Dore stratovolcano some 3 million years ago. A roiling cloud of fibrous pumice fragments, rock debris, and volcanic gases— heated to a temperature of several hundred degrees—had swept over the surrounding countryside, laying down a blanket of blond tuff that was, in some places, several thousand meters thick (Féraud et al. 1990). The periphery of this vast deposit includes the area today known as Saint-Nectaire and the land now owned by the Bellonte family.5 Gas bubbles trapped in the tuff made for very light stone, which proved attractive to stonecutters—who discovered and began quarrying in the area in the fifth century—not only for its intrinsic characteristics (it could be easily cut and transported) but also for the fact that the deposit lay close to the old Roman road crossing the Massif Central. Stone taken from what is now Bellonte land was used to produce, among other things, the sarcophaguses of the Merovingians—a Salian Frankish dynasty that came to rule, from the mid-fifth to the mid-eighth centuries, over a region largely corresponding to ancient Gaul.6 Archaeological evidence revealed that it was, in fact, the fifth-century stonecutters who had dug the caves and that they had used them as dwellings. By the ninth century, the region was besieged by the rival armies of Charles the Bald and Pepin the Second, fighting over the remains of Charlemagne’s empire. Evidence of a wooden fortress, surrounding the approach to the quarry/cave complex and dating to this period, was also discovered by Alphonse and Dominique. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, stone cut from the quarry was used to build several of the Romanesque churches in the region—including the church in Saint-Nectaire—as well as castles in Saint-Nectaire (subsequently destroyed) and in Murol. Security was an issue in this era as well, as roving bands of arsonist-thieves set upon small communities, robbing what they could and burning everything else. The caves were consequently used in this period to safely store the harvest taken from surrounding fields, and defenses were augmented with the construction of a small castle just below the caves (Allios 1995; 2005a; 2005b). Alphonse followed up with other forms of historical research and discovered that, when the quarry fell out of use after the twelfth century, the caves did not. During the French Revolution, Father Antoine Dubois—a son of the Dubois family from Farges, who had become the vicar of Cournon-(d’Auvergne)—returned home and secretly offered the sacraments to his neighbors. It was Antoine Dubois’s half-brother, Donat Dubois—acting in his role as mayor of the commune of Saint-Nectaire—who led local revolutionaries in the destruction of religious artifacts and in the relentless hunt for Father Antoine. But every night, Antoine and Donat Dubois ate together in their father’s home, where Antoine often slept. And when Father Antoine baptized children, Donat was often named as their godfather. When Donat was ordered to deliver a silver bust of Saint Nectaire to his revolutionary commanders, he detached the hollow arm of the statue and inserted the bones of the saint inside to preserve them from the iconoclasts. He gave the arm to his brother, Antoine, who in the dark of night carried the reliquary up the hill from Saint-Nectaire to Farges. Drawing on his boyhood

80 • Food Between the Country and the City knowledge of the area, he chose the caves now on Bellonte land in which to hide the bones of the saint. As the story goes, he broke his leg climbing down into the caves, and he would have died there if not found three days later by Donat, who shared Antoine’s childhood memories of the caves. The Bellonte connection to this historical drama was consolidated years later when Donat’s granddaughter, Anne, married Emile Bellonte’s great-great-grandfather, named, as his father was, Antoine Bellonte. After the French Revolution, the caves served various purposes. At the end of the eighteenth century, horizontal entryways were dug at ground level, and they were transformed into cow pens and sheepfolds. When, in 1870, a phylloxera infestation struck the vineyards of France’s best wine-producing regions, vines were planted on every available parcel of land in the Auvergne, which by 1892 had become the third-most-productive wine region in the country. In this era, the caves were temporarily converted into wine cellars. In 1962, Emile Bellonte bought the land on which the caves were located from a neighbor. At that time, the caves were being used to age cheese, but Emile was interested in the land for its pastures and for the stone quarry (whose history he did not know). For a time, he sold sand and stone quarried from land around the caves to local builders, in order to augment farm income. The Bellonte family used one of the caves as a sheepfold, one to store hay, and one to age cheese, renting a fourth one to a neighbor who kept pigs, chickens, and pigeons in it. When the Bellontes abandoned raising sheep, Emile took to storing farm equipment and other bric-a-brac in the caves. But Alphonse envisioned a radically different use for these caves. Given that the events evidenced within the layers of cave sediment so poignantly indexed the history of Farges and its inhabitants, Alphonse determined to create a museum within the cave complex that would distinguish the Bellonte farm from so many others in the region, drawing visitors to the farm who might buy the cheeses they made. With the assistance of a Paris-based company that had set up a small museum Alphonse had seen in a nearby town, he set to work creating a multimedia exhibit called Les Mystères de Farges. Alphonse’s nephew Antoine (Pierrot and Doudoune’s son) and his niece Babeth (Bernard and Annie’s daughter) were the first guides to escort visitors through the cave exhibit, which has remained largely unchanged to this day. In the first cave chamber, visitors are told about the geology of the caves and their history. They are also briefly told how Saint-Nectaire cheese is made, and they see cheeses aging on straw mats in the back of the chamber. In the second chamber, visitors see evidence of the caves’ use as dwellings in the Middle Ages, and the evolution of the complex is illustrated by a three-scene diorama with a recorded narrative. In the third cave, the recorded story of Father Antoine Dubois is told, with moving silhouettes of characters in the drama projected on the cave walls. In the fourth cave, visitors see a collection of stereoscopic photographs of Saint-Nectaire and its environs taken in the first decade of the twentieth century by a man of local origin named Viginet; these images are also accompanied by a narrative recording.

Bringing It All Back Home • 81 Upon exiting the last cave, visitors are invited to walk through the hamlet of Farges—where they may visit a restored thatched-roof building with several informational text boards mounted on the interior walls, as well as the village fountain— ultimately arriving at the foot of a hill where the Bellonte stable is located. Visitors are seated in an area of the barn, divided from the milking parlor by a wall, where feed grain and hay are stored. There, they are shown a ten-minute film in which the story of the farm, and its animal husbandry and cheesemaking methods, are described by a narrator and by several members of the youngest Bellonte generation, who address themselves to the camera. Thereafter, depending upon the time of day, visitors are invited into the milking parlor to see the cows being milked and/or into the cheese room to watch (through a glass partition) the cheese being made. From the time the cows are brought in for milking, it takes approximately three and a half hours until cheesemaking is completed. Visitors can linger as long as they wish—on average, they spend between 30 and 45 minutes—to watch what is happening at the moment. The Bellontes use eight milking machines to aid them in their work. The milk passes directly from these machines, through overhead pipes, into a stainless steel vat in the cheese room. Following the addition of a starter culture and rennet, the curd forms. After the automated cutting of the curd and the draining of the whey, the curd is extracted from the vat by hand and put into molds in which it is first pressed by hand and then, after being lined around its edges with a strip of cloth and salted, pressed in a hydraulic machine press. After several more hours in a second machine press, the young cheeses are removed from their molds and refrigerated for a few days before being placed in a cave—because Les Mystères de Farges occupies most of the space in the Bellonte’s own cave complex, the family rents additional caves in an adjacent village—where it is left to age for several weeks. After watching cheese being made, visitors may buy cheese (that has returned to the farm from the cave) either directly outside the cheese room or in the visitors’ center in the Bellonte cave complex, where other produits de terroir and souvenirs from Les Mystères de Farges are also sold. Visitors may also dine in the auberge that Alphonse installed in 2005 over the fourth cave, where the fare includes a plate called the Phonsounette (Phonsou being Alphonse’s nickname), a personalized version of a melted Saint-Nectaire cheese and potato dish typical of the region, often prepared by Alphonse himself.

Quarrying Heritage and Gathering Tourists The creation of Les Mystères de Farges was supported, in part, by a European Union program called Liaison Entre Actions de Développement de l’Economie Rurale (LEADER). This program—started in 1991 and continuing, now in its “fourth round,” to the present day—represents a concerted attempt by the EU to mitigate the effects of the post-World War II phenomena outlined above, including rapid

82 • Food Between the Country and the City industrialization, the emergence of productivist agriculture, large-scale rural-to-urban migration, and the attendant collapse of rural regional economies and constituent communities. The LEADER program has focused on the social, economic, and environmental regeneration of rural regions, with an emphasis on initiatives that use local resources in sustainable ways and that generate employment locally. LEADER has, for example, promoted the EU’s Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) program (an EU-wide version of the French Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée system), through which producers may be granted exclusive rights to market traditional products bearing the names of places whose natural and human endowment contribute to their distinctiveness (West 2013). LEADER has also supported agro-tourism and heritage industries in depressed rural areas. The idea behind such initiatives, in the words of John Gray, is that “instead of local farmers relying on CAP price support mechanisms to produce agricultural commodities for people outside their rural locality, rural localities are now places that people from outside come into to consume the diversity of things that now constitute rural localities: environment, heritage, beautiful natural landscapes, local customs and artefacts” (Gray 2000: 44). According to archaeologist Kevin Walsh, heritage tourism may be connected to a general nostalgia for rural community, and for a direct connection to productive processes, that many urban dwellers today feel themselves to have lost, whether literally or figuratively (Walsh 1992)—an assertion that resonates with the ideas of Raymond Williams. Beverly Butler similarly suggests that “experiences of rupture, displacement, and the concomitant ‘traumatisation of temporality’ [a term she borrows from Walsh] synonymous with episodes of radical change” have contributed greatly to “the construction of heritage discourse” (Butler 2006: 465). She echoes David Lowenthal, who asserts that “ ‘the search for heritage’ dominates the contemporary global context” (Butler 2006: 470; Lowenthal 1996: 9). She quotes Lowenthal as saying: “ ‘massive migration sharpens nostalgia,’ and the trauma of ‘refugee exodus’ has defined new ‘heritage-hungry’ constituencies” (Butler 2006: 470; Lowenthal 1996: 9). If postwar European rural-to-urban migration has given rise to nostalgia for the countryside, programs such as LEADER and initiatives such as Les Mystères de Farges have responded to the heritage-hungry constituencies of which Butler speaks. Critics of heritage tourism have suggested, however, that the objectives of preserving rural heritage and fostering rural development may fundamentally conflict— the former implying conservation of social and economic institutions and practices (or restoration of those destroyed by previous forms of development), and the latter implying significant social and economic transformation. Jacinthe Bessière asks, simply: “To what extent can heritage be conserved [or, we might add, reconstructed] and transmitted without upsetting its identity?” (Bessière 1998: 29). Others have argued that heritage tourism obliterates (both literally destroys and causes to be forgotten—in French, oubliée) the very community it celebrates, through the creation of a Disneylike experience without substantial depth. Walsh writes: “[Urbanites] create artificial roots through the consumption of representations of rurality” (1992: 154). In the

Bringing It All Back Home • 83 process, he warns, heritagization itself may facilitate, or consolidate, or complete the destruction of that to which it refers, by replacing it with a depthless simulacrum.7 Heritage consumers may or may not realize that this is so. In any case, according to Bessière, “objects are grasped just as they are about to disappear and their beauty [the ‘beauty of death’ as she calls it, following Daniel Fabre] is measured through the shock generated by emotion and memory” (Bessière 1998: 28; Fabre 2007). Needless to say, Alphonse sees Les Mystères de Farges and the work his family does while hosting visitors on the farm rather differently, and I would argue that his perspectives—grounded as they are in the real-life exigencies of making a living from family farming today—are rather more nuanced and, therefore, deserving of our attention. To begin with, the idea that heritage tourism makes commodities of the cultural forms that it presents to visitors troubles Alphonse very little, for he knows that Saint-Nectaire cheese has long been a commodity for trade. In fact, recognition of a cheese called Saint-Nectaire, and a corresponding productive tradition, may be traced to the presentation of a cheese from the region to Louis XIV by the maréchal de France, Henri de La Ferté-Senneterre (a corruption of Saint-Nectaire), and subsequent demand for this prized commodity at Versailles and elsewhere in France. Even if, for centuries, cheesemaking families in the region consumed much of what they produced, they also generally marketed surplus cheeses in order to secure valuable income—in many cases, their primary cash income. Alphonse sees himself as carrying on the traditional practice of marketing the products of his family’s labor. In his case, however, marketing entails the work associated with numerous contemporary professions. I once observed, in conversation with him, that in order to be farmers and cheesemakers, he and his family have had to become historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, museum curators, tour guides, architects, designers, restaurateurs, shopkeepers, financial planners, accountants, and marketing specialists. When I suggested that he had to be a Renaissance man to remain on the farm, he laughed and then replied, without hesitation: “No, I am a peasant.” On the surface, this statement might be read as an expression of postWorld War II French nationalism, which has dressed agricultural policies benefiting an industrializing nation and the leaders of industry (including French agro-business) in a national discourse celebrating les paysans as the enduring soul of le pays—a discourse cementing popular support for policies as diverse as French defense of continuing CAP farm subsidies, French investment in the extension of AOC systems to the EU as a whole (West 2013), and the successful petition for recognition of the “gastronomic meal of the French” on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Given Alphonse’s leftist political views, a more informed reading of his statement might associate it with the more radical positions taken by the French sheep-farmer-turned-antiglobalization-activist José Bové or the founder of Slow Food, Carlo Petrini, each of whom celebrate—albeit in distinctive ways—the connection between smaller-scale farmers and their land, both in an ecological sense

84 • Food Between the Country and the City and in a socio-historical one. But Alphonse’s embrace of the term paysan was at once simpler and more complex, reminding me of the dispossessed French peasant woman Lucie Cabrol, depicted in three short stories in John Berger’s collection Pig Earth. She preserved herself in an ever-changing world by knowing every nook and cranny of her environment, harvesting what could be found wild on the land all around her—morels, wild cherries, blueberries, raspberries, wild strawberries, blackberries, juniper berries, cumin, yellow gentians, dandelions, violets, lilies of the valley, mistletoe, primroses, cyclamen, wild rhododendrons, trolles, and snails—and capturing their value at market on the other side of one boundary or another, whether natural frontiers between altitudes, seasons, or ecosystems or social frontiers between the countryside and the city, between nations, or between social classes (Berger 1979: 136–45). To be sure, Alphonse differed substantially from Lucie Cabrol, not only in that he inherited a share of his father’s property, but also in that he was far better educated and far more cosmopolitan, not only than Berger’s fictional character, but also than most of his Auvergnate neighbors being pushed off the land in the days of his youth.8 But like his father before him—who not only kept cattle and made cheese, but also sharecropped and mined sand and stone, among many other things, to increase his income and to sustain the family farm—Alphonse has similarly diversified his activities, and he multitasks constantly. He, however, quarries heritage in the caves on family land, and instead of mushrooms and berries, he gathers tourists. By definition, the tourists Alphonse attracts to the Bellonte farm are external to the community that they visit—outsiders, many even foreigners. But as we have seen, the recent history of migration from rural to urban France ties tourists to the places they have abandoned—communities left incomplete by out-migration—whether literally or figuratively. One might therefore argue that Les Mystères de Farges has reconstituted community in Farges or, at least, around its remaining farmers/cheesemakers. Whereas the postwar exodus disconnected the Bellontes from fellow villagers and potential consumers alike, Les Mystères de Farges has (re)connected them with an array of people. These include not only former residents of the region nostalgically returning from time to time, but also those without personal histories in the region, including retirees and the getaway class coming for short stays or, even, for longer stints (sometimes buying homes on the depressed regional real-estate market and fixing them up, whether as primary or secondary residences). According to such an argument, Les Mystères de Farges facilitates the Bellontes’ engagement with an ever-more-dispersed and mobile community that consumes the products of their labor. It also connects them to this community socially. Indeed, since the opening of Les Mystères de Farges, the Bellontes’ world—including their social circle— has increasingly been shaped by tourists. The Bellontes now spend a great deal of their time each day interacting with visitors to the farm, and some of these interactions have given rise to enduring relationships. Indeed, Alphonse’s cosmopolitanism has allowed him to conceive of those who visit the farm not as naïve, condescending romanticists, but as three-dimensional people worthy of genuine engagement,

Bringing It All Back Home • 85 which has, in turn, facilitated their treating him and his family as people with greater depth—all profoundly undermining the stereotypes, both rural and urban, proffered by analysts such as Walsh. Each time I have visited the farm, I have heard stories of other visitors with whom one or another family member has had memorable interactions. I was myself referred to Alphonse by Mother Noella Marcellino, a Connecticut-based Benedictine nun and cheesemaker whom I had come to know a few years earlier and who had previously visited Alphonse while conducting research on cheese for her doctoral dissertation. My visits to Farges often prompted Alphonse to correspond with Mother Noella, and when she and Alphonse met in Paris in 2012, they phoned me. Since I first visited the Bellonte farm in 2004, Alphonse has come to visit me and my family in London three times. Not only does Alphonse’s network of friends include many who have visited him on the farm, but his local interactions have also increasingly come to be defined by his involvement with tourism. He has served, since 2008, both as president of the Department of Puy-de-Dôme’s Tourism Development Agency and as mayor of Saint-Nectaire—all reinforcing his entrepreneurial acumen and political savvy while broadening his networks and further enhancing his vision of the countryside he inhabits and its relationship to the city. He may, at times, tire of promoting his own and other tourist enterprises—of the hard work of marketing requiring that he never stop moving, as friends and family members often say of him. But he does not see his current constellation of interactions as having replaced, or displaced, a more authentic form of community that would have otherwise given context to his life. Tourism has, quite simply, become part and parcel of life in Farges for him and his family—as much as cheesemaking. In fact, cheesemaking and tourism exist in symbiosis in Farges. Cheesemaking is the centerpiece of the tourist visit—the feature that makes the attraction of tourists possible. At the same time, tourism brings consumers to the Bellonte farm, giving the Bellontes a unique selling point for their cheeses and shortening the supply chain for their product, so that they are able to capture nearly all of the market value of their work. The combined profits of cheesemaking and tourism—the latter including tour tickets, sales of other local products, and meals in the auberge, among other things—make the farm viable, whereas neither activity alone would. Of course, the relationship between cheesemaking and tourism in Farges is, in some ways, strained. Neighbors have complained over the years as rising numbers of cars and, now, tour buses clog the tiny hamlet’s streets and as pedestrians peer into private spaces, despite Alphonse’s best efforts to direct visitors toward appropriate parking spaces and walkways. While the Bellontes benefit financially from all of this, their neighbors do not. Even members of the Bellonte family betray ambivalence about the throngs passing through the places they inhabit. Annie and Doudoune—now the principal cheesemakers—at times express weariness with working under the constant gaze of tourists—“some of whom are more of a bother than others,” as Doudoune once put it, diplomatically, in conversation with me. Visitors themselves also experience tension between the tourist experience and the operation of an actual farm and cheese

86 • Food Between the Country and the City room. Most notably, some are confused by what, to them, appear to be rather modern tools and techniques in the midst of what they expect to be a traditional farm— whether in the form of automated milking machines, commercial starter culture and rennet, stainless steel electrically powered vats and presses, plastic molds, tiled cheese-room walls, or the glass partition separating them from the cheesemakers. Paradoxically, in order to preserve the tradition of Saint-Nectaire cheesemaking, the Bellontes have had to modernize their farm. The paradox is multilayered, for in order to create and sustain a modern cheesemaking enterprise, the Bellontes have had to preserve tradition—at least in the eyes of tourists. Whereas some might consider tradition as preserved by the Bellontes for tourist consumption to be a mere simulacrum, I would again argue that Alphonse’s understanding of it is more subtle—and worthy of appreciation. In Alphonse’s view, tradition is not unlike cheese itself. Aficionados often describe cheese as a living entity, composed of myriad organisms in dynamic interaction. It is, however, also a dying thing: flavor, for example, is the product of the breakdown of milk’s long-chain casein proteins into peptides, amino acids, and amines, and its globules of fat into fatty acids—literally, milk’s decay. Alphonse views tradition—specifically, the tradition of cheesemaking—in a similar way, as both a living and a dying thing. In order to live, tradition must be conveyed through time. In the process, it necessarily changes, some of its component parts even breaking down: it is consumed, it is remembered, it is (re)made again and again. According to Alphonse’s understanding, the cheese his family makes partakes of tradition precisely because Saint-Nectaire cheese, along with those who make it and the means by which they do so, have been constantly transformed over centuries and because, as a consequence of the cheese’s necessarily constant rebirth, it continues to exist today. Reasons for the kinds of transformations of farmstead cheesemaking that tourists— not to mention Geo journalists—find vexing are many. Some forms of modernization on the Bellonte farm can be traced to forces that are beyond the Bellontes’ control and that, if they had been able, they might have resisted. EU regulations passed in 1992 and enforced by inspectors since 1998 have required that anything coming into contact with milk, curd, or cheese be made of nonporous material—hence, the stainless steel vat the Bellontes now use. In conversation with me, various members of the family remembered how switching over to this new piece of equipment caused them great difficulties, as they were accustomed to making cheese without a starter culture, relying upon the bacteria harbored in a wooden vat (locally referred to as a baste) to function as a starter, as cheesemakers in the region had for centuries. But some forms of modernization on the Bellonte farm have been by their own choice, such as the switch to hydraulic pressing machines. Before the herd was expanded to fill the new barn in 1978, the Bellontes pressed their cheeses entirely by hand before placing them overnight under a simple static weight (a stone). Hand pressing entailed the application of steady pressure for approximately forty-five seconds at a time, repetitively, for up to ten minutes per cheese. As a consequence, the Bellontes who had spent years making cheese suffered from repetitive stress disorders and/or

Bringing It All Back Home • 87 rheumatoid arthritis. Therefore, switching over to mechanical presses was, for the Bellontes, a health and safety issue—meaning, in the case of a family farm, an issue of the well-being of family members. The switch was also essential to quality control, because machine pressing allowed the Bellontes to process the greater amount of curd they were producing before it hardened and dried, whereas hand pressing would not have. It might, of course, be argued that the moment the Bellontes scaled up production they necessarily abandoned tradition, adopting a more industrial logic of production. However, the Bellontes experienced the grow-or-die dilemma rather differently. Expanding their herd was what allowed them to stay on the farm when, all around them, smaller family farms were failing. Subsequently, only farms of the Bellontes’ size could afford the capital investments necessary to meet more stringent EU food safety protocols; nearly all of the smaller farms still in existence when these regulations came into force soon gave up cheesemaking entirely. Scaling up was no simple matter for the Bellontes. Successfully expanding the family farm required that they reinvent not only the farm, but also the family. Whereas, in generations past, family farms in the region were generally passed on as a single inheritance from father to eldest son, Emile Bellonte laid a new foundation, through the formation of a GAEC, for a family-farm enterprise that would be able to sustain nearly all of his and Bernadette’s progeny, including four children and nine grandchildren—something unprecedented over the generations during which Bellontes have farmed in Farges. When I worked on the farm in the summer of 2006, twelve Bellontes made a living working either on the farm or in the visitors complex (including the exhibit, the shop, and the auberge), while another three derived their livelihood from selling the farm’s produce in shops or restaurants they owned in the village of Saint-Nectaire. The farm also employed half a dozen other local young people in various capacities. To the Bellontes, then, the continued existence of their family farm was the essential form of continuity against which all other decisions involving conservation or transformation were weighed. And the attraction of tourists to visit them on the farm was an essential factor in the equation of preserving their “living tradition” of dairy farming and cheesemaking.

Facing the Present by Making a Living of a “Living Tradition” In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams wrote: “[T]he common image of the country is now an image of the past, and the common image of the city an image of the future. That leaves, if we isolate them, an undefined present. The pull of the idea of the country is toward old ways, human ways, natural ways. The pull of the idea of the city is toward progress, modernisation, development. In what is then a tension, a present experienced as a tension, we use the contrast of country and city to ratify an

88 • Food Between the Country and the City unresolved division and conflict of impulses, which it might be better to face in its own terms” (Williams 1973: 297). In this chapter, I have sought to expose the tensions—between past and present, and between the country and the city—experienced by the Bellonte family as they farm and make cheese today in Farges. My analysis has challenged the simple association of the past with bucolic countryside, an uncorrupted peasantry, and authentic foods, suggesting that the past has been experienced by members of the Bellonte family as a time of turbulence and uncertainty shaped in no small measure by the forces of modernity, including industrialization and large-scale migration from the country to the city. It has also challenged the simple association of the future with progress as defined by continuing modernization and industrialization, illustrating how the Bellontes’ future prospects are significantly shaped by expectations on the part of those to whom they sell their cheese that they embody the past as bearers of a timeless tradition. It is the Bellontes, however, who have truly faced this tension on its own terms, to use Williams’s words—or, perhaps even more accurately, faced this tension on their own terms. Responding to the rise of productivist agriculture, dairying, and cheesemaking, as well as to increasingly stringent health and safety demands from the EU (and the French state implementing European regulations), they have selectively adopted new technologies. In answer to consumer expectations, they have wrapped their products in a historical narrative—a story, as much about their present as their past, that they have crafted with as much attention to detail as they give to their cheesemaking. By choosing carefully how he has adorned himself and his family, Alphonse has refused to allow the Bellontes to be treated as relics of a disappearing countryside. Conscious of the dynamics that have reconstituted the country, the city, and the relationship between them over recent decades—dynamics that promise further transformations, and tensions, in the future—the Bellontes have sought not only to endure change by staying on the farm, but also, to the best their abilities, to steer change according to their own wishes by reproducing and embodying a “living tradition” and by making a living of that tradition within a community of their own making that moves between, and ties together, the country and the city as they know them today.

Acknowledgments I wish to thank Alphonse Bellonte and his family for sharing reflections on their work and their lives with me over the years that I have visited their farm. Thanks also to those who attended the “Food and Foodways in the Country and the City” symposium in Lisbon for their comments—and particularly to Nuno Domingos, José Manuel Sobral, Elizabeth Hull, and Emma-Jayne Abbots, who offered critical commentary on a subsequent draft version of this chapter. The research upon which this chapter is based was funded by the British Academy.

Section II Of the City and Its Food

–5– Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture: A Self-Critique Laura B. DeLind

It’s April and it’s been just a year since we began working on the 700 block of S. Hayford, transforming a 1/2 acre of abandoned land into an urban farm—Urbandale Farm. The transformation has been remarkable, and many have remarked upon it. Newspaper articles, for example, have focused on the work being done and the altered physical appearance of the property. Radio spots and video clips explain that a once abandoned field on a dead end street in a forgotten neighborhood on Lansing’s Eastside, is now home to neatly groomed beds of familiar vegetables grown to feed local residents. Michigan State University, likewise, has publicized the project, claiming that two of its professors have created the first urban farm in the Lansing area and that outreach of this kind is in the best tradition of a land grant university.

To be sure, all of this has been (and continues to be) hard, sweaty work. But, it’s admirable stuff; heartwarming stuff according to some (McNamara 2010). Hundreds of days and thousands of volunteered hours have been spent clearing brush, busting sod, preparing soil, planting, weeding, watering, and harvesting. It has also been (and continues to be) work that involves multiple community partners—the county land bank, city planning offices, food banks, neighborhood development centers— institutions both public and private that in various ways regulate, administer, and advocate for the common good. The results, it would seem, speak for themselves. In its first a year, 2010, Urbandale Farm raised and marketed more than 2,500 pounds of vegetables. Since then, it has tripled its acreage and quadrupled its sales. It has been awarded more than $100,000 in federal, state, and local grants to hire a farm manager, to train apprentices, to explore marketing strategies, to develop a veggie wagon, to expand production, and to engage neighbors in food and farming activities. There is much to celebrate and ample room for self-congratulation, which helps to explain the positive PR and the tendency for institutions to appropriate success whenever possible. Urbandale Farm (and the attention it is receiving) is not unlike hundreds of similar food and farming enterprises sprouting up on the urban landscape.

– 91 –

92 • Food Between the Country and the City But this is not the only story that can be told about our work in Urbandale. Another might go like this: It’s April and it’s been just a year since we began working on the 700 block of S. Hayford, transforming a 1/2 acre of abandoned land into an urban farm—Urbandale Farm. In that short amount of time much has happened. We have seen the house across the street razed and turned into yet another empty lot. We have seen the two-story house on the corner red-tagged and abandoned. We have witnessed the eviction of a young family in February, their furniture set out in the front yard in the snow. We have learned that two houses south of the farm are now in foreclosure and will soon be demolished— their renters displaced. We’ve said “good-bye” to a friend and neighbor, a S. Hayford home owner, who decided to move to Florida. We’ve watched as three new families have moved into rental properties, one still flashing the city’s florescent green condemned sticker. Much has changed in just a year. Yet no newspaper articles have showcased this transformation. No radio station has welcomed these new neighbors and no institution directly or by association has claimed responsibility for this outcome. Nevertheless, the city using FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] funding is poised to purchase and demolish a dozen more houses and the land bank is turning foreclosed properties into gardens. We at Urbandale Farm feel the loss quite profoundly.

Both of these stories were recorded in my journal in 2011, and both continue to be true. To be honest, they troubled me, each for a different reason, when I first wrote them. They still trouble me today. The first story, a success story, presents urban agriculture as a form of social intervention that is improving city life—doing good things for residents and for a place clearly in need of help. Urbandale is a poor neighborhood with 45 percent of its population living at or below 185 percent of the poverty line. It is a highly transient neighborhood, a vulnerable neighborhood. It is a neighborhood that bears the imprint of its blue-collar history, its location in the city’s hundred-year floodplain, and FEMA regulations designed to keep people out of harm’s way. Urban agriculture is a welcome, indeed a high profile, solution for what ails the neighborhood and for what will make it stronger. The second story is less upbeat and a bit more enigmatic. It is a story of a neighborhood in decline and a population experiencing continual distress. Oddly enough, in this story, urban agriculture, rather than being a solution, appears to be proceeding hand in glove with neighborhood displacement. Reading between the lines, one might even conclude that urban agriculture is a beneficiary of displaced people’s misfortune. Just what is happening here? The more time I spend in Urbandale, the more I ponder the relationship between these two seemingly mismatched stories. Specifically, I have come to question and distrust the easy narrative of urban agriculture as a transformational project and many of the assumptions that underlie this claim. Said a bit differently, I have begun to wonder whether urban agriculture is being used by me and people like

Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture • 93 me—however unwittingly—as an instrument of continued inequity and exploitation, thereby reinforcing some of the very conditions that it was designed to address, if not eliminate. If urban agriculture does have the potential to generate positive social change, does this potential really lie in handfuls of fresh, affordable collards, in more healthful diets, in tidier landscapes, and in six-month apprenticeships? Or does it lie in something quite different, something more basic and more deeply embedded? I now suspect that it’s the latter and that it involves the long-term process of placemaking and the repoliticization of Urbandale and its residents. I am certainly not alone in asking these questions. Chad Lavin (2009), Julie Guthman (2008a), and E. Melanie Dupuis and David Goodman (2005), for example, have all provided sharp and provocative theoretical critiques of the local food movement of which urban agriculture is a part. They call our attention to the unseen and unexamined racism and classism, to the elite presumptions of health and wellness that frame social change yet leave power structures intact. Similarly, scholars such as Laura Lawson (2005), Malve Von Hassell (2002), George McKay (2011), and Sarah Moore (2006) have noted the ebb and flow of community gardens over time and the frequently neoliberal and occasionally fascistic aspects of their existence. Their work has helped me sort through many of my own earthbound conflicts and self-delusions. They provide valuable touchstones—reality checks—as I try to come to terms with the privileges and power structures embedded in contemporary foodsystem activism. What follows, then, is my attempt to rethink, or think more deeply about, the work that I am doing under the rubric of urban agriculture—as a student, as a scholar, as a citizen. It is not an attempt to discredit the place, my partners in this work, what we have done together, or the urban agriculture movement in general. Rather, I am using my own direct experiences and observations as a case in point. I am challenging myself—and, I hope, a few others—to critically consider where and why our work is problematic and how we might use it to shrug off the easy and uneven comforts afforded by the status quo. My discussion is divided into five sections. In the first, I consider the reasons typically given for urban agriculture projects, my own included, and question their conceptual construction. In the second and third, I note how these presumptions play out on the ground and ponder who reaps the long-term and short-term benefits. In the fourth section, I offer some initial thoughts about what urban agriculture can offer, and in the fifth, I reflect on what it will take to embed urban agriculture in the fabric of daily life and contribute to the politicization of neighbors. My experiences do not and cannot speak for all urban agriculture or local foodbased activity. Neither can they (nor should they) speak for Urbandale and its residents. I don’t live in Urbandale. Like many proponents of urban agriculture, I have never lived in “my” neighborhood, despite the time I’ve spent there. I am a nonnative Michigander who lives close to a midsize Rust Belt city where land has become momentarily superfluous. I am a white, middle-class, middle-aged woman. I am

94 • Food Between the Country and the City employed and overly educated. For these reasons, I am different from most Urbandale residents. Then again, I am not so different. What my experiences can do is initiate a critical discussion, one that connects urban agriculture to a real place, to its residents, and to processes of politicization and depoliticization. I can ask questions that do not have easy (or maybe even any) answers. This, I think, has value, for in our rush to publicize our many food and farming successes (the message in the first story that opened this essay), there has been a conspicuous absence of more probing ethnographic or memoir-like discussion. Novella Carpenter’s Farm City (2009) is definitely a shining and accessible exception; we need more such works. I also am aware that my writing style is conversational, not strictly academic. This is deliberate. It is another attempt to cross boundaries and bridge realms of knowledge and influence. This form of communication, I feel, more easily acknowledges the importance of the interpretive and the sensual as inextricable aspects of all social work. It can move us in the direction of greater openness, greater sensitivity, and a stronger objectivity (Harding 1991; hooks 2009). But it can do this only if we remain vigilant. We cannot afford to lose ourselves or our purpose within the subjective. We cannot allow ourselves to be seduced by our own voices. There have been too many self-absorbed stories and confessional food journeys to make that type of narrative a welcome or a necessary addition to our collective insight. If local food and urban agriculture are to be transformational, we need to recognize the structures that predetermine outcomes and channel behavior into familiar patterns. We cannot deceive ourselves or lose our way.

Urban Agriculture: A Mechanism for Overcoming Deficits Urban agriculture in the United States is not an oxymoron, as a student of mine once claimed. Despite an on-again/off-again one-hundred-year history, it has been growing steadily over the past twenty-plus years, in lockstep with the local-food movement. Just what is meant by urban agriculture is somewhat less certain. Definitions variously frame urban agriculture is an “instrument,”1 a “practice,”2 “a set of strategies,”3 an “industry,”4 and “a system.”5 But the most popular notions of urban agriculture—the ones most likely to be featured in and replicated by the media— deal with urban agriculture’s phoenix-like ability to rise from abandoned or blighted urban spaces, producing food for urban residents, creating markets, generating income for entrepreneurs, and thereby stabilizing and revitalizing urban economies and communities. Urban agriculture thrives as a Cinderella story. As comfortable and comforting as such stories are, there is a decided tendency to reduce urban agriculture to the level of a mechanism—a tool for fixing a problem or collection of problems. Bethany Ruben Henderson and Kimberly Hartsfield, for example, contend that “[c]ommunity gardens seem a perfect mechanism to engage

Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture • 95 citizens in a local government’s efforts to address a variety of social ills” (2009: 12). I find this claim disturbingly reminiscent of the first story that began this essay. First, it frames “the urban” and the functions of agriculture within a strong deficit orientation. The popular perspective holds that there is trouble right here in River City, as in most cities—poverty, crime, decay, and in Rust Belt cities, vacant land. The focus is clearly on the problem and on what isn’t there—no jobs, no food, no trust, no care, no ability. Problems, by implication, need to be solved. Our hyper-positivism fueled by science and technology assures us that for every problem there is a solution—and moreover, we will find it. In fact, the more closely we define a problem the more targeted will be its solution. Hungry people can be fed; fat people can be made thin again; unsightly landscapes can be tidied up; unsafe places can become beacons. But we know, when we are allowed time to think about it, that problems (and solutions) when taken out of context—without redundancies, without memories, and without the strain and wisdom of local ownership—have brittle solutions. We have only to ask why housing projects fail or why soup kitchens thrive to know this is so. What all this suggests is that the way we see a problem or ask a question has everything to do with what we accept as its solution or answer. A deficit orientation too often traps us into asking what Peter Block (2003) calls the “how” questions—how do you do it; how long will it take; how much does it cost; how do you get those people to change; how do we measure it; and how have other people done it successfully.6 Here, the emphasis is on experts, speed, funding, divisiveness, quantification, and replication. With the ultimate prize awarded to outcomes rather than processes, “how” questions are well positioned to restrict rather than liberate the way we think and behave. They affirm instrumental relations and leave the field open for counting calories (or other nutrients) or for tracking miles per hour, bushels per acre, or dollars per pound. They segment knowledge and authority and have little to say about the wisdom of ordinary citizens or about their laughter, storytelling, decision making, anger, or grief. They suggest that there is a mechanical nature to social conditions (i.e., needs), that there are (and should be) best practices, and that context and scale are largely irrelevant. This scenario, according to Harry C. Boyte, draws comfortably on the prevailing civil society approach to citizenship: Simply, the dominant civil society approach . . . depoliticizes citizenship while it professionalizes politics. It assigns politics to the arena of government, consultants, lobbyists, and experts, leaving ordinary citizens as healers on the side. It also separates production, which it locates in the economic sector, from public life. As a result, citizenship is purified, stripped of power, interests, and the institutional foundations needed for serious civic work; politics is defined in distributive terms associated with government, as who gets what; and the actual process of creating the what—our public wealth—disappears from view. The world threatens to become entirely privatized and the market to spin out of control (Boyte 2004: 58).

96 • Food Between the Country and the City Second, who is the “we” that defines the problem and applies the fix? As Dupuis and Goodman (2005) argue in their critique of the local-food movement, the construction of sanitized solutions reflects and reinforces the hegemony of prevailing white, middle-class and upper-class values and the bureaucracies and structures that support racial and class inequity. In other words, those who get to define the problem also are in a position to control and benefit from the solution, often for generations. They hold the power; they dominate the discourse; they control the language. Recognizing this, Guthman (2008a; 2008b) shows us how such an orientation informs much of our food-related volunteerism, which can be seen as charity work. Doing good for others but always at one’s own convenience and discretion is a far cry from Boyte and Nancy N. Kari’s (1996) sense of public work or from John Saltmarsh and Matthew Hartley’s (2011) sense of democratic engagement. The term food desert serves as a potent example. At Urbandale Farm, we, like many other interventionists, have used (and continue to use) this term when we write for grants or speak publicly. Years ago, Urbandale was labeled a food desert, and we have been quick to capitalize on the label, as it allows us to rationalize our choice of location and the worthiness of our project. While the label was initially a brilliant device for illustrating the geography of food and market inequity, both the term and its use are now being questioned. A recent post on COMFOOD (a Tufts University email discussion list) eloquently argued: So the term food desert has emerged as a safe and neutral way to avoid rocking the boat without an analysis of inequity, racism, oppression, etc. But it is dangerous to falsely describe a problem because the result will be a false prescription of the solution. I equate the difference between food desert and food apartheid to the difference between charity and justice. . . . Charity assumes people need expertise and help from others, while justice assumes people have the expertise and are capable of helping themselves. The analysis and strategic choices that come with the approach have huge implications for how, and even if, a problem is sustainably solved (Ahmadi 2009).

A Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative report similarly noted: In short, the inequities that give rise to food deserts cannot be solved by restocking stores [or adding another on-farm market]. They are a result of the fundamental reality that so often keeps low-income people of color sick: insufficient power. If efforts to eliminate food deserts are to be effective in building healthier communities . . . they must be rooted in strategies to build the power of low-income communities of color. This means they will not be limited to putting fruits and vegetables on the shelves of corner stores, but will grow out of a sophisticated analysis of the political and economic dynamics that led to the food desert, cultivate a strategy to build broad-based community power to change those dynamics, and develop strong community leaders through their campaign work. In other words, they need to involve broad-based community organizing (2010: 2).

Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture • 97 Statistical poverty, food deserts, and the existence of abandoned land have all worked in our favor as we operate Urbandale Farm. These deficiencies have enabled and legitimated the grants we’ve received from the county, the city, and the federal government. They have allowed us to frame reality (and appropriate power) under the guise of concern. Despite rhetoric and rationalization, reluctant messiahs have the power to gentrify, to bust unions, and to appoint economic emergency managers, who can suspend democratic process, something that is now happening in several poor and predominantly black cities in Michigan (Hantz Farms 2009; Alter 2010; Associated Press 2012; Maddow 2011).

Urban Agriculture: A (Bureaucratic) Blessing The Lansing Urban Farm Project (LUFP) is a recently established Michigan nonprofit with a three-part mission: (a) to raise and market fresh food for urban residents, (b) to use food and farming to catalyze neighbor engagement and neighborhood revitalization, and (c) to do this in a way that is sustainable and locally meaningful. Ultimately, the goal is to initiate place-based programs, reclaim local resources, reestablish neighborhood commons, and turn their ownership, management, and evolution over to area residents. Urbandale Farm is LUFP’s first such project and is, by most accounts, a successful one. From the beginning, LUFP connected with (and benefited from) the largesse of numerous local organizations and government offices. Its closest partner and fiduciary is a twenty-year-old neighborhood center that serves as a hub for neighborhood development and capacity building on Lansing’s Eastside. For the center, Eastside neighbors and the welfare and rights of the Eastside neighborhood always come first. LUFP shares office space, working values, and operational strategies with this vigilant organization. But community work is political work, and LUFP has other bedfellows as well—the county land bank and the city’s Office of Planning and Development (OPD) in particular—all with concerns and constraints of their own. When LUFP’s cofounders first approached the land bank inquiring about land trusts and the ownership of a particular vacant parcel in Urbandale, we were told, “Take it; it’s yours. You are not part of the problem; you’re part of the solution.” We were astounded by this liberal (and unexpected) gifting and equally overjoyed. We were privileged from the get-go by the local bureaucracy, and not surprisingly, a land bank official became a member of LUFP’s board of directors. Since then, the land bank has invested in the project with additional land, a foreclosed house for a farm manager, an AmeriCorps volunteer, and considerable in-kind assistance. In turn, LUFP has been used to publicize and justify land-bank programming. Our success, measured in production, sales, and “redeployed”7 land, reflects well on the land bank.

98 • Food Between the Country and the City The land bank is charged with stabilizing neighborhoods and sees itself as a community growth tool. To this end, it manages foreclosed properties, demolishing those housing units in the poorest condition and restoring those with economic potential. The latter are publicly sold (sometimes rented), propping up housing stocks and real estate values, though they often are priced beyond the reach of immediate neighbors. The land bank does much good work. But, even as a not-for-profit public entity, with almost 500 properties and more than $18 million in federally awarded neighborhood stabilization funding, it is bound to the marketplace and ruled by “how” questions and civil society’s sense of citizenship (McNamara 2010). Encouraged by Urbandale Farm’s success, the land bank now views its vacant lots, quasi-vacant lots, and future vacant lots as potential urban farms and garden sites. Brambles can be removed, trees cut down, and plots reconfigured for gardens, orchards, or berry patches. Our success has inspired the land bank to hire a full-time garden-program coordinator and three AmeriCorps assistants, as well as to initiate a small-grant program for new urban farmers. As we become a model program, urban agriculture becomes a magic bullet, one that provides a solution to the immediate and unsightly problems caused by foreclosure and vacancy. The land bank’s portfolio of vacant land is being dealt out like playing cards, without an overarching strategic plan, to anyone who has an interest in raising food for whatever purpose, though preference is given to market-focused uses. To date, those who have shown interest have been predominantly young adults—white, well-educated local-food advocates—good people to be sure but rarely next-door neighbors. A small fee and a year’s lease transfers liability and the cost of seasonal maintenance (for example, mowing and snow removal) from the county to an individual farmer. Red ink changes to black. This is frequently called a win-win situation. Except that it isn’t that simple. Magic bullets rarely are. In this rush to make urban agriculture a solution, Urbandale neighbors are rarely sought out or consulted. They may be told, as a courtesy, how the land next door or across the street—the spaces they see from their kitchen windows and interact with every day—will be used. But dialogue is rare, and there have been instances of outright indifference to personal histories and emotional attachments—“My father built that house. I don’t want it to be torn down.”—that may get in the way of official decisions. While a protocol for land use and distribution has recently been crafted, there has been minimal local input or response. When a neighbor does object, for whatever reason, the familiar response is: “Well that’s fine, as long as you shovel the sidewalk and mow the property.” This, I would argue, trespasses on the rights of residents and is a form of colonization. It also ensures that land resources remain an individual and private responsibility. Far from building community or civic responsibility in any engaged way, it usurps local decision making, asks for no long-term commitment, and dispenses with serious urban planning. It leaves most residents, people who are already disaffected, shrugging indifferently and asking their own

Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture • 99 rhetorical question—“Why should we care?”—a response that helps to rationalize further deficit-based intervention. LUFP is also partnering with OPD, an office charged with maintaining the safety and stability of Lansing neighborhoods. Like the land bank, this office has embraced urban agriculture as an economic strategy and has provided Urbandale Farm with operational funding in the form of a community development block grant. This support is critical to our operation and has been gratefully acknowledged. Again, not surprisingly, a city manager serves as an ex officio member of LUFP’s board of directors. OPD manages well over $1 million of FEMA funding, and Urbandale lies within the heart of the city’s hundred-year floodplain. Because residents are technically in harm’s way (and because of Katrina backlash), homeowners are being offered the opportunity to sell their properties to the government. Houses, once sold, are demolished, and vacant lots appear in their place. Between OPD and the land bank, several dozen Urbandale homes have been identified for demolition. Again, “how” questions (and their answers) abound, as do unanticipated consequences. Because houses lie in the floodplain, there can be no new construction and no federal support for homeowners wanting to improve their properties. Legally, there can be no improvement at all greater than 50 percent of assessed value. This all but ensures the downward spiral of property values, especially for rental properties, which now constitute about half of the housing stock in Urbandale. It also means that homeowners are ineligible for public funds targeting health-related improvements such as lead abatement. It seems that keeping people, especially children, in lead-contaminated housing is the best way to save them from flooding. It’s a strange trade-off. By the same logic, eliminating homes, affordable housing, and residents while increasing the opportunities for urban agriculture appears to be the best way to save the neighborhood. It’s remarkable how seamlessly the land bank, an extension of county government, and FEMA, a national program working through city government, support one another and how effortlessly the promise of urban agriculture becomes the logical and sanctioned solution to perceived Urbandale woes. FEMA, in responding to floodplain conditions, has designed a program that minimizes public liability by moving people out of harm’s way. (When the problem is seen as flooding, there is little need to consider where displaced persons will go or whether there is any place for them to go.) The land bank, in turn, finds that de-peopled properties are easier and less costly (that is, more efficient) to manage when leased for agricultural purposes. Riding the crest of the local-food movement, who can object to growing food—good food—in a city? There is another irony here as well, one that resonates with Walter Goldschmidt’s (1978) observations of rural America during the first half of the 1900s. Then, traditional farming communities were crumbling, their interpersonal relationships and infrastructure giving way to the efficiencies and economics of industrial agriculture.

100 • Food Between the Country and the City Displaced persons were forced to (and encouraged to) migrate to urban centers in search of employment and a promised modernity. Today, cities, especially in the Rust Belt Midwest, have lost their industrial core, and there is an attempt to manage this loss with an agrarian-like solution, a new modernity. But now, as then, urban and rural lifestyles have been overly romanticized and decontextualized. Today’s agricultural solutions are being patched into urban cracks, using many of the same tools—investment banking, government sanctions, market-based initiatives—that once distorted and destroyed the social fabric of rural places. We seem to be chasing after chimera, instead of asking: “Who’s the man behind the curtain?”

Urban Agriculture: “What’s the Big Deal; It’s Just an Empty Lot” Many city managers are aware of these ironies but maintain they can do little about them. They are legally bound to ensure rational outcomes—sanitized solutions— despite the fact that these outcomes may further injure and disenfranchise. It’s about accountability, measured in statistical and dollars-and-cents terms. Still, from the perspective of anyone who has spent time in Urbandale, it is clear that this thirtysquare-block area of six hundred homes will remain a neighborhood for years to come. It has history; it has vitality; it has the need to survive—for there are few other places in the city where residents of modest means can own their own homes or where persons managing on limited incomes can live in a protected and bike-able subdivision with mature shade trees and green spaces. And this is what is so very troubling to me. As urban agriculture becomes the preferred bureaucratic solution, it ignores and ultimately disallows many of the best parts of the neighborhood. The very notion of an empty lot, for instance, is troublesome. Who says? Empty of what? I have spoken to dozens of people at our on-farm market who have volunteered statements like, “I used to live on S. Hayford, and I come back every once in a while to see how the place is doing.” “I lived here during the last big flood (1975).” “My father built that house, and my sisters and I were born there.” “My house is gone now, the freeway took it out.” “I remember playing in the woods that run down to the river; it was a beautiful, wild area.” “I remember delivering newspapers and talking with Mrs. Love and making friends with her huge black dog.” Far from being empty, these lots are full of memory and story and meaning. People lived (and live) here, made homes here, raised families here, and died here. Urbandale is a place, however fragile, and bulldozing its houses and leveling the earth to create a collection of noncontiguous garden plots cannot and should not bury this reality. I cringe when I hear young, otherwise sensitive, would-be urban farmers say, when residents hesitate to embrace urban gardens: “What’s the big deal; it’s just an empty lot.” This is language that reflects, at best, a lack of awareness and, at worst, a deep indifference to people in place, to citizenship. It also reinforces the notions that Urbandale is made up of a collection of discrete and poorly used

Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture • 101 resources (aka commodities), not living histories, and that others with more imagination or expertise are better equipped to use these resources. This is hardly the case. I have seen Urbandale kids playing in overgrown and abandoned lots. They balance like gymnasts on fallen trees. They duel like pirates with sticks-turned-swords. They eat “wild candy” (mulberries). They build forts; they jerry-rig swings. There is nothing neat about what they do. The kids leave trash, make noise, and fight with each other. But they are also discovering, in Gary Paul Nabhan’s sense of the word (1998: 98). They are exercising their bodies, interacting with their environment, and comparing notes on the conditions that shape their lives—racism and poverty among them. They are learning about who they are. They are actively engaged in developing a sense of place—their place. Seen from their perspective, outdoors is where you want to be when you live in a neighborhood of small, overcrowded houses, a place where privacy is scarce. Is this all good? Hardly. Are there safety issues? Absolutely. But these issues were not caused by Urbandale, and they won’t be addressed by auctioning off bits of the local landscape to outside bidders. Urbandale Farm, as it expands into vacant lots, has taken care to work with neighbors and kids. By that I mean that we’ve knocked on doors to ask permission to make a farm. We have regular public celebrations. We have an apprenticeship program that gives priority to unemployed and underemployed Urbandale adults. We also deliberately work with kids, sharing our growing spaces with them and inviting them to work with us. A veggie wagon designed and staffed by middle schoolers brings farm produce to shut-ins. A kids’ garden on the “5 Lot Lot,” under the guidance of a gifted adult neighbor (a graduate student trained in agroecology), sporadically captures and directs kids’ energy and interest. Parents do not object, but so far, neither do they assist. But the truth is that we are now in control of these “underused,” “re-deployed” spaces. I cannot honestly say that kids spend more time here now than they did before we arrived. I can say that, as the farm grows, we have less unstructured time for kids and their discovering, less physical space for their imaginations and spontaneous play. Their weedy plots and their undisciplined behavior get in our way. We are about growing and marketing vegetables, and as we grow (in all senses of that word), we find we need to become more efficient. We need to find ways to keep the farm economically viable, and we need to be accountable to our granting agencies. How will we manage once our funding ends? How will we pay a farm manager? “How” questions now dominate our planning meetings. For all our goodwill and our expressed multifunctionality, I am beginning to sense a change in our primary directives, in our immediate purpose. We are more concerned with the pragmatics of keeping ourselves afloat than with integrating into the neighborhood. We have detailed crop plans and business plans. We have a laminated sign, which politely spells out farm rules, fastened to the chain-link fence that we lock when we leave for the day. Each decision makes sense, but each, I believe, has taken us a degree

102 • Food Between the Country and the City off-center. Despite our mission, the neighborhood and the farm remain separate (maybe are even separating further), and we are slipping into the familiar tautology of reasoning that holds if we cease to be, what good can we be to them—rather than, if they cease to be, what will happen to us? Similarly, it is our time, our resources, and our wisdom that seem to matter most. Leaving spaces open for kids or for some undefined future use by residents is no longer a priority. To the land bank’s delight, other urban farmers are now competing for vacant land, and we have begun to fight among ourselves (a bit like vultures) over the choicest locations. At the same time, we are intent on expanding our marketing reach and bringing in experts to conduct educational and farm-related workshops. A workshop on hoophouse construction (so that we can farm year round) is being planned, and the farm will invite student farmers, many from Michigan State University, to learn and assist.8 Far less effort is being expended on using the farm as a neighborhood commons, enlisting local expertise, or engaging with neighbors—who may or may not want to garden or even eat vegetables, but who are our neighbors nonetheless. We haven’t taken the time to reflect on the way their lives relate to ours or on how their existence defines our own. So, where is the balance? How can we expect to invite Urbandale residents to sit on LUFP’s board if we and they are not part of the same daily process? How do we expect urban agriculture to contribute to an urban food system that ultimately belongs to “the people” if we drape ourselves in the mantle of existing power structures and assist only as long as those who need our help behave in ways that suit our interests? At best, this is too close to charity work for my comfort. At worst, it’s a wolf in green clothing.

Rethinking Relationships and Working through Confusions Like so many other community-based development projects, we are being pushed into attending to market economics first, assuming that, once the farm is viable, we can then turn our attention toward the niceties of neighborhood-building and place-making. But there are problems with such assumptions. First, they imply that a sense of place and identity and the capacity for collective action are predicated on economic success, not political processes. As many scholars have pointed out, community is formed from necessity (not individual choice), from the need to share resources, to make commitments and sacrifices, and to take action in order to survive (Adams 1962; Kemmis 1990; Loren 2003; Vitek 2008). Furthermore, community vision, according to John McKnight, is a multistranded phenomenon, equally dependent on local capacity, collective effort, spontaneity, stories, and celebration (1995: 160–71). How well served will community members be (and where will they be) when Urbandale Farm and similar agricultural projects finally meet their economic expectations (that is, when their bottom lines please their funders and they remain

Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture • 103 competitive)? It is quite possible that the community and its residents will have died, done in by their received cure. Second, this perspective assumes that economic stability and the poetry of daily life are things apart, that each can be pursed independently. An unspoken corollary here is that the hard logic of market economics is far more essential than the emergent and interpretive nature of neighborhood storytelling and grassroots action. This logic seems to imply that, once the formulas for production and consumption are in place and all the equations balance, then—and only then—will there be resources sufficient to fix the social landscape. But by then, who is in control? An apparent exception—one that actually works to prove the rule—is the current penchant for creative economies that harness art, history, entrepreneurship, and green aesthetics to economic development (Florida 2002; 2008). Despite the attention paid to context and the particular, the overriding assumption is that such sensitive development depends on attracting a “creative class” of people—the best and the brightest—to frame a preferred quality of life. The focus is seldom on the people who already live in the community. It is an orientation steeped in middle-class bias. Furthermore, the unique features fashioned from common resources too often become marketable things, easily and eagerly privatizable. Such strategies can become brutally mechanistic, transforming people and their capacities, their collective possessions, and their passions into commodities and destinations. They tear at the heart of place-making by never admitting to its owned and lived and living nature. As Robert Archibald writes in his achingly beautiful essay “The Power of Place”: I am obsessed with the word place—no place, any place, some place, my place. Once it seemed to me an innocuous sort of word, uninspired, passive, devoid of passion. But now place is a word with subtleties of meaning, nuances of intent and emotion. Perhaps I thought place was a dull, undistinguished word because I understood places as disembodied, existing outside of the people who live in them, just there, like unseen and unheard trees falling in uninhabited forests. I thought that places existed even without witnesses. But now I understand that humans create places, and that until we live in them, bury our dead beneath then, empty our tears upon them, name and remember them, weave our stories in and through them, places do not exist. To name a place defines a relationship as surely as falling in love. We are the name givers, story weavers—the place makers (Archibald 2004: 37).

The real challenge for Urbandale Farm and for urban agriculture more generally, it seems to me, is not one of growing food (though that is important), but of placemaking. Place-making is an everyday political process; it is a foundation of civil society and citizenship. It is about people exerting their rights, owning their resources, belonging to their landscapes, and participating fully in the decision making and the responsibilities of self-determination. This doesn’t mean that they’ll start eating broccoli (though they might); it doesn’t mean that they’ll stop being obese (though

104 • Food Between the Country and the City they might), it doesn’t mean that they’ll keep chickens or even keep their yards mowed (though they might). It does mean that much of the work of urban agriculture should serve as a catalyst for reclaiming local commons and the voice, power, and self-expression of displaced persons. According to William Copeland, a Detroit social-justice activist, “What people have to understand is that the urban agriculture, neighborhood economic development and justice work happening in Detroit is not a lifestyle choice, it is dead-on self-determination activity for survival by the residents of this devastated city.” He goes on to say that “[t]he problems we face in Detroit are being mirrored all around the world: privatization, land grabs, issues of food sovereignty, the struggles for community stability and self-determination” (Hill 2011). It is the reluctance to meet the places within which we work on their own terms— to take the time to learn from their histories, their struggles, and their residents and ultimately to become allied with them—that needs to be reconsidered. We are too ready to intervene and to be caretakers, less ready to facilitate local self-expression and political challenges to the system, whatever the ultimate outcome. More than fifteen years ago, McKnight wrote, “There is a mistaken notion that our society has a problem in terms of effective human services. Our essential problem is weak communities” (1995: 172). It is still a problem.

Can We Get There From Here? So where does this leave us? Is our good work misplaced? Should we take our hoses, six-row seeders, and good intentions and go home? That is certainly one possibility but not an especially good one. Rather, I think that we need to approach urban agriculture as a form of civic engagement, striving as we do our earth work and our food work in real places to gain greater personal, sociocultural, and political insight, to initiate generative relationships, and in Boyte’s words, to see residents as “cocreators of democracy, by connecting their work to public life and thus engaging them in public work” (2004: 75). For this to happen, I suggest that we have three critical responsibilities that should be as sacred as soil health, crop diversity, and economic rationality. The first responsibility is to learn how to critically self-reflect—to learn humility and to accept the role of student rather than teacher. I must learn to ask myself why I am bothered by Urbandale residents not showing up on time (or at all), for this is quite different from my asking how I can get them to do what I want them to do, such as come to Saturday markets or even to farm celebrations when, after all, we’re frying green tomatoes. Likewise, asking myself why I don’t air my personal grievances in public might be equally self-instructive. It might teach me something about why residents so often settle theirs outdoors. Such thinking can offer me entry into Guthman’s analysis (2008a; 2008b)—into an awareness of how racial history and elitism are bound into urban agriculture. It can even help me to recognize that I am the

Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture • 105 outsider here—a guest at best, a legal intruder at worst. Hundreds of such questions pondered on a daily basis can lead me to a deeper understanding of what it means to work in this neighborhood—with its rhythms, language, resources, history, and stories. They also can make my own unexamined prejudices and assumptions more visible. They can lead me to explore how the same institutions and social structures impact LUFP and the Urbandale neighborhood differently—the ways in which I am advantaged, as well as the ways in which I am taking advantage. Few government offices have ever said, “Take it; it’s yours” to an Urbandale resident. Likewise, few have noted or acted upon the connection between upriver subdivisions and megamalls, with acres of impermeable blacktop, and Urbandale flooding. One area causes flooding; the other receives it. One gets massive tax breaks; the other gets disappeared by tax dollars. Seeing less partially and cultivating ethnographic insight will not cause our bell peppers or our bottom line to grow larger, but they can sensitize us to another grounded reality—the reality of Urbandale and the relationality of our differences (Kandaswamy 2007). We are challenged to avoid replicating the same inequities that we purport to address. A second responsibility flowing from the first is to facilitate public conversations wherever and however possible. The farm and its many earth-dependent activities can offer new spaces and occasions for informal and voluntary interaction among ourselves and our neighbors. We can cultivate local voices and relationships, not just when it is convenient for us to do so (a festival or workshop), but on a routine basis, as part of every working day. It is one thing to hand someone a broadfork and show him or her how to prepare a bed for planting; it is another to listen to the person’s stories and to discuss his or her kids’ future or the FEMA paradox. An urban farm has the potential to become what Ray Oldenburg (1989) has called a “great good place”—a nonexclusionary setting where people can gather, where talk erupts, where information is shared, where opinions (and arguments) circulate, and where the scaffolding for civic engagement is built. We cannot cause people to like us or to participate with us; we can only work in ways that enlarge common interest, encourage self-organizing, and contribute to commonwealth. Taking an asset-oriented approach toward people and place privileges their language, their experiences, and their skills. So why have we named our fields the “5 Lot Lot” and the “Redbud Lot” without consulting our neighbors, many of whom could offer more meaningful and historically insightful names? Similarly, why does the land bank hire an outside company to mow its properties despite the fact that many Urbandale residents are unemployed? Why are we comfortable tearing out our fence-line scrub but not tearing out our chain-link fence? Once again, we are allowing liability and efficiency to trump neighborhood ownership and capacity building. As part of our agricultural residency, we are in a position to initiate public conversations on uncomfortable topics such as these even if it interferes with our own immediate agenda. In other words, we need to move from comfort zones to contact zones (Musil 2003). As part of our agricultural residency, we are in a position to

106 • Food Between the Country and the City write and talk about the paradoxes of urban agriculture and the disenfranchisement of neighbors, not just in peer-reviewed journals, but first and foremost with local officials, neighborhood associations, church groups, and the residents with whom we work. We are in a position to partner with neighborhood watches and other incipient, as well as established, collective enterprises. We are in a position to challenge governing agencies again and again, as well as to insist that neighbors be consulted and their rights be recognized, that protocols be written and grievance processes be followed. We can do that. We will certainly ruffle feathers. But we cannot claim (or hide behind) a privileged sense of neutrality. We gave that up the first day we started clearing brush and well before our first radish ever sprouted. We are embedded in the life of the neighborhood. We occupy Urbandale, and it occupies us. What we choose to do with our privilege—our nonneutral position—is critical. One hopes that we will use it to add value and to empower those among whom we work. There is no guarantee that we will succeed. There is, however, every reason for us to try if our purpose is to enable ownership and self-reliance among people in place. And this brings up the third and last responsibility—that of letting go. Engaged agriculture of the sort I am talking about is slow work, committed work. It is not a season long or a plot wide. It can’t be measured by pounds of produce sold. Rather, it requires growing trust, which means interacting with residents as we find them and in ways that are not only agricultural but personal and process oriented. Said a bit differently, it is work that blurs the boundaries between agriculture and activism, between sales and solidarity. This means being a partner in the continual narrative of neighborhood life. It means working with the land bank to rethink its policies, to renovate rather than demolish foreclosed housing—retaining neighbors instead of acquiring new farm sites. It means working with parents to protect neighborhood kids from being shredded by a beleaguered educational system. It means networking and facilitating and refocusing public attention. It means putting residents on the LUFP board and, at a minimum, on all committees that deal with land tenure, acquisitions, and planning. But it also means knowing when it’s time to leave. If we (urban farmers, scholars, activists) are not Urbandale residents ourselves, if we do not inhabit that place on a day-to-day, 24/7 basis, then we must acknowledge the rights of those who do. We can be advocates. We can use our privilege to catalyze and give voice—but ultimately, the resources must be owned and the decisions must be made by neighbors themselves. Urbandale Farm will, we hope, capture the local imagination and become a site for production, food access, and entrepreneurship, as well as a common space within which collective identities and new relationships take root. It might not, of course. But if it does—if it is to stay embedded in the landscape—it will need to belong to the people and the place. Urban agriculture is only one piece of a much larger struggle for self-determination. It is not the answer. It takes soul and public work, as well as productive soil, to sustain a neighborhood.

–6– Urban Hunger and the Home Village: How Lilongwe’s Migrant Poor Stay Food Secure Johan Pottier

The “Food and Foodways in the Country and the City” conference blurb suggested that rapid urbanization and escalating food prices had given rise to policy discourses that applaud the countryside as “an enduring locus of foods that are more authentic and more secure, even if such foods, as well as the countryside sustaining them, are under threat of disappearance.” These discourses “perpetuate the divide between urban dwellers and rural foods.” The present article deals with a related set of discourses, in which the notion of a divide is also upheld but which recommend that the city, not the countryside, be called upon to ease the problem of urban food insecurity. The two policy approaches stand opposed to each other, but they share the idea of a disconnect. Concern over rapid urban growth in sub-Saharan Africa, combined with the pervasive threat of volatile markets for food and fuel, has led to calls for proactive planning. Municipal authorities are being urged to tackle rising rates of food insecurity by thinking “city agriculture” (RUAF Foundation 2010: 3). In a document prepared for the World Bank, RUAF recommends that cities prepare to cut the overall cost of supplying, distributing, and accessing food by shortening rural-to-urban supply chains and by investing in urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) and better infrastructure. Likewise, the United Nations’ High Level Task Force on the Global Food Crisis advises “reducing the distance for transporting food by encouraging local food production, where feasible, within city boundaries and especially in immediate surroundings” (UN-HABITAT 2008: 15). Despite an earlier caution that the contribution of UPA to urban welfare must not be exaggerated (Ellis and Sumberg 1998: 219), policy makers appear confident they can create the conditions “to increase urban food production, food processing and distribution capacity” (RUAF Foundation 2010: 6). While some politicians and planners may disapprove of urban agriculture, cities such as Kinshasa (in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Kampala (Uganda) benefit from its practice. In Kampala, where nearly half of all households grow some

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108 • Food Between the Country and the City food, “the city council has enacted ordinances . . . to facilitate and regulate urban agriculture, while protecting public health” (Cohen and Garrett 2009: 9). Even when the authorities are not overly sympathetic, as in Kinshasa, they tolerate UPA and acknowledge its contribution to the city’s food supply (Tollens 2004). It is intriguing, however, that the call to prioritize UPA and lessen dependence on rural areas has come at a time when institutions are also calling for more awareness of how “the food system . . . is a continuum from rural to urban” (Food and Agriculture Organization 2012: 1). The FAO position paper continues: “We need to consider food systems with their urban, peri-urban and rural components together, including the geography of food production (in the rural-urban continuum), food distribution, storage, processing, marketing and consumers” (Food and Agriculture Organization 2012: 1). The perspective breaks with the tradition whereby development policy and related research have adopted a simplified concept of urban and rural areas, with the words rural referring to more “remote farming areas” and urban to “crowded cities.” To a large extent, this view has facilitated the isolated treatment of issues affecting each space, and it has as a result failed to acknowledge the important poverty-reducing interlinkages that exist between the two spaces (von Braun 2007: 1).

The conviction that the city must shorten its supply chains does not sit comfortably with the (equally recent) emphasis on thinking within a rural-urban continuum. The contradiction is not new, however, and recalls the time when policy makers celebrated the virtues of modernization and city life. Their developmentalist narrative, which emerged after World War II, equated modernity with urbanization, suggesting that the urban had more potential than, and was superior to, the rural. Powerfully expressed with regard to the Zambian Copperbelt in the 1960s and early 1970s, the modernization story was “narrated in terms of linear progressions and optimistic teleologies” before it exposed itself as a myth (Ferguson 1999: 13). A few decades later, industrial workers knew the myth had imploded; the signs and symbols of modernity were being snatched away. As incomes and life expectancies shrank, the frightful prospect of retiring to rural areas which could hardly be called home had kicked in (Ferguson 1999: 82, 110; see also Pottier 1988: 11–12, 59). For Southern Africa, the academic contribution to the modernization myth can be traced back to the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI). Despite a fine seminal essay by Godfrey Wilson (1941–1942), who so brilliantly argued that urban industrial development, rural impoverishment, and the world economy needed to be understood within a single framework, RLI (Manchester School) anthropologists went on to view the urban and the rural as polar opposites. The disconnect they evoked appeared convincing. Not only did anthropologists insist that “tribesmen” were adapting to urban spaces with astonishing speed and flexibility, but they equally insisted that the industrial laborers would “advance proudly to the ranks of the ‘first class’ ” and become permanent “townsmen” (Ferguson 1999: 27). By the

Urban Hunger and the Home Village • 109 1960s, academics, policy makers, and ordinary Zambians firmly believed that modernizing Zambia was destined for “ever-greater urbanization, modernity, and prosperity” (Ferguson 1999: 14). This view made the economic malaise of the 1980s hard to swallow. Other Southern African countries, too, even those with very different political systems, promoted the myth of modernization by unilinear progression. In postindependence Mozambique, Malawi’s neighbor, the Frelimo government rejected free market competition, yet it “admired and praised the attributes of modernity” in an attempt to realize the features of a modern, industrialized nation (Pitcher 2002: 54). The city-prosperity equation was graphically expressed when Mozambique’s president, Samora Machel, proclaimed that “communal villages” would become “cities in the countryside” (Pitcher 2002: 91). In the long run, Frelimo’s high modernist assumptions proved ill-attuned to lived realities. Neither industry nor the transformed countryside reached the imagined heights. The belief in urban prosperity in sub-Saharan Africa persisted despite evidence to the contrary. Already in the mid-1970s, as David Parkin noted in Town and Country in Central and Eastern Africa, evidence suggested that urban dwellers who had embraced the modernization myth clung to their dream when it slipped away: [M]any men and especially many women living in overcrowded urban conditions and working, if at all, in underpaid jobs, still do not seriously question the assumption held by many of them that “town” in some way offers a better life than “country.” Income and expenditure levels apart, the criteria by which such attitudes can be measured are subjective (Parkin 1975: 24).

Analysts, too, took their time. Not until the late 1970s did they critique the dualsociety approach and reconfigure the tribal and the modern as a single socioeconomic space. Influenced by neo-Marxist historiography and dependency theory, some analysts began to appreciate that “oscillating migration” might push migrants to invest in rural social relations (Ferguson 1999: 90). The ethnography in this article sheds light on the social dimensions of the urbanrural continuum, in that it explores how the urban poor in Lilongwe, Malawi, navigate urban-rural linkages.1 The guiding question is this: how do their struggles to stay food secure square with the policy idea that urban farming needs boosting in a bid to shorten supply chains? In Lilongwe, the capacity for UPA may already seem fully realized, since the vast stretches that separate residential areas (called Areas) are annually cultivated with maize. Access to this inter-Area space, however, requires political connections and is difficult to negotiate for residents from poorer, so-called spontaneous Areas. The Lilongwe City Council does not at this stage invest in UPA, and it may not do so in the near future either. Its focus, rather, is on the need to radically overhaul the most deprived townships. To that effect, the council has secured a grant from the Bill and

110 • Food Between the Country and the City Melinda Gates Foundation (US$2.5 million) to improve roads; water, sanitation and health services; and hygienic standards in food markets.

The Urban and the Rural: Malawi’s Food Policy in Historical Perspective Despite deep frustrations over President Bingu wa Mutharika’s political and economic policies, as well as the brutal manner in which he suppressed protests in July 2011, analysts appreciate the (now-deceased) president’s commitment to national food security, which at times set him on a collision course with donors. Mutharika mostly stood his ground, pushing through “economic reforms that stabilized the economy, especially in respect of food security” (Cammack and Kelsall 2010: 8). Historically, under President Kamuzu Banda (1964–1994), rural Malawians had relied on state-subsidized maize farming. ADMARC, the state marketing board, distributed subsidized seeds and fertilizer, and it bought harvests at guaranteed prices before selling at subsidized prices to consumers. To offset losses, ADMARC was “cross subsidized by profits it made from buying smallholder export crops, such as tobacco, cotton and groundnuts, at producer prices well below export parity” (Harrigan 2008: 241). Although ADMARC was eventually scaled back following donor pressure, ad hoc initiatives (for example, promoting hybrid maize, removing social restrictions on farming Burley tobacco) were ushered in to keep smallholders from sliding into abject poverty. These measures, a timid return to subsidized agriculture, ended with Banda’s demise. Banda also attempted “to stabilize the rural population and slow down the rate of urbanisation . . . through agricultural development and settlement schemes, seen as ways of raising earnings in rural areas and achieving a desirable quality of life” (Chilivumbo 1975: 309). These measures came into force when numerous migrants returned in the mid-1960s from newly independent Zambia and from Rhodesia after its white-controlled government’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Great Britain; at that time economic opportunities in South Africa for migrants were minimal. Banda hoped that returnees, who were unused to rural life, might find the settlement schemes attractive. If ever there was a historical moment when the rural was celebrated as on a par with the city, it was then. The settlement schemes reduced urban-bound migration, but they did not stop it (Chilivumbo 1975: 310). After Britain rejected Banda’s proposal that the former colony should fund the construction of a new capital, Lilongwe, thereby replacing the colonial capital Zomba, Malawi’s president obtained funding from South Africa and agreed to an apartheidstyle design. This is visible “in the sharp zoning of land-use types, and in the ‘Garden City’ concept that allowed vast areas of unbuilt-upon land to separate residential areas from one another” (Englund 2002: 140–41). Permission was required to live in the capital, a restriction lifted only when President Bakili Muluzi came to power in 1994.

Urban Hunger and the Home Village • 111 The population of Lilongwe has yet to reach 1 million, but its expansion has been substantial and rapid. Peter Mvula and Asiyati Chiweza (2010) give some statistics (see Table 6.1). The data show that the number of people living in Lilongwe grew by more than 50 percent from 1998 to 2008. Over the same period, Malawi’s population rose by 32 percent, reaching 13 million in 2008. Although the lifting of restrictions on mobility and residence was welcomed, Muluzi’s neoliberal policies brought much misery: rural livelihoods deteriorated quickly, interhousehold inequalities widened, and fertilizer prices skyrocketed. Widening, too, was the gap between the (low) price of maize at harvest time and the (inflationary) price ahead of each harvest. Affordable maize for the masses was no longer a guaranteed right. Donor pressure and a good deal of wrangling made Muluzi agree to slow down the pace of market liberalization and to launch the agricultural Starter Pack program. Seed and fertilizer were universally distributed in 1998–1999 and 1999–2000, leading to higher maize yields on smallholder farms and to a lowering of the consumer price (Harrigan 2008: 243). Though this was good news for urban and rural consumers alike, certain donors (the U.S. Agency for International Development, the European Union) declared the initiative a false start; it was too costly for government to sustain, and, as the EU saw it, the program overlooked the growing incidence of landlessness. The revised and scaled-down program, now called the Targeted Input Programme (TIP), benefited 1.5 million households in 2000–01 and just 1 million the following year. When Malawi suffered from famine in 2002, the program was once again scaled up (Harrigan 2008: 246). Mindful that landlocked Malawi was vulnerable to food shortages, Muluzi’s successor, President Mutharika (2004–2012), achieved national self-sufficiency in maize via new irrigation programs and pro-poor subsidies (Cammack and Kelsall 2010: 38). These measures got smallholder agriculture out of its rut, transformed Malawi into a net exporter of maize, and kept the lid on preharvest price hikes. Affordable maize year-round did not mean, however, that Malawi was thriving. By 2011, villagers struggled to meet the rising cost of materials and services needed for farming, including the cost of seasonal labor. They felt abandoned by the government and were aggrieved when the number of beneficiaries of the revamped Farm Table 6.1

Population of Lilongwe, 1966–2008.

Year

Population

1966 1977 1987 1998 2008

19,425 98,718 223,318 440,471 669,021

112 • Food Between the Country and the City Input Subsidies Programme (FISP) dropped to just 250,000 households. The summer of 2011 turned into a summer of discontent; the economy was on its knees. For two years running, Malawi had “stumbled from one crisis to another—the exit of cotton and tobacco buyers, shortages of foreign exchange, artificially high exchange rates, fuel shortages, poor rains in parts of the country, and budget overruns, all resulting in donor threats to withhold aid” (Cammack and Kelsall 2010: 38). The one bit of good news was that maize prices remained fairly stable, as I observed in Lilongwe prior to the April 2011 harvest. It was the calm before the storm. In July, Malawi suffered an economic and political meltdown; up to twenty protesters were killed.

Chinsapo and Ntsiliza: Introducing Lilongwe’s Urban Poor Endearingly called the Garden City, Lilongwe has Areas designated for the affluent and separate Areas for those who serve them. Thus, many residents of the townships of Ntsiliza and Mtandire are employed as domestic servants in nearby Area 47. Besides providing domestic labor, Ntsiliza and Mtandire meet the seasonal demand for agricultural labor, since affluent residents grow maize on land between Areas. Ntsiliza residents also work in the City Centre, as security guards for instance, but their low wages rarely suffice to sustain a family. Chinsapo, the second township (besides Ntsiliza) in which I conducted research, has a more intricate relationship with the City Centre.2 While most residents qualify as urban poor, a significant number are in secure employment, often as bus or taxi drivers, or they earn a living as small-scale entrepreneurs. Some long-term migrants have also successfully invested in housing within the township. Chinsapo’s population mushroomed in the 1990s, reaching 30,000 at the turn of the twenty-first century (Englund 2002: 141).3 The catalyst was president Muluzi’s decision to promote “new possibilities for small-scale entrepreneurship with no restrictions on spatial mobility” (Englund 2002: 138). Urbanization took off, but migrants remained village-centered. The influx of entrepreneurs, traders mainly, resulted only rarely in permanent urban settlement. Their mobility notwithstanding, most migrants had “not ever ‘left’ their mudzi, the home village” (Englund 2002: 146). Harri Englund’s perspective on Chinsapo resonated with what Gillian Roe had observed in the early 1990s: [Some 70 percent of residents would] send money home for cultivation or for other uses, indicating that the rural economy [was] dependent upon the earnings of the urban sector to a large degree. All households interviewed had a garden if not within the immediate area, then at “home” in the rural area and . . . relied on their garden as an important source of food which lasted on average 8.4 months and allowed 26 per cent of households to sell some produce (Roe 1992: 89).

Urban Hunger and the Home Village • 113 Since migrants rarely practiced peri-urban agriculture, much of the maize grown in the mudzi found its way to Lilongwe. By the end of the 1990s, however, there was evidence of a “mutual dependence between urban and rural fortunes” (Englund 2002: 149). Land in Chinsapo and Ntsiliza is still managed under customary law: village headmen remain the appointed custodians, while residents lack legal title. The situation gives the townships an ambiguous character and causes friction with city administrators. One flash point is Chinsapo’s expansive market, called Chinsapo II or Kampuno, which is situated on the “wrong side” of the Lilongwe-Likuni road—that is, on land officially marked as Forest Land. Though the trees have long been cut down and the market serves a vast population, the municipal authorities commonly regard Kampuno as illegal. Another controversy is the issue of where precisely the city boundary runs. While administrators contend that township residents encroach on city land to which they have no right, Mtandire’s Chief Chigoneka reasons that it is the city authorities who constantly move the boundary and encroach on customary land. The tension was highlighted when I asked the City Council housing manager about the Gates Foundation initiative. He told me: “The plan—approved by government last year—will bring peri-urban areas like Chinsapo and Ntsiliza to within the city boundary. But government is afraid to hand over the land to us [the council] because of the compensation this would entail.”4 The sticking point, as migrant residents saw it, was whether compensation would be paid when property was destroyed to improve the road network. Residents speculated, rightly perhaps, that provision was being made to assist house owners with relocation, but they wondered whether tenants would be offered alternative, affordable accommodations. Even long-term migrants felt vulnerable. In the twenty years since Roe’s study, Chinsapo has become thoroughly urbanized. Its overcrowded core is now even more congested, while the space lying to the west—called Block 4 in 1991 and earmarked for farming—is fully built up. Moreover, as I observed, Chinsapo is witnessing a big increase in multitenanted plots— that is, a numerical increase in residences on plots originally intended to house single families. Plot density raises concerns over water, environmental protection, and health. The dry season of 2011 was marked by a building frenzy, which some people described as normal for the time of year but which was perhaps amplified by the plans for slum upgrading. Today, the standards for rented accommodations vary widely. Where Roe had seen “striking little evidence of the landlord/lady doing anything beyond the bare minimum [of providing] a dwelling structure with a pit latrine somewhere in the vicinity” (Roe 1992: 40), dwellings still show little sign of improvement. All too often, residents continue to live in blocks that contain houses no bigger than a small single room.5 Blocks built in the late 1990s, in contrast, have more space and are often semi-detached. Yet here too, kitchens are not part of the house, and cooking is done outdoors. Also much expanded since Roe’s research is Chinsapo’s commercial center. What was then a market, some grocery stores, two maize mills, some service businesses

114 • Food Between the Country and the City (tailors, carpenters, repair shops), and a few bars (1992: 70) is today a most bustling space. Retail outlets have multiplied to accommodate new needs. These relate to the mobile phone industry, hair dressing, bicycle maintenance, and fast food (for example, stands offering cheap meat/offal and chips). Along the main road linking the City Centre to Likuni, mini-marts, more bars, a bakery, several timber yards, welding yards, a dry cleaner, and other service businesses have emerged. Equally flourishing is the informal economy run from people’s homes, in which tomatoes, cooking oil, onions, dried fish, charcoal and firewood, and a variety of snacks can all be bought.

The Hunger Season: Migrants and Mobility I carried out survey interviews in both Chinsapo and Ntsiliza to learn how township dwellers identified, understood, and remedied the incidence of food insecurity. Since both settlements had started off as villages, in my survey of 120 households, about one-quarter contained nonmigrants (“originals”); they are not included in this article. Chosen at random, the migrants I interviewed had in common that they depended on low wages or casual/seasonal work (ganyu), with incomes often topped up through small-scale retailing; that they shopped for their food daily, often twice a day; and that their homes rarely had running water or electricity. Respondents fetched water from wells (sometimes) and communal taps (mostly), the latter a service more expensive than when private taps are used. Cooking was done predominantly with charcoal fires or, when one was in a hurry, on wood fires. In line with a recent survey of South Lunzu, a ward in Blantyre, Malawi, where only one-third of the population is food secure (Mvula and Chiweza 2010: 6), township dwellers in the present study are also mostly moderately to severely food insecure. Their diet is monotonous, dominated by a stiff maize porridge (nsima) and vegetables, and it is deficient in micronutrient-rich foods. Malawi’s urban poor rarely consume protein-rich foods such as poultry and meat. My sample had relatively few food-secure households because I did not seek to include them. Besides nsima and green vegetables, tomatoes, and onions, small fish (fresh or dried) are also central to the diet. Popular species include usipa (Engraulicypris sardella), matemba (Barbus paludinosus) and utaka (which can be any of several species of Haplochromis). Resembling the anchovy, usipa is abundant, cheap, and popular. In Chinsapo, even poorer households may consume small quantities of usipa (or other small fish) twice a week. The Kampuno market has responded to the demand. In the summer of 2011, 30 kwacha would buy a small “heap” (about enough to fill a customer’s cupped hands) of fresh usipa. The price was fixed; the heap was not.6 Vendors absorb fluctuations in procurement costs by adjusting the amount that goes into the heap. In Lilongwe, there is a general perception that food insecurity relates to the hunger months (mwezi wa njala), which run from December through mid-March. During

Urban Hunger and the Home Village • 115 this time, maize supplies dwindle, and households come to rely on purchased food. People who do not suffer a drop in staple-food consumption and have the means to continue to buy sufficient relish for sauce are said to be food secure. Food insecure households, in contrast, must reduce their diet; in the case of acute poverty, people may opt for just one meal a day. The food-insecure go in search of temporary work or additional ganyu, and they will have to use low-grade flour (mgaiwa) for their nsima, the staple of every meal. It is at the maize mill that women from hunger-prone households congregate, sometimes as early as July, hoping for free handouts from the miller or for a reward for the odd jobs they perform. Ganyu work at the mill may mean standing in line for others who cannot hang around, in return for which women will be paid in cash and/ or given maize husks (madea). They take the husks home to sift out the maize grit (misele), which they grind into flour. The poorest among them, however, will grind the madea itself.7 What might a typical lunch look like? Table 6.2 shows a sequence of lunches based on my observations in March (Ntsiliza) and July (Chinsapo) 2011. Households usually have the same food for lunch and supper, though the evening meal may be added to. Dry season meals (July) have more volume (more nsima) and often are accompanied by two items: fish (or very occasionally meat) and vegetables. March, in contrast, sees an increase in the consumption of vegetables, while the amount of nsima is cut and fish is eaten less frequently. March is also a time when fresh maize, grown around the house (if permitted), becomes available. Nsima is virtually synonymous with food itself. Its cultural significance has been highlighted for villages in Dedza, south of Lilongwe, where matrilineal-matrilocal principles apply. Englund writes: Table 6.2

Typical lunches (and suppers) in Ntsiliza and Chinsapo.

March:

Monday: Tuesday: Wednesday: Thursday: Friday: Saturday: Sunday:

nsima with pumpkin leaves nsima with okra leaves nsima with beans (a green vegetable added for supper)* nsima with usipa fish, beans nsima with mustard leaves nsima with pumpkin leaves nsima with goat meat, mustard leaves

July:

Monday: Tuesday: Wednesday: Thursday: Friday: Saturday: Sunday:

nsima with eggs, mustard leaves nsima with fresh utaka fish, tomatoes nsima with dried usipa, okra leaves or cabbage nsima with beans (mustard leaves added for supper) nsima with beans, mustard leaves nsima with fresh usipa, mustard leaves nsima with chicken pieces, cabbage

*Since beans take a long time to cook, enough will be prepared to last two days.

116 • Food Between the Country and the City A young mother is advised by elderly women to eat as much nsima as she can, because it gives “strength” (nyonga) and makes the foetus “grow” (kukula). . . . It is usually maize from the mother’s own garden that provides the indispensible nsima. . . . The mother has land by virtue of specific relationships. The “matrilineal” features of Dedza villagers’ social life include the practice whereby women are the most visible custodians of land. Marriages, moreover, are mostly uxorilocal (Englund 1999: 144).

The matrilineal-matrilocal residence system is known as chikamwini. It prevails in Malawi’s central and southern regions (Kishindo 2004: 215),8 the areas from which the bulk of Chinsapo/Ntsiliza migrants originate. Under chikamwini, it is women, not men, who inherit land. And women’s rights are not fragile (Peters 2010: 180). Hunger means reducing the amount of food consumed and eating undesirable foods. When the going gets tough, says Mr. F., “my food intake changes. For breakfast I have a soft [watery] porridge. I do not have lunch, but may eat a pawpaw to cool the heart (kuziziritsa mtima) as I wait for supper. Supper will be just nsima, perhaps with pumpkin leaves if I’m lucky.”9 In another household, where illness had brought hunger at the end of the rains, I was told of the agony of having to resort to maize-husk flour. “It’s worse than mgaiwa,” the young household head winced. “We may spend an entire week just on nsima made from madea, supplemented with okra leaves.”10 Another woman, Mrs. K., recalled what she and her equally poor neighbor do when the hunger bites. We stop having breakfast, or we have it every other day. The relish also changes. We just have pumpkin or okra leaves and cut down on fancy usipa. To ensure we have something to eat, I go out hoping to find extra ganyu work. But this is difficult in the rainy season, and borrowing is out of the question. If you borrow from a friend or neighbor, you need to pay back within a month; even when they charge no interest, it is difficult. And no one as poor as us can borrow from moneylenders, because they charge “caterpillar” [voracious] interest.11

Hunger is tackled in other ways, too. Mr. C., the miller, explained: In a normal year, the milling business tapers off by October. From then on, I hear women chat about the amount of nsima their households consume. I learn that the number of nsima lumps an adult gets on a plate goes down from three to two. This is common in households that have no steady income and rely on ganyu. Some weeks later, by late November [when schools let out until after the New Year], poor women talk about the children they have sent to the mudzi. Sending children home for all of December reduces the mouths that need feeding. Women now also talk about “walkman,” the small amounts of low-grade maize flour (mgaiwa) they purchase in the market or in neighborhood shops.12

Urban Hunger and the Home Village • 117 Between October and February, as yet another sign of food scarcity, I see an increase in the amounts of soya and millet being milled. As substitutes for maize flour, soya and millet flour are despised. But those forced to consume these unpopular substitutes apply their own logic, praising the soya porridge for its nutritional value and claiming it is so good they can now do away with the sauce (vegetables, tomatoes, fish). Seeing through their rhetoric, I know they can no longer afford relish. Similarly, people switching to millet flour praise it for being longer-lasting than maize. They have a point, since a 50-kilogram bag of millet goes further than 50 kilograms of maize, but it’s not the whole story.

Households not only reduce their food intake and downgrade its quality, but they also strategize to avoid having to make such adjustments. Strategies include storing home-grown maize for consumption during the hunger months, which means eating maize bought cheaply during the dry season. The most common strategy, however, is to earn extra cash from ganyu. When highly food insecure, urban people also draw on the assistance of family members. The strategy of sending children “home” during the hunger months extends to adults, too. In one Ntsiliza household, Mrs. H. prepares for the hunger months by doing extra ganyu during the dry season. Her situation can be described as follows: Mrs. H., widowed with three children, originates from Ntcheu. She came to Ntsiliza in 1990 after her husband (also from Ntcheu) got work as a builder. When he passed away, their oldest son, age 17, left school to follow in his father’s footsteps. But since the son’s income is insufficient to sustain the household, Mrs. H. does dry-season ganyu herself almost daily, fetching water for use on building sites. With the money from ganyu, Mrs. H. sets aside enough to ensure that her teenage children are fed from November until late February. It is, indeed, in November, when villagers make ridges on maize fields, that she leaves for her mudzi. In addition, she will have made enough money to pay a ganyu laborer on the land she rents at home. Although Mrs. H. had once inherited land in her mudzi, she lost the right to it when her visits became too sporadic. After her husband’s death, however, the visits picked up again in frequency.13 Her time away from the children means not only that there are fewer mouths to feed in her city household, but also that she spends productive time in the village. At the end of the growing season, Mrs. H. will have harvested some ten bags of maize, all of which will find their way to the township. Equally important, she will have worked for relatives and been “back home.” To ensure there is enough maize to last from harvest to harvest, the older son will have produced another five bags on a field he rents in Ntsiliza itself.

But the growing season is also a time of stress in rural areas, where cash becomes scarce due to the purchase of agricultural supplies and services (for example,

118 • Food Between the Country and the City fertilizer and ganyu labor) and medicines (with malaria and other illnesses peaking). The upshot is that urban migrants cannot just turn up in the home village and expect to be fed. In Chinsapo, too, adults may leave for the mudzi. The story of Mrs. N. is typical: Mrs. N. was born in Dedza. At the age of 17, she married her Chinsapo-born husband and moved to the township. He trades in wetland (dambo) sand and river sand, which are used in construction. There are six children; the oldest is 13. Life has been precarious for this household, which is why Mrs. N. still farms a 1-acre plot in her mudzi, which she “owns” under chikamwini. Every year in November, before the hunger sets in, Mrs. N. takes all six children home, with permission from their schools. The time away from the city is spent farming her land and doing ganyu for relatives. Being available for ganyu makes the longish stay socially acceptable.14

Better-off residents may also temporarily return home. Mr. D., a security guard, lives in town with his wife, their four children, and a younger brother of school age. His wife supplements his modest-but-regular income by selling roasted groundnuts and popcorn. As is not uncommon, Mr. D. and his wife originate from the same village, some 80 kilometers from Lilongwe.15 There, he owns a 4-acre plot (purchased), and his wife owns a 2-acre plot (inherited). They employ ganyu workers but spend a full month (December/January) at home, taking the children with them. The 2009–2010 harvest yielded 21 bags of maize, about half of which came to the city. The most common mobility pattern, however, is for older married women to go home for a few weeks when maize is planted. They initiate cultivation, pay up front for all remaining tasks, return to the city, then travel home again for harvesting. Payment for ganyu up front allows relatives to buy essential supplies, fertilizer especially. The migrant’s strategy, then, is to grow food for the urban household and to help rural relatives by recruiting them for cash and leaving some food in the village. Everyone appreciates the arrangement. But farming at home also brings problems for the urban migrant, most critically the cost of transportation over long distances. Transportation costs increased sharply in 2009–2010, then reached a crisis point in the summer of 2011, when there were massive fuel shortages. After the April/May maize harvest of 2011, some migrants tried to lower this cost by milling at home, which meant they would not be charged for transport, but they then faced other problems: the cost of milling was higher than in town, and diesel-powered mills rendered the flour less tasty.16 Besides these practical concerns, farming at home may be thwarted by family disputes over land, which have become pervasive among matrilineal relatives: “splits now take place not only between cousins (the descendants of sisters) but also between full-sisters” (Peters 2002: 173). Older migrants I interviewed readily acknowledged that disputes might be such that a permanent return to the mudzi was ruled out.

Urban Hunger and the Home Village • 119

Farming at Home or in Town Problems associated with farming at home invite reflection on whether farming in town might be a better alternative, as policy experts now suggest. To answer that question, I present an overview of where migrants farmed in 2010–2011, beginning with the home farms. Combining data from Ntsiliza and Chinsapo, Table 6.3 shows the extent to which migrants from ninety households boosted their maize supply through farming at home. Out of the ninety households surveyed, about one-third (thirty-one) actively cultivated at home and would bring at least some of the harvest to Lilongwe. This percentage contrasts sharply with the situation in Chinsapo twenty years earlier when “all households rel[ied] to some extent on their gardens at home” despite also cultivating in the township (Roe 1992: 3; emphasis added). Three factors may explain the drop. First, by 2011, Malawi’s maize sufficiency had brought stable prices yearround. Second, transportation costs had spun out of control, making it much more expensive to bring harvests to the city. Third, the number of land disputes involving matrilineal relatives was rising. The low percentage of migrants who actively cultivate in the mudzi must not, however, be misconstrued to mean that positive urban-rural linkages are disappearing. When the No Farming at Home category is looked at closely, it emerges that many migrants who do not farm in the mudzi nonetheless own land from which they derive either an income (rent) or welcome “social credit” (by having relatives cultivate that land). Thus, of the twenty migrant households who arrived in Lilongwe in the 1990s and did not actively cultivate at home in 2010–2011, seven had an adult family member (sometimes two) who owned village land farmed by relatives, parents mostly; three had an adult who owned village land that was rented for farming; eight had never cultivated at home, since they never owned any land; and in one case, the village land once owned had been sold. (There was also one household for which I did not collect the information.) Where migrants owned village land used by others

Table 6.3

Migrant households farming in their home villages.

Migrant Households Interviewed: N = 90

Farming at Husband’s Village

Farming at Wife’s Village

Farming at Both Villages

Not Farming at Home

0 3 2 3 3

1 0 4 8 1

0 2 0 1 3

7 7* 20 24 1

Migrants Who Arrived Pre-1980s: N = 8 1980s: N = 12 1990s: N = 26 2000s: N = 36 2010s: N=8

*All seven households farmed in Lilongwe.

120 • Food Between the Country and the City (ten out of twenty), some food or cash remained in the village, while some came to the city. In short, despite not farming at home, half the respondents in the 1990s group enhanced their own food security and/or gained social credit in their villages of origin. These respondents, just like those who actively cultivated, did whatever they could to assist relatives with the purchase of essential supplies for farming. Beyond strengthening food security in both town and country, the tacit deal was to foster relationships that would ensure a smooth return to the village should this ever be desired or necessary. What about more recent migrants? Of the twenty-four households who arrived during the first decade of the twenty-first century and did not cultivate at home, none farmed in Lilongwe, and only nine owned village land. The latter statistic partly reflected their age (too young to have inherited) and partly reflected conditions of land scarcity (Peters 2002: 165). The two factors worked together. Women from areas where chikamwini is practiced regularly said they would have inherited land by now had they not migrated. In nearly all cases of ownership (eight out of nine), however, the land was managed by relatives (usually parents), who would claim most of the maize harvest. The young migrant’s share, often small, would be kept in the village to be drawn on during visits. Only one landowner said she rented her land, while the land of the remaining two was left uncultivated. In this group of households that did not farm at home, then, just under half (nine out of twenty-four) owned land that was either cultivated by relatives (earning the owner social credit) or rented for cash. When the two categories (1990s and first decade of the 2000s) are merged, we find that nineteen out of the forty-four migrant households who did not farm at home still had close ties with the mudzi through farming. The implication for urban food security is that village fields—owned mostly by women—boost the food and livelihood security of urban migrants even when these migrants do not farm the fields themselves. We should note, too, that the incidence of renting out village land for cash is low. While renting land may seem a sensible strategy given the high cost of transportation, the option is a nonstarter in villages short of arable land. Uncultivated land that migrants may have inherited is nowadays often redistributed to land-poor relatives. To summarize, Table 6.3 shows that active farming in villages of origin continues to be a strategy through which a significant percentage of the urban poor, about one-third of my sample, effectively boost their food security. Farming at home either contributes directly to the urban household’s food supply or, though less commonly, is converted into cash to strengthen the ability to purchase food in town. Maintaining a farm at home also creates the conditions for nurturing good social relationships, which help to ensure a smooth change of residence should unforeseen circumstances drive migrants out of the city. In addition, nineteen migrant households who did not farm at home-owned land that relatives (or, less commonly, a tenant farmer) put to productive use. This gives a total of fifty migrant households, out of ninety, who are

Urban Hunger and the Home Village • 121 involved in rural food production. Their households and (in most cases) those of their rural relatives are mutually tied. What about urban agriculture? The information in Table 6.4 reveals that only twenty-two of the ninety migrant households interviewed farmed in the city, mostly within or just outside the townships. Significantly, of the twenty-two, half had arrived by the late 1980s, when farm land was still ample. Ever since the mid-1990s, however, when both Chinsapo and Ntsiliza witnessed land invasions, migrants have found it more difficult to take up urban agriculture.17 Among migrant households who arrived since 1990 (seventy respondents), only eleven had urban gardens; these people blamed “greedy originals” for converting farmland into building plots (see p. 114 above). When opportunities to rent or purchase farmland do arise, new migrants usually find the asking price too high. The difficulty of accessing farmland in town may be one reason why so many migrants in my sample hung onto their land in the mudzi. Of course, the causality is by no means one way. It can also be argued that newcomers do not seek to farm in town because many are women who own land at home.

Burial at Home: Not Over My Dead Body? If the above information shows that recent arrivals maintain an interest in the mudzi, the same cannot be said of the urban-born offspring of early migrants. The urbanborn regard Lilongwe as home and increasingly fail, or do not bother, to assist rural relatives. They have, these offspring say, drifted apart. The unease second-generation migrants feel when visiting the mudzi, usually their mother’s, is a regular topic for conversation. Mrs. J. is typical of her generation. She grew up in Chinsapo, left for Mzuzu (Northern Malawi) after marrying, then moved back to the parental house in Chinsapo on losing her parents. About a recent visit to the mudzi, Mrs. J. said: “ . . . my home village is in Mulanje, where my mother is from, but here [Chinsapo] is where I have lived most of my life. Actually, I don’t

Table 6.4

Migrant households farming in Lilongwe.

Migrant Households Interviewed: N = 90

Farming a Large Field (Larger Than 2 Acres)

Farming a Medium-sized Field (1–2 Acres)

Farming a Small Field (1 Acre or Less)

Not Farming in Lilongwe

1 1 0 0 0

2 1 1 1 0

0 6 7 2 0

5 4 18 33 8

Migrants Who Arrived Pre-1980s: N = 8 1980s: N = 12 1990s: N = 26 2000s: N = 36 2010s: N=8

122 • Food Between the Country and the City enjoy going to Mulanje.” She laughed. “Last month, I did go there with my brother because of a funeral, but we felt like strangers (achilendo). As for the village in Dedza, my father’s home, I have never visited. We do not belong there.” I asked Mrs. J. about her children: J.P.: Do your children visit Mulanje? Mrs. J.: No, they have never been. I have never taken him [the oldest boy, age 6]. J.P.: But maybe he has been to his dad’s village in Zomba? Mrs. J.: No, he’s never been. Fathers do not take children to their mudzi. J.P.: Would you ever consider returning home for good? Mrs. J.: No, I’d rather die here.18 This final remark echoed the known fact that second-generation migrants who struggle to survive in the city will do anything not to have to return “home.” A man in his mid-thirties confirmed this: That’s how it is. When someone born in town gets fired from a job, for example, they stick around hoping they will get another. Even those who do want to go back to the mudzi cannot do so if they do not have a house there. Or land. Most of us have neither.19

Standing by this “drifting apart” discourse, Group Village Headman Chisenga, Chinsapo’s traditional authority, said of long-term migrants: “if you cannot take fertilizer to your rural relatives, you will reap as you sow.”20 Migrants who fail to assist their rural kin cannot hope to maintain good relations. Town people, the headman added, used to meet expectations by sending money or fertilizer at the start of the maize season, but nowadays, many fall well short of the expectation. Not only is life in Lilongwe expensive, but most established migrants—some drawing small pensions—also have to assist their urban-based children and grandchildren. Among well-established migrants, the perceived disconnect is sometimes reinforced with the saying that “natural love has gone” (masiku ano chikondi cha umunthu chinatha). Natural love refers to the 1970s and early 1980s, when villagers felt obliged to send food to those working in town, expecting nothing in return. Today, reciprocity is expected, and urban dwellers are supposed to send money or goods home, which not many can sustain. Some older migrants conceded they experience divided loyalties. Affable Mr. L. told me: I would love to have gone back to my village because there are no makolo [parents, elders] left. There are just children now that side. But the problem is that I have my house and land here in town. . . . Whether I want it or not, I cannot leave my children behind.

Urban Hunger and the Home Village • 123 Should I leave my children and my house here and go live in my sister’s house? No, that would not make sense. So I’m forced to stay here even though my heart wants to take me that side.

After a pause, he added: “There are many who never go home. After all, ‘home is where you live’ ” (ku mudzi ndikomwe ukukhala).21 It is a popular saying. And since Chinsapo has a cemetery and transportation is expensive, older migrants know that their wish to be buried in town will be honored. At the thought of being buried “at home,” Mr. C.H., a retired carpenter in his eighties, cracked this joke: “If you die and they take your body to the mudzi, and they don’t know you there, they will be asking who is this one? And your brothers will be explaining while your body decomposes!” He finished with: “Friends and relatives are the people you live with on a daily basis.” He, too, is surrounded by children and grandchildren. But the comfort of a supportive large family does not mean the long-term migrant is complacent. “Life is unpredictable,” Mr. C.H. continued. While he owns his humble abode, bought from the Group Village Headman in the 1980s, he knows of the Gates Foundation grant. Slum upgrading could mean eviction: Depending on what the city authorities decide to do, because we [migrants] are not “originals,” if they say “leave,” we will leave. If they say “go home,” it can happen anytime. The challenge is that this is a city, and the authorities plan to bring new roads here. It may mean pulling down our houses and asking people to build modern ones. Or the city will build houses so that we should be paying. If that happens, I’ll be going home.22

Older migrants’ reluctance to retire to their mudzi is increasingly set in stone, literally, in the way multigenerational compounds are springing up. Mrs. M., who is a widow, explained that the house being built next door was meant for her parents, who had decided to come live in Chinsapo when her father retires from his Blantyre job. With several of their married children living in the city, the parents had opted for retirement in Chinsapo in preference to the mudzi.23

Conclusion Whether policy makers celebrate the rural or the urban, there is, in either case, a conspicuous failure to appreciate that these seemingly opposed spaces coproduce one another (Williams 1985). This failure persists despite a growing awareness that the urban and the rural constitute interlocking spaces imbued with multiple flows and interactions. The reason for this persistent failure, in the context of urban food insecurity, is a concern over fast-increasing rates of urbanization and poverty, which has given rise to the idea that the potential for urban agriculture needs developing. This vision of the city as an engine for growth not only is at odds with new analytical

124 • Food Between the Country and the City understandings, but also, as this article shows, ignores the investments the urban poor make to maintain cordial links with the country. With the exception of firstgeneration migrants and their urban-born offspring, migrants do not see a disconnect with the rural—often remote rural—sources of their food. On the contrary, they maintain dynamic relationships with their rural homes. As has been argued also for other sub-Saharan cities, “the livelihoods of the urban poor [continue to be] interdependent with the livelihoods of the rural poor, and flows of food and cash occur between family members resident in both locations” (Ellis and Sumberg 1998: 217). My research confirms this for Lilongwe. Seasonal hunger brings urban-rural ties and interactions into focus. In Chinsapo and Ntsiliza, two of Lilongwe’s poorest townships, urban-rural linkages are a major strategy through which migrants attempt to overcome seasonal hunger. Migrants undertake short-term trips to the mudzi, may actively farm there, will employ villagers as ganyu workers, and (whenever possible) will assist relatives with purchasing essential farming supplies. Urban-rural relations are buoyed by cultural practices, notably matrilocal residence and women’s inheritance of land. If land is available, younger migrant women grow food at the mudzi, help out relatives in various ways, and bring to town the staple food that sees them through times of hunger. While some younger migrants aspire to an independent life in town, many more straddle the divide successfully. Even when they are not actively farming at home, they will make sure not to forfeit their rights, even though cordial relations may be strained by protracted disputes over land or by the heightened cost of living in town. The need to maintain good relations with the mudzi, however, is underscored by the uncertainties of an urban existence. Not only are unemployment and living costs high, but there are also plans to upgrade Chinsapo and Ntsiliza—plans that should phase them out as slums. Migrants who know that their haphazardly constructed dwellings do not meet modern planning standards also know that it would be foolish to pretend that they will live in town forever. Even second-generation migrants, who mostly loathe the idea of a permanent return to the mudzi, stay in touch with the country: visiting “home” once in a while, taking small food and nonfood gifts to relatives, and offering hospitality whenever relatives come to town. Their efforts, minimalist though they are, could make a big difference in the long run.

Acknowledgments My 2011 research in Lilongwe was supported by a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (KAKENHI/A/22242029), administered through the Global Collaboration Center (GLOCOL), Osaka University. I thank Professor Eisei Kurimoto and Dr. Akiko Ueda for inviting me to join the GLOCOL team of food researchers. I am indebted also to Kondwani Chikadza of the Institute of Policy Research and Empowerment in Lilongwe for his invaluable assistance and to

Urban Hunger and the Home Village • 125 Dr. Steve Collins, Theresa Banda, and Bina Shaba of Valid International for offering me a home away from home. Last but not least, I thank participants at two symposia where drafts of this paper were presented: “Food and Foodways in the Country and the City,” sponsored by the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, and the SOAS Food Studies Centre, University of London, and held in Lisbon in November 2011; and the African Studies seminar held at Emory University in Atlanta in March 2012.

–7– Perceptions of the Country through the Migration of City-grown Crops: Guinean Food in Bissau and in Lisbon Maria Abranches

Guinea-Bissau is a small country of around one and a half million inhabitants situated on the West African coast. Its economy is based predominantly on agriculture, and farming activities are part of the country’s urban and rural landscapes; other livelihood strategies have long been combined with farming by the majority of the population, in an attempt to cope with economic uncertainty and political unrest. The country and the city in Guinea-Bissau have historically been closely related, in spite of a number of attempts, dating from colonial times, to offer and impose an economic and social divide. Echoing Raymond Williams’s (1973) analysis of English writings from the sixteenth century, images of an urban-rural divide fail also, in the Guinean context, to grasp the way in which larger historical dynamics have shaped one in relation to the other. Likewise, notions of rural and urban food are complexly intertwined in GuineaBissau. The use of similar endogenous techniques of production in both the country and the city, as well as the small distances between production, distribution, and consumption that characterize both rural and urban foodways, contribute to this interconnection. What happens, then, when such distances increase? By looking at a transnational context that has the migration of Guineans and their foods from Bissau to Lisbon as the main setting, I try to bring new insights into the discussion of foods and foodways in the country and the city. How do the close social ties that link Guinean food producers, traders, and consumers change with migration? What does food from the country mean for Guinean migrants, and how do they perceive that food? How are their views different from those of Guinean producers and consumers in Guinea-Bissau, and how can perceptions of homeland food by migrants be compared to the way new and unfamiliar foods are seen in Lisbon? How can the notions of interlaced proximity and distance, familiarity and strangeness, or us and the “other”—which are not pure categories, but rather constructed dichotomies that are shaped and transformed across borders—influence Guinean migrants’ relation to their source of sustenance? Answers to these questions will help us to understand

– 127 –

128 • Food Between the Country and the City in what ways migration brings the country and the city closer together in the Guinean context, through reimagined meanings of Guinean food. Finally, given the long history of migrations across West Africa, as well as wider movements along the continent that have made Guinea-Bissau a country of great ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity, I explore ways in which ethnic relationships, land, and food are interwoven. I focus particularly on the Fula people, given the key role they play in international migration from Guinea-Bissau and their weight among Guinean migrants in Lisbon. Acknowledging these relationships will offer a better understanding of how they influence the construction of romanticized images of Fula rural foods, as well as the way in which migration generates changes in these images and meanings through mechanisms of adaptation of food preparation and food sharing practices.

Late Colonialism and the Political Economy of Agriculture in Guinea-Bissau Portugal’s colonial endeavor to create a plantation economy never succeeded in Guinea-Bissau. An export-oriented production of groundnuts, followed by sugarcane and rice, was at the origin of the first land concessions ( pontas) of the nineteenth century. Yet, these were not taken by Portuguese entrepreneurs, who avoided Guinea-Bissau because of what they considered an adverse climate and health risks. Rather, they were taken by Cape Verdeans who migrated to the mainland in order to escape the famine of the 1860s in the Cape Verde Islands. Contracted Guinean farmers kept their traditional techniques of production and took de facto ownership of the land, where small-scale land concessions functioned as commercial centers rather than plantations (Galli and Jones 1987). The Portuguese were likewise unsuccessful in stimulating large-scale private investments, as they did in other colonies, particularly Angola and Mozambique. Early in the nineteenth century, the majority of imports and exports in Guinea-Bissau was in the hands of non-Portuguese trading houses, which took the bulk of exports to Germany, Great Britain, and France and supplied imports from these countries, as well. Cape Verdean, Portuguese, and Lebanese traders, headquartered in Bissau, acted as intermediaries for foreign firms; other Africans, along with Cape Verdean and Lebanese traders, operated isolated trading posts and village shops. On the lowest level of this layered system of commerce were the itinerant African traders who had dominated trade in the eastern parts of the country during precolonial times (Galli 1995: 55). In the early 1970s, colonial economists and agronomists offered a dualist analysis of the Guinea-Bissau economy, whereby a divide between a traditional nonmonetized sector and a modern monetized one corresponded to the rural and urban areas of the country. Evidence that this divide was, already back then, a false construct is offered by Rosemary Galli (1995), through the example of the illegal circulation of money coming from Senegal into the rural sector of Guinea-Bissau, following what was a long-established flow of commodities and trade goods across borders.

Perceptions of the Country through the Migration of City-grown Crops • 129 Likewise, the social structure of Portuguese Guinea (as Guinea-Bissau was called in the colonial period), whereby, since 1914, the population was divided into the “civilized” and the “indigenous,” did not find a real equivalent divide between city and countryside. This division was made according to criteria of linguistic competence and “manners and customs,” and only the “civilized” were to be guaranteed full rights (Mendy 2003; Teixeira da Mota 1948). Following this social structure, the city of Bissau was constructed with an urban center known as prasa, in which were concentrated the businesses and services that served the Portuguese residents and the “civilized” Guineans; the predominantly rural population, who were ruled by chiefs and subject to customary law, were considered indigenous. Yet, rural Guineans, who still represent the majority of the country’s population today, were by then already flexible and mobile, and Guineans did not fit neatly into these categories (Galli and Jones 1987: 30). In spite of living mainly in the villages and working on individually owned, family-owned, or chief-owned land, many people migrated both within and outside the country, or they worked simultaneously as contract laborers on pontas or on the few successful large-scale private plantations, owned mainly by foreign merchants. Agriculture development policies started by the colonial government in 1945 introduced new and improved varieties of rice and groundnuts, animal-pulled tractors, commercial tree farming, and diversification of food and export crops (Galli and Jones 1987: 35). However, these efforts were hindered by insufficient government budgets, scarcely improved physical and technological conditions, paternalistic social relations, and a lag in price increases as compared with other West African countries (Galli 1995). After the start of Guinea-Bissau’s liberation war in the 1960s, exports declined dramatically, and a new understanding of agricultural development, partly occasioned by the Green Revolution and its new technological package, went hand in hand with the suggestion of trying to eliminate small wholesalers in order to monopolize trade for Portugal. Yet, the incorporation of some of the new ideas into colonial practice in 1968, as well as the improvement of roads, health facilities, and schools made possible through the use of military personnel and serving military purposes, were quickly overthrown by the war, which induced hundreds of thousands of people to move from their villages. Until independence, therefore, the economy remained mainly dependent on small farmers (Mendy 1990), just as strongly entrenched indigenous local-level power structures and social and economic practices outdid an infrastructurally undeveloped state.

From Postindependence to Liberalization and Structural Adjustment Reforms Following independence,1 the newly installed PAIGC2 government pursued the nationalization of the economy and the control of agricultural trade, in some ways similar to Portuguese colonialism’s efforts to nationalize trade (Galli 1995: 73). The economy was to be run through a network of 120 People’s Stores (Armazéns do

130 • Food Between the Country and the City Povo) and through SOCOMIN, the government agency responsible for guaranteeing a fair exchange of agricultural products for imported goods. The intention was to channel part of the country’s agricultural surplus into the urban sector and to foster the creation and development of a thus-far-hardly-existent industrial sector. Yet, the reality turned out to be quite different. Due to low crop purchase prices and the inadequacy of the new system to cover a nation of 3,600 villages, the People’s Stores proved unable to offer the required diversity of products at affordable prices; they experienced increasing shortages of goods and also suffered from corrupt practices, such as profiteering by managers (Forrest 2002: 239; Galli and Jones 1987: 113). The stagnation of agriculture, the impoverishment of farmers, and an increase in informal trade and migration were the consequences of such policies, and the problems of rural communities were only exacerbated. These problems were also compounded by a poor road infrastructure that did not facilitate movement of goods to the city of Bissau; many villages were cut off from commercial transportation and trading routes. Yet, well-defined boundaries between rural and urban sectors remained difficult to identify during this period, and they became even less identifiable after the liberalization and structural adjustment program (SAP) reforms of 1987. On the one hand, the fact that state investments were mainly concentrated in the city generated an increasing distance between the small urban-political elite and the rural majority of Bissau-Guineans. Joshua Forrest (1992), who defined this process as “de-linkage,” traces it to the immediate postindependence period, whereas Alexandre Abreu (2011) maintains that the liberalization phase of the country’s history marked the final consolidation of that disconnection. On the other hand, though, this increased distance was also felt by the majority of urban dwellers, who were not part of the elite and who felt the deterioration of their living conditions as much as the rural population. If we look at the complex cultural impacts of such processes in African cities such as Bissau, this distance is embodied in the difference between the small elite from the prasa and the majority of city inhabitants, who, having most often migrated from other, rural areas of the country, reside in unplanned peripheral settlements that lack basic services such as electricity, sewer systems, or running water. The reason that the government’s socioeconomic changes offered limited improvements to the urban and rural population of Guinea-Bissau was linked to the fact that the beneficiaries of medium-term and long-term loans for agricultural development were, for the most part, already privileged elite owners of cash-crop farms ( ponteiros). Other unforeseen problematic results of the SAP reforms—such as rising levels of inflation and growth of external debt—limited economic opportunities; such limited opportunities, along with a series of postindependence domestic conflicts, largely influenced migration across borders. Recent politico-military conflicts, moreover, have contributed to increasing the divide between the majority of the population and the new politico-military elite, whose members have been using their positions for personal gain while the general population languishes in poverty (Embaló 2012). A widespread sense of foreboding and the ever-more-precarious daily life that people

Perceptions of the Country through the Migration of City-grown Crops • 131 are facing, as well as the negative perception of agricultural-based livelihoods by the younger generations, has affected rural-urban migration and international migration. On the other hand, an end of state control over commerce has also resulted in diverse opportunities for food production and small-scale commercial activities in Bissau and its outskirts. Despite the increase in human poverty—the percentage of Guineans with a daily income below $2.00 rose from 49 percent in 1991 to 64.7 percent in 2002 and 69.3 percent in 2010—these income-generating activities, mainly performed by women, have proved to be a successful model (Aguilar et al. 2001). Alongside the production of rice in vast swamp areas around the city, subsistence and market-oriented smallholdings, as well as spontaneous food markets, have expanded in the urban periphery (Lourenço-Lindell 1995). This contributed not only to the blurring of boundaries between images of city and countryside and their related livelihoods, but also to a particular way of seeing Guinean food independently of its rural or urban origin, as I will explore below. Badjiki (roselle leaves), djagatu (African eggplant), kandja (okra), malagueta (chilies) and sukulbembe (West African peppers)—the main vegetable crops arriving in Lisbon from Bissau—are, for the most part, cultivated in the urban periphery by women of Mancanha or Pepel origin, who have found creative ways of taking advantage of the free-trade climate to accumulate personal savings (Forrest 2002). Their urban location is what actually enables the commercialization of their produce across borders from Guinea-Bissau to Portugal by Guinean migrant traders and their families. In addition to cost-effectiveness, the proximity of farm sites to the city has the key advantage that produce can be sent fresh to Lisbon. If this produce had to be transported over a longer distance within Guinea-Bissau, with its poor road infrastructure and a general electricity shortage that inhibits proper refrigeration, costs would rise and freshness would suffer.

Guinean Migration to Portugal: The Travel of People, Food, and Land Although the first flow of Guinean migrants to Portugal followed the declaration of Guinea-Bissau’s independence and Portugal’s 1974 return to democracy, more massive migration occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, related both to the search for better labor opportunities and to the 1998–1999 civil war in Guinea-Bissau. Guinean migration to Portugal had its most significant growth between 1986 and 1996; in that period, Guineans in Portugal went from being the tenth-most-represented foreign nationality to being the fourth (Machado 2002). In its data for 2010, the Portuguese Office for National Statistics, in spite of ignoring an estimated large number of undocumented Guinean migrants, placed Guineans as the fifth-largest group within the total non-European Union population of Portugal; the Guinean population was reported to be 19,304 (Instituto Nacional de Estatística 2011).

132 • Food Between the Country and the City Even if Guinean migrants come predominantly from Bissau, many of them have moved from rural areas to the capital prior to moving across borders to Portugal. The Fula (along with the Manjaco) are one of the most-represented ethnic groups among Guineans in Portugal, and members of the Fula ethnic group play the key role in the transnational trade of Guinean food. In many cases, these people lived their childhood and early adulthood in the eastern rural regions of Guinea-Bissau—where agriculture and cattle raising, along with small-scale commercial activities, were the family’s main occupations—then moved to the capital as young adults. There, they continued their petty-trade activities, and some specialized in small-scale cross-border trade between Guinea-Bissau and neighboring countries—Gambia, Guinea, Senegal—since they found a shortage of jobs for unskilled workers. Petty trade has been, and still is today, one of the diversification-of-livelihood strategies common in both rural and urban areas. In the face of economic uncertainty and impoverishment resulting from a series of ill-designed development policies, this livelihood diversification is a key coping strategy that has long contributed to urban and rural households’ domestic income. In the city, it is carried on by more-skilled workers, as well. For example, civil servants, who experience constant delays in salary payments, often engage in pettytrade activities for complementary income. The Fula are particularly known in Bissau for their trading skills. Taking advantage of their previous commercial experience, they are the key performers in both countries of the transnational family-based trade that makes Guinean foodstuffs harvested by Mancanha and Pepel women around Bissau available to migrants in Portugal. This process is facilitated by an informal system for sending and receiving packages of foodstuffs across borders. A trustworthy home-based family member buys the produce in a local food market in Bissau or directly from the urban farmer. After packing it in suitcases or in plastic bags, he or she takes the produce to Bissau’s airport on the day of a flight to Lisbon and tries to find a passenger who agrees to act as carrier. When the flight arrives in Lisbon, a family member is waiting to receive the food and then sell it (Abranches 2013). Having access to homeland food is essential for migrants, not only to activate memories that help to keep a link between both countries and thus to make sense of a transnational world, but also to alleviate the corporeal adversities and cosmologic insecurities brought on, among other things, by unknown food. Guinean foodstuffs are perceived as having particular healing qualities that help not only Guineans in their homeland, but also, in particular, migrants away from it. Because Guineans and their food share the same land of origin—the land that gives them life—they also share the same material and spiritual substance. This is a central connection in Guinean cosmology, as it is for people elsewhere (Sahlins 1985), and maintaining this connection by continuing to consume their homeland foods enables migrants to keep their body and mind safe in a distant land, ensuring them protection from the threats of foreign food and unfamiliar lifestyles (Strathern 1988).

Perceptions of the Country through the Migration of City-grown Crops • 133 Perceptions of healthful Guinean food are linked to the importance of the land in different ways. First, the material and spiritual value of Guinean land, which is symbolically taken to Lisbon with each arrived Guinean foodstuff, is associated with traditional techniques of land use that are perceived as more healthful, due to the fact that agriculture in Guinea-Bissau is still mainly organic and relies on farmers’ own seeds (Temudo and Abrantes 2013). It is also linked to sacred relations with the spirits of the ancestors who inhabit that land and to the life-bringing meanings the land embodies. Finally, the value of the land is not absent from commercial strategies, since growing vegetables in Bissau is not just subsistence oriented, but also partly directed at acquiring money. A new relationship in such positions of value is underpinned by the transnational context, which created both a new demand for Guinean food by the migrant community and the need to compensate for people’s physical disconnection from the land of origin. The initiation of this transnational trade of food was, in fact, an outcome of the absence of familiar food felt by the first arrived Guinean migrants in Portugal, of the absence of formal Guinean exports in the global marketplace, and of the market opportunity that some of the first migrants perceived.

Urban and Rural Food in Guinea-Bissau: Deconstructing a False Dichotomy Migrants’ family members who are involved in the transnational food trade from Guinea-Bissau are mostly urban dwellers. Even in cases where there was not an internal movement prior to the kin’s migration to Portugal, families have later been pulled from the country to the city in order to facilitate the transnational business, with remittances often being used for the construction of homes in Bissau or other urban or peri-urban areas in the regions of origin, rather than in the villages. Farmers who have migrant relatives therefore choose to abandon their lands and move to urban or peri-urban areas, where they sometimes survive solely on the remittances received from abroad. City and countryside have historically been linked in different ways in GuineaBissau, but the increased movement of people to urban from rural areas resulting from international migration adds to that connection. A significant growth of the city population dates back to the immediate postindependence period and has continuously intensified. The population of Bissau rose by 80 percent between 1995 and 2005. Bissau now accounts for around 25 percent of the country’s population (Instituto Nacional de Estatística Guiné-Bissau 2009). As a consequence, new settlements have continued to be created out of spontaneous squatter constructions in peripheral neighborhoods, which stretch from the city center and progressively diminish until swamp areas used for agricultural land fully dominate the landscape (Lourenço-Lindell 1995). Recently, nearly 90 percent of Bissau residents were

134 • Food Between the Country and the City estimated to live in this periphery, where many have vegetable gardens and agricultural smallholdings. This reliance of urban households on agricultural activities makes images of city and countryside converge in one space or, as C. M. Rogerson (1993) puts it, generates a “ruralization” of the city, as in other sub-Saharan countries, resulting from urban households’ need to cope with rising living costs. The way rural and urban socioeconomic landscapes are intertwined in Guinea-Bissau can also be seen through the participation of members of urban households in the cashewharvesting season; this participation is common among both those who have their own groves and those who work as wage laborers. An old tendency to dichotomize rural and urban Guinea-Bissau is thus just as misleading today as it was in relation to colonial policies, as discussed above. Likewise, the relation between rural and urban foods is shaped, in Guinea-Bissau, by historical processes. The failure to create effective road access between city and countryside is at the origin of inefficient transportation of commodities from rural regions such as the south, which is characterized by mangrove forests and swampy soils that can be especially difficult to traverse in the absence of good roads. The lack of infrastructure not only creates crop-shipment difficulties in rural regions, but also contributes to urban food insecurity in Bissau. Geographically rotating weekly markets known as lumu are set up in regionally strategic locations between rural areas and urban centers, but they only partially resolve these problems. Additionally, in Bissau, there are several storehouses run by lokateros—private intermediaries who are responsible for the shipment of rural producers’ goods to the city—where Bissau residents can acquire more diversified produce. Yet, urban food production and sales of not only vegetables, but also fish and rice,3 are essential to secure access to food for the urban poor and to provide a livelihood for many in the city. In Bissau, from where all food products going to Lisbon are sent, there is, however, ambiguity in terms of how Guinean food is perceived, since such perceptions are, as ideas of country and city, positional and relational (Williams 1973). The idealization of Guinean food as more healthful than that of not only industrialized Europe, but also neighboring West African countries seems to overcome any distinction between rural or urban origin for Bissau dwellers. It is the absence of mechanization in agriculture and the use of organic methods of production only, in rural as well as in urban areas, that contributes to that idealization. Paradoxically, however, the same reasons that endow Guinean food with healthful properties are subject to criticism by some, especially by young Guineans who are involved in agricultural work in the family’s urban smallholdings. Pona, for example, was a Pepel owner of a plot of land in Bissau where, with the help of relatives and, occasionally, contracted workers, she planted and harvested the vegetable crops that would later be sent to the Guinean migrant community of Lisbon. Some of her children were present at the plot on the day I visited it. While two daughters watered one part of it and one son cleared another, the youngest girls played nearby, singing and dancing around. In a moment of rest, the young boy shared his discontent with me: “This job is very tiring. It makes

Perceptions of the Country through the Migration of City-grown Crops • 135 us grow old too quickly.” He went on to complain about the absence of mechanized production techniques that could help him in his task. In this instant of seeming despair, he looked me in the eyes and asked for my support. He wondered if I could help with new technology that might ease his work, given my European provenance. This is an example of the influence of historical processes in forming perceptions of food and agricultural work in Guinea-Bissau, including among the urban population. Marina Temudo and Manuel Abrantes have shown how young people’s negative views operate in rural Guinea-Bissau, due to the postcolonial failure to improve living conditions in rural areas, the low prices for agricultural products, and the obstacles to their shipment and sale, as well as to the perception that development funds are being usurped by the urban elite and project staffs (Temudo and Abrantes 2013: 29). Internal migration and the deterioration of living conditions for the majority of the urban population shape similar views in the city. Yet, it is precisely the fact that all agricultural systems are rain-fed and maintained through endogenous techniques in which agro-chemicals are not used that makes Guinean consumers in Bissau and in Lisbon—especially in the latter, where migrants are confronted with wider varieties of industrialized foods—perceive Guinean produce as more healthful and tastier than exogenous food. In Bissau, the consumption of fresh vegetables and fruits that are acquired daily and cannot travel long distances is thus mainly dependent on urban production. Foodstuffs originating from rural regions of the country include dried fish and shellfish, palm products, groundnuts, cashews, kola nuts, and such popular fruits as Guinea gumvine ( fole), baobab fruit ( kabasera), néré ( faroba), and velvet tamarind (veludo). These rural products are acquired in the weekly lumus or in storehouses in Bissau. Yet, their rural origin was never mentioned to me as playing a role in the foods’ social or material value. Instead, the value ascribed to food seemed rather dependent on the regional provenance of consumers, since food’s relation to the land of origin is also tied up with people’s place of birth. This relation gains even more importance with international migration and the imposition of larger physical distances.

The Country Seen from a Distant City: Perceptions of Familiar and Strange Foods in Lisbon In Portugal, Guinean migrants live for the most part in Lisbon and its periphery. Although most of the Guinean food arriving in Lisbon originates in Bissau, the occasional arrival of food from a migrant’s region of origin represents a particularly important way of bridging distances and contributes to a rethinking of dichotomies such as near and far, showing how these are not pure categories. Yasin and her mother, for example, were born on Bolama Island; they later moved to Bissau, from where the latter migrated to Lisbon. Since Yasin still had relatives living on the Island, she counted on their help to provide her in Bissau with the dried oysters (ostra seku)

136 • Food Between the Country and the City and dried fish (skalada) that she sent for her mother to sell within the migrant community in Lisbon. The way this pragmatic business strategy was combined with the symbolic realm of the foodstuffs’ origin could be seen in Yasin’s mother’s reaction to the arrival of dried fish and seafood from Guinea-Bissau. “ In Bolama, we have really good fish,”—she once said to me in Lisbon, with a longing smile, pointing at the recently arrived packs of small dried fish—“but I miss the way we used to eat it fresh. Having it dried like this is more a tradition from the south.” Unfortunately, Bolama-style fresh fish could not stay fresh without proper refrigeration during the long shipping time from Bolama Island to Bissau to Lisbon. Yet, regardless of their urban or rural origin, Guinean foodstuffs are seen by Guineans in Lisbon as essential to minimize the perceived corporeal threats, from consumption of exogenous food, that inevitably come with migration. For migrants, the problem is not only the discomfort caused by unfamiliar tastes, but also, as seen above, the idea that Guinean food, given the use of traditional agricultural techniques in Guinea-Bissau, is more healthful than European processed foods. Once, over lunch at the home on the periphery of Lisbon of one of my research participants, Cadi, there was a long discussion about notions of healthful Guinean food as opposed to unhealthy European food—or, as Cadi and other migrants more commonly labeled it, kumida di branku (white people’s food). Over a rich goat-meat dish with rice, chilies, and baguitche (prepared with okra and eggplant), with the television showing the afternoon news, Cadi’s old aunt Quinta, who was visiting from Bissau, complained: “I don’t trust the meat here. The minute a chicken or a cow is born, it is instantly fat. How is that possible? That’s not natural! I eat it here only because I have no choice.” Then, suddenly, a news bulletin was shown on the television—a well-known Portuguese actor had just died of pancreatic cancer. The two women, shocked by that news, followed attentively (occasionally, sighing and expressing pity) the television report on the life of the actor and his friends’ reactions to his death. Once the subject on the screen changed, Cadi and her aunt debated unfortunate common cases of cancer in Europe and related them to unhealthy “European foods.” “Guinean food is better because we don’t use chemicals in agriculture. That’s the positive side of it being a less developed country,” they said. Cadi, her aunt, and many other Guineans in Lisbon associate “modern” processed foods with the downside of development. In Bissau, however, as seen through the example of Pona’s son, some people—especially young farmers—live this dichotomy differently. Whereas economic and agricultural development is associated by migrants with a deterioration of food’s healthful organic properties, nonmigrant young people in Bissau use the notion of development as an idiom to express frustration, needs, and aspirations (Bordonaro 2009: 71), rather than seeing it as incompatible with quality food. In reality, the present-day view of many young people in Bissau is in line with the economic program idealized but not accomplished by the independence leader Amilcar Cabral, who saw the problems of Guinea-Bissau as related

Perceptions of the Country through the Migration of City-grown Crops • 137 to the backward nature of indigenous agriculture and who advocated that peasants be integrated into modern society (Galli and Jones 1987: 49). Moreover, for many farmers in Bissau, being aware that their crops’ final destination is Europe contributes to a desire on their part to migrate, as well. Constantly, other urban farmers displayed, like Pona’s son, an attitude of hope toward my possible help: “Can you help me?” one of them once asked. “There are no jobs here, you see? There, I could do anything! All my kandja and badjiki go to Portugal. Why can’t I make it too?” For Guinean migrants, however, the country they romanticize is more than what opposes the city. It is their nation or region of origin, and it opposes a wider imagined notion of “European” or “white people’s” food. The country of origin, materialized in a fertile, healthful land that might actually be urban or rural, is idealized by migrants due to the physical distance from that country experienced with migration. Even if the detachment between production and consumption is precisely one of the criticisms of European industrialized foods, the increase in distance from production to consumption of Guinean food with migration is compensated for by migrants in ways that I will explore below. Moreover, country and city, near and far, or familiar and strange are entangled in other ways in Guinean migrants’ notions of their foods. After lunch, Cadi and her aunt provided examples of such entanglements in their narratives. Highlighting the importance of having foreign entities support the quality of Guinean foodstuffs, for example, they ascribed special authority to those entities and expressed satisfaction with others’ recognition and appreciation of Guinean food. Cadi’s aunt explained: Our products have vitamins that have already been confirmed by groups of Italian doctors who work in Guinea, through Caritas.4 Caritas has even created a center in Guinea, where they teach about food practices, about what is more nutritious for children and also for adults. And they really recommend many of our products, like lalu [pounded baobab leaves], which is very rich in vitamins and very good for children. Kandja, badjiki, and djagatu are also very rich in vitamins, and djagatu, for example, is used against diabetes as well. It is proved.

To Guineans, foreign recognition of their food’s quality reinforces their belief in its health benefits. Likewise, bringing homeland food to the knowledge of others provides Guinean migrants with a sense of satisfaction. Guinean food vendors in Lisbon, for example, were often pleased to get curious local passersby to try their food. Funny faces and exchanged laughs were part of these daily encounters, in which Guinean sellers claimed to feel proud. When similar encounters occurred between Guineans and Cape Verdeans, conversations about the differences in food between the two countries would gain an enthusiastic tone of friendly competition, with the Guineans teasing the Cape Verdeans about their country’s dry and infertile land, where healthful food products could not be found.

138 • Food Between the Country and the City However, what is seen as natural and healthful Guinean food among migrants does not always originate in the fertile Guinean land, and the perceived connection between people and land can be negotiated in different ways when not all foods are available in the new country. Migrants then have to take on new strategies to minimize perceived threats.

Idealizing Meanings of Guinean Food: Land, Ethnic Relationships, and Adaptations The examples above have shown how new relationships that are generated with migration play a role in the idealization of Guinean food as more healthful and more desirable for Guineans. Likewise, family, ethnic, and religious relationships that link the people involved in production, distribution, and consumption of Guinean food contribute to this idealization. “Us” and “them” are, however, like country and city, not fixed categories, and adaptations have to be made, especially when the chain is extended across borders, distances increase, and relationships need to be reconfigured. Cadi’s old aunt provided good evidence of the link between food and relationships, highlighting, in this case, ethnic and religious belonging. Through her own life history, she explained such connections: It depends on the tribu [tribe]. Each tribu has its own dish. . . . My father is Cape Verdean, and my mother is a Christian from Bafatá [in Guinea-Bissau]. But I am fidju di Farim [a daughter of Farim, a town in Guinea-Bissau]. Our traditional food? . . . We, sons of Farim, what we like most is brindji di skilon [fish broth with rice]. It’s a Christian’s food.

The importance of the land in Guinea-Bissau can be translated in the notion of tchon, which might be related to the soil, to the national or regional society, or to ethnic relations. As elsewhere in Africa, it cannot be understood through ahistorical models, but rather must be understood within processes of change that have occurred throughout history. A long history of peaceful migrations and hostile invasions shaped the ethnic mosaic that is now Guinea-Bissau. Following these precolonial movements, different ethnic groups settled in different regions of the country, which resulted in the fact that sharing a common region of origin is frequently associated with having a similar ethnic background.5 Subsequent internal migration transformed Bissau into the primary location where the country’s ethnic diversity is encountered, and relationships of exchange between farmers, sellers, and clients in the food markets of the city are often based on a shared ethnic belonging. This not only reinforces the relationship of trust between client and seller, but it gives clients the idealized impression that the acquired produce comes from their land. Yet, this is not always the case, since the intermediary role of sellers might, even in Bissau, increase the distance between

Perceptions of the Country through the Migration of City-grown Crops • 139 farmer and client, as opposed to when the exchange is performed directly between the two. With migration, there is additional complexity in these relationships. Whereas Pepel and Mancanha women—the former originally from Bissau; the latter from coastal regions not far from the capital—constitute the majority of urban farmers around Bissau, they are not responsible for Guinean food distribution in Lisbon, which is, as seen above, mainly reserved to the Fula. What is more, the Pepel are not widely represented among Guinean migrants in Lisbon. Although the ethnic distribution of Guineans in Portugal is difficult to estimate precisely, the only survey, conducted in 1995, revealed that half of those arriving in the 1990s were Fula, Mandinga, Manjaco, or Mancanha (Machado 2002). These ethnic groups are also known to have the longest history of migration across borders, migrations that were, during colonial times, directed toward neighboring Senegal and Gambia. Yet, the close nature of the social ties that link producers, traders, and consumers— and inflects the meanings of country and city in Guinean foodways—extends to the transnational level. Urban fresh vegetables are the main foods that are sent to Lisbon, in terms of both quantity and the regularity with which they are sent. The Fula trader who, in Bissau, buys these food products in large quantities is usually a relative of the migrant food trader who receives them in Lisbon. Once the produce arrives in Lisbon, the relationships of exchange established are, as in Bissau, based on networks of trust that are often ethnic based. Boar, one of the few non-Fula sellers of Guinean food in Lisbon, narrated an episode that provides evidence of such relationships: When I came to Lisbon, I decided to open a shop of Guinean food. But then other people did the same, and because most Guineans here are Muslims [Fula], they are a little bit, . . . well, if they know there are other Muslims selling these things, they prefer to buy from those instead. So, we had to quit the shop.

The main crops consumed by the many Fula migrants in Lisbon do not originate in “Fula land.” Yet, in face of the increased physical distance, the fact that they are Guinean foods and are sold by Fula merchants enhances their importance for migrants. Other Guinean food products sold in Lisbon are more directly associated with Fula rural regions of origin, although, paradoxically, they originate even farther from that soil. Maize, millet, and sorghum, for example, are key crops and components of the diet in the eastern regions of Guinea-Bissau, where many Fula live. The exchange of maize between Fula merchants and customers in Lisbon contributes to providing Guinean Fula migrants with particular familiar tastes and sensations, giving them a sense of home that helps to bridge distances. During the maize season in Lisbon, Guineans can be seen roasting and sharing it in their spaces of socialization and exchange. Yet, that maize, in reality, does not originate in their homeland regions. Instead, it is bought by female Fula traders from Portuguese or

140 • Food Between the Country and the City Cape Verdean sellers on the outskirts of Lisbon. It is the fact that the maize reaches its final consumers from the hands of Fula sellers—women who are also responsible for roasting it, following techniques similar to those used in Guinea-Bissau— and is then shared within the community that endows the maize with “Guinean Fula” taste. Another interesting example of such negotiations is provided by Sali, a Fula restaurant owner in Lisbon who specializes in cooking and selling yams to other Guineans who make use of the space outside her restaurant, usually after five o’clock in the afternoon, when her work in the restaurant slows down. Sali buys the yams from a wholesale market on the outskirts of Lisbon, but the act of distributing and sharing them with other Guineans, who sit together while eating, compensates for this uncertainty in terms of the produce’s origin. For Sali, selling yams is, above all, an obvious strategy for accumulating income, but she also contributes to reinforcing community ties through this practice. Sauces, which can easily be adapted, also play a key role in endowing food with Guinean values. In Guinea-Bissau, rice is the main staple food (bianda). Since meat or fish is not always affordable, the ingredients accompanying the rice (mafe) are often sauces, prepared for example with chilies and lemon (kaldu branku), palm oil (kaldu di tcheben), or groundnuts (kaldu di mankara). In Lisbon, the importance of these sauces for endowing exogenous food with a Guinean flavor is noteworthy. As Rosa, a Guinean migrant in Lisbon, pointed out: “Even if I buy the meat . . . the chicken . . . here, I have to cook it in the Guinean style. I cook a Guinean sauce, with palm oil, for example. I don’t know . . . it has to be spicy.” The role of sauces is also crucial in Guinea-Bissau, since imported rice is often consumed there, because of its competitive low price and a decrease in domestic rice production following the increased cultivation of cashew trees.6 These are examples that illustrate the key role played by mechanisms of food preparation and food sharing in compensating for the rupture with the land of origin that inevitably comes with migration—but that can also occur within Guinea-Bissau. Similar practices have been observed by Marilyn Strathern among the Vanuatuans of Melanesia, who “turn European things to their own ends rather than seek to encompass European ends; in other words they Vanuatize things derived from the European world rather than Europeanize themselves” (Strathern 1988: 81). Such adaptation strategies help Guinean migrants to feel more connected to their country—whether Guinea-Bissau as a whole or their rural regional of origin—through the foodstuffs they consume.

Conclusions The travel of Guinean food to Lisbon has accompanied the migration of people from Guinea-Bissau to Portugal since that migration started to grow significantly in the

Perceptions of the Country through the Migration of City-grown Crops • 141 1980s. The deterioration of economic conditions that, along with a series of postindependence political conflicts, motivated international migration from Guinea-Bissau had long been felt by the majority of the Guinean population, in both rural and urban areas. Portugal’s neglect of Guinea-Bissau during colonial times and ill-designed agricultural development policies that continued with independence, as well as the negative impact on people’s economic well-being of liberalization and structural adjustment reforms, have all contributed to the way agriculture in Guinea-Bissau, as well as Guinean foods, are perceived by Guineans. Among some of the most important changes in these perceptions, young people’s negative views of agriculturalbased livelihoods and processes of “deagrarianization” and “depeasantization” in the country (Temudo and Abrantes 2013) go hand in hand with the association of endogenous production techniques in agriculture with preferred, more healthful foods. These historical processes have also influenced the way the country and the city, as well as urban and rural foods, are intimately related in Guinea-Bissau. The blurred boundaries that have belied these dichotomic constructs since colonial times are nowadays evident in some paradoxical attitudes, linked to other constructed oppositions. An example of these other constructs can be found in the opposition between industrialized and organic foods, which is related to views of modern and traditional production techniques. This is evident in the way Guinean foods are perceived by migrants as more healthful due to the absence of mechanization and processing that characterizes “unhealthy,” “modern” European foods, whereas urban farmers in Bissau, especially the young, aim not only at making use of mechanized techniques that they associate with a developed world, but also at actually experiencing that world, which is expressed in their own migratory aspirations. Guinean food is also perceived as more healthful and preferred due to the tchon (understood as land or soil) that is shared by people and food and to the proximity of producers, traders, and consumers, as opposed to larger-scale markets where consumers are alienated from production. Familiar and strange, like near and far, have been examined here as dichotomic constructs that are related to notions of country and city, which are all mutually constitutive components of larger processes. International migration, for example, generates changes in these perceptions and relationships. To migrants in Lisbon, the physical distance from their land of origin and the wider availability of undesired foods, associated with diseases and risks, reinforces their attribution of healthful qualities to Guinean food. On the other hand, that same distance makes Guineans romanticize their homeland food, as well as the idea of country. Country, to them, means more than what surrounds the city, since most Guinean food that arrives in Lisbon is actually of urban origin. It means their nation of origin and the rich Guinean land that gives life to people and food. It can, however, also mean their particular rural region of origin in Guinea-Bissau, as it does for the Fula migrants from the eastern regions of Guinea-Bissau, who reimagine their particular foods through mechanisms of adaptation of exogenous food preparation and food sharing in Lisbon. Such adaptations materialize yet another

142 • Food Between the Country and the City way in which apparent oppositions are brought closer together. Ultimately, this blurring of boundaries between apparent opposed binaries connects images of the country and the city, following the way they have historically been connected in Guinean urban and rural landscapes.

Acknowledgments This research was funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia of the Portuguese Ministry for Education and Science (SFRH/BD/47395/2008).

Section III Of the Nation and Its Food

–8– The Country, the Nation, and the Region in Representations of Portuguese Food and Cuisine José Manuel Sobral

Food and Cuisine in Contemporary Portugal: Between Cosmopolitanism and the Regional and Local Just as in many affluent countries, today’s culinary selection in Portugal is characterized by great pluralism. Although this is a generalization, culinary choices can be considered as being distributed between two poles. The first is dominated by cosmopolitanism. The opposite pole is represented by a territorialized regional and national cuisine. Between the poles, there is also hybridity and fusion between the supposedly Portuguese and the foreign. We are simplifying and talking about the culinary selection people find when eating out. Also, the culinary selection we are portraying is distributed in the territory in a very uneven way. The assertion of a Portuguese cuisine is part of a more general process that is already documented in places as distinct as Great Britain and Finland, which saw a growing demand for so-called traditional food at the end of the twentieth century (Warde 1997: 58–67). The same trend has occurred, among other places, in countries such as France (Poulain 2002) and Italy (Montanari 2010: 83). This is all part of a larger protest against fast food and criticism of the dominant agro-food industry around the world. One of its main sources is the counterculture movement (Bellasco 2007), which became influential in the late 1960s. In counter-cuisine, we find intertwined themes such as the avoidance of “chemicalized” food, an appreciation of craftsmanship and tradition, and an “organic motif” concerned with the impact of consumption on the planet and “with the integration of self, nature and community” (Bellasco 2007: 220). We cannot offer here more than a hint as to why counterculture is associated with the celebration of food and cuisine defined as traditional. If we are to understand this whole movement, we must bear in mind that it combines various dynamics linked to the effects of contemporary globalization epitomized by the universal spread of fast food. This is rejected, by invoking “authentic” culinary traditions—local, regional, and national. The Slow Food movement is the most notorious of these reactions

– 145 –

146 • Food Between the Country and the City across various continents. Originating from the Italian left and linked to the defense of popular cultural traditions, it appeared in the 1980s in response to what was seen as the threat of homogenization. It strived to defend the features of regional and local traditions in food—and its producers—and in cuisine. Other facets of the movement include the defense of sustainable, localized production, organic food, and biodiversity. It specifically defined itself as being against the whole lifestyle symbolized by fast food, advocating the “slow life” (in opposition to the “fast life”), a concept that is linked to extolling the enjoyment of food (Andrews 2008).1 Aware of the criticisms and market trends, at least some fast-food chains have chosen to respond by including local ingredients and dishes on their menus. In Portugal, for example, vegetable soups identified with traditional cooking and, more recently, the McBifana—a typical Portuguese sandwich with fried pork—and local varieties of apples and pears have appeared on the menus of the McDonald’s chain. These adaptations indicate another dimension of globalization linked to the proliferation of culinary diversity and pluralism; this is found both in the mix of culinary traditions and in the praise for local cuisine seen as an expression of the territory and culture, as well as in the canonization of the cuisine deemed traditional as heritage (James 1994: 39–56; Montanari 2010: 83; Poulain 2002: 19–34; Wilk 2006: 195–201). The Council of Europe recently published a work attuned to these culinary trends, celebrating the culinary diversity on the continent (Goldstein and Merkle 2005); each country contributed with a sample of its supposedly traditional national cuisine. The role played by food as a marker of national identity was, hence, officially enshrined. These dynamics have not been restricted to the sphere of cuisine, but have also included its raw materials, namely the ingredients used to make it and ensure its specificity. This was the kind of process that stimulated initiatives defending local produce—for example, those linked to the 1992 reform of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy and to the EU’s LEADER local development program (Araújo 2011). It also stimulated the EU’s creation of Protected Designation of Origin (PDO), Protected Geographical Indication (PGI), and Traditional Specialty Guaranteed (TSG) product designations. In 2008, Portugal was one of the European countries with the most PDO and TSG products, along with Italy, France, and Spain, among others (Fonte 2010: 155; De Soucey 2010: 439). The interest in regional and local cuisine implies an appreciation of the produce as well as the cuisine, bringing added economic and symbolic (and, hence, political) value to both. This is often linked to a more comprehensive appreciation of rural life, seen as a more authentic and community-based world than the city, which is frequently represented as having the opposite values. We do not think of this kind of discourse as absolutely new. We believe, instead, that there are strong affinities between defending today’s local and regional food and the apology for a Portuguese national cuisine in the late nineteenth century. In short, current discourses have their predecessors there. Moreover, linked to the defense of cuisine, we find a certain praise for the countryside.

The Country, the Nation, and the Region in Representations • 147

Food, the City, and the Country In his novel A Cidade e as Serras (The City and the Mountains), published in 1901, the Portuguese writer José Maria Eça de Queirós (1845–1900) draws a deep contrast between urban life in Paris and life in the Portuguese countryside. Jacinto, a wealthy Portuguese born in Paris, lives on the Champs Elysées and socializes with the French élite. Although he praises the triumphs of civilization—electricity, the phonograph, information, culture, and fine cuisine—he is bored to death with his life. Influenced by a friend who was visiting Paris, he makes the decision to travel with him by train to the north of Portugal, to visit his estates in the Douro region. After some adventures, including losing the huge amount of baggage that he had packed in an attempt to survive barbaric country living, Jacinto adapts to the place and abandons Paris and city life forever. If the city signified civilization—and Paris was the epitome of the city, the “capital of the nineteenth-century” (Benjamin 1939)—it was also a place of vice and hypocrisy. As Jacinto led a bachelor life, that would mean the end of his lineage. In the countryside, he marries and has children, sets down roots, and dedicates himself to life as a landowner. Irony plays an important role here, as in other novels by Eça de Queirós. The image of the countryside, mainly depicted in pastoral tones, also reveals the poverty of the rural proletariat that the reforming and paternalistic resolve of the landowner tries to mitigate. Notwithstanding this irony, a largely positive picture is painted of the country, which we quickly see through the beauty of the landscape and the closeness and solidarity of social relations. Eça de Queirós was the best-known Portuguese writer of his era; he was also a cosmopolitan diplomat who lived in Paris. Food—including French haute cuisine— plays a very important role in his works. However, here it acquires an exceptionally rich meaning, as he links it with dichotomous images of the city and the countryside. Parisian cuisine is portrayed as the height of sophistication, with luxurious products such as foie gras, lobster, and exotic foods, as well as vanguard recipes such as oranges in ether to brighten up the fruit’s “soul.” Only the best wines are served: bordeaux, burgundies, champagne. There are even various kinds of water. However, despite this diversity, the hero has no appetite. The opposite happens in the countryside. Although initially reluctant to indulge, he is quickly won over by dishes prepared by local cooks, as well as by the local wine quite unlike the refined ones he was used to drinking. The water he enjoys mostly comes from the local springs. The contrast between the city and the country is also the contrast between France (the foreign) and Portugal (the national). The cuisine that is ultimately praised is precisely that of the “vernacular delicacies of old Portugal” (Eça de Queirós 2009: 108). This kind of defense of Portuguese cuisine was visible even before Eça de Queirós’s novel. It appears, for example, in Júlio Dinis’s 1869 novel As Pupilas do Senhor Reitor (The Wards of the Rector), which provided one of the most influential depictions of Portuguese rural society as a harmonious community; it defended

148 • Food Between the Country and the City Portuguese cuisine—and the use of local produce—as opposed to the then-alreadyfashionable French cuisine. A writer from a later generation, José Valentim Fialho de Almeida (1857–1911), unrelentingly defended Portuguese cuisine to the point of declaring that culinary denationalization was a clear sign of “ethnic decadence” (Fialho de Almeida 1992). His words do not need to be taken literally to give sense to the discourse. Historically, the times of both Eça de Queirós and Fialho de Almeida saw the proliferation of nationalism and imperialism (Hayes 1963: 196–285), and Portugal was seen by the intellectual elite as being in decay. Meanwhile, it is interesting to note that in the fiction of both Eça de Queirós and Fialho de Almeida, the city is portrayed as an environment dominated by conventions, a lack of character, and vice. In his work The Country and the City, Raymond Williams refers to the importance of the images of the city and the country in literature, and he highlights their interrelationship. In his view, the country is associated with positive ideas of a natural way of life and community, as well as negative connotations of backwardness and ignorance; the city, conversely, is associated with positive ideas of learning and communication, as well as negative connotations of ambition and worldliness (Williams 1973: 3). He also notes that we can appreciate the full meaning of images of the country and the city only if we understand their association with underlying economic and social processes, such as those related to the development of capitalism. Otherwise, we would reduce them to recurrent “symbols or archetypes,” “giving them a primarily psychological and metaphysical status,” and would not be able to see how they were responses to historical and cultural changes. Also, we need to take into account both persistence and change in these ideas (Williams 1973: 289–91). This paper, which purports to offer an interpretation of the role of the images of the countryside in the making and dissemination of Portuguese cuisine, takes some of its inspiration from Williams’s ideas but also, in what concerns nationalism, from other contributions that, for example, point to the central role of the countryside in the artistic imagination of homeland that saw in it the location of the authentic nature of the nation. As Anthony D. Smith states, artists’ images “of the countryside and its inhabitants helped to popularize and give concrete sociological expression to the idea of a national community rooted in its own distinctive homeland” (Anthony D. Smith 2013: 106). The construction of a Portuguese cuisine is seen as part of a nationalist enterprise, important not only politically, but also in cultural terms. You can find the effects of nationalism in literature, in the arts, and in various fields of knowledge—the last decades of the nineteenth and the first ones of the twentieth century were a golden age for ethnography, mainly dedicated to the study of rural and peasant culture, the essence of a distinctive nationality (Leal 2000; Sobral 2012). The nationalist enterprise is also related to social and economic dynamics. The development of capitalism and the urbanization of Portuguese society, which began to gather pace in the nineteenth century and intensified in the early 1960s and which

The Country, the Nation, and the Region in Representations • 149 emptied the countryside, are a background to this process of cultural (and political) nationalization. I aim to show how, in general terms, the countryside has been conceived for a long time as a place where authentic Portuguese cuisine can be found—and how this remains true today. Although the urban elite plays a major role in the process— and the city clearly contributes to the making of Portuguese cuisine—it is the country that is most closely tied to this cuisine. Besides continuity in the images of the country, there is also change; hence, there is no lineal continuity between the past and the present. Attention will be drawn to some of the main actors and agents involved, without overlooking the economic, social, political, and cultural processes underlying the production and consumption of Portuguese cuisine.

The Construction of a National (and Regional) Cuisine in Portugal At the time of A Cidade e as Serras, French haute cuisine—the international cuisine of grand hotels and restaurants (Mennell 1996: 215)—was dominant in Portugal, as in other countries around the world. To be more precise, it was the cuisine favored by the upper classes (Ferguson 2004), constituting a powerful means of social distinction (Bourdieu 1979). It was certainly what these classes consumed on more formal occasions, although on others they would have eaten more common food (Sobral 2008). At this same time, however, we can also detect a great change in the attitudes toward food in Portugal in cookbooks. Whereas books published during the nineteenth century revealed the strong influence of international cuisine (and of French cuisine in particular), Portuguese dishes began to gain ground in the early twentieth century. In a 1905 new edition of what is perhaps the most influential cookbook of the second half of the nineteenth century—O Cozinheiro dos Cozinheiros (The Cooks’ Cook) by Paulo Plantier, an example of the hegemony of international haute cuisine—we find, in contrast to what came before, not only Portuguese dishes, but also a reference to “Portuguese culinary traditions” (Plantier 1905). In another contemporary but muchless-famous book (Carneiro 1901), we find popular ingredients such as sardines and cod, as well as recipes belonging to vernacular Portuguese cuisine. An explicit claim of the connection between cuisine and national identity appears in a book published anonymously in 1902 and entitled Cozinha Portuguesa ou Arte Culinária Nacional (Portuguese Cuisine or the National Culinary Art). In it, Portuguese cuisine is defined as “that of our grandparents”—“simple, substantial and good”—and it is considered a sign of patriotism to defend it (Anonymous 1902). Cookbooks were to play a fundamental role in the creation of a Portuguese cuisine. There were certainly vernacular foods in Portugal, some of them documented since the Middle Ages (Arnaut 2000). They were common to or linked to other cuisines, especially (though not exclusively) Iberian ones. Benedict Anderson

150 • Food Between the Country and the City pointed to the role of books and print capitalism in the building of nations he called “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983). Cookbooks perform nationalization in what concerns food and cuisine through selection, establishing boundaries and identifying certain dishes and recipes as national; hence, they are a powerful instrument for the reification of national cuisines. For Sidney Mintz, national cuisines are constructions, a “holistic artifice” based on food found within the scope of a political system; he claims that: “there can be regional cuisines, but not national cuisines.” According to Mintz, cuisine, “more exactly defined, has to do with the ongoing foodways of a region, within which active discourse about food sustains both common understandings and reliable production of the foods in question” (Mintz 1996: 104). While agreeing with his views on national cuisines—they are the product of nation-states, drawing boundaries that separate them from others and making a whole of what is internally differentiated— we do not share his concept of regional cuisines, as he underplays the role of agents and policies in constructing them. Our assertion here is that regional cuisine is not a direct reflection of local practices; although based on these, it is constructed by restaurants, authorities, writers, compilers of cookbooks and recipes, and the like. They tend to ignore or downplay the realities of daily home cooking, and they do not refer to the foods of the poor in times of scarcity. There is plenty of bibliographical evidence for hunger and undernourishment both in the country and in the main cities during the period in question. Bread, potatoes, and vegetables, along with some sardines, cod, and bacon, were the main staples of the poor; the price of bread was an object of open political dispute and social unrest in the first decades of the twentieth century.2 Also, regional cookbooks have an overabundance of dishes for festive occasions, food eaten on special days such as Christmas or Easter, family rites of passage such as baptisms and weddings, and special events like the slaughter of the pig (Mennell 1996: 217–20). We must stress the purpose of using cookbooks as a source. As Ken Albala recently stated, “cookbooks are rarely if ever accurate descriptions of what people actually ate at any given time and place” (Albala 2012: 229). However, their interest lies in the fact that they reveal food ideologies, by which the same author meant “a way of thinking about the world that is part of a larger esthetic, political, or social mindset” (Albala 2012: 231). The authors and readers of these first cookbooks should be viewed as actors in what Priscilla P. Ferguson, following Pierre Bourdieu, aptly named the “gastronomic field” (Ferguson 2004: 84–109). These people were members of the upper-middle and upper classes, in general with high levels of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1979: 128–38). Not only would they have the economic capacity to buy the products (Guy 2012: 194) and sample the foods that allowed them to discriminate, but they would also claim to define legitimate taste. Furthermore, such writers and gourmets lived in the “big city,” where the markets offered

The Country, the Nation, and the Region in Representations • 151 a much wider range and variety of products than those in rural areas, where selfsufficiency predominated (Mennell 1996: 73). We now turn to two of these books, which were among the most influential in the early twentieth century. In 1904, Carlos Bento da Maia published his important Tratado Completo de Cozinha e de Copa (Complete Treatise of Cuisine and Pantry). Bento da Maia is the pseudonym of a Lisbon army officer and industrialist. His book is full of advice on how to manage the kitchen and prepare food, and it boasts a large collection of recipes. It clearly targeted a middle-class audience—and women—who could not obtain the more inaccessible products of cosmopolitan cuisine and had limited budgets. The book was not a compendium of Portuguese cuisine; nor did it reveal explicit nationalist concerns. What makes it an innovative work is the fact that some recipes are identified with localities and regions; they accompany the majority with no identification and others with a national identification, such as Portuguese or French. António de Oliveira Bello’s work Culinária Portuguesa (Portuguese Cookery) was published some decades later, in 1936. Bello was a member of the upper bourgeoisie, one of the main industrialists of his time, and he was familiar with French haute cuisine and with the world of the elite who traveled abroad. His book marked a significant change in attitudes toward Portuguese cuisine, which he commended. First, his was the first book seeking to codify its essential features; second, it identified their place of origin in a systematic way. Together with dishes for which no origin is given—they are implicitly defined as Portuguese— there are others whose origin (region or place) is specified. For the first time, we also find recipes from the colonial empire being defined as Portuguese. Portuguese cuisine is thus defined as embracing the empire, as well as the various regions of Portugal. Moreover, at the same time, the Portuguese Gastronomy Society, over which Bello presided, aimed to defend “national cuisine and top quality Portuguese food produce” and “raise the level of the local cuisine in each region” (Bello 1936: 8–9; emphasis added). Bello identified himself with the Estado Novo program of dictator António de Oliveira Salazar’s authoritarian, nationalist, and antidemocratic regime, inspired by fascism and Catholic conservatism. The Estado Novo was in place between 1933 and 1974; besides celebrating the empire, it promoted the image of an essentially rural Portugal. Agriculture, though in relative decline, was extolled, as was the peasant world from which its leader, Salazar, had emerged. The rural population was stereotypically praised for its supposed frugality—a transformation of necessity into virtue—and absence of luxuries, its attachment to land and place, and its imputed traditionalism and conservatism demonstrated by an at-least-apparent support of the hierarchies represented by landownership, Catholicism, and the patriarchal family. In fact, the regime constructed this image of the countryside in opposition to the “big

152 • Food Between the Country and the City city,” mainly Lisbon. The city, and its industrialized outskirts that had grown in the first decades of the century, had become the focus of support of republicanism, trade unionism, socialism, and anarchism. Hence, the city conjured up ideas of radicalism, class struggle, and dissent—all anathema to Catholic conservatives. It was this image of the rural world that the nationalism of the Estado Novo, like other nationalisms, promoted (Anthony D. Smith 2013: 78–107; Roshwald 2006: 68–73). This was what lay behind some of the importance given to ethnography and folklore at the time: these dealt with the “popular,” while overlooking the harsh and miserable condition of rural people. Moreover, it was a cuisine with roots in the regions of an essentially rural country that was served in the network of governmentrun hotels (Pousadas de Portugal, or Inns of Portugal), designed to promote tourism and dispersed throughout the country (Melo 2001: 250–58).

The Portuguese Situation from a Comparative Perspective These processes of constructing a national and regional cuisine are not specifically Portuguese. On the contrary, what was happening in Portugal echoed what was happening elsewhere, such as in England (Mennell 1996: 221) and Italy. In the latter, the first codification of a national cuisine was part of the effort to construct the postRisorgimento nation, and it was accompanied by praise for diversity and regionalism in the “popular-national rhetoric” of fascism, leading to the creation of an Italian gastronomic-cultural charter (Montanari 2010: 78–79). It is entirely plausible that people in Portugal knew what was happening in Italy, given the well-known influence of the policies of Italian fascism on the Portuguese Estado Novo. However, in light of the Portuguese elite’s old relationship with France, it is here we should turn our attention to first. In France, wine and food, which revealed the rich regional diversity of the French nation, had been extolled, particularly since the nineteenth century (Guy 2002: 34–45; Csergo 1996). This has been explained by a very complex set of factors, including, for example, the development of communications and, with them, the automobile and tourism, meaning that places became more accessible. Along with this, we find the celebration of a national territory formed by multiple and diverse terroirs; this was the key to the excellence and specificity of the products, starting with the wine for which the French designation of origin system was enshrined in the nineteenth century (Guy 2001; 2002). None of this happened by chance. According to Stephen Mennell, unlike in England, where the rural population quickly became part of the rural and industrial proletariat, in France the peasantry, in its various levels, continued to be of great economic and political importance, while urban development was much slower. This difference is reflected in the greater continuity of rural culinary traditions in France (Mennell 1996: 215–29). It is also a key factor because of the growing global competition in the food trade at the time (Mintz 2008: 23). The connection between

The Country, the Nation, and the Region in Representations • 153 food, wine, and territories, through designations of origin, not only provided French products with internal niches in the market, but it also protected them from international competition as they claimed their own unique characters. The very first step in the certification process, as we know it today, took place at a conference in Madrid in 1890–1891 (Guy 2012). As Kolleen M. Guy states: “The emerging body of law on collective trademarks and protection of food appellations, in this way, was an expression to a set of cultural beliefs about the imaginary, but for that very reason all the more important historic and geographic relationship between the nation and food” (Guy 2012: 193). Note that this takes place in a setting marked by economic protectionism and an acute nationalist rivalry, expressed by the fight for geopolitical hegemony and the building of colonial empires (Hayes 1963: 216-41). Hence, the development of “national culinary consciousness” in France “not only accepted but actively promoted regional difference on the assumption that all were subsumed in the greater whole” (Ferguson 2004: 129). The new appreciation for regional cooking in Portugal—as a constitutive part of the national one—was also influenced by what was happening there. The direct impact of the French contribution is also demonstrated by Bello himself, who was perfectly aware of the trends in France. The investment in regional cuisine in France was also tied to the development of railway and road networks, as well as the circulation of cars and tourism that was promoted by the famous Michelin Guide beginning in 1900 (Rauch 2008: 22). Bello not only belonged to the car-owner class in Portugal, but he was also an important figure in the development of tourism, as a member of the Sociedade de Propaganda de Portugal (Portuguese Propaganda Society), founded in 1906 and also known as the Touring Club of Portugal (Matos et al. 2009; Cunha 2010). Indeed, the Touring Club of France had dominated the promotion of French regional cuisine—as had the Touring Club of Italy in that country (Montanari 2010: 79). In France, the cuisineappreciation movement was accompanied by a deep nostalgia for the rural world— a world from whose images farm workers had been excluded (Rauch 2008: 32). In Portugal, as in France, it was ultimately members of the urban elite who first defined regional food, using the countryside and the rural world as a reference. (Rauch 2008: 32).

Contemporary National, Regional, and Local Celebrations Let us now return to the contemporary Portuguese scene, where, as said before, promoting Portuguese cuisine has a prominent place; the references are mostly to rural areas—coastal places are in the minority—with praise for their diversity.3 Among the many forms this promotion takes, of particular note are two major national shows: the Festival Nacional de Gastronomia (National Gastronomy Festival) and the Feira Nacional da Agricultura (National Agricultural Fair).4 Both take place in Santarém,

154 • Food Between the Country and the City a small town in the center of Portugal, which is the hub of Portugal’s most important agricultural region, the Ribatejo (Gaspar 1993: 125). Both events celebrate food, albeit in different ways. The festival, with its restaurants and taverns, concentrates on cuisine, with a small market where pork sausages, hams, cheeses, regional sweets, olive oil, and a few drinks are sold. The fair’s protagonists are food producers and retailers and government agencies involved in agriculture, along with some cattle ranchers and makers of agricultural machinery. What the two events have in common is that they both extol a national image emphasizing regional diversity. Identity marks are visible not only on the food products, but also on the actual décor, which feature photographs evoking spaces of provenance and artifacts— such as agricultural implements or costumes—that everyone identifies with specific places. These are items referenced in ethnography over the past century. Music and dance groups identified with regions and villages also play a part. An examination of the actors, discourses, and images of these events is enlightening. At the 2012 National Agricultural Fair, for example, which featured the theme “the pleasure of tasting” in one of its main pavilions, in addition to people who produce and sell food and large retail chains, official agencies—city councils, the Ministry of Agriculture, European Union programs related to regional development and agriculture (such as LEADER and ProDeR), farmers’ associations, and companies involved in rural tourism were also present.5 Thus, we can see concerted action by several economic and political actors with vested interests in the production and retailing of food, from supranational actors to national and local ones. In any case, the appeal of rurality and tradition in both events refers to the past—a past that was the subject of ethnographic research in the nineteenth century and was “objectified” (Handler 1988) as part of the official image of the countryside in the twentieth century under the Estado Novo. The exhibitions of farm work at the 2012 fair showed the Ribatejo region’s iconic tasks—such as the herding of bulls used in bullfighting, which became a national image of the countryside in Portugal in the Salazar era. Not only is bullfighting popular here, but this was the region of the campino, a herdsman on horseback, whose image was popularized as one of national masculinity during the Estado Novo. Also at the 2012 fair, there were competitions for horse-drawn vehicles— although it has been decades since they disappeared from the countryside—handicraft displays, and folk dancing by groups in traditional dress; this was in line with the Estado Novo concept of “popular.” It should be emphasized, however, that the types of events and displays at the 2012 fair were not strictly in line with what was going at these fairs until recently. For example, although heritage has been asserted in the past, nothing compares to the “heritage crusade” (Lowenthal 1998) going on nowadays, with the support of global agencies such as UNESCO; in addition, rural tourism is something new. Both were conceived by European agencies and the Portuguese government as weapons against desertification and abandonment of the countryside.

The Country, the Nation, and the Region in Representations • 155 Other more recent issues, such as environmental concerns, sustainability, and the use of renewable energy, were thus connected with archaic representations of the countryside. Note that a poster for one rural development association supported by the European Union’s LEADER program advertised its work under four headings— rurality/history/culture/nature—which seemed to sum up both the old and the new themes that were present.6 The past recalled combined references to both the world of landowners (riding their horses) and that of workers (singing, dancing, and making handicraft items). There were popular events that bridged class divisions, such as bullfighting and fado concerts—fado being originally a type of urban popular song, which was enshrined as a symbol of Portuguese national identity during the Estado Novo. However, this is a sanitized view, of course, which reminds us of the pastoral representations of the countryside deconstructed by Raymond Williams. Exploitation and poverty that bred social unrest and came to the surface with land occupations in southern Portugal after the democratic revolution of 1974 are excluded from the picture. The written discourse and images both explicitly emphasized products’ authenticity and their roots in the local landscape. In 2012, a few well-known proponents of standardized food and the industrial production chain staked their claim to a link with Portuguese production. The McDonald’s stand advertised the company’s link to rural Portugal, identifying the producers—photographed in a rural setting—who supplied McDonald’s restaurants. Two major Portuguese supermarket chains—Pingo Doce and Continente—highlighted their connection with national production. In their marketing and advertising, all these corporations are playing to nationalist rhetoric, which apparently resonates with consumers. As in other places, McDonald’s went through a process of “localization” or “indigenization” in Portugal (Tierney and Ohnuki-Tierney 2012). However, the fair itself showed that the promotion of the regional and the local is an economic strategy that goes beyond the nation-state. Indeed, the government is on site and supports the fair, but the huge stand of the LEADER program in a prominent place in the main pavilion serves as an example of the supra-local, European character that governs these regional and national representations.

The Testimony of More Recent Cookbooks These representations of cooking and food are echoed in more recent cookbooks. We will address only two of the most important, which are dedicated exclusively to food represented as Portuguese. Originally published in 1981, Cozinha Tradicional Portuguesa (Traditional Portuguese Cooking) is undoubtedly one of the most influential recent cookbooks. Written by the most popular Portuguese-cooking author and the first host of TV cooking shows, Maria de Lurdes Modesto, it has been reprinted many times. Regional and local recipes considered traditional are presented in the

156 • Food Between the Country and the City context of the actual regions where they were collected. Furthermore, the author claims she is committed to fighting “for the revival of the Portuguese culinary heritage to counter a certain monotonous international cuisine that threatens to invade our homes.” In short, the intention was for readers to see the book as a “gastronomic image of the old nation that we are.” Two criteria governed the choice of dishes: “representativeness” and “authenticity” (Modesto 1999: 5–6). Later, in 1999, Modesto and two coauthors published Festas e Comeres do Povo Português (Feasts and Foods of the Portuguese People). Most of the recipes collected in this work come from the countryside—including small regional capitals—which had been losing population for decades. However, what makes this book different is that its spatial references are enhanced by the connection between food and the festive calendar, marked by Christian celebrations (such as Christmas and Easter) or secular festivities (such as Carnival or the slaughter of the pig). This vision is based on Portuguese ethnography, a discipline in which rural life has been the main subject of study. Rich, festive food is overrepresented. Therefore, these and other books should in no way be expected to provide a realistic portrayal of what was eaten in Portugal in a rural past. Nevertheless, they are important as ideal representations of the cuisine. It is worth mentioning here that recent political change in Portugal seems to be somehow reflected in matters of food and cuisine. In 1974, a dictatorship was replaced by a democratic government, bringing a rhetorical emphasis on people’s sovereignty and the celebration of popular culture, in Portugal identified with rural folk (Sobral 2007). We believe that the subsequent proliferation and success of cookbooks such as Modesto’s is tied to this ideological and cultural process; this proliferation includes an increasing number of books on Portuguese regions. However, we must be aware that this is part of a rediscovery of the rural, the traditional, the vernacular, and the local, which, as we have already noted, is in no way specific to Portugal. This (re)discovery of food originating from the countryside also took place in Portugal in a context of radical change in both the countryside and agriculture. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Portugal was a rural country, and agriculture was the largest sector of the Portuguese economy; Portugal was still essentially a rural country in the 1950s, although agriculture’s importance to the economy and employment was in sharp decline (Rolo 2000). The workings of capitalism, both internally and internationally, underpin the dramatic changes in the relationship between the rural and the urban. In this respect, the greatest transformation stemmed from a large-scale migration, intensifying from the start of the 1960s, from the Portuguese countryside to the prosperous core of the European Union or to metropolitan areas of Portugal’s main cities, Lisbon and Porto (Ferrão 2000). Hence, rural revivalism coincided with a crucial change, which was an emptying of the countryside. Even so, although the consumers of the cuisine—and the produce—of Portugal’s rural regions are mainly city dwellers, they retain strong ties with the countryside

The Country, the Nation, and the Region in Representations • 157 they recently left behind and with which they still have some kind of link: a house, some property, family networks, friends, or memories.

The Appeal of the Regional and the Rural in a Context of Change There is continuity and novelty in the links between past and present attitudes toward food and cuisine. The role placed on food and cooking as part of an effort to promote the revitalization of the countryside is a novelty, as are concerns with the environment. Among the continuities between past and present, we can discern the localization of products and culinary practices, clearly linked to current certification processes or linked to tourism, as we found earlier. Even so, these are trends of a magnitude previously unknown. The localization of products, certification, and agro-tourism—which did not exist before the 1980s, tourism in the rural space being limited to the few often-luxurious government-run inns—are now widespread. The very defense of heritage, based on valuing cultural elements already appreciated in the past, has now increased and is sanctioned by the work of transnational agencies such as the European Union (De Soucey 2010) and UNESCO; at the agricultural fair, an application was unveiled for preserving a local fishing community as “national UNESCO heritage.” We fully agree with Richard Wilk, for whom the emphasis on culture and the celebration of differences are now a part of contemporary globalization: “Culture has become a key commodity in the world economy, and a basic tool of government” (Wilk 2006: 198). The use of food and cuisine as markers of national and regional identities is one of the main links between past and present. As we have seen, the national-cuisine movement began as a reaction against international haute cuisine and established itself in the 1930s. The movement continues even today. Nationalism remains present in both cuisine and the identity of products. As proof of this, take the example of a resolution adopted by the Portuguese government’s Council of Ministers in 2000, which defined Portuguese traditional cookery as a part of the “Portuguese cultural heritage.”7 The same government resolution underscored Portuguese traditional cuisine or cookery, defining it as “Portuguese traditional recipes” using foodstuff produced in Portugal. National authenticity is also asserted in the marketing of products. At the 2012 agricultural fair, for example, a variety of rice grown in Portugal was advertised as “genuine Portuguese rice”—the only “certified” rice in Europe because of its quality and “food safety.” Hence, claims of genuineness—or authenticity—accompany the selection of foodstuffs and dishes. Several studies have highlighted the connection between claims to authenticity tied to cuisine and food consumption (Lindholm 2008; Truninger and Sobral 2011). A recent study on the sociology of food consumption distinguished various aspects of authenticity, such as “geographic specificity,” “simplicity,” “history

158 • Food Between the Country and the City and tradition,” and “ethnic connection” (Johnston and Baumann 2010). All these are present in one way or another in the materials we gathered here celebrating Portuguese cuisine and produce, from the writings of Eça de Queirós, Júlio Dinis, or Fialho de Almeida and the content of cookbooks to government policy and the food festivals and agricultural fairs we just mentioned. However, as previously stated, it is city people who formulate these discourses and representations—and the public policies that support them. Regional food is the product of an invention or re-creation of tradition because, as it has been argued, it never existed in the forms in which it is defined today. Moreover, cooking practices in the past were never homogeneous, but included those of distinct classes and lifestyles. This invention or re-creation of tradition, supported by political power, operates through a selective codification that transforms culinary practices transmitted by observation, practice, and word of mouth into a “frozen” corpus of written recipes; this corpus can then be reproduced, which helps objectify the systematization. Although this process praises the countryside as a place with a more authentic and genuine cuisine, and as a repository of disappearing traditions, it is the city that drives the process, as this is where we find the culinary intellectuals and journalists who promote it, as well as the political institutions who support the appreciation of regional food and culinary heritage. Many of the restaurants that offer regional cuisine and many of its consumers are found in the city. Furthermore, while the most influential agents in the re-creation of regional cuisines are in large cities, such as the Portuguese capital of Lisbon, the role played by those in the smaller towns and regional or local centers, as well as the efforts of local authorities, should not be forgotten. In recent decades, these more-local agents have promoted events designed to market and sell produce and prepared foods, uniting the claim to identity with initiatives for revitalizing local economic activity. The local authorities in Alpalhão—a village in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal—organized a gastronomic festival in March 2013. There were some three hundred people there who, for five euros each, could eat a dish called arroz de cachola—rice with pig’s blood and offal—and drink a glass of wine. This was popular, inexpensive food and wine. National-government agencies and major retailers were absent, and attendees were mostly small farmers, rural and industrial workers, and retired people. Nowadays, this type of event is being replicated everywhere: national initiatives are echoed in local ones. As already pointed out, Raymond Williams noted that the city, the country, and their images are interrelated. It is from this perspective that we should analyze what is happening to food and cuisine. Simply put, why is the promotion and consumption of local and regional national cuisine represented as coming essentially from rural roots? There are multiple reasons for this, in no way specific to Portugal. The consumption and supply of the products involved invoke specificities of taste and pleasure—local roots attached to the place of production and the terroir

The Country, the Nation, and the Region in Representations • 159 (Aurier et al. 2005; Schnell 2013)—as well as health, safety (Menasche 2010), sustainability, and nationality. A recent book by two Portuguese nutritionists and academics, with the evocative title of 50 Super Alimentos Portugueses (50 Portuguese Super Foods), maintains that people can benefit their health by “consuming what is ours” (Teixeira and Carvalho 2012). We must not forget that cooking and food laden with such symbolic value thus acquires added economic value. Underlying these representations, there is a global reaction to making culinary styles standardized and uniform, associated by many with fast food. Even so, as we saw at the outset, fast food is just a symptom of a more global phenomenon: the organization of the modern world and its pace, already described as the “McDonaldization” of society (Ritzer 2000). The reaction to globalization takes the form of the protection of diversity, the search for roots even if they are unknown or mythical, and the revivalism of local and national cuisines (Flandrin 1996: 722). Homogenizing trends, the product of globalism, breed gastronationalism (De Soucey 2010: 433; Montanari 2009: 208–9; Alison K. Smith 2012: 445). Fast food triggered the revival of the “local” or “traditional,” a revival that “played the local/ authentic against the global/industrial” (Penfold 2012: 294). Therefore, instead of seeing globalization—or the spread of global capitalism—as something separate from localization, we should view the two, as underscored by Wilk (2006: 195), as two faces of the same historical phenomenon. In this process, the countryside—and agriculture—are invoked as referring to a simpler life, one that is more real, one that has a greater sense of community and is closer to nature compared to city life. Why is it that people value food advertised and perceived as traditional and authentic (that is, what they believe to be the national and regional food we have described)? We do not claim to fully explain the processes involved in the consumption of such food—and therefore the representations linked to their marketing and sale. What follows is simply an attempt to give some final possible explanations. One explanation lies simply in culinary pleasures linked to sensory memory (Sutton 2005), part of social recall, an emotive memory (Lupton 2005) evoking the past and its social relations through nostalgia (Swislocki 2009). Note that Portuguese food in general and, for many, regional food linked to the rural world represent the food with which most of the Portuguese population was socialized. Many who live in large cities came from the countryside. Moreover, local people can regain a renewed sense of esteem, and of commonality, from being identified with products and food seen as cultural items. Cuisine as culture sells well nowadays. There are symbolic benefits, and some economic profit, to be gained from food sales or culinary tourism entailing not only gourmets or high-paying customers, but also local consumers, as in Alpalhão (Long 2012: 401–402). The attachment to food considered traditional has been seen precisely as a response to changes in lifestyles brought on by modernity. This food’s appeal presumably

160 • Food Between the Country and the City relates to a “widespread feeling of insecurity or uncertainty induced by declining normative regulation or social belonging” (Warde 1997: 64). The attachment to traditional food provides a sense of belonging to a community (De Soucey 2010: 449), whether local, regional, or national, “that most potent of modern secular religions” (Lindholm 2008: 67). Furthermore, attachments to the “homeland” merge with the image of the countryside, at the same time a symbol of the imagined community and of better food, as opposed to the city.

Acknowledgments This chapter is based on research funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia of the Portuguese Ministry for Education and Science (PTDC/CS-ANT/ 115978/2009).

–9– Hazz al-Quhuf: An Urban Satire on Peasant Life and Food from Seventeenth-century Egypt Sami Zubaida

Conceptions and representations of the countryside and its peasant inhabitants are predominantly urban creations. They are products of literate observers and ideologues, litterateurs, politicians, economists, and social theorists, as well as pictorial representations in high art. The rural world’s own self-representations, such as folklore, songs, and pictures, themselves become objects of study and classification by urban savants. Rural life as an issue of policy and reform, as well as concern for the conditions of peasant life, are features of political and ideational modernity, as are conceptions of society and politics as objects of study, with regularities, patterns, and fluctuations that follow principles and laws. Premodern attitudes assumed social arrangements and differentiations to be given and immutable. In politics, you could envisage or urge the change of a ruler or prince, but with little idea of a system that is subject to evolution or revolution.1 As such, the condition of the rural world and its inhabitants would be seen as given and immutable, and the hardships and catastrophes of that life seen as part of God-given nature and fate. The work to be discussed in this paper is an example of such an outlook. The debased condition of peasants, including their food, is wittily ridiculed by an urban scholar, ostensibly commenting on an ode supposedly uttered by a poor peasant, lamenting the hardships and misfortunes of his life and fantasizing about the foods that would give him solace and gratify his perpetual hunger. Highlighting the supposed stupidity and crudeness of the peasant is an example of a more general phenomenon of the superior classes— their contempt and ridicule of their inferiors. We see this in Great Britain, with the old stereotypes of the working classes and particularly of the Irish. We also see it in the American supremacist stereotyping of blacks, and in the general characterization by colonial powers of native peoples as naive. In Egypt, the term fellah, peasant, continues to be used, to the present day, to indicate inferiority and incompetence, though, of course, it is not politically correct. The work to be discussed here is Yusuf Al-Shirbini’s Hazz al-Quhuf.2 Little is known about Al-Shirbini. He lived and worked in the middle and later decades of the

– 161 –

162 • Food Between the Country and the City seventeenth century in Dimyat (Damietta), one of the main cities of the Egypt’s Nile Delta (Introduction, i–x). He lived in Cairo for some years, where he studied at the school/mosque of al-Azhar. His main claim on the historical record is the work under discussion. He was a minor ’alim (religious scholar), an occasional preacher, and a onetime weaver. Hazz al-Quhuf was probably written in the 1680s. The book is in the genre of adab (belles lettres), the product of gatherings of local scholars and literati who exchanged and discussed texts and commentaries in religion, law, and literature. Learned commentaries, drawing on diverse sources and anecdotes, were part of this genre of writing. Al-Shirbini claimed the rural poetry in his work was related to him: he quotes the ode line by line, and on each line he writes lengthy disquisitions, tracing the meaning and etymology of words, digressing into anecdotes, essays, and verses. The substance of the verses is primarily about food and drink items, wherein lies the interest of the work for our present pursuit. Before proceeding to a consideration of this work, I should highlight its contrast with the varieties of modern attitudes and representations of rural life. One dominant theme in modern discourses, starting in eighteenth-century Europe and intensifying in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is that of policy and reform, based on economic and social theorizing on the place of agricultural production and the potential for its augmentation and improvement. One early approach was the work of the eighteenth-century French theorists called the Physiocrats, who considered agriculture to be the principal source of wealth and celebrated rural life as natural and noble. Classical political economy, inaugurated in the work of Adam Smith, further theorized the place of agriculture and peasant labor in the economy, also with implications for policy and reform. Karl Marx, in the following century, followed in this tradition, with a focus on revolutionary transformations that would come from the urban proletariat and save the (passive) peasants from their dire conditions. Marx, in many ways, seemed to share a premodern conception of the peasant as a passive victim, resistant to change and revolution. He spoke of “rural idiocy” and regarded peasants as a class of isolated households, lacking consciousness of their common interests: like potatoes in a sack! Marx’s contemptuous characterization echoes premodern attitudes, but with the prospect of rescue through a revolution that comes from elsewhere. There is also the romantic theme of celebrating nature and the pastoral, and the peasant as part of this noble and elemental simplicity. Such themes were common to social theorists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Physiocrats, as well as to many literary works. Peasant food was also celebrated for its simplicity and naturalness. This romanticism also became evident in literature and art of the Arab world and the Middle East in their modern renaissance, beginning in the late nineteenth century. It is vividly illustrated by a now-classic modern song by Muhammad Abdul-Wahhab, the doyen of early-twentieth-century Egyptian music, entitled “Mahlaha ’Isht al-Fallah” (How Beautiful Is the Life of the Peasant). Nationalists and the movement for women’s liberation also romanticized peasants as the ideal and typical Egyptians, offspring of the soil and the country (ibn al-balad). Peasant

Hazz al-Quhuf • 163 women were naturally liberated, sharing work and life with the men. Zaynab by Muhammad Husayn Haykal, published in 1913, is reckoned to be the first Egyptian novel; the central character is a peasant girl, and the work is a romantic narrative of her life and loves. It was made into a film in 1925 (perhaps also the first full-length Egyptian film). Haykal was a French-educated lawyer, and he wrote the novel while in Paris. This was the first of many literary works, by urban literati, giving various portrayals of rural life, mostly sympathetic, often romantic. These features of modernity are in stark contrast to the portrayals and sentiments expressed in the premodern satire under discussion.

The Ode and the Commentary Let us first set the scene for the conditions of rural life in seventeenth-century Ottoman Egypt. Peasants cultivated smallholdings, to which they were legally tied, like serfs. Formally, the land belonged to the state and the peasant paid a tax/rent related to the volume or value of the harvest. But the state contracted the collection to a multazim, a tax farmer.3 Often these tax farmers assumed the position of a landlord, and their role was sometimes hereditary. They had broad powers related to tax/rent collection, including the power to inflict punishments for perceived infringements and underpayments. The periodic visits for tax collection of the multazim’s staff and soldiers were severe ordeals for villages, with much coercion and humiliation. The inhabitants of the village were obliged to provide food and board for the collectors and their horses, a heavy obligation that fell upon each household in turn. In addition, the local authorities imposed corvée labor obligations for public works and repairs. Many lines in Abu Shaduf’s ode elaborate on these hardships and the protagonist’s suffering, anxious anticipation, and occasional attempts at evasion of some of these exacting requirements. Al-Shirbini, in his commentaries, remarks on the severity and misery of the peasant’s life, but without much sympathy. He considered these hardships as a fact of nature, decreed and unchanging. He repeats his praise and thanks to God who had not created him a peasant. This is reminiscent of utterings in which men thank the Lord for not having created them women. Typically, the peasant’s dwelling was a mud hut, with a single space shared with animals. At the center would be a mud oven with a flat top, like a table, and a side opening for fuel, typically dung-and-straw cakes, and for earthenware pots to be placed inside. In the colder months, the family members would make their beds over the flat surface of the oven, which would have retained some of the warmth from the cooking fire. Al-Shirbini divides the population of Egypt into the following categories (Introduction, xxxix–xliii). The inhabitants of the cities, especially Cairo, are most genteel and refined, and they have excellent food. Within this group, he privileged the families of Turkish descent as a kind of aristocracy of taste. The rural population is

164 • Food Between the Country and the City divided into inhabitants of the larger villages directly bordering the Nile, who are accorded some respect in terms of lifestyle and taste. The lowest category consisted of the peasants of the hamlets of the hinterland, bordering small tributaries and marshes of the river. Abu Shaduf belongs to this last group. Al-Shirbini reserves his special ire and contempt for the rural religious functionaries and Sufi dervishes and sheikhs, who are depicted as ignorant, superstitious, and avaricious. In the enumeration and description of food items, ingredients, and dishes, alShirbini takes descriptions from the verses of the ode and comments on the foods’ crudity, dirtiness, and unhygienic nature; he then draws a contrast with the more refined urban versions of those foods. As such, much information is given on the foods and cookery of the period.

The Food in the Verses Here is one example of lines of the ode about food: “And nothing has demolished me after this and that / But kishk when it is ready to ladle” (that is, I collapse before the expectation of eating kishk [331])

I shall explain kishk presently. Al-Shirbini proceeds to write elaborate commentaries on all the lines of the ode, including these. He gives the possible meanings, derivation, and etymology of the words used and goes into digressions on related meanings, anecdotes, and lines from other poems with related themes or expressions. The fact that the ode is written in a mixture of colloquial and literary Arabic gives scope for much elaboration, such as whether the verb hadd for “collapse” (it actually means “to let go”) is related to the name of the hoopoe bird, hudhud! He then proceeds to relate mentions of that bird in the Koran and other sources. Many similar passages follow about the word hadd. There then follow, at length, reflections on agriculture, the hardships of the peasant’s life, prayers and rituals to be performed at planting and harvest, and so on. He concludes this section with: “Agriculture in any case is a tribulation from which we pray God to spare us and our loved ones” (335). The author then comes to the food, explaining what kishk is, how it is made in the rural setting, and how poor and unhygienic it is there; he next describes how it is prepared much better and finer by the city people. I shall now concentrate on the food aspects of the text, proceeding by genre of ingredients and dishes.

Milk and Dairy Milk is typically from a cow or buffalo. It is rarely mentioned as a fresh drink; it is virtually always fermented and preserved, often in combination with grain. Two food items containing milk are prominent in the verses: kishk and mish.

Hazz al-Quhuf • 165 Kishk (alternately pronounced kishik or kashk) is a common Middle Eastern genre of fermented, dried milk, buttermilk, or yogurt (the last is absent from this text) that is, often after being soaked into grain or flour, formed into cakes and dried.4 Al-Shirbini explains how kishk is prepared properly by the people of the large villages by the Nile. Wheat is washed, cooked in water until soft, and then dried in the sun, after which milk and mish (a strong crumbly cheese; more below) are added. The mixture is stirred and left to ferment for some days; then more milk is added to cut the acidity. The mixture is eventually formed into small cakes and dried. For Al-Shirbini, this is excellent and healthful food, prepared quite differently from how the people of the hamlets and marshes do it: “God spare you such disgusting sight! They make it with strained cottage cheese culture and [probably buttermilk] and just a small quantity of milk, which makes it extremely sour, sharp to the taste, gross in nature compared to other types, and laxative” (335). The author proceeds to describe the way kishk is cooked in different places. The people of the villages cook it with rice and fatty meats, and sometimes with chicken or other fowl. In Dimyat, they cook it with fat mullet. The refined people of Turkish descent make it into soup, with rice, and garnish it with fried greens and butter, and sometimes with mutton. This is in contrast to the (bad) cooking of the hamlets, in which the inferior kishk is cooked with dried fava beans, with barley bread and onions added, and it is eaten hot in the morning and then cold and dry at night, which is unhealthy and leads to flatulence and worse. The author then goes back to fanciful etymology and looks, at length, into the possible derivation of the word kishk. A regular theme throughout the commentary is the contrast of hamlet food with the refined village/city versions. Recurrent items of difference include the addition of butter, fat, and meat in the refined versions, as well as the use of clean water and clean fuel (wood) for cooking (as opposed to dung cakes in the hamlets) and cooking pots of copper or fine pottery (as opposed to crude earthenware). The other common dairy item is mish, defined by the author as “blue skimmedmilk cheese that had been left to age till it becomes sharp and salty enough to cut the tail off a mouse, for this is the thing country people eat for lunch, and sometimes for dinner, too” (361). It is typically eaten with bread and onions, and it constitutes a regular item in the diet of the Egyptian poor to the present day. The author then contrasts the country mish with the urban versions, which, of course, are more refined, made with full-fat milk, and he shades into other fine cheeses.

Vegetables: Mulukhiya The vegetable most frequently mentioned is onions, green or dry, which are always used as a garnish, on dishes such as kishk, bisar (a stew of mulukhiya and beans), or lentils. Few other vegetables appear in the text, except for the frequent mention of mulukhiya, commonly translated as “Jew’s mallow.” It is a green leafy vegetable,

166 • Food Between the Country and the City with an appearance between spinach and nettle leaves, although it is very different in taste and texture. Botanically, it is Chorcorus olitorius, and it is also called jute leaves. It is used fresh or dried, and in Egypt, it is always finely chopped. It has a distinctive bitter taste and, cooked in soups and stews, gives a viscous or mucilaginous (to its detractors, slimy) texture, similar to bamia/okra (another favorite in the region). I am dwelling at length on mulukhiya because it is iconic to Egyptian food culture, historically and at present, and is considered a major item of national cuisine. It features prominently in the text under consideration. “Happy is he who sees bisar come to him on the threshing floor / And bolts it, though he be by colic enfeebled” (346)

Bisar is frequently mentioned as a regular food, alongside lentils. The peasant version consists of dried mulukhiya mixed with pounded dry fava beans in an earthenware pot, then covered with water and cooked in the oven; after it has cooked for a time, the mixture is broken up with a whisk to reach a smooth consistency, more water is added, and it is cooked further. It is then dressed with a little sesame oil and garnished with chopped onion, and broken barley bread is added. Another frequent garnish is chopped coriander leaves. The author tells us that peasants eat this for lunch and dinner, as well as during Ramadan nights. It is an occasion for the author to ridicule the peasant further: “then the peasant ends up looking like a swollen water-skin, [he and his wife go to bed on top of the oven,] and the flatulence goes around and around in their bellies and erupts like a hurricane, and this serves as their incense all night long” (347). He further ridicules what he guesses of their sex life, and he concludes: “we seek shelter with God from the peasant’s disposition.” Then, he talks about “the urban kind, how delicious it is.” The author lists the usual differences in urban cooking of mulukhiya: clean leaves, fresh or recently dried, stalks removed, chopped fine, cooked in pure, clean water, in a well-covered copper pan (tanjara Rumi,5 a Turkish copper pot with tight fitting lid), over a fine wood fire (hatab Rumi, Turkish again), until it reaches the right consistency, garnished with garlic mixed with clarified cow’s butter and the fat from the tail of a sheep. The dish is seasoned with pepper and cumin (said to be good for digestion). Some may add some crushed beans, but then more fat and butter are added to soak into it; others use small mutton kebabs (jam’al-habayib, the gathering of the beloved). The refined Turks would cook the mulukhiya leaves fresh and whole, combined with butter and meat or chicken. At the present time, mulukhiya, where it is known in Turkey, the Arab Levant, and Cyprus, is cooked as whole leaves, like spinach or greens, unlike the Egyptian style of mincing it fine and cooking it in a broth. The Cairo version of the peasant dish bisar uses the same basic ingredient, mulukhiya and beans, but they are superior-quality ingredients, cooked in clean, pure water, using superior cooking utensils and fuel. To this mixture are added various

Hazz al-Quhuf • 167 fats, always including butter, seasonings, and often meat, making the dish something quite different from the peasant version. The other green leafy vegetable mentioned as an item of peasant and city food is khubayza (mallow), which grows wild and is foraged from the edges of fields. It is cooked in water, dressed in sesame oil, and garnished with chopped onion and coriander. And, of course, it is done much better in the large villages and the city. Pulses are ubiquitous, then and now. Lentils, chickpeas, and fava beans, fresh and dried, are staples and feature in many dishes, as we have seen. They are common to all regions of Egypt, urban and rural. Ful (pronounced “fool”), or fava, is regular daily food in Egypt, then and now. The most common appellation of a fava dish in modern times is ful mudammas, which is slowly stewed dried ful that is then garnished with oil or butter and any of a wide range of items: onions, cheese, eggs, and seasoning—now typically shatta, a chili sauce, and lemon juice. Ful mudammas features in the ode, as in this verse: “And nothing has made me yearn like stewed beans [mudammas] and their smell! / Happy is he to whom comes a bowl with half a loaf” (341)

Anyone who has smelled dried fava cooking will recognize the allusion to the smell, which is strong, distinctive, and, to many, appetizing. Al-Shirbini’s commentary on this verse includes some interesting etymology of mudammas. Scholars and commentators have puzzled about the derivation of the word, and there is no general agreement. So, it is interesting to consider the derivation given here: “mudammas being taken from dims (bedding straw for cattle) because [the beans] are cooked in a fire fuelled with dims” (342). Given Al-Shirbini’s other instances of speculative etymology, we cannot be sure of this one, but it is as good a hypothesis as any. Al-Shirbini then goes through his usual routine of outlining the exemplary cooking of ful in the city and its atrocious treatment by the peasant. He describes the typical pot for cooking the bean, the fawwal, a pot-bellied pot with a narrow entrance easily sealed with a cloth. Talking of city cooking, he describes the clean white beans, then the pure water poured over them, then the pot being placed in an oven, like a baker’s oven, overnight, but watched and water added when necessary. Until the early twentieth century, the fawwal would be placed in the slow fire/ashes of the boiler heating up the water of the public baths. Al-Shirbini does not mention this method, which may suggest that it was of a more recent origin. The product of this preparation and cooking has the color and consistency of pressed dates and, when eaten by city folk, is dressed with butter, olive oil, or clotted cream, sometimes with the addition of lime juice or vinegar and chopped green leeks. This is similar to the more sumptuous styles of current eating, with the exception of clotted cream. Also, the modern repertoire would include a chili sauce, the chili being a post-Columbian import to the Old World. Predictably, Al-Shirbini finds the peasant version of this dish to be

168 • Food Between the Country and the City far inferior—in the quality of the beans, the purity of the water, the foulness of the fuel, and the paucity of the dressing: onions and, for the better-off, linseed oil (still widely used at the present time).The half loaf mentioned in the verse is made with barley or maize. Al-Shirbini recommends having a cup of coffee after eating the beans, which was not available to the peasant. A now-common item that is missing from Al-Shirbini’s narrative is ta’miyya, more widely known as falafel (now a globalized item), which seems to have an Egyptian origin, although clearly not from Al-Shirbini’s epoch. It is now commonly made from chickpeas, but typically in Egypt, dried fava beans are used. The haricot bean fasoulya, now common throughout the region, was a New World import and arrived much later. The only root vegetable Al-Shirbini mentions is qulqas, or taro, described as being used for a stew with beans or meat. Qulqas is still used, though not widely, in Egypt, many other parts of the Middle East, and Cyprus. The now-most-common root, the potato, was another import from the New World and arrived in the region much later.

Fish “Happy is he to whom mussels come, to his house / And who invites the people of the village and plays host” (366) “If I see next to me a casserole of fish-skins / Then that is a day of happiness and [one on which] of one’s clothes to make a boast” (368) “Me, my wish is for a meal of fisikh first thing / I shall forever weep for it and grieve” (416) “Happy is he who sees a casserole of fish in his little oven / Though it be, my brothers, uncleaned!” (425)

Fish, it would seem, came to the poor villagers mostly by virtue of the waterways and tributaries that reached their hamlets. Al-Shirbini tells us that mussels are to be found on the seashore and in saltwater lakes. He explains what they are to his readers, which would suggest they were not familiar. The word for mussels is umm al-khulul, the mother of vinegars! Egyptian informants tell me that this mollusk still bears that name at present, though it is little known. Not only is this a strange name, but it is unusual in Egyptian shellfish vocabulary, which is predominantly derived from Greek and Italian names. The reference to vinegar, infers the author, is due to its being used as a dressing. We are told that the mollusk is removed from its shell, mixed with salt and vinegar, and eaten raw. Al-Shirbini is unsparing in his condemnation of this food, which he considered disgusting and eaten only by the degraded peasants.

Hazz al-Quhuf • 169 “Sometimes they take it out while still alive and knead it with salt and eat it, this making the most disgusting, vile and revolting dish—we seek shelter from it with God and give praise and thanks to him that we have never eaten it.” (367)

It is the one food item for which Al-Shirbini finds no superior version in the city. Fish skins are the skins of salted fish, which, after the flesh is eaten, are then washed and put in a tajin, an earthenware casserole, and cooked in the oven. They are sometimes eaten with a dressing of cottonseed cakes, which substitute for tahini, or sesame paste. Al-Shirbini does not disapprove of this dish, and he finds superior city versions. Fisikh, or fasikh, is salted rotted fish, usually mullet. The fish, in Al-Shirbini’s account not cleaned, are salted and layered in a barrel. When they are taken out, they are squeezed dry and eaten with bread, lime juice, or vinegar and often chopped onions and garlic. Al-Shirbini is scathing about the horrible smell and disgusting rotten taste, and he marvels at how the villagers, especially the women, find it such a delicacy. He does, however, praise an urban version, made with mullet roe that is salted and dried, which he considers a great delicacy. This is batarikh, which is known all over the Mediterranean world; it is called boutargue, botarga, or poutargue in France and Italy, the word deriving from the Greek for eggs. Both fasikh and batarikh are still eaten at the present time in Egypt, though not as commonly. In the 1970s, Cairo markets had sections for fasakhani, processors and sellers of the fish; in some places, markets may still have such sections today. Fasikh is a seasonal food for the Egyptian spring festival known as shamm al-nasim, the breathing of the breeze, which features outdoor picnics at which fasikh is eaten with raw onions. I have participated in one such festival and tasted the fish, with raw onions, not with much enthusiasm. Fasikh resembles Scandinavian rotted herring. Shamm alnasim, which is ancient Egyptian and pre-Islamic, much like Nowruz in Iran and other Iranic world countries, used to be celebrated by all Egyptians, but it is fading in importance; it is increasingly identified with Copts and avoided by many pious and sectarian Muslims. It is strange that Al-Shirbini does not mention its association with fasikh, which may indicate that this association is more recent. “Casserole of fish” is mentioned in one of the verses above. The commentary on this verse starts with a treatise on the diversity of fish and recipes for their preparation. It then goes on to explain what the poet’s casserole would have been made with: small fry and dogfish from the ponds and holes left after the retreat of the waters of the Nile. These fish would be put in a casserole (tajin) with onions and linseed oil, cooked in the oven, and then eaten with barley bread. Al-Shirbini considers this dish with his usual contempt: unwashed and uncleaned fish with bones, heads, and all in muddy water. Only the poverty and hunger of the peasants would make them long for such food. The treatise on fish eaten at the time is more interesting. Al-Shirbini’s list includes mullet, bream, and binni, a river fish that could be a variety of carp or barbell. Fish

170 • Food Between the Country and the City was considered with some trepidation, as it was delicate and cold and moist in the Galenic scheme. To adjust the humors, we are told, it should be cooked in clarified butter, onions, and hot spices—“they also increase sexual appetite” (426). “Large fish are most nutritious when eaten with old wine and raisin, and small fish when eaten with old wine and faludhaj” (a sweet dish made with starch, sugar or honey, and almonds; the term, Arabized Persian, occurs in old recipes but is absent in modern usage). The specification of wine seems unusual; the combination of fish with raisins, to my knowledge, occurs only in Sicilian cooking, and it is considered to be of Arab origin. Mullet is stuffed with onions and spices and eaten with fluffy rice. Recipes for stuffed mullet or similar fish occur in present-day cooking, though they are not common. We are told that fish is also made with kishk (see above) and eaten with sticky rice. I don’t know of any modern or recent recipes that combine fish and kishk; indeed, a taboo on the combination of fish and yogurt is observed in many places. It is interesting that, apart from the disgusting mussels, no other types of shellfish are mentioned. In modern times in Egypt, shellfish are mostly known by Greek and Italian names. There is an avoidance of, if not a prohibition against, these products among Muslim populations in parts of the Eastern Mediterranean, though not explicitly in Egypt. Shellfish may not have been considered by Al-Shirbini and his class to be proper food.

Meat Products Meat is hardly mentioned in connection with peasant food. Kebab and fatty meats are mentioned in passing as an addition to other dishes in refined urban cooking. The meat product that recurs in accounts of peasant food is tripe (kirsha, kirshat). Here is the translation of one reference from the ode: “Happy is he who sees in the refuse dump tripes tossed away / Even if the flies have settled on them in swarms! / If I saw them, I would take them all, boil them / And eat them with the undigested matter that is on them, and feel no revulsion” (432–33)

Apart from its disgusting image, this verse also conveys a deep hunger for a rarely found morsel of animal flesh. Al-Shirbini, strangely, doesn’t pursue the satirical potential of this image, but he tells us that tripe, usually from the slaughter of animals on the Feast of the Sacrifice, is carefully cleaned, even by the despised peasants, and would then be cooked with the offal, the head, and the trotters, a dish “they call jaghl maghl and hold in the highest esteem” (435). And these delicacies are not shunned in the city; far from it. In the city, the same elements are cooked cleanly, with clarified butter and various spices, the head being “rolled in the clean, washed tripe” (435) The dish is called saqat (meaning fallen things, reminiscent of the origin of the

Hazz al-Quhuf • 171 English word “offal”: off + fall). Saqatat, a plural of saqat, is still used in Turkey and some Arab areas to designate offal, and the term has also been adapted in Greek as sikotaki. Tripe and offal have been highly valued in the Middle Eastern gastronomy, by rich and poor, though in more recent times shunned by the modern middle and upper classes. In Egypt, there is still the designated trade of sammat, tripe processor. There are market shops and eateries that specialize in tripe, heads, and trotters, as well as peddlers who sell animal livers and brains (kibdeh wa mukh) from their carts. You can find tripe shops in the market areas of most Middle Eastern and many Southern European cities. While Egypt largely retains Arabic vocabulary—kirsha (tripe) and kawari’ (feet)—other parts of the region use Persian and Turkish terms: Kelleh pacha (head and feet) and Iskembe, pacha, kipa, and other designations for tripe are featured in many stalls, restaurants, and salons all over the region, including Egypt. But the image and association of these foods have varied and diversified over modern times. Until recently, they came to be associated with the lower and traditional classes and were avoided by the educated middle classes. In particular contexts, they can be associated with drink: late-night revelers would end their night in the early hours at a market stall or a salon serving tripe and head/feet soup, but no drink, alongside workers taking their meaty breakfast before the day’s work. This custom, at one point in the early twentieth century, extended even to Paris, where revelers retired in the early morning to Les Halles to share tripe dishes (tripes a la mode de Caen) and onion soup with the market workers having their breakfast. The images and associations of tripe have now come to a revalorization in terms of gastronomy and restored authenticity, similar to what happened to trotters in Western gastronomy: after being forgotten and rejected, they have resurfaced as gourmet objects in the endless search for both authenticity and novelty.

Poultry Chicken is mentioned in passing as one of the luxurious additions (like meat) to other dishes in the urban and Turkish repertoires. Pigeon, Egypt’s distinctive poultry to the present day, makes an appearance in the ode: “Happy is he who sees in the oven of his house casseroles / Of squabs from the dovecote of Abu Sha’nif!” (418)

The word used for squabs is zaghalil, indicating young pigeons, otherwise hamam, the more general designation for pigeons, is dominant at present. The commentary explains that these are the young of wild pigeons, attracted to the dovecote towers with food and nesting; the pigeons’ droppings are utilized as fertilizer, and their young are slaughtered for the table. These birds are distinct from domestically raised pigeons, which are the main type available in recent times. The author repeats his

172 • Food Between the Country and the City praise for the city styles of cooking, with the addition of butter and spices, while, presumably, the peasant method was simple roasting. Pigeons/squabs occupy a place of honor in recent and current Egyptian cookery, and there are specialty restaurants in Cairo and elsewhere where pigeon is the main fare. It is offered in two main styles: spatchcocked and grilled or stuffed and braised. The classic stuffing is of fireek, cracked green wheat, common to much of the Middle East, though it is becoming increasingly rare, replaced by rice and burghul, cracked wheat from a different process of boiling, drying, and cracking. It is not uncommon to find even urban Egyptians keeping pigeons as a hobby, some ending up at table. Duck and goose (and also rabbit), all items common in Egypt, in both country and city, in recent times, are absent from the ode and the commentary. Eggs are notable for their total absence from the text or commentary. This is puzzling, for we know eggs to have been common items on Ottoman menus at least from the fourteenth century, and Ottoman styles spread to Egypt, at least for the elites, of whom Al-Shirbini writes with reverence. Eggs are also mentioned as part of the peasant diet in more recent sources.

Conclusion In this parade of food landscapes in the seventeenth-century Egyptian country and city, we may note a number of features that merit further comment. One such feature is the remarkable continuity of many food ingredients over the centuries, right up to the present day. Main items that distinguish Egyptian food today were present then: ful, or fava beans, especially in their stewed mudammas form; mulukhiya; pigeons; kishk; and the various grains, pulses, spices, and condiments common to the region. The main additions are post-Columbian imports from the New World, principally the tomato and the chili, as well as the potato, maize, and haricot beans. By the seventeenth century, some of these items must have been penetrating slowly into many regions. The only item mentioned that could be New World is maize. However, there is an ambiguity in the word dhurra, which could have been millet, although the reference to maize bread would make it more likely to be the American maize. The other remarkable feature is the seeming availability, however limited, of many of these ingredients to the peasants. We are familiar with food histories of Europe in which the peasantry seemed to have a very limited diet until relatively recent times.6 The Egyptian peasant suffered equally from a limited and monotonous diet, confined, for the most part, to barley bread, onions, and pulses. This accounts for the deep longing of Abu Shaduf for other food items and his hunger for even the dirty fly-infested tripe on the rubbish heap, the salty fish skins, and the small fish from muddy waters, uncleaned—all items of animal protein. Yet, a variety of food

Hazz al-Quhuf • 173 ingredients seem to have been known to the peasant and occasionally consumed, in however a supposedly debased a form. The food of the city and of the elite, reverentially lauded by Al-Shirbini, seems to be distinguished primarily by the addition of animal protein and fatty ingredients and spices: butter, fatty meat, kebab, and chicken. A variety of fish and methods of cooking fish are listed, some of which survive in modern versions, but others are no longer common, even if known. Salted, preserved fish, fasikh and batarikh, survive but are not common. Stuffed mullet is even more unusual, and I heard of it from only Iran and Turkey. Still, the continuity of items and methods is remarkable. We have accounts of food repertoires in rural and urban Egypt in the early nineteenth century, notably in the classic narratives of E. W. Lane, written in Egypt in the years 1833–1835. Lane gives the following list of peasant foods: Their [the peasants] food chiefly consists of bread (made of millet or maize). Milk, new cheese, eggs, small salted fish, cucumbers and melons and gourds of a great variety of kinds, onions and leeks, beans, dates and pickles. . . . Rice is too dear to be an article of common food for the fellaheen [peasants], and flesh-meat they very seldom taste (204)

In contrast, the table of the urban comfortable classes (162–63) featured a wide and sophisticated variety of rich foods: yakhnee, a stew of meat and vegetables; kawurmeh, “a richer stew with onions”; stuffed vine leaves; stuffed gourds; lamb kebabs; various salads and pickles; and fish dressed with oil. Most meats were cooked in clarified butter. “A boned fowl, stuffed with raisins, pistachio-nuts, crumbled bread, and parsley, is not an uncommon dish” (162); nor was a whole lamb similarly stuffed. There were sweets and fruit of great variety. We note that the contrast between city (prosperous classes) and country (peasants) with regard to diet is much greater in Lane’s account than in the text under study. But this may be because Al-Shirbini was considering urban food in relation to a register of ingredients eaten by peasants and missing out on the elite foods that did not relate to that itinerary. We also note that Lane’s list of peasant foods is somewhat wider than Al-Shirbini’s, and it includes the missing eggs. Regarding the New World imports, we note, in the nineteenth century, the presence of maize but still no mention of tomatoes, potatoes, or chilies. We know that tomatoes spread slowly and were often shunned as poisonous in many places. There is mention of tomatoes being introduced in Aleppo, Syria, in the late eighteenth century.

–10– Reflecting Authenticity: “Grandmother’s Yogurt” between Bulgaria and Japan Maria Yotova

“For us, the Bulgarians, yogurt is as important as bread. There is no other product so closely connected with our daily diets, from the cradle to the deathbed.” This is how, in November 2007, the president of ELBY, the only state-owned company in the dairy sector, started his speech at the public celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the company’s licensing activity. He also expressed his gratitude to the chairman of the Japanese yogurt market leader, Meiji, for the long-term partnership between the two companies and for his efforts “to popularize Bulgarian culture” in Japan. Returning the compliment, the Japanese top manager highlighted that the two companies had a common mission: to discover new strains of Lactobacillus bulgaricus that thrive in “Bulgaria, the homeland of yogurt,” and to develop new products that contribute to human health. The event revived discussions in the mass media about the need to protect Bulgarian traditional technologies and about the international fame of the national product. Bulgarian yogurt has consistently been a focus of public attention during the past decade or so of Bulgaria’s post-socialist transition. Internet forums, newspapers, and consumer associations have provided venues for heated discussions about what the authentic product is and should be. At various regional events, local women insist on their traditional recipes for yogurt preparation. Evoking images of peaceful rural life, “grandmother’s yogurt” (produced to strict European Union standards, however) is also to be found on the shelves of supermarkets in the cities. Such insistences on traditionally and locally produced food, conspicuous in advertising and public discussion, are a sign of the general globalization that has swept through the post-socialist world since 1989. This preoccupation with the authentic taste is not, however, merely a search for the local amid external global forces of change (Watson 1998; Wilson 2006). Nor is it equivalent to transnational alternative food philosophies that are interpreted as forms of active opposition to mass-produced food (Goodman 2003; Sarasua and Scholliers 2005; Schlosser 2001). Rather, I suggest that the national significance of grandmother’s yogurt in present-day Bulgaria is defined by the dynamic interplay between discourses of scientific progress and industrialization, on the one

– 175 –

176 • Food Between the Country and the City hand, and romantic visions of rural life and farming traditions, valorized through global marketization (specifically in Japan), on the other. In other words, this paper is an ethnographic exploration of the ways in which global processes and industrialization create a mirror through which national authenticity is reflected and created.

Grandmother’s Yogurt: Imagining the Rural, Imagining the Nation The village, seen as the cradle of authentic folk culture, has always been a part of Bulgarian national ideology. During the socialist era, many rural regions were given romantic names, such as “the valley of roses,” “the breadbasket of Bulgaria,” or “the mountains of Orpheus.” Today, these regions are imagined as places that keep the old culinary traditions of the nation. Regional policies, rural-tourism development, and sophisticated marketing strategies have formed a special taste for heritage foods and traditional recipes, and they have elevated local grandmothers to the status of living national treasures. At the same time, deepening economic and social disparities between the country and the city cast a dark shadow on local grandmothers’ performances at various events. In a global era of seemingly universal and placeless commodities, the relationship between place and food seems to have become increasingly important, and the countryside, where farming and other agricultural activities take place, has become a central locus of authentic foods produced by traditional methods. The utility of the countryside, and foods associated with it, as a source of national essence has been illuminated by a number of scholars (see, for example, Guy 2002; Kisban 1989; Orland 2005). As Jeffrey Pilcher (1998) has shown for the Mexican tortilla, government officials often try to dictate national cuisines by encouraging the consumption of particular rural foods for economic and/or nutritional purposes. This seems to be the case for yogurt in Bulgaria. A seasonal food with many regional varieties before the socialist era, yogurt rose to a daily food of national significance under the industrialization doctrine and nutrition policies of the Communist Party. This “food of longevity,” however, was promoted not only to feed the rising working class in the cities. Because of its unique technology of production, it was also considered a means to gain access to international markets. One of the first licensing agreements, signed with the Japanese company Meiji in 1973, was viewed as a great success for the Bulgarian dairy industry. What Meiji wanted, however, was not the unique technology and pure cultures of the socialist enterprise, but pastoral scenery from rural Bulgaria. Today, the international valorization of Bulgarian yogurt is a source of national pride. Since its successful marketing in Japan is seen as recognition of both national cultural traditions and industrial technologies, yogurt occupies a special place in regional-development strategies and nationalrepresentation policies.

Reflecting Authenticity • 177 In spite of the tensions that may exist between practices and performances, between individual preferences and collective traditions, yogurt is usually defined as a typically Bulgarian food, representative of national culture. As a number of scholars (see, for example, Goody 1998; Wilk 2006) have argued, however, cultural forms perceived as national, authentic, or traditional are inevitably shaped by larger historical processes. In the Bulgarian case, scientific research, socialist industrialization, and international value-creation have contributed to the rise of yogurt to the center of Bulgarian selfhood. These are reflected in present-day consumer attitudes toward grandmother’s yogurt; in notions of what a traditional product should taste and look like, and in personal narratives and public discourses of traditional food. It is by passing through these processes of industrialization and internalization that grandmother’s yogurt has become a typically national product, amplifying its significance as a source of national essence. At the same time, we should be aware that the rural as a material space (that is, the countryside that sustains the production of dairy products) might have evolved in a different way from the rural as a represented space (the idyllic pastoral scenery in the commercials for grandmother’s yogurt, for example). Although it might be tempting to approach the rural in such separate conceptions, as Keith Halfacree (2006: 45) points out, these are “intrinsically interwoven and co-existent rather than mutually exclusive” spaces, and if I make use of such a distinction here, it is in order to highlight the ambiguity of national and regional policies that seemingly provide the stimulus for small-scale farming and local foods while at the same time supporting large-scale industrial production. The discourses surrounding grandmother’s yogurt in presentday Bulgaria suggest that homemade products are more authentic, tasty, and healthful than their industrial counterparts, even if the countryside and farming practices sustaining these local products are under threat of disappearance. In other words, there is a wide gap between rural life as a lived experience, on the one hand, and the way it is imagined as part of the national culture, on the other. This gap may be made invisible in the context of folkloric re-enchantment, as documented by Gerald Creed (2011) in revivals of regional festivals and local traditions, and in ethnographic exhibitions dedicated to traditional foods or culinary festivals where local women compete to win the award for the best-tasting yogurt. Still, the gap exists, and it speaks to an explicit rural/urban hierarchy that, manifested in everyday mundane cultural activities, generates political, social, and personal identification (Creed and Ching 1997: 3). Nevertheless, by providing new forms of rural-urban interactions, the exhibitions and festivals, with their representation of the rural, enhance the symbolic capital of grandmother’s yogurt, foddering the national imagination as effectively as discourses of technological development, because in Bulgaria, as in many other places around the world, imagining the nation is about imagining the rural (Dominy 1997; Williams 1973). Following Sidney Mintz (1997: 367) in his observation that food is not a timeless representation of meaning but a societal process of value-creation, I am trying

178 • Food Between the Country and the City to understand the historical processes through which yogurt has been shaped as a traditional, healthful, and typically Bulgarian food, as well as understand how, once yogurt became part of national ideology, it has shaped processes of national identification. I begin with an examination of scientific discourses developed since the beginning of the twentieth century; next, I proceed to look at the ideological transformation of yogurt during socialism; then, I offer an ethnographic description of its international valorization as Meiji Bulgaria Yogurt in Japan. Finally, I explore the meanings and values attached to yogurt today, trying to define its significance on the regional and national levels.

The Food of Longevity: Yogurt in Scientific Discourses Humans have had a longtime relationship with thousands of lactic acid bacteria. The role of these microorganisms in health and longevity was first recognized by Russian scientist Elie Metchnikoff (1845–1916), a 1908 Nobel Prize winner. At the dawn of the twentieth century, he developed a theory that aging is caused by toxic bacteria in the gut. He proposed that lactic acid bacteria could neutralize these toxins and slow down the aging of the body. Metchnikoff attributed the long lifespan of Bulgarian villagers to the large quantity of lactic acid bacteria they consumed with one of their daily foods, yogurt. In The Prolongation of Life: Optimistic Studies, he explains the results of his research on various lactic bacteria and concludes that “the Bulgarian rod” is most effective in neutralizing the toxins in the body1 (Metchnikoff 1908: 179). Thanks to Metchnikoff, yogurt, practically unknown in the West at the time, gained much popularity among European consumers. At the same time, Metchnikoff’s theory inspired many Bulgarian researchers to study the microflora in and the nutritional value of yogurt (Katrandjiev 1962; Kondratenko 1985; Popdimitrov 1938). They conducted their research holding the position that the national product was superior in terms of taste and health qualities to other milk-fermented products. To support their claims, Bulgarian scientists emphasized connections between national traditions of sheep breeding, the variety of milk-processing techniques, and the abundance of lactic bacteria in trees and plants found in the Bulgarian mountains.2 Pictures of women in peasant dresses selling yogurt in town markets and of shepherds and centenarians from the Rhodope Mountains decorate publications reporting research results, along with figures, tables, and scientific data. Thus, pastoral rural life and ancient traditions were utilized in support of the assertion that Bulgarian yogurt was a culturally specific product, the food of longevity of Bulgarian villagers. At the same time, one might argue that such representations were used to show the rudimentary basis of preindustrial methods of yogurt preparation, compared to the modern conditions of industrial production (Stoilova 2011: 124). In their study of the development of the Bulgarian dairy industry during the twentieth century, for example, Georgi Atanassov and Ivan Masharov (1984) find artisanal methods of

Reflecting Authenticity • 179 yogurt preparation primitive and backward, standing in sharp contrast to the production technology and pure cultures developed by Bulgarian dairy specialists. In this sense, researchers are quite ambivalent in their evaluation of peasant traditions. On the one hand, they used rural representations as proof of authenticity; on the other, they implied that preindustrial production practices were backward and rustic.3 It should be noted that such discourses were ideologically colored, as they were often used to show the achievements of the socialist regime in modernizing the food system and improving nutrition. In the following section, I provide a brief account of the socialist transformations that led to the establishment of yogurt as the people’s food, a powerful discourse that established a close connection between yogurt and the working class.

The People’s Food: Yogurt Discourses during Socialism During the first half of the twentieth century, Bulgaria was an agricultural country; more than 80 percent of the population lived in rural areas. Almost every family owned dairy animals, which were milked for home production of various dairy products. The beginning of a full-scale industrialization in the dairy sector during socialism occurred with the establishment of the state-owned dairy enterprise Serdika in 1947. Specialists developed a complete chain of supply and production of dairy products, adapting the traditional production technologies to large-scale industrial output. State production standards were introduced, giving detailed instructions for every aspect of the manufacturing process.4 These were not the only changes. By 1965, one-half of the Bulgarian population was already living in urban areas. As farmers were transformed into factory workers and villagers into town dwellers, demand for dairy products increased significantly. Women and their roles in society were also significantly affected by these changes. Now, they had to work outside the family, and the transformation of their social role from a housekeeper to public-sphere worker resulted in increasing demand for industrial food, including cheese and yogurt. Drawing on Bulgaria’s long dairy traditions, nutritionists such as Maria Demireva (1968) defined these products as people’s food, and she saw their increasing consumption as a sign of improvement in the national diet. Even though compromises with quality were made, compared to some other food commodities (such as meat, fish, or sausage) basic dairy products were some of the most accessible foods to the general public. Yogurt consumption was further boosted by national nutrition policies. Yogurt was included in school and hospital meals, and it was provided free of charge to workers in heavy industry. It appeared, in various forms, on the menus of restaurants and public cafeterias, and it was considered to be an important characteristic of what was called Bulgarian cuisine. Expressing grave concern for people’s health, the Ministry of Trade, in several orders from 1975 to 1978, recommended to restaurants

180 • Food Between the Country and the City and cafeterias the use of cheese and yogurt instead of meat and sausage. Living in a big city such as Sofia provided better educational and medical services. At the same time, however, consumers were faced with food scarcity and limited choices for their daily diets. Yogurt was a valuable source of protein, especially for those who were not connected with a rural village. In that sense, it was a vital food both for the people and for the regime—yogurt fueled socialist industrialization by feeding the working class. Meanwhile, the practical significance of yogurt for the urban diet seemed to enhance its symbolic function as a national unifier. The speeches given by Communist leaders and Serdika managers at national conferences assigned yogurt a special place in Bulgarian history and culture; it was a product of the industriousness of the Bulgarian people and their ancient traditions of milk production (Minkov 1974: 4–5). At the same time, the great diversity of strains of Lactobacillus bulgaricus was explained by the unique combination of soil, relief, and climate which contribute to the great diversity of flora and fauna in Bulgaria. As these discourses were evolving, however, the romanticized countryside was rapidly changing: agricultural work was devalued; village life was losing its charm for young people; the agricultural workforce was aging. Although effective to some extent in lowering the levels of rural emigration, the policy of establishing industrial enterprises in villages did nothing to alleviate the labor shortages in agriculture (Creed 1998). The labor shortages meant less food production in the public sector, a chronic shortage of some foodstuffs, and an increase in the importance of informal household production. Consequently, increasing number of townies had to divide their time between the personal plot and the factory floor, caring more about the fruits and vegetables in their gardens than the production quota and factory discipline. As various foods were circulating through the network of so-called ruralurban households (Brunnbauer and Taylor 2004), the importance of “the economy of jars” was increasing (Smollett 1989). Its role in the national economy was recognized by Communist leaders and industrial managers, who would often turn a blind eye to the sacrifice of working hours in favor of private pursuits for self-provisioning (see also Creed 1998). An ex-manager of a yogurt factory told me the plant faced constant shortages of raw milk and could not always satisfy the increasing demand for dairy products, so he wished “grandmothers in the villages would produce more cheese and yogurt.” Homemade yogurt had one more important function. In spite of all the regulations and state standards that provided for the use of pure cultures in yogurt production, the bad quality of raw milk forced dairy managers to use homemade yogurt in industrial production. As one regional manager described the situation, “grandmother Penka’s bacillus” seemed stronger than the “pure cultures” of the central laboratory, as it could ferment “any milk without failure.” Evidently, the state yogurt, a loudly proclaimed achievement of the Bulgarian dairy industry, could not do without the yogurt of the local grandmothers produced using methods that, according to the

Reflecting Authenticity • 181 circumstances, would be labeled either authentic and traditional or backward and primitive. No matter what the evaluation of grandmother’s yogurt would be, yogurt as a national food was assigned a significant role in state policies. It was a source of health and nourishment both for individual bodies and for the national soul.

Bulgaria, the Holy Land of Yogurt: Yogurt Discourses in Japan The 1970s saw the people’s food go international. Convinced of the superiority of the domestic product, dairy managers tried to expand the “unique” Bulgarian technology into license agreements with leading dairy companies around the world (Atanassov and Masharov 1984; Minkov 2002). As part of the Eastern Bloc, Bulgaria had a basic mission to provide various foods for the huge Soviet market. These were brandless items to satisfy consumers’ everyday needs. National leaders, however, were ambitious to prove Bulgaria was a “Japan of the Balkans,” playing a significant role as a mediator of technology transfer between the East and the West (Kandilarov 2004: 458–59). When Bulgaria participated in the Expo ’70 world’s fair in Osaka, the Japanese interest in the sour-tasting national product was viewed as a great success for the Bulgarian dairy industry. What the Japanese company Meiji needed, however, was not the loudly proclaimed unique technology and pure cultures, but pastoral scenery from rural Bulgaria. Kanbe, a member of Meiji’s Bulgaria-yogurt project team at the time, remembered the culture shock he experienced on trying the sour-tasting yogurt presented at Expo ’70. Technologically, it was not difficult to produce Japan’s first plain yogurt with Lactobacillus bulgaricus. Accustomed to a sweet dessert-type of yogurt, however, Japanese consumers completely rejected the new product.5 To assert its authenticity, Meiji turned to the alleged place of its origin, making full use of the Bulgarian rural idyll—mountain villages, herds of sheep and cows, big families and healthy elderly people living in harmony with nature. With the acquisition of a FOSHU (Foods for Specified Health Use) Japanese government certificate, Meiji Bulgaria Yogurt was officially recognized as functional food. Thus, the product— and its marketing—fully matched the spirit of the health trend of the 1980s, and it came to represent some of the trend’s core values: natural food, a healthful lifestyle, healing, and spirituality. Among those who became convinced of yogurt’s power to alleviate the stresses of busy lifestyles is a group of women from Tokyo who gather every month to celebrate yogurt as a gift of nature. Their gatherings were initiated in the early 1970s by one of the first women to become a member of the Japanese Diet, Tenkoko Sonoda (now in her nineties). Her first encounter with the food of longevity was at the Bulgarian embassy in Tokyo. Not long after she included the product in her family’s diet, she noticed a positive change; her husband’s health improved, and she felt a level of energy she had never experienced before. Later, Sonoda initiated a campaign for

182 • Food Between the Country and the City home production of Bulgarian yogurt, sending out small portions of starter culture to women all over the country. A colleague of mine remembered the sour-tasting product ritually prepared by her mother when she was a child. That yogurt, together with a piece of bread, gradually replaced her typical breakfast of rice and miso soup. Even now, she cannot imagine her daily diet without Bulgarian yogurt, with its living Lactobacillus bulgaricus (strain LB81, as the product package claims). Since yogurt is consumed mainly for its expected health effects, most dairy companies do not allude to nature and tradition, but rather to science and research in their branding strategies. Their products are like a web of codes—various combinations of letters and figures (LG21, BB536, FK120, BE80, and so on)—to identify the specific bacteria strains in the yogurt, each strain being associated with particular health effects. Meiji Bulgaria Yogurt, with its LB81 strain, is not more medicinal than other similar products. Yet, as if the product’s name itself has become a guarantee of health and authenticity, it is thought to be more natural and secure than other brands. In one of Meiji’s commercials, the Bulgarian sumo wrestler Koto Oshu states convincingly: “Yogurt? Of course, I eat yogurt every day. It is a gift from heaven.” Trying to convey this sacredness, another advertisement narrates: “Here the wind is different; the water is different; the light is different. In this land delicious yogurt was born.” This is how marketing forces have transformed Bulgarian sour milk into a culturally meaningful product for the Japanese consumer. Meiji’s successful branding verifies Patricia Lysaght’s observation (2004) that traditionalizing the image of industrial food products to underpin the proposition of a natural, safe, and quality product is a successful strategy in today’s food marketing. These discourses also suggest that the countryside, whether domestic or foreign, has never lost its allure as a locus of healthful, authentic, and secure foods, even if the countryside sustaining these foods has irreversibly changed. Of course, the “original taste” produced by Meiji, was neither the taste of grandmother’s yogurt in rural Bulgaria, nor the taste of the state product that fed the socialist consumer. What Meiji created was the competitive taste of a brand, communicative and distinctive enough to win the heart of a highly health-conscious urban consumer. And Meiji created a beautiful picture of Bulgaria, “the holy land of yogurt,” an image integral to the story told by various actors in post-socialist Bulgaria.

Lactobacillus Bulgaricus Is Number One: Yogurt as an Alternative Discourse “If you want to taste real yogurt, you should visit some grandmother in the country,” concluded Daniela, a 45-year-old accountant from Sofia, during one of our supermarket visits. She took almost unconsciously Na baba (Grandmother’s Yogurt) from the shelf and added that the “genuine” product could exist only in the countryside

Reflecting Authenticity • 183 where cows were raised “traditionally” and milk was “natural.” She was convinced most manufacturers nowadays used “foreign bacteria” in their products, which was changing the “typically Bulgarian” preference for sour-tasting yogurt with Lactobacillus bulgaricus. “Our bacillus has emigrated to Japan,” said Daniela jokingly, and she told me the story of a friend working as a home helper in Madrid who prepared her own jars of yogurt with leaven from Bulgaria because plain yogurt was hardly to be found in local supermarkets. Since the quality of a given company’s product is judged by its taste (in terms of sourness and texture), and by its potential to serve as a leaven for homemade yogurt, on many occasions I myself would be advised to choose very carefully among the numerous yogurt brands on the market, since one needed real yogurt produced by traditional methods. One of the most powerful discourses in present-day Bulgaria, an echo of the Japanese images of Bulgaria as the homeland (and holy land) of yogurt, reflects the common belief that only plain, sour-tasting yogurt is the authentic, healthgiving product prepared with the “unique” Lactobacillus bulgaricus (imagined as a bacterium specific to Bulgaria). Similar to the geographic nationalism displayed in Russian natural-food philosophies (Caldwell 2010: 89), this discourse defines Bulgaria as a place with distinctive bio-national qualities that determine the taste and health characteristics of yogurt. In spite of the close connection between the ideas of homeland and the countryside, associated with rural spaces and national authenticity, the Bulgarian discourse is not necessarily grounded in specific locations, as is the French concept of terroir. It is probably because, for Bulgarians, homeland incorporates both the imagined space of the nation (rodina) and the physical place of one’s roots (rodno miasto) that, whether in Sofia or in Madrid, people embrace the homeland discourse so ardently. During socialism, when yogurt was defined as the people’s food and was understood to give nutrition to factory workers and townspeople, there was little thought given to the existence of Lactobacillus bulgaricus and the uniqueness of the native product. There were no public discussions about Bulgarian yogurt traditions, and of course, Japan was never a factor. Since the opening of the country to the global economy, not only new foods and commodities, but also various dietary ideas and philosophies have entered the national market to compete for the ex-socialist consumer. The focus on natural taste and traditional production, however, should not necessarily be connected with such food ideologies as the organic-food or Slow Food movements. In the Bulgarian case, discourses about unique technology, scientific contributions, and global marketization are as important to the valorization of grandmother’s yogurt as ancient dairy traditions and a romanticized view of the countryside. In 2009, the discovery of Lactobacillus bulgaricus by the Bulgarian scientist Stamen Grigoroff was nominated by a committee formed of national television including journalists, actors, and other intellectuals as one of “the greatest Bulgarian events of the twentieth century.” The video introducing the nomination opened with

184 • Food Between the Country and the City the emotional sentence: “1905 was the first time the civilized world got struck by the potential of Bulgarian science.” Against the background of the city of Geneva, where Grigoroff was a student at the time of the discovery, the video showed the Japanese Meiji Bulgaria Yogurt, from the changes to its packaging to the diversity of products now sold under the brand name. The special attention to Bulgarian yogurt in Japan suggests how important international recognition is for the valorization of the native product. The exhibits at the yogurt museum in Studen Izvor, Grigoroff’s birthplace, emphasize that yogurt is not just “our” ancient tradition, but also a health food contributing to the prosperity of modern civilization. Together with the old pots and vessels once used in yogurt preparation, one can see a miniature model of morerecent industrial production. Additionally, detailed information is provided about the advantages of the Bulgarian technology and the health benefits of the native bacterium. Another information panel describes an international symposium dedicated to Bulgarian yogurt, which was held to celebrate the centenary of the discovery of Lactobacillus bulgaricus. The story of Louis XI of France (1423–1483), whose stomach problems were cured with sheep-milk yogurt from Bulgaria, further emphasizes the significance of Bulgarian cultural traditions to the popularity of yogurt in the Western world. A man in his sixties who visited the museum with a group of colleagues shared with me his view that, since Bulgarian industry and agriculture were completely destroyed in the post-socialist transition, there was nothing else to be proud of but Bulgarian yogurt. He was critical of what he considered the complete abdication of the state from the national economy, resulting in many manufacturers and dubious product quality. “During socialism, at least we knew what we ate,” was his conclusion, echoing comments by urban consumers recorded by Yuson Jung (2009) in Sofia. Such attitudes, however, should not be seen as an attempt to preserve socialist values of sociality and collective responsibility, as is the case with Russian nationalist food practices (Caldwell 2002). Similar to the reactions of other consumers in the post-socialist world, who interpret the infusion of foreign foods as evidence of the decline of domestic goods (Patico 2003), the suspicion with which many Bulgarians view foreign food technologies and nontraditional ingredients in dairy production reflects their consciousness of lost national positions on the international market and a drop of status, both at the individual and at the national level. In this sense, the celebration of yogurt as traditional Bulgarian food should not necessarily be interpreted as a reaction against the type of standard, mass-produced products seen in the increasingly industrialized global market (Lysaght 1994; Sarasua and Scholliers 2005). On the contrary, many consumers (especially the elderly) remember with nostalgia the taste of industrial yogurt produced to a strict state standard that would get sharply sour only after three days, just like homemade yogurt. During socialism, Bulgaria’s position as one of the largest food exporters in the Soviet Bloc and the achievements of the country’s agricultural industry were used

Reflecting Authenticity • 185 by the state as a means of propaganda. Few were those, however, who believed the socialist goods, however good or safe, could compete with Western goods in fancy packages. With the end of socialism, many people expected that the slogan “we export for the Soviets” would be replaced by the much more attractive phrase “we export for the West.” However, unsuccessful agricultural reforms and an inability to meet European Union criteria in food production practically closed the doors to the European market. What is more, the loss of the big Soviet market and closures of production facilities led to such a substantial decrease in agricultural production that Bulgaria turned from a self-sufficient country into a food importer. Industry has also suffered from the so-called shock therapy reforms of the 1990s. Since almost 46 percent of the working population was employed in industry, and even villagers were engaged in nonagricultural activities (Creed 1998), post-socialist deindustrialization led to deprivation and a loss of status. “We always bring up the rear” (vinagi sme na opashkata) is a common phrase used to express the shared perception of Bulgaria’s weak position in the global economy. In contrast, the image of beautiful Bulgaria, as reflected in the Japanese mirror, is clear of problematic issues such as economic instability and an unsuccessful transition. Born out of mutually complementary discourses of tradition (the homeland of yogurt) and modernity (bulgaricus is number one), yogurt has emerged as a counterweight to Bulgaria’s national pessimism. In this sense, the disregard for “foreign” bacteria and new tastes on the yogurt market should not be read as a resurgence of local practices against perceived threats of cultural homogeneity from globalization (Watson 1998). Rather, it is a token of the importance Bulgarian people attach to yogurt as a source of national pride in times of economic instability and social change. And it is because Bulgarian yogurt has crossed the borders of the country to become a symbol of health and happiness in one of the world’s economic powers that Bulgarians can feel connected to the modern developed world. Thus, as a bridge between Bulgarian and international consumers, rural and urban households, individuals and government bodies, yogurt has come back to its homeland to provide an alternative discourse of the national self.

Homemade and Ranked Number One: Rural Voices in Yogurt Discourses In July 2010, Daniela was the first of my Bulgarian friends to inform me that the government was going to restore the state standard for Bulgarian yogurt that existed during socialism. “No additives and dry milk, no foreign bacteria and GMOs [genetically modified organisms] in our yogurt” was the way Daniela summarized the national standard. As a result of recent media exposure of dubious production practices in the dairy sector, most consumers embraced the idea of having the old standard back.6 The minister of food and agriculture promised that yogurt would be

186 • Food Between the Country and the City followed by other traditional foods in this revival of government standards, because it was important to “protect Bulgarian traditions and consumers’ health.” However, the national standard totally excluded regional yogurt varieties, and like the high regulatory standards set by the European Union (Thorne 2003), it works in favor of large companies that can afford to comply. As Jeffrey Pilcher has observed in relation to the Mexican tortilla industry, “[T]he homogenizing effects of national food processing companies may pose as great a threat to local cultures as the more visible cultural imperialism represented by Ronald McDonald” (Pilcher 2002: 223). The voices of those threatened by such policies, however, rarely reach government officials and policy makers, who are supposedly committed to the protection of Bulgarian traditions. These traditions obviously refer to the technology and yogurt cultures used in mass production during socialism, and government policy prioritizes large-scale agriculture and industrial production. The assumption that smaller farms cannot become competitive in a European sense has left hundreds of thousands of subsistence farms without state support (Hirata et al. 2010). The growing polarization between rural people and urban-based policy makers provokes distrust and indignation in local farmers, evident in their scornful comments about “those above.” Now, the tourist market for folklore and rurality is considered as the only possible route to revive rural areas and connect them to the global economy. Recently, the government has initiated the creation of a culinary map highlighting “authentic” foods. Ethnographic exhibitions and food festivals featuring local culinary traditions have been established in a number of towns and villages.7 Even though the Yogurt Fair in the town of Razgrad has not reached the popularity of the Rose Festival held in the so-called valley of roses, according to the Razgrad municipal government, the number of international tourists is increasing annually. It is difficult to say to what extent this event contributes to the economic revitalization of the region, as resources seemed to be transferred to urban-based tour operators rather than to the local community. However, it did arouse excitement and enthusiasm among some of the villagers. The keen tourist interest in grandmothers’ performances and pots of yogurt was a source of great pride for the local women. They competed for the best-tasting yogurt, gave demonstrations of yogurt preparation, and eagerly explained to visitors that their yogurt had a magical effect on everyone who tasted it. Participation, however, is strictly regulated by the municipality. Local women need to apply for permission to sell their products; their products have to be inspected by the Institute of Hygiene and Veterinary Control and have to be sold in pots bought through the mediation of the municipality. In other words, local grandmothers and their homemade products, announced as cultural heritage, undergo a process of selection, standardization, and control—cultural heritage was subject to management and subjugated to the needs of the tourist market. That the festival was seen as one of the few possibilities to connect the region with national and global markets is indicative of the ambiguity of economic reforms and social transformations in

Reflecting Authenticity • 187 post-socialist Bulgaria, with its falling standards of living, increasing economic gaps, and “ghost” villages resulting from migration. With the closure of shops, schools, and public transportation routes, more and more villages have turned into museums of desolation. Life for those who have remained has become a hard-fought struggle for survival. Health deterioration, rising prices for forage, and discriminatory subsidy policies have forced many villagers to give up their farming activities. Ironically, the local women who proudly recommend their yogurt to the tourists during the festival are forced to rely more and more on shop-bought products for their daily meals. At the same time, those who still can produce their own jars of yogurt are not allowed any market presence, except for the three days of the festival when they serve as a tourist attraction. As in other post-socialist countries (see, for example, Mincyte 2009; Nickolson 2003), strict measures are adopted to curb the informal distribution of raw milk and dairy products, viewed as a public-health hazard. Thus, the same key actors who promote local foods and rural traditions, helping to define them as cultural heritage, turn out to support large-scale farming and industrial food production. Meanwhile, yogurt discourses celebrate the countryside as the cradle of national culture and define rural people as guardians of tradition. Images of a happy, problemfree rural life dominate the public space in advertisements, tourist brochures, and museum exhibitions. For urban tourists, the pots of grandmothers’ yogurt are attractive because the symbolism surrounding them offers answers to fundamental questions about “where we come from, where we are, and where we are going” (Selwyn 1996: 148). Conforming to such images, local women act in accordance with the social roles assigned to them by public discourses. They denounce stressful urban lifestyles and the artificial taste of industrial foods “made for profit.” As in the case of women from Razgrad who take pride in being viewed as masters of yogurt, such discourses are as important to rural people to sustain their self-esteem and identity as to urban tourists and consumers in their search for roots and authenticity. In other words, such images play a significant role not only in displays of national authenticity, but also in valorization of rural people and the countryside itself. It might be argued that the rural voices insisting on the superiority of local products are an attempt to upset existing cultural hierarchies. As Gerald Creed and Barbara Ching (1997: 17) note, in some sense, it is the reversibility of the rural/urban hierarchy that makes these distinctions so culturally useful. However, these rural voices are not an expression of some self-conscious, concentrated effort to resist the hegemony of urban cultural values (Bauer 1992). Rather, it is the accent on modernity in yogurt discourses (scientific achievements and internationally recognized Lactobacillus bulgaricus) that gives people in rural areas a sense of cultural importance. The public attention to the yogurt festival and the selection of yogurt as a national symbol were sources of pride to local women; these women might be playing second fiddle in political and economic life, but homemade yogurt was number one and their own cultural contribution to sustaining the nation was undisputed. Hence,

188 • Food Between the Country and the City many of the women continued to participate in public performances as masters of yogurt, insisting on the authentic taste of their products. Such engagements show that local people are not merely passive recipients of an external world that impinges on them (Macdonald 1997: 175). On the contrary, like Slovenian fishers engaged in rural tourism (Rogelja 2006), people in rural Bulgaria seem to be aware of the external images of them and try to use these representations in a pragmatic way. In this sense, the establishment of the Yogurt Fair in Razgrad turned into an instrument for local women to nuance the leading voices in yogurt discourses and to adopt them as an opportunity to assert their own cultural value—as national heritage and guardians of tradition.

Concluding Thoughts: Local and (Inter)National Interplays in Pots of Yogurt What is particularly interesting about yogurt in present-day Bulgaria is that, in spite of the great diversity of brands, there is only one dominant taste on the market, and that is the sour-tasting plain yogurt containing Lactobacillus bulgaricus. Almost all yogurt advertisements show romanticized images from rural Bulgaria, celebrating village life as the cradle of national traditions. The mobilization of the countryside as a branding technique in company strategies reflects its strong appeal to the postsocialist consumer. Food is being sold through stories (Freidberg 2003), and Bulgaria as the homeland of yogurt is the story created by a Japanese company to place its product in a given cultural context. The homeland discourse is important as a marketing strategy, both in Bulgaria and in Japan, because the ascribed characteristics of food can serve as a means for sustaining a relationship with space and territory in a context of dissolving territorial specificities (Holtzman 2006: 367). This is why grandmother’s taste, with its imagery of locality and familial tradition, is so appealing. Moreover, through the quotidian consumption of yogurt with Lactobacillus bulgaricus coming from the Rhodope Mountains, for example, people reconnect symbolically to places they have long left behind. They also get a sense of shared cultural experience, not only with other members of the Bulgarian nation, but also with an imagined international consumer who supposedly shares similar ideals of taste, health, and authenticity. Another interesting aspect in the case of Bulgarian yogurt is that its strength as a key national symbol is based upon a commercial and symbolic relationship with an Asian capitalist state. No other socialist state has followed such a path of national identification, and no other Eastern European country arouses such strong associations in Japanese people. In spite of the great geographic, politico-economic, and cultural distances between Bulgaria and Japan in the 1970s, the food of the Bulgarian people turned out to be in the right place at the right time to evolve into a strong international brand. It is disputable whether Bulgarian yogurt, with its claims

Reflecting Authenticity • 189 of health and authenticity, could have flourished on the common socialist market. For one thing, similar traditional milk products (such as kefir and matsoni) could be found throughout Eastern Europe; in addition, the state-controlled (but not consumer-driven) common market needed mainly basic (and brandless) commodities to provide nutrition to the working class. To be recognized as a significant part of Europe has historically been a Bulgarian national ideal. However, the road to Europe has always been difficult and obscured by various economic, political, or ideological factors. Known as the most-loyal satellite of the Soviet Union, Bulgaria was not a desired partner for cooperation in the West. Being aware of the enormous technological gap between the East and the West, Bulgarian national leaders turned to Japan for cooperation (Kandilarov 2004). Although they were often scolded by their big Soviet brother, the USSR, for their ambitions to prove Bulgaria to be the Japan of the Balkans, they could develop strong cultural and economic exchanges with the Asian nation. However, yogurt became truly Bulgarian not during the socialist era, when most people were not aware of the homeland discourse evolving in Japan, but only after the collapse of the socialist regime, in a context of material and cultural dispossession (Kalb 2009: 214). As strict food regulations accompanying Bulgaria’s membership in the European Union drew new, invisible boundaries in the system of production and consumption, growing numbers of people were marginalized, losing their previous illusions and definitions. Once transformed into a meaningful cultural product for the Japanese consumer, Bulgarian yogurt came back to its homeland to convince Bulgarian consumers of its sacredness and their own national significance. Representing cherished national ideals in times of shaky cultural values, yogurt has transformed itself into a cultural emblem, a healing balm for some of the national traumas. It is because food becomes part of our selves and our bodies—and, at the same time, is an object of national policies, international trade, and supranational regulations— that foodstuffs can travel through space and time. The case of Bulgarian yogurt is an example of how food, with its almost “magical property of jumping scale” (Dunn 2009: 208), links political bodies and the bodies of individuals, national spaces and rural places, the global economy and household economies. Thus, pots of yogurt connect grandmothers in rural Bulgaria with policy makers in Sofia and Brussels (where the European Union is headquartered), with tourists, consumers, emigrants (and ethnographers) from different places and countries. At the same time, as grandmother’s yogurt was undergoing processes of industrialization, standardization, and global marketization, increasing numbers of people were marginalized and left out of these networks of production, regulation, and consumption. Interestingly, the appeal to place and tradition in post-socialist Bulgaria is not a rejection of industrialization, technology development, and global large-scale production, as in the case of alternative-food philosophies. As Manning and Uplisashvili (2007: 637) note in relation to the dual lineages of Georgian beer brands, nostalgia for preindustrial practices and traditions is characteristic of those who feel that their

190 • Food Between the Country and the City claim to modernity is unchallengeable. Although for some post-socialist consumers, the diversity of tastes on supermarket shelves may be a sign of the normalization of the country (Jung 2009), few are those who have reached a Western quality of life. As people’s choices are inevitably formed through discourses and narratives (Scholliers 2001: 9), the food they eat every day cannot be separated from their ideas and images of food, ranging from the beautiful Bulgarian scenes in Japanese advertisements to the heated discussions and notions of the Bulgarian tradition in the mass media. Since discourses are taken for granted as part of the fabric of reality, even those individuals who are now viewed (and view themselves) as guardians of tradition are under the spell of the native bacillus. The continuous interplay between the traditional and the modern, the regional and the national, the global and the local (Wilk 2002; 2006) that occurs in the quotidian production and consumption of yogurt gives people a sense of what it is to be Bulgarian in an era of shaky cultural values and dramatic social change. Today, each pot of grandmother’s yogurt contains not just a health-giving substance with millions of organisms of a specific bacterium, but also notions of national tradition, modernity, and the success of Homo bulgaricus.

Acknowledgments This paper has benefited significantly from the critical readings of friends and colleagues. I am especially grateful to José Manuel Sobral, Nuno Miguel Domingos, and Harry G. West for providing me with great inspiration and constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper.

–11– Unpacking the Mediterranean Diet: Agriculture, Food, and Health Monica Truninger and Dulce Freire

In 2010, UNESCO included the Mediterranean diet on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. In this diet, olive oil, cereals, fruits, and vegetables are essential foods, together with moderate amounts of fish, meat, and dairy products and many condiments and spices. Wine or infusions are the accompanying drinks. According to UNESCO, the Mediterranean diet is based on “a set of skills, knowledge, practices and traditions ranging from the landscape to the table, including the crops, harvesting, fishing, conservation, processing, preparation and, particularly, consumption of food.”1 UNESCO considers that this is a “nutritional model that has remained constant over time and space.” This chapter intends to unpack, in part, this institutionalized discourse. Despite the emphasis placed on the immutability of the Mediterranean diet model, the gastronomic heritage common to several countries of the Mediterranean rim follows the social dynamics that emerge and evolve at the interface of the city and the countryside. Since the end of the 1940s, several studies have pointed out the health benefits of a particular set of food practices that is common in some Mediterranean countries, in contrast to more typical practices in Northern Europe and North America. This healthful diet gained recognition by the World Health Organization, in 1994, as a “nutrition reference model” (CIHEAM 2012: 24), and it is presently endorsed by the American Heart Association and the British Heart Foundation (Hoffman and Gerber 2012: 19). The recognition by UNESCO has not only endorsed the therapeutic character of this diet, but also amplified the social and cultural relevance of foods and foodways that have best adapted to the agro-ecological conditions of the Mediterranean region. The standardization of the Mediterranean diet reinforced by national and international institutions resonates at the global level and reconfigures local practices. In a period in which agriculture and food are again at the core of international debates, the heritage status assigned to the Mediterranean diet contributes to repositioning the rural Mediterranean territories alongside transcontinental urban spaces. An analysis of this repositioning enables a revisiting of Raymond Williams’s (1973)

– 191 –

192 • Food Between the Country and the City writings, as an aid in thinking about new configurations of city-rural relations within the present context of competitiveness and sustainability of agro-food markets. In this chapter, the following questions are addressed. How has the Mediterranean diet been assembled and appropriated by epistemic communities, particularly in nutrition and the health sciences? What is its composition and nutritional outcomes? How authentic is it? To what extent is the Mediterranean region responding to the demand for quality-food diets? Taking the emblematic case of olive oil, how is the expansion of industrial olive groves matching health recommendations and market demands? Reflection on these issues is based on empirical data for Portugal. The Portuguese case is used as a lens with potential to disclose the many changes that are affecting the Mediterranean region. Albeit there was no intention of reducing this vast region, with its complex meanings and practices, to the ones of a single country, the Portuguese case is deemed sufficiently rich to illustrate these changes. In fact, this country is neither covered by UNESCO’s classification2 nor located on the Mediterranean Sea rim. However, scholars have repeatedly considered Portugal a Mediterranean country (see, for example, Gilmore 1982; Ribeiro 1998; Silbert 1966), a discussion we address but do not explore in great detail, for it is not our focus. This chapter concerns three central aspects. First, we examine the discourses produced by medicine- and nutrition-related epistemic communities about the Mediterranean, focusing in particular on the Southern European countries. It is relevant to analyze how the model diet was construed and disseminated by nutritionists and other health professionals, as well as the types of discourses put forward by public bodies to guide populations on how to care for their health and nutrition (DíazMéndez and Gómez-Benito 2010: 437). At the same time, as we witness the increasing popularization of the Mediterranean diet in several Northern European countries, the traditional Mediterranean countries, exemplified by Portugal, are distancing themselves from the ideal type of this diet (Durão et al. 2008). Second, the authenticity of the Mediterranean diet is going to be assessed, together with an appreciation of its variance across space and time and its appropriation by past rural populations. Since the nineteenth century, the discourses produced by geographers, agronomists, economists, and other social scientists have reflected a conflicting relationship between an advanced, urban, and industrial Northern Europe and a backward, rural, and agricultural Southern Europe. In the latter, significant structural societal and economic changes happened much later, even in agriculture (Lains and Pinilla 2009). It is apposite to evaluate how those images of backwardness attached to rural areas and to particular ways of eating show continuities, or discontinuities, with the assemblage of the Mediterranean diet as a collectively recognized dietary model to solve myriad health problems of modern urban societies. Finally, the impacts on local territories of agricultural and commercial practices that sustain the global diffusion of the Mediterranean diet are going to be assessed, taking the Portuguese cases of the olive tree and oil as illustrative. These are important food icons that have connected the different communities that historically

Unpacking the Mediterranean Diet • 193 occupied the Mediterranean rim, giving a certain sense of homogeneity to this area. As olive oil is present in several gastronomic traditions of this region, it can be considered an essential element in the Mediterranean diet’s identity. Moreover, olive oil became an integral part of healthful diets, given the importance attributed to it by the medical sciences. Olive oil has attained a high level of gastronomic versatility and prestige that has enabled it to outflank both an image of scarcity associated with the rural Mediterranean and the images rendered by gourmet food niches. It is rapidly turning into a global product for the masses, associated with the preservation of a common good: the health status of world populations.

The Mediterranean Diet: The Scientific Construction of Social Practices The arguments and recommendations that underpin the preservation of the Mediterranean diet denote that traditional and rural eating habits should permeate the urban foodways of any continent. On the one hand, this diet values nutrient-rich plantbased foods, which were losing prominence and weight in the food habits of industrialized countries since the late nineteenth century (Grigg 1995). On the other hand, apart from infusions, the diet also promotes wine, a drink that has been dissociated from a healthy image since the temperance campaigns at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century—and especially since the generalization of anti-alcoholism campaigns after World War II (Caro 1990; Freire 2010). This diet also tries to conform to the religious beliefs and culinary specificities of local communities. As it is inscribed in the UNESCO writings that define the principles of this diet: “The system is rooted in respect for the territory and biodiversity, and ensures the conservation and development of traditional activities and crafts linked to fishing and farming.”3 How has the Mediterranean diet achieved such iconic status as a healthful diet? There is evidence, from archaeological records and ancient Greek, Roman, and Arabic texts, of the diets historically prominent in the Mediterranean region. Such evidence points toward the existence of well-nourished populations that based their diets on plants, bread, spices, sweets, beer, and wine. However, it was from three thorough studies on the eating habits of some Mediterranean populations that more firm evidence emerged on the health benefits of this diet. These were the Rockefeller Foundation study, led by Leland Allbaugh in 1948; Ancel Keys’ Seven Countries Study, in the early 1950s; and the EURATOM study that took place between 1963 and 1965 (Nestle 1995). The results of these studies, conducted in Italy, Crete, and other parts of Greece, pointed out that the diet of those populations was mostly composed of plant foods and that the main fat was olive oil. People in the areas studied had a higher life expectancy than Northern Europeans or Americans and were also less prone to cardiovascular problems.

194 • Food Between the Country and the City Thus, it was based on a diet pattern found in the Cretan population in the 1940s and 1950s that the Mediterranean diet model was built and given legitimacy as a food pattern that improved health and life expectancy among its consumers. And yet, it is relevant to point out that, in Allbaugh’s study in Crete, a discrepancy was found between the optimistic views of the scientific team conducting research on the island (surveys, food inventories, interviews) and the perceptions of the Cretan rural population. Despite the surprising results regarding people’s health status, a member of one of the families studied complained: “We are hungry most of the time” (Allbaugh 1953: 31). When people were asked about the foods they most longed for, meat came first (signaled by 72 percent as their favorite food), followed by rice, fish, pasta, butter, and cheese (Nestle 1995: 1315S). Very similar results appeared in the food surveys conducted by several authors (Carvalho and Gomes 1973; Lima Bastos and Barros 1943; Silva 1948) in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in different rural areas of northern and southern Portugal (such as Alentejo, Vila Real, and Santo Tirso). In these surveys, respondents longed for meat, milk, cheese, fish, and fruit, complaining that food scarcity was a regular feature in daily life (Freire 2011). Maria M. Valagão’s in-depth study on the food habits of farmworkers and ex-emigrants in a region of Alto Douro in the 1980s reported several statements confirming the hardship of Mediterranean rural life. One ex-emigrant evokes life in the region in the 1960s, offering a glimpse of foodways at the time: “When I left 20 years ago, we would eat a broth with maize bread [caldo com broa] and we would eat nothing else but codfish and sardines, and one sardine would be often shared by three” (Valagão 1990: 329). In fact, in Portugal, at least since the nineteenth century, meat was hardly ever consumed in rural areas, with the exception of the less economically valued parts of the pig, such as bacon (Sobral 1999). Meat consumption was mostly confined to celebratory occasions (such as weddings) or ritual events (such as the killing of the pig); meat was eaten more frequently only by the elite (Valagão 1990; Freire 2011). Despite this gloomy scenario of misery, scarcity, and even, at times, hunger in the Mediterranean region, Ancel Keys’s Seven Countries Study was important in calling attention to how a reduction of fat and cholesterol in the diet could improve heart health and, thus, lessen the incidence of cardiovascular diseases. The diet-heart hypothesis (despite its controversial views4) has influenced in a major way the construction of what later became the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Pyramid, introduced in 1992. The path toward this Food Pyramid began with the Dietary Goals for the United States released in 1977 by the United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, in which the consumption of saturated fats was discouraged, following the research of Ancel Keys on the Mediterranean diet. However, vested interests around the meat and dairy industries were severely troubled, and later that year, the U.S. government was forced to modify the goals and include recommendations for meat and dairy consumption. Such general guidelines remained little changed to the present day, apart from variations in graphic

Unpacking the Mediterranean Diet • 195 representation (e.g., the USDA food pyramid was replaced by the MyPlate graphic representation and related guidelines in 2011). USDA guidelines and the Mediterranean diet model influenced each other—and have been under pressure from industry lobbies over the years. Following more studies and scientific interest around the Mediterranean diet, the principles and a pyramid graphically representing them were presented by Walter Willet at the 1993 International Conference on the Diets of the Mediterranean, held at the Harvard School of Public Health and aimed at informing the American population of the advantages of eating this diet. A year later, the pyramid was copyrighted by the nonprofit organization Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust (Dernini et al. 2012). The pyramid also offered advice on the frequency of physical exercise, but it was less clear on other practices, such as commensality, cooking, family meals, and so forth. Interestingly, USDA nutritional guidelines published in 1995 introduced a novelty that might have gotten inspiration from the Mediterranean diet pyramid of 1993: physical exercise appeared for the first time as a daily recommendation for the American population. The Mediterranean diet model shows an adaptation of the eating patterns of the Cretan rural population in the 1960s to the urban habits of the American population. The inclusion of meat and dairy products was one of the compromises made. As Marion Nestle clarifies: “Because animal foods are principal sources of fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol in American diets, the dietary guidelines necessarily should promote predominantly plant based diets similar to those traditionally consumed in the Mediterranean and Asia. That this point may not be evident from U.S. food guides is at least in part a result of pressures from meat and dairy food producers to ensure that their products retain a dominant position in American diets” (Nestle 1995: 1319S). This opens up a discussion about the authenticity5 of the Mediterranean diet. Some foods were possibly included to fit an idealized healthful diet constructed by epistemic communities across time. It also shows the strength of market pressures to include advice on daily consumption of particular foods that were not frequent in the diets of the populations living in rural Mediterranean areas (for example, dairy products and meat from cattle). Given the controversies about the authenticity of the Mediterranean diet appropriated by American nutritionists, in which meat and dairy were included with some weight, a scientifically revised pyramid was introduced in 2010. This new pyramid was independent from the Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust and was put forward by the Mediterranean Diet Foundation (Fundación Dieta Mediterránea), created in 1996 and based in Barcelona, Spain. The aim of this foundation is “safeguarding the millenary heritage shared by the populations of the Mediterranean basin whose lifestyle and customs from agricultural practices, cooking, feeding and physical activity practised regularly have aroused the interest of eminent scientists from around the world in recent decades for its contribution to the prevention of many diseases.”6 The foundation promotes research on the Mediterranean diet, regarding

196 • Food Between the Country and the City its health, historical, cultural, culinary, agricultural, and environmental aspects, and it disseminates the results of these studies. This research organization, with clear objectives for promoting this diet, epitomizes a response to the Americanization of the Mediterranean diet, aiming at preserving its authenticity. This move toward a search for an alleged authenticity of the Mediterranean diet becomes visible when we analyze the new pyramid that this group of experts puts forward. A clear shift in the type of advice is apparent. Instead of focusing on individual foods (olive oil, fruits and vegetables, seeds and grains), the new pyramid gives prominence to advice on changing not only foods but also lifestyles. The new Mediterranean diet pyramid (see Figure 11.1) encapsulates a lifestyle focus, in which the origin of food, the way we eat, how we eat, and with whom we eat are all offered as guidelines toward what is believed by epistemic communities to be a healthful lifestyle. Apart from food recommendations, a particular food culture and lifestyle are advanced in order to achieve overall health. As it is stated in the UNESCO text: “The Mediterranean diet . . . promotes social interaction, since communal meals are the cornerstone of social customs and festive events.”7 Ideas of community belonging and a sense of togetherness at the table are rendered by the images inscribed in the graphic representation of this diet. As stated by Sandro Dernini and colleagues (2012: 71): “What emerges over the years is the evolution of the Mediterranean Diet from a range of specific foods to a comprehensive Mediterranean lifestyle in which food, health, culture, people, and sustainability all interact, even if its practice in the Mediterranean is diminishing.” Eating should be performed together with family and/or with friends around a table, strengthening conviviality. It is encouraged that families with children take on cooking activities together, possibly evocative of concerns about the demise of cooking skills among the younger generation. Physical exercise or leisure activities in the open air should preferably be done with others, where joy and a sense of community are strengthened. Finally, it is encouraged that people use foods produced locally, in season, which (allegedly) lessens impacts on the environment. The last premise links the Mediterranean diet to a sustainable and low-carbon-footprint diet, as has been recently recognized by the Food and Agriculture Organization at the international scientific symposium Biodiversity and Sustainable Diets United Against Hunger (Burlingame and Dernini 2012). And yet, these are very problematic assumptions about Mediterranean foodways’ and rural lifestyles, which are going to be scrutinized in more detail in the next section.

The Mediterranean Region, Diet, and Authenticity There is a long debate in the social sciences literature about the limits and the definition of the Mediterranean. Since the nineteenth century, this term is a polysemic

Serving size based on frugality and local habits

Guidelines for Adult population

Weekly

Sweets < – 2s

Potatoes ≤ 3s

Wine in moderation and respecting social beliefs

Red meat < 2s Processed meat < – 1s

White meat 2s Fish/Seafood > – 2s

Every day

Dairy 2s (preferably low fat)

Every Main Meal

Olive/Nuts/Seeds 1–2s

Fruits 1–2 | Vegetables > – 2s Variety of colours/textures (Cooked/Raw)

Eggs 2–4s > 2s Legumes – Herbs/Spices/Garlic/ Onions (less added salt) Variety of flavours Olive Oil Bread/Pasta/Rice/ Couscous/Other cereals 1–2s (preferably whole grain) Water and herbal infusions

Regular physical activity Adequate rest Conviviality 2010 edition

Figure 11.1 New Mediterranean diet pyramid.

Biodiversity and seasonality Traditional, local and eco-friendly products Culinary activities s = Serving

© 2010 Fundación Dieta Mediterránea The use and promotion of this pyramid is recommended without any restriction

Mediterranean Diet Pyramid: a lifestyle for today

198 • Food Between the Country and the City concept that lends itself to multiple meanings and uses (Ruel 1991: 11). In that century, geographers (for example, Conrad Malte-Brun and Elisée Reclus) attached the term Mediterranean, for the first time, to a type of climate, consecrating it as an autonomous object of study (Ruel 1991). Later on, in the twentieth century, the French historian Fernand Braudel, writing in 1949, contributed to this debate with a detailed examination of the geophysical, environmental, and human elements of the Mediterranean world (Braudel 1973). Braudel’s book, which became a classic, features a complex Mediterranean characterized by great diversity of ecosystems and cultural heritage across a vast territory that surrounds this inland sea. By taking the definition of a place according to its foods and autochthonous crops, Braudel emphasizes the olive tree as an icon of this region (Braudel 1973). The distribution of the olive tree sets the limits of the Mediterranean. The Portuguese geographer Orlando Ribeiro backed this claim up (Ribeiro 1998), but other authors argue that it is the fig tree that should be considered as the plant for demarcating the region (Matvejevic 1999). Although valuing different products, these views point out the need for a particular climate characterized by warm-to-hot and dry summers and cool moist winters, with soil and morphological features wherein crops such as grape vines, fig trees, olive trees, and wheat grow well. Despite the fact that Portugal does not sit on the Mediterranean Sea rim, it shares these ecosystem features and has most of these products in its territory.8 For many years, the Southern European Mediterranean countries were attached to stereotypical images of the rural and the countryside (in opposition to the cosmopolitan images of modern towns associated with Northern European countries) and to backwardness, illiteracy, and poverty. Such images, to a certain extent, matched the reality. To illustrate, Portugal was considered a rural country up until the late 1960s. At the time, around 50 percent of its working population was employed in agriculture, wherein agriculture contributed with 27.2 percent of GDP (Lains 2009). The food situation was characterized by significant nutritional imbalances (a lack of meat proteins, calcium, and vitamins), scarcity, and nutrient deficiencies in many regions of Portugal (Freire 2011). However, since the 1960s, with the intensification of a rural exodus combined with other social changes, there was a rapid process of de-ruralization, with a quick shift in employment from agriculture to service sectors (Ferrão 1996). In 1950, agriculture contributed 31 percent to GDP; by 1970, the figure had dropped to 12 percent, and it was 8 percent in the 1990s (Soares 2005). These social and economic shifts were reflected in pronounced transformations in the diet of the population. In the 1950s, the Portuguese had access to 2,400 calories daily per capita; in the 1970s, the amount was 3,000 calories—a figure that has been part of the nutritional recommendations of health professionals and international organizations since the 1940s9 but that the Portuguese would reach only thirty years later (Freire 2011). This rapid shift also meant that, at the symbolic and social levels, a strong attachment and connection to the countryside would linger for decades in the memories

Unpacking the Mediterranean Diet • 199 and practices of the Portuguese population (Truninger 2013). Despite the movement of people from the countryside to coastal cities (Porto, Lisbon, Setúbal), looking for better working conditions and an increase in available income, a strong link prevails to rural social networks important to securing noncommoditized food provisioning (Valagão 1990; Truninger 2013). It is to this rural food heritage that nowadays many claims and images are linked in the marketing of the Mediterranean diet, in Portugal or even in Spain (Díaz-Méndez and Gómez-Benito 2010). This rural past is often portrayed as idyllic, romantic, and quiet and is associated with quality food (Schmidt et al. 2004; Williams 1973). The hardship of country lives, where dietary nutritional deficiencies and even hunger were common, is hidden away in the bucolic images rendered by the marketing of the Mediterranean diet. Moreover, the Mediterranean diet promotes and renders an image that eating together should be done at the table (see Figure 11.1). There is scant evidence that poor rural families before the 1960s would manage to eat together at the table and according to fixed times on a regular basis, at least in Portugal. First, because in many rural houses the idea of eating at the table was not common, people would often eat next to the fireplace and from the same bowl. Second, mealtimes and domestic routines were often dictated by the rhythms and paces of other activities outside the home (such as farming) that impinged upon synchronization of family members’ schedules. To illustrate, Valagão’s study notes that, even in the 1980s, small farmers in the region of Alto Douro struggled to have their meals at fixed times, repeating a long-lasting pattern. Dinnertime was dependent on the demands of farming work. Only big farmers and landlords could afford to have regular mealtimes at the table, but even for these people, contingencies of everyday life would interfere. The mythologizing of Mediterranean lifestyles such as eating together at the table enshrines ideals rarely attained in practice. Such ideals may reflect middle-class expectations about eating proper and wholesome meals (Jackson 2009). Nowadays, given the major demographic and cultural transformations in Mediterranean societies—increasing female participation in the paid workforce, the use of domestic technologies and convenience foods, fragmentation of the overall time families could spend eating together (Jackson 2009; Warde 1997)—it is difficult to imagine how these guidelines are implemented in practice. It is important to note, however, that moral expectations about eating together do command the organization of eating in many families in everyday life, and people do make a daily effort to orchestrate eating events around regular and fixed schedules. The process of standardization of the Mediterranean diet, mostly driven by medicine and nutrition epistemic communities, highlighted particular features of the Mediterranean diet and foodways while hiding others from view. This selection process of making some things visible while occluding others was construed to fit high-tech agricultural production, global markets, and urban consumers, affecting rural-city relations in significant ways. The marketing of the Mediterranean diet provokes a unified and single image of it, connected to certain products and landscapes.

200 • Food Between the Country and the City It standardizes and normalizes a particular notion of the Mediterranean region and its foodways (Busch 2011). In the following section, we wish to make visible the existence of transformations in rural regions of Portugal that are departing from these idealized notions to produce yet another (transfigured) Mediterranean—one that is exported to global markets and deemed as the authentic one, based on the premise of delivering health, nutrition, freshness, taste, and food quality.

Country-City Relations, Markets, and Agricultural Techniques The promotion of the Mediterranean diet associates it not only with healthful food, but also with images of a rural territory characterized by sustainable farming practices. In line with the policies that the European Union has promoted since the 1990s, UNESCO and the Fundación Dieta Mediterránea aim precisely to support local and seasonal products, to preserve biodiversity, and to minimize environmental impacts. In recent years, international agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization are also helping to generalize these recommendations. In a European and global context in which biodiversity and sustainability are set out as priorities for public policy, it is necessary to assess how the growing international demand for products historically associated with the territories of the Mediterranean rim is being fulfilled. Olive oil and the olive tree have been two of the main protagonists of recent transformations. Historically, the European Union countries are the largest producers of olive oil, and they also represent about 60 percent of world consumption of this product. In recent years, however, sales have increased to other destinations, especially to countries that traditionally were not large olive oil importers, despite their having received large numbers of immigrants from Mediterranean countries. In 2011, the most important world markets for European olive oil were the Unites States (accounting for 38 percent of European exports) and, to a lesser extent, Australia, Brazil, Canada, and Japan (with values that varied between 4 and 9 percent).10 According to the Portuguese olive oil producers and distributors trade association, the increasingly widespread popularity of olive oil is opening new markets, and expectations for the future are optimistic. It is estimated that, by 2020, Portuguese olive oil exports will grow by 30 percent. However, even with increased production, it is expected that, at least in Portugal, producers will be unable to satisfy all of the increased demand for olive oil in international markets. There is, therefore, the ambition to produce even more. There are three routes for responding to the growing urban demand for products associated with the Mediterranean diet, in particular olive oil. Only two depend on the agro-ecological conditions available in the old Mediterranean and that can also be found in Portugal. One route follows the exploitation of the olive tree in rain-fed agricultural systems, which historically have marked the experiences of Mediterranean

Unpacking the Mediterranean Diet • 201

Figure 11.2 Average production of olive oil in Portugal from harvest years 1940–1941 to 2009–2010 (Matos and Martins 2013).

agriculture and rural societies. Another route is associated with expansion of the irrigation agro-industry,11 which has taken place particularly since the end of World War II, resulting in changes in farming practices and crop varieties. As Portugal has Mediterranean characteristics in almost all its regions, especially in inland areas, olive groves are scattered throughout the country, at elevations up to 700 meters above sea level. Olive groves in dry areas with uneven topography have several characteristics—for example, the trees grow slowly and mechanization is difficult—that limit productivity and increase production costs considerably. These were factors that affected olive groves’ economic profitability, leading either to their abandonment or to the promotion of specific public policies that protected this subsector. During the twentieth century, due to a scarcity of olive oil to supply the domestic market, the Portuguese government promoted the expansion of olive groves, and as a result, production increased in the 1950s (Figure 11.2). Until the 1970s, olive oil was the main fat consumed in the country, a food pattern that prevailed because of the protectionist policies of the dictatorship (1933–1974) of António de Oliveira Salazar and his successors. However, the increase in production was based on the expansion of traditional olive groves: local varieties of trees, scattered olive trees on mountainsides, polyculture systems on small plots. Modern olive groves (based on extensive plots, monoculture, and geometrically ordered plantings) were a rare sight on Portuguese landscapes. Exploitation of traditional olive groves was entirely dependent on the workforce. Thus, during the 1960s, with the rural exodus and an increase in rural wages, olive trees were abandoned, and production dropped. This gave rise to the so-called olive grove crisis (Baptista 1993). Figure 11.2 shows how olive oil production decreased during the 1970s and 1980s. Consumption in Portugal fell from about 10 kilograms per capita per year in

202 • Food Between the Country and the City

Figure 11.3 Total area devoted to olive groves in the main producing regions of Portugal (Matos and Martins 2013).

the 1950s to 3 kilograms in the 1990s, a decline that was offset by the increased availability of vegetable oils and animal fats. Today, consumption of olive oil is rising again. The Figure also shows that, in the past twenty years, there has been an increase in domestic production of olive oil. However, a change in production geographies is taking place. There is now a regional specialization, with the olive groves sited in areas that offer the best comparative advantages in the current global market competition (Figure 11.3). In some of these regions—such as Trás-os-Montes, in the extreme northeastern part of the country—olive trees still grow mainly in thinly planted groves in hot and dry ecosystems.12 But in other regions—such as Alentejo, where there is the biggest growth in acreage and productivity—olive groves are shifting from traditional rain-fed systems to densely planted irrigated groves. Alentejo, the largest Mediterranean region of the country, has often been likened to a fiery heath, an image that refers to its recurrent drought conditions (Rodrigo 2009). However, the vulnerability of agriculture to low rainfall is changing. Since the eighteenth century there have been efforts to increase water availability—crucial to extending cultivated areas and increasing productivity and the supply of foodstuffs and other commodities (Federico 2005). In the nineteenth century, greater scientific knowledge and improved technology enabled major ecosystem interventions (such

Unpacking the Mediterranean Diet • 203 as large dams and water-distribution systems), and proposals to turn Alentejo greener multiplied. The plans devised by Portuguese engineers and presented to several governments were part of modern trends toward intensification of resource exploitation and “domestication of nature” (Dicke 2001; Freire 2007). Despite these plans, irrigation was confined to a few areas and based on small-dam systems until the 1940s. However, over the past seventy years, several large dams have been built, which are now irrigating around 155,000 hectares (44 percent of all irrigated land in Portugal). It is forecast that the amount of irrigated land will continue to grow in the coming years. As in neighboring Spain, the profit-making plans for irrigated areas involve changing the specialization model of agriculture; in Alentejo, this means less reliance on animal husbandry and more extensive use of irrigated land for maize, vegetables, fruits, vineyards, and olive trees. Thus, in recent years, the implementation of irrigation infrastructures is the most striking transformation that is under way in Alentejo, and this transformation is contributing to increased production of some of the most emblematic products of the Mediterranean diet. Olive trees in traditional groves can live for up to thousands of years in the climate and soils of the Mediterranean; however, the current commercial success of olive oil production is not underpinned by these traditional olive groves. Such groves are being abandoned, transformed, or even ripped out. To illustrate, there is a thriving trade that displaces hundred-year-old olive trees from their traditional places to public and private gardens around the world. The value of these trees has clearly shifted from food to ornament (Freire and Truninger 2012). At the same time, the amount of olive oil that is produced in what are called intensive and super-intensive olive groves is increasing. About 50 percent of Portugal’s production of olive oil originates from what are known as traditional aligned systems, but irrigated intensive and super-intensive systems are gradually encroaching and becoming more common in some parts of the Portuguese landscape.13 A significant portion of the Portuguese olive oil that is meeting the growing global demand for products associated with the Mediterranean diet is being produced from olive-tree varieties that enable a high yield and have a short life span (about ten years); these trees grow in irrigated groves, and production is mechanized. These olive groves are expanding on the most fertile lands and near dams. In the area of the massive Alqueva dam—capable of irrigating 110,000 hectares—there are 21,000 hectares of olive groves. About 10,000 hectares belong to a single company that claims to be the owner of the world’s largest olive grove. The Ministry of Agriculture predicts that, in 2020, Portugal will be producing almost 100,000 metric tons of olive oil per year and that Alentejo will provide more than half of that production.14 The countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea aspire to increase olive oil production to meet growing demand, which is taking place in distant countries. But the expectations of high yields and profits from this business are stimulating the encroachment of olive groves onto other territories. In the early 1980s, the Portuguese geographer Orlando Ribeiro could still write that the “olive tree is the only

204 • Food Between the Country and the City crop with global importance, which is confined to the Mediterranean region” (Ribeiro 1998: 14). This statement is becoming severely challenged. Mediterranean countries are still the main producers: more than 50 percent of the world’s olive oil comes from Spain, while other countries—Italy, Greece, Tunisia, Turkey, Morocco, and Portugal—contribute between 3 and 9 percent each (Matos and Martins 2013). However, some efforts to produce olive oil in other parts of the world have been quite successful. If the native Mediterranean varieties of olive trees would not adapt well to other latitudes, the same is not true for varieties mastered in the lab and used in irrigated industrialized productions. Since the sixteenth century, when Portuguese navigators pioneered maritime travel, the global circulation of plant-based products has intensified (Ferrão 2005). At the same time, efforts by farmers, agronomists, and botanists to adapt crops with high market value to similar ecosystems located on other continents have increased. According to Bernard Dell, Angus J. M. Hopkins, and Byron B. Lamont (1986), there are several climate pockets that replicate the Mediterranean climate, including parts of Australia, California, Chile, and South Africa. Historically, the most important market competition has come from California, and this competition has drastically affected agriculture systems in some regions of Southern Europe (Critz et al. 1999; Pamuk and Williamson 2000).15 From the second half of the nineteenth century, it has been clear that the agriculture of the old Mediterranean was faced with competition from products of the “new” Mediterranean. In a trend similar to what has happened with other products (wine, oranges, and dried fruit, for example), olive oil is extricating itself from the old Mediterranean. The emergence of new olive oil producers in continents beyond Europe is becoming a serious alternative (or third way), besides traditional or industrialized Mediterranean production, to respond to growing world demand. In recent years, olive oil made in the United States or Brazil has started to supply those countries’ domestic markets. In the harvest year 2010–2011, Argentina, Australia, and Chile each supplied between 0.5 and 1 percent of world olive oil production (Matos and Martins 2013). For now, the high valuation accorded European olive oil on world markets challenges new producers to please the taste of consumers. However, in the medium term, Mediterranean olive groves may well be facing competition from new producer countries. Olive oil still is the unifying icon of the European Mediterranean diet, but the oil itself may be produced on any continent nowadays.

Concluding Comments In this chapter, we sought to understand the construction of the Mediterranean diet by particular epistemic communities, namely professionals in the nutrition and health sciences, and to examine the extent to which the Mediterranean region is responding to the demand for quality-food diets. By taking the emblematic case of olive oil,

Unpacking the Mediterranean Diet • 205 we sought to understand the expansion of Portuguese (and beyond) industrial olive groves, by unpacking some contradictions and examining some impacts of the standardization of the Mediterranean diet. Undoubtedly, the Mediterranean diet is getting more fashionable, and it is being sold as a more healthful diet, important to tackling twenty-first century health problems such as obesity, cardiovascular diseases, and some types of diabetes. The scientific discourse around the Mediterranean diet fosters the consumption of a set of food products whose production significantly affects local landscapes and agricultural systems in the Mediterranean region. Under the European Union’s common agricultural policy, in some parts of this large region, one can already witness the expansion of areas cultivated with olive trees. The increased production of foods associated with a Mediterranean diet is often framed within the context of rural development and sustainable agriculture projects, but it takes place on a global stage to satisfy a global market. To the extent that there are Mediterranean edaphoclimatic conditions and production technologies that ensure the replication of Mediterranean products in other part of the globe, countries far from the Mediterranean can supply both local and distant markets with foodstuff that meet the criteria of the Mediterranean diet. The farming systems of the Mediterranean rim, especially those of European countries, are facing changes in world demand for their food products (for example, because of a greater value being placed on healthful products and because of new consumption habits of Asian populations). They also face added pressure from the different international normative frameworks for food governance, which affect both production and marketing of foodstuffs (and are exemplified by the UNESCO classification ascribed to the Mediterranean diet in 2010, the guidelines for sustainability announced by the Food and Agriculture Organization the same year, and the European Union’s post-2013 changes to its Common Agricultural Policy). This chapter aimed at contributing to a reflexive exercise on the extent to which the Mediterranean region’s economic agents are responding to the proposals and projects endorsed by these different international bodies. The normative framework against which food production is undertaken reveals the constraints put on the countryside, as it evolves with the shifting tendencies of urban food consumption in contemporary societies. As a dietary model, the Mediterranean diet is underpinned by scientific evidence, gathered by epistemic communities. It is an urban-oriented intellectual and scientific construction that, on the one hand, aims at standardizing the productive activities of vast and distant rural areas according to therapeutic and nutritional needs of urban consumers. This reflects the interrelationship between the country and the city that Raymond Williams identified in his famous work (Williams 1973). But on the other hand, the Mediterranean diet also standardizes urban lifestyles through a romanticized image of rural foodways appropriated by city dwellers. Ideals such as eating together around a table were already difficult to put into practice on a regular basis

206 • Food Between the Country and the City in rural areas of the twentieth century, let alone in urban areas of the twenty-first century. Thus, the countryside of the Mediterranean is being pressured by the demand of the city, by competition from “Mediterranean” products from new territories, and by foods from other sources that regularly supply local markets. In fact, this triple pressure has been intensifying since the second half of the nineteenth century, making Southern Europe, and notably Portugal, subject to constant changes in agriculture, in society, and in rural landscapes. As a result of such pressures, a paradox was identified in this chapter: cities and other urban areas worldwide are being fed by an imagined “hot and dry” Mediterranean countryside that produces “wet and fresh” food products. The case of olive oil was an excellent entry point from which to unveil this paradox. The hundred-year-old olive trees, with enormous twisted trunks, fail to produce the olive oil we consume today. They are part of our memories of a “fiery heath” rural landscape that belong to the old Mediterranean of the past. Such images are time and again inscribed on the marketing labels of olive oil bottles made in the new Mediterranean: one that is much fresher and wetter and that targets distant urban consumers.

Notes Chapter 1: Conflicting Wine Narratives 1. Quoted at: Marketing de Vinhos (2011), “Vinhos do Alentejo em Prova no CCB” [website], September 28, 2011, http://www.marketingvinhos.com/2011/ 09/vinhos-do-alentejo-em-prova-no-ccb_28.html, accessed October 10, 2011. 2. The producers acted collectively through the Associação Técnica dos Viticultores do Alentejo (ATEVA). 3. Alentejo now includes eight demarcated subregions: Borba, Évora, GranjaAmareleja, Moura, Portalegre, Redondo, Reguengos, and Vidigueira. 4. The term is a derivation of Michael Billig’s assertion on nationalism (Billig 1995). 5. Phylloxera is a pest that attacks grapevines. Oidium, or powdery mildew, is a fungal disease that affects plants. 6. These local cooperatives were founded between 1955 and 1971: Borba (1955), Portalegre (1955), Redondo (1956), Vidigueira, Cuba e Alvito (1963) and Reguengos de Monsaraz (1971). 7. By 1980–1981, the amount of land controlled by UCPs had declined to 528,000 hectares, with 16,100 permanent workers; by 1985–1986, the figures were down to 360,000 hectares and 9,670 permanent workers (Baptista 2010: 150). 8. The author interviewed António Cachola on September 17, 2011. 9. In the context of land use in southern Portugal, monte (hill) refers to the location of the housing buildings and the rural properties’ facilities. 10. Examples of traditional nomenclature include Marquês de Borba, Terras del Rei, Reguengos de Monsaraz, Tapada do Barão, Baron de B, Vila dos Gamas, Morgado da Canita, Comendador, Conde da Ervideira, Conde de Vimioso, Real Lavrador, and Vila Santa, Estate names appearing on labels include Herdade do Gamito, Quinta da Esperança, Herdade da Capela, Quinta da Viçosa, Quinta do Carmo, Herdade dos Machados, Herdade da Ajuda, Herdade do Rocim, Herdade Grande, Condado das Vinhas, Terras d’ Ervideira, and Herdade do Esporão. 11. Quoted at: Comissão Vitivinícola Regional Alentejana (n.d.), “Denominação de Origem Alentejo,” Vinhos do Alentejo [website], http://www.vinhosdoalentejo. pt/detalhe_conteudo.php?id=17, accessed February 21, 2012. 12. Quoted at DJF Vinhos (2013) Alentejo, http://en.dfjvinhos.com/v/alentejo, accessed October 2, 2012.

– 207 –

208 • Notes 13. In 1934, one researcher, Henrique de Barros, published a pioneering study on the Alentejo village of Cuba (Barros 1934). 14. Barros’s monograph (1986) and, more recently, works by Paula Godinho (2001) and Renato Miguel do Carmo (2007), among others, have deepened knowledge of the history of Alentejo (Baptista 2010). 15. The author interviewed Guilhermino Ramos on September 19, 2011. 16. The author interviewed Manuel Vitória on September 17, 2011. 17. Rural workers represented 70 percent of the working population in 1950, 57 percent in 1970, 21 percent in 1991, and only 12 percent in 2001 (Baptista 2010: 176). 18. The author interviewed Maria Palma on September 17, 2011. 19. The author interviewed Luís Lopes (Sociedade Agrícola de Pias) and Maria Clara Roque Vale (Monte da Capela) on September 19, 2011. 20. The author interviewed Manuel Candeias on September 19, 2011. 21. The author interviewed Águeda Palma on September 20, 2011.

Chapter 2: Embodying Country-City Relations 1. Throughout this chapter, I cite quotations from a range of research participants who were interviewed during the course of my research. In addition, I conducted long-term participant observation in Cuenca and neighboring rural communities. Participants included middle-class city dwellers; rural, lower-class residents; and North American expatriates who have retired to the region. 2. For broader discussions of cholas, see Mary J. Weismantel (2001) and Linda Seligman (1989). 3. See Emma-Jayne Abbots (2013) for further discussion. 4. The exception is the hiring of cholas as domestic workers. 5. See Jason Pribilsky (2007) for a comparative discussion of maize, migration, and remittances in neighboring Jatundeleg. 6. The “nobles” are an elite, predominantly white class who trace their ancestry back to the Spanish conquistadores and historically have had significant landholdings and political power.

Chapter 3: Bringing the City to the Country 1. A rondavel is a typical South African dwelling, consisting of a circular building with a conical thatched roof. 2. All names are pseudonyms. 3. The homelands, or bantustans, were territories set aside by the apartheid government for the purpose of creating ethnically homogeneous, independent states for South Africa’s black ethnic groups. Ten were created altogether. They were subsequently dismantled following the democratic elections of 1994. The area

Notes • 209 in which data for this paper were collected is located in the former KwaZulu homeland, which was formed officially in 1970 and, in 1977, was granted internal self-government. See Gerhard Maré and Georgina Hamilton (1987). 4. One exception goes as far as to claim a wholesale eradication of African food culture as a result of increasingly globalized food systems (Raschke and Cheema 2008). 5. This is well illustrated, for instance, in Fiona Scorgie’s discussion (2003) of how virginity testing in rural KwaZulu-Natal has become a terrain for the “mobilisation of tradition” in an effort to defend cultural rights vis-à-vis a competing national focus on individual or human rights.

Chapter 4: Bringing It All Back Home 1. I interviewed Emile only once, but I also draw upon his memoirs—a small, unpublished booklet, edited by Daniel Tardy, entitled Le Livre d’Emile. 2. The Maginot Line comprised a series of defensive installations mounted by the French after World War I along the border with Germany, but the German army swiftly moved around the Maginot Line in 1940, passing through the Low Countries to invade France. 3. Emile further reflected on this: “Me, I couldn’t have worked in a factory. I like working the land, living with the seasons. Of course, you can’t count the hours like in a factory, it’s no comparison. When you’re a peasant, you depend on nature and on the animals that you have to feed and milk every day. I didn’t go on vacation, especially in the 1950s. Only once, we went to Marseille in 1953.” 4. According to a French Ministry of Agriculture spokesman, the number of fromageries in France had declined from 20,000 in the 1970s to approximately 3,000 by 2010 (Allen 2010). 5. For their assistance with the relevant volcanology, my thanks to Paul Martin Ayris of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences in the Section for Mineralogy, Petrology, and Geochemistry at the Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversity in Munich and to Jean-François Pastre of the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique in Clermont-Ferrand. 6. Viewers of the popular science-fiction films The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions will recognize the Merovingian name, used by Lambert Wilson’s character. 7. For contrasting views on the uses of heritage, see, for example, Michael Brown (2003) and Laurajane Smith (2006). 8. To give just one example of Alphonse’s cosmopolitanism, his lifelong interest in cinema—he even appeared as an extra in the 1990 film Uranus, starring Gérard Depardieu—served him as a valuable resource in bringing Les Mystères de Farges to fruition and in marketing it to potential visitors.

210 • Notes

Chapter 5: Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture 1. The Community Food Security Coalition; see: http://www.foodsecurity.org/ ua_home.html (page no longer available). 2. The Land Stewardship Project, as cited in Jim Bowyer et al. (2011: 2). 3. Unger et al. (2006: 26). 4. Luc Mougeot as cited by Michael Broadway (2009: 23). 5. The Council on Agriculture, Science and Technology, as quoted in “Urban Agriculture and Community Food Security in the United States: Farming from the City Center to the Urban Fringe,” Community Food Security Coalition North American Urban Agriculture Committee, October 2003: 3, http://communitywealth.org/_pdfs/articles-publications/urban-ag/report-brown-carter.pdf, accessed June 21, 2010. 6. Block does not claim that “how” questions are un-useful and should be eliminated. Rather, he argues that they tend to be used too early in most social projects and dominate the discourse. 7. This word was used by the director of the land bank as he explained the cycle of property ownership, foreclosure, and reuse. Its instrumental and military connotations are hard to ignore. 8. The city and the land bank have agreed to provide funding for a hoophouse at Urbandale Farm.

Chapter 6: Urban Hunger and the Home Village 1. Between March and September 2011, I carried out three months’ research in Lilongwe. 2. According to data from the National Statistical Office, the 2008 census set Chinsapo’s population at 39,006. Ntsiliza, much smaller, had around 10,000 residents. 3. Lilongwe’s “squatter township” was first researched in 1991 when UNICEF sponsored a study of Chinsapo II (Roe 1992). Chinsapo I and II, then more clearly separated, sprang from a single village the colonial authorities had moved across the Lilongwe River. 4. The author interviewed Lilongwe City Council Housing Manager Hastings Mumba on September 16, 2011. 5. My interviewees lived mostly within the contours of Gillian Roe’s map (1992). 6. At the time of fieldwork, 1,000 kwacha equaled 3.80 British pounds sterling or 4.16 euros (US$5.55). 7. Interview with Mr. C., a miller, on July 12, 2011.

Notes • 211 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

The exception is the Lower Shire region (Peters 2010: 184). Interview with Mr. F. in Chinsapo on July 19, 2011. Interview in Chinsapo on July 22, 2011. Interview with Mrs. K. in Chinsapo on July 11, 2011. Women dry pumpkin and okra leaves in March for use later in the year. When the coarse maize flour mgaiwa is made, the husks (madea) are left in during grinding. Mgaiwa is sold in a small plastic bag that is called a walkman, because the quantity is considered to be the amount an individual needs when walking (traveling) for a day. Interview with Mrs. H. on March 22, 2011. Prolonged absences erode an individual’s right to land (Englund 2002: 148). In such cases, or when land disputes or witchcraft accusations prompt a move to the city, family heads may decide to pass the land on to other relatives (Peters 2002: 165). Nowadays, in southern Malawi, land is controlled by families, not chiefs. Interview with Mrs. N. on July 9, 2011. Interview with Mr. D. on July 11, 2011. In Dedza, Harri Englund “found that almost 80 percent of marriages had been formed within a five-mile radius of the wife’s village” (2002: 146). The main invasion of Chinsapo was along the Chankhandwe River. Landhungry people from elsewhere in Lilongwe took control of part of a privatized former government farm. Some invaders were later evicted, but not those cultivating the madimba (wetlands) surrounding the farm. Ntsiliza witnessed a similar invasion. Maize flour is not only lighter than harvested maize, but it is also less bulky and can thus be brought to town in small quantities, for instance by visiting relatives. Interview with Mrs. J. on September 13, 2011. Interview on July 27, 2011. The author interviewed Group Village Headman Chisenga in Chinsapo on July 4, 2011. Interview with Mr. L. on September 15, 2011. Interview with Mr. C.H. on September 12, 2011. Interview with Mr. M. on July 6, 2011.

Chapter 7: Perceptions of the Country through the Migration of City-grown Crops 1. Independence was declared unilaterally in 1973 and recognized by Portugal the following year. 2. The acronym stands for the African Party for the Liberation of Guinea and Cape Verde.

212 • Notes 3. Subsistence and market-oriented gardens exist in and around Bissau. Subsistence rice is produced in the vast swamp areas of Bissau, and artisanal fishing goes on in the estuary of the Geba River, where the city is located (Lourenço-Lindell 1995). I do not focus on urban fish catches or rice production here because these commodities do not travel to Lisbon, as the urban vegetables do. 4. Caritas Italiana is an ecclesiastical charity, represented worldwide. 5. Far from being clear-cut distinctions, however, most ethnic categorizations are made up of complex boundaries, stemming from the fluidity of past movements, from transpositions, from the reciprocal influences of various cultural traditions, from ethnic mergings and subdivisions, from close relationships to other peoples in similar language groups that transcend national borders, from Islamization, and from European colonialism (Lepri 1986; Lopes 1987). 6. The widespread cultivation of cashew trees was motivated by the high international price of cashew nuts in the 1980s, the limited labor intensity of cashew production, and the comparable seasonality of cashew and rice cultivation.

Chapter 8: The Country, the Nation, and the Region in Representations of Portuguese Food and Cuisine 1. The Slow Food movement has been accused of romanticizing the past and of ignoring the labor of peasants and the poor in general (Wilk 2006: 193; De Soucey 2010: 449). 2. See, in general, António A.M. Corrêa (1951), for an anthological survey of the studies on food and nutrition in Portugal from the nineteenth century to the date of its publication. Information on undernourishment among the working classes and the lower middle class is available in Alfredo Saramago (2004: 215–20). For conflicts revolving around the price of bread in the first decades of the twentieth century, see Fernando Medeiros (1978). 3. In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, the countryside on the outskirts of Lisbon attracted urbanites in search of leisure, food, and drink. This association still has not been lost entirely (Dias 1987). 4. See http://www.festivalnacionaldegastronomia.com, accessed on September 27, 2012; http://www.cnema.pt/calendario_apresentacao.php?aID = 4206, accessed on September 27, 2012. 5. See http://www.qca.pt/iniciativas/leader.asp, accessed on September 15, 2013; http://www.proder.pt/homepage.aspx, accessed on September 27, 2012. 6. The same types of values are at work in the modern-day construction of foie gras as a marker of national identity in contemporary France (De Soucey 2010: 445): 7. See “Resolução do Conselho de Ministros n 96/2000,” Diário da República, I Série B, n. 171, posted July 26, 2000, http://dre.pt/pdf1sdip/2000/07/171B00/ 36183620.pdf, accessed on October 4, 2013.

Notes • 213

Chapter 9: Hazz al-Quhuf 1. On political modernity in the Middle East, see Zubaida (2011), Chapter 2: “Political Modernity,” 77–114. 2. The full Arabic title has been translated as Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded. Quhuf is the plural of qahf, which literally means cranium but here also refers to the woolen cap typically worn by peasants. Hazz means to shake or to rattle; hence, the rattling of the cap or head has been rendered by the translator as “brains confounded.” An edition translated and introduced by Humphrey Davies has been published in two volumes (the first, the original Arabic; the second, the English translation) by Uitgeverij Peeters (Leuven, Belgium) in 2007. All quotes here are from volume two, with page numbers. 3. The historical context, including the land and tax system and the hierarchy of village heads and state officials, are elucidated in Humphrey Davies’s Introduction, xxxvii–xlvii. 4. For a survey of the types, locations, and uses of kishk/kashak and related foods, see Aubaile-Sallenave (2000). 5. Rumi, literally Roman, was used until relatively recent times to designate Turks and Turkey: Anatolia under the Byzantine Empire was known in Arabic as bilad al-rum, country of the Romans; it retained this designation after becoming Ottoman, and its inhabitants are rum. This is confusing, because the term also designates Greeks and the Greek Orthodox Church. See Zubaida (2011), Chapter 3: “Shifting Social boundaries and Identities in the Middle East,” 115–30. 6. See, for example, Weber (1976), Robb (2007), and Dickie (2008).

Chapter 10: Reflecting Authenticity 1. The benevolent bacterium that drew the attention of the Russian scientist was discovered in 1905 by Stamen Grigoroff, a Bulgarian student in medicine at Geneva University. Encouraged by a professor to study the microflora of homemade yogurt from his country, Grigoroff discovered one main bacterium that caused milk fermentation. It was later named Lactobacillus bulgaricus, after the homeland of its discoverer. 2. Most researchers connect the origins of Bulgarian yogurt with the sheep breeding that existed on Bulgarian lands around 3000 B.C. (Atanassov and Masharov 1984; Katrandjiev 1962). 3. As a result of such scientific discourses, Bulgarian yogurt established itself as a concept not only in scientific research, but also in journalism and ethnography. In a recent article by Maria Markova (2006), for example, the author uses the expression “Bulgarian sour milk” without questioning this concept.

214 • Notes 4. For more details on standardization and consumers’ attitudes toward standardized food in socialist and post-socialist Bulgaria, see Yuson Jung (2009). 5. Dairy products are not a substantial part of the Japanese traditional diet, and their consumption increased only after World War II, with the Westernization of the Japanese diet. In 1950, with the launch of a sweetened hard type of yogurt, Meiji became the first Japanese company to start industrial production of yogurt. In 1971, a year after the Osaka Expo, Meiji was ready to launch Japan’s first plain yogurt. Drawing on Metchnikoff’s research, it intended to name the new product Bulgaria yogurt. However, after asking for permission, Meiji got an unexpected refusal from the Bulgarian side: “Yogurt is the heart of our people. We can’t lend the country’s name to a product made by another people.” Two years later, on the condition that Bulgarian production technology and pure cultures be adopted as a guarantee of quality, Meiji received the desired permission, and its new brand was crowned with the name Meiji Bulgaria Yogurt (Meiji Dairies Co. 1987). 6. Based on the socialist BDS (Balgarski Darjaven Standart [Bulgarian State Standard]) 12: 1982, the present standard defines Bulgarian yogurt as a product fermented with Bulgarian symbiotic yogurt cultures (Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptoccocus thermophilus). 7. Among the most popular are the festivals of beans in the village of Smilyan, of potatoes in the town of Klissura, of rakia (a traditional alcoholic drink) in the town of Troyan, and of sudjuk (sausage) in the town of Gorna Oryahovitsa.

Chapter 11: Unpacking the Mediterranean Diet 1. http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/RL/00394, accessed November 18, 2012. 2. Recognition was assigned to Spain, Greece, Italy, and Morocco. In March 2012, Portugal presented to UNESCO a bid (jointly with Croatia, Cyprus, and Algeria) to be included in the recognized group of countries. The Portuguese bid was prepared by local and national partners: the municipality of Tavira (in Portugal’s Algarve region), the Ministry of Agriculture, Sea, Environment, and Spatial Planning, and the National Commission for UNESCO. It has the support of other ministries, public institutions, and private organizations (including the University of Algarve and the Order of Nutritionists). It is anticipated that the results of this application will be known during the General Assembly of UNESCO scheduled for the end of 2013. 3. http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/RL/00394, accessed November 18, 2012. 4. Some of these controversial views are linked to the so-called French Paradox, coined by Serge Renaud in early 1990s. It refers to the observation of a low incidence of cardiovascular diseases in the French population despite a high consumption of polyunsaturated fats. This paradox generated a lot of controversy in the scientific community, for a review see Michel de Lorgeril and colleagues (2002).

Notes • 215 5. On the concept of food authenticity and its nuances, see Monica Truninger and José Manuel Sobral (2011). 6. http://dietamediterranea.com/en/foundation/objectives/, accessed November 18, 2012. 7. http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/RL/00394, accessed August 18, 2012. 8. Using geophysical and human criteria, Orlando Ribeiro (1998) divided the country into three main regions (northwest, northeast, and south); in only one of them—the northwest—are there specific non-Mediterranean characteristics (such as a wet and humid climate, densely populated area, and dispersed settlement). It is possible to find Mediterranean pockets in the northeast, especially in the Alto Douro region (which produces the famous port wine and also olive oil). South of the Tagus River, the country is clearly Mediterranean (with rain-fed agriculture and concentrated settlements). In fact, despite Portugal’s long Atlantic coastline, more than half of the country matches the Mediterranean rim’s features (Silbert 1966). 9. Portugal became a member of the Food and Agriculture Organization in 1946 and of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (what is now the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) in 1948, but participation in these organizations was not enough to change basic dietary patterns in the country. 10. Data collected by Portugal’s olive oil producers and traders association (http:// www.casadoazeite.pt/en/DATA/exportation/tabid/210/language/pt-PT/Default. aspx, accessed on October 25, 2012). 11. This model is totally different from the irrigation systems that were set up, for centuries, in the southern Iberian Peninsula (for example, the huertas of Valencia). 12. However, local producers have been gradually developing strategies to extend irrigated olive groves to the region. On April 9, 2009, a regional newspaper reported that Trás-os-Montes had its first very densely planted irrigated olive groves (Canteiro 2009). 13. The density of trees per hectare distinguishes various production systems: traditional systems are defined as having 70 trees per hectare; traditional aligned systems include 120 trees per hectare; intensive systems have 200–450 trees per hectare; super-intensive systems have 600–800 trees per hectare. The last two production systems are always irrigated (Barroso et al. 2013: 86–89). 14. This information was reported in the Portuguese daily newspaper Público on October 28, 2012; See Silva (2012). 15. Alto Douro wines (Martins 1990) and Azorean oranges (Dias 1999), which since the seventeenth century supplied the British market, have, from the nineteenth century onward, had to adapt to new trade competition.

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Chapter 5: Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture Adams, Richard N. (1962), “The Community in Latin America: A Changing Myth,” Centennial Review, Summer: 409–34. Ahmadi, Brahm (2009), “RE: Re: Re: Food Apartheid COMFOOD Thread,” [email protected] [email discussion list], June 29 15:51:39-0700, accessed June 30, 2009. Alter, Lloyd (2010), “Future Farming in Detroit or Spectacular Speculation?” TreeHugger [online media outlet], January 6, http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/ future-farming-in-detroit-or-spectacular-speculation.html?campaign = th_rss& utm_source = feedburner&utm_medium = feed&utm_campaign = Feed%3A+ treehuggersite+%28Treehugger%29&utm_content = Google+Reader, accessed September 10, 2011. Archibald, Robert (2004), “The Power of Place,” in The New Town Square, Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 37–59. Associated Press (2012), “Protest Planned at Snyder’s Neighborhood over Michigan’s Emergency Takeover Law,” Lansing State Journal, January 15: 5A. Block, Peter (2003), “How Is the Wrong Question,” in The Answer to How Is Yes, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 14–25. Bowyer, Jim, Bratkovich, Steve, Fernholz, Kathryn, Howe, Jeff, Bratkovich, Janet, Stai (2011), “An Introduction to Urban Agriculture: Past, Present, and Future,” white paper prepared for the Greater Lansing Food Bank, Dovetail Partners Inc., November 15. Boyte, Harry C. (2004), Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Boyte, Harry C., and Kari, Nancy N. (1996), Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

References • 227 Broadway, Michael (2009) “Growing Urban Agriculture in North American Cities: The Example of Milwaukee,” Focus on Geography, 52/3–4: 23–30, 73. Carpenter, Novella (2009), Farm City, New York: Penguin. DuPuis, E. Melanie, and Goodman, David (2005), “Should We Go Home to Eat?: Toward a Reflexive Politics of Localism,” Journal of Rural Studies, 21/3: 359–71. Florida, Richard (2002), The Rise of the Creative Class, New York: Basic Books. Florida, Richard (2008), Who’s Your City?, New York: Basic Books. Goldschmidt, Walter (1978), As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness, Montclair, NJ: Allenheld, Osum. Guthman, Julie (2008a), “Bringing Good Food to Others: Investigating the Subjects of Alternative Food Practice,” Cultural Geographies, 15/4: 431–47. Guthman, Julie (2008b), “‘If They Only Knew’: Color Blindness and Universalism in California Alternative Food Institutions,” Professional Geographer, 60/3: 387–97. Hantz Farms (2009), “Preliminary Plans Call for the Development of Underutilized Land to Produce Fresh, Local, Natural, Safe Fruits, Vegetables, and Trees,” April 2, Detroit: PR Newswire. Harding, Sandra (1991), Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Henderson, Bethany Ruben, and Hartsfield, Kimberly (2009), “Is Getting into the Community Garden Business a Good Way to Engage in Local Government?” National Civic Review, 98/4(Winter): 12–17. Hill, Corey (2011), “Vision: Urban Gardening and Green Economy Flourish in Detroit,” AlterNet [online magazine], March 20, http://www.alternet.org/ story/150308/vision%3A_urban_gardening_and_green_economy_flourish_in_ detroit, accessed January 18, 2012. hooks, bell (2009), Belonging: A Culture of Place, New York: Routledge. Kandaswamy, Priya (2007), “Beyond Colorblindness and Multiculturalism,” Radical Teacher, 80 (Winter 2007): 6–11, 48. Kemmis, Daniel (1990), Community and the Politics of Place, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Lavin, Chad (2009), “Pollanated Politics, or, The Neoliberal’s Dilemma,” Politics and Culture, 2: 57–67. Lawson, Laura (2005), City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America, Berkeley: University of California Press. Loren, B. K. (2003), “Got Tape?” Orion [online magazine], May/June, http://www. orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/121, accessed September 13, 2005. Maddow, Rachel (2011), “I Guess I’m the ‘Tyrant’ in Pontiac, Then,” The Rachel Maddow Show, aired December 8, http://video.msnbc.msn.com/the-rachel-maddowshow/45607138#45607138, accessed January 10, 2012. Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative (2010), “Introduction/Executive Summary,” Building Bridges Project: Campaign Case. Mahoning Valley Organizing Project (MVOC): Health Equity Campaign, Youngstown and Warren, Ohio.

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Chapter 6: Urban Hunger and the Home Village Cammack, Diana, and Kelsall, Tim, with Booth, David (2010), “Developmental Patrimonialism? The Case of Malawi,” Africa Power & Politics Working Paper 12, London: Overseas Development Institute. Chilivumbo, A. B. (1975), “The Ecology of Social Types in Blantyre,” in David Parkin (ed.), Town and Country in Central and Eastern Africa, Plymouth: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 308–18. Cohen, Marc, and Garrett, James (2009), “The Food Price Crisis and Urban Food (In)security,” Human Settlements Working Paper Series, Urbanization and Emerging Population Issues 2, London: International Institute for Environment and Development. Ellis, Frank, and Sumberg, James (1998), “Food Production, Urban Areas, and Policy Response,” World Development, 26/2: 213–25. Englund, Harri (1999), “The Self in Self-interest: Land, Labour, and Temporalities in Malawi’s Agrarian Change,” Africa, 69/1: 139–59.

References • 229 Englund, Harri (2002), “The Village in the City, the City in the Village: Migrants in Lilongwe,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 28/1: 137–54. Ferguson, James (1999), Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt, Berkeley: University of California Press. Food and Agriculture Organization (2012), “Food, Agriculture, and Cities: Embracing at regional level the challenges of food and nutrition security, agriculture and ecosystem management in an urbanizing world,” briefing note, http://www.fao. org/index.php?id=28645, accessed on February 16, 2013. Harrigan, Jane (2008), “Food Insecurity, Poverty, and the Malawian Starter Pack: Fresh Start or False Start?” Food Policy, 33: 237–49. Kishindo, Paul (2004), “Customary Land Tenure and the New Land Policy in Malawi,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 22/2: 213–25. Mvula, Peter, and Chiweza, Asiyati (2010), “Urban Food Security: The Case of Blantyre City,” report sponsored by the African Food Security Urban Network, Zomba: University of Malawi, Chancellor College. Parkin, David (1975), “Introduction,” in David Parkin (ed.), Town and Country in Central and Eastern Africa, Plymouth: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 3–44. Peters, Pauline (2002), “Bewitching Land: The Role of Land Disputes in Converting Kin to Strangers and in Class Formation in Malawi,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 28/1: 155–78. Peters, Pauline (2010), “‘Our Daughters Inherit Our Land, but Our Sons Use Their Wives’ Fields’: Matrilineal-Matrilocal Land Tenure and the New Land Policy in Malawi,” Journal of Eastern African Studies, 4/1: 179–99. Pitcher, Anne (2002), Transforming Mozambique: The Politics of Privatization, 1975–2000, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pottier, Johan (1988), Migrants No More: Settlement and Survival in Mambwe Villages, Zambia, Manchester: Manchester University Press for the International African Institute. Roe, Gillian (1992), Beyond the City Limits: Anatomy of an Unplanned Housing Settlement Area in Lilongwe, Malawi, Zomba: Centre for Social Research. RUAF Foundation (2010), “The Growth of Cities in East-Africa: Consequences for Urban Food Supply,” paper developed for the World Bank, (December 20), Leusden, Netherlands: Resource Centre on Urban Agriculture and Food Security, http://www.ruaf.org/sites/default/files/The%20growth%20of%20cities%20 in%20East%20Africa--FINAL-%2020-12-2010%20_2__1.pdf, accessed on October 15, 2011. Tollens, Eric (2004), “Food Security in Kinshasa: Coping with Adversity,” in Theodore Trefon (ed.), Reinventing Order in the Congo: How People Respond to State Failure in Kinshasa, London: Zed, 47–64. UN-HABITAT (2008), The State of African Cities 2008: A Framework for Addressing Urban Challenges in Africa, Nairobi: UN-HABITAT.

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Chapter 7: Perceptions of the Country through the Migration of City-grown Crops Abranches, Maria (2013), “When People Stay and Things Make Their Way: Airports, Mobilities, and Materialities of a Transnational Landscape,” Mobilities, 8/4. Abreu, Alexandre (2011), “Migration and Development in Contemporary GuineaBissau: A Political Economy Approach,” Ph.D. dissertation, SOAS, University of London. Aguilar, Renato, Monteiro, Huco, and Duarte, Aquino (2001), Bandim: Subsídios para uma Política de Apoio ao Pequeno Negócio, Bissau: Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisa. Bordonaro, Lorenzo (2009), “‘Culture Stops Development!’: Bijagó Youth and the Appropriation of Developmentalist Discourse in Guinea-Bissau,” African Studies Review, 52/2: 69–92. Embaló, Birgit (2012), “Civil-Military Relations and Political Order in GuineaBissau,” Journal of Modern African Studies, 50/2: 253–81. Forrest, Joshua (1992), Guinea-Bissau. Power: Conflict and Renewal in a West African Nation, Oxford: Westview Press. Forrest, Joshua (2002), “Guinea-Bissau,” in P. Chabal (ed.), A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa, London: Hurst, 236–63. Galli, Rosemary E. (1995), “Capitalist Agriculture and the Colonial State in Portuguese Guinea, 1926–1974,” African Economic History, 23: 51–78. Galli, Rosemary E., and Jones, Jocelyn (1987), Guinea-Bissau: Politics, Economy, and Society, London: Frances Pinter. Instituto Nacional de Estatística (2011), Statistical Yearbook of Portugal 2010, http://www.ine.pt/xportal/xmain?xpid=INE&xpgid=ine_publicacoes &PUBLICACOESpub_boui=133815390&PUBLICACOESmodo=2&xlang=en, accessed September 13, 2013. Instituto Nacional de Estatística Guiné-Bissau (2009), Results of the 3rd Census, http://www.stat-guinebissau.com/, accessed September 13, 2013. Lepri, Jean Pierre (1986), “Contribuição para a Análise Sociológica da Guiné-Bissau Actual,” Soronda, 1: 143–68.

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234 • References Melo, Daniel (2001), Salazarismo e Cultura Popular (1933–1958), Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais. Menasche, Renata (2010), “Campo e Cidade, Comida e Imaginário: Percepções do Rural à Mesa,” Ruris, 3/2: 195–218. Mennell, Stephen (1996), All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Mintz, Sidney (1996), Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past, Boston: Beacon Press. Mintz, Sidney (2008), “Food, Culture, and Energy,” in Alexander Nützenadel and Frank Trentman (eds.), Food and Globalization: Consumption, Markets, and Politics in the Modern World, Oxford and New York: Berg, 21–35. Modesto, Maria de Lurdes (1999), Cozinha Tradicional Portuguesa, Lisbon: Editorial Verbo. Modesto, Maria de Lurdes, Praça, Afonso, and Calvet, Nuno (1999), Festas e Comeres do Povo Português, Lisbon: Editorial Verbo. Montanari, Massimo (2009), Il Risposto della Polpetta e Alter Storie Intorno al Cibo, Rome and Bari: Editori Laterza. Montanari, Massimo (2010), L’Identitá Italiana in Cucina, Rome and Bari: Editori Laterza. Penfold, Steve (2012), “Fast Food,” in Jeffrey M. Pilcher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Food History, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 279–301. Plantier, Paulo (1905), O Cozinheiro dos Cozinheiros, Lisbon: Paulo Plantier Editor. Poulain, Jean-Pierre (2002), Sociologies de l’Alimentation, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Rauch, André (2008), “Les Pionniers du Plat Régional et du Vin de Pays—France, 1920–1940,” in Julia Csergo and Jean-Pierre Lemasson (eds.), Voyages en Gastronomies: L’Invention des Capitales et des Régions Gourmandes, Paris: Éditions Autrement, 22–32. Ritzer, George (2000), The McDonaldization of Society, Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Rolo, Joaquim C. (2000), “População Agrícola,” in A. and M. F. Mónica (eds.), Dicionário de História de Portugal, vol. IX, Suplemento P/Z, Lisbon: Livraria Figueirinhas, 134–38. Roshwald, Ariel (2006), The Endurance of Nationalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saramago, Alfredo (2004), Para uma História da Alimentação de Lisboa e seu Termo, Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim. Schnell, Steven M. (2013), “Deliberate Identities: Becoming Local in America in a Global Age,” Journal of Cultural Geography, 30/1: 55–89. Smith, Alison K. (2012), “National Cuisines,” in Jeffrey M. Pilcher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Food History, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 444–60.

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Index Abbots, Emma-Jayne, 11–13, 17, 30, 47–9, 208 Abdul-Wahhab, Muhammad, 162 Abrahams, Caryn, 62, 223 Abranches, Maria, 14, 15, 132 Abrantes, Manuel Bívar, 133, 135 Abreu, Alexandre, 130, 230, 141 Adams, Richard N., 102 aesthetics and food, 59–72 agriculture, 4, 5, 9, 13–15, 26, 36, 52, 62, 76, 82, 88, 91–106, 107, 110, 111, 113, 121, 123, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 136, 137, 141, 154, 156, 159, 162, 164, 180, 184–6, 191–206 industrialization of, 4, 13, 26, 36, 76, 82, 88, 134, 186, 201, 203, 205, 206 urban, 13–15, 91–106, 107, 113, 121, 123, 132 agro-business, 76, 83 Aguilar, Renato, 131 Ahmadi, Brahm, 96 Albala, Ken, 8, 150 alcohol consumption, 33, 37, 67, 193, 214 Alentejo, 11, 33–9, 158, 194, 202, 203, 207, 208 agrarian reform in, 26, 32, 39 latifúndio in, 11, 23, 25–8, 30–3, 35, 39 poverty in, 30–7, 39 Unidades Colectivas de Produção (UCPs) in, 26, 27, 207 workers in, 30–7, 39 Aleppo, 173 Allbaugh, Leland G., 193, 194 Allen, Peter, 209 Allios, Dominique, 79 almonds, 170 Al-Shirbini, Yusuf, 16, 161–5, 167–70, 172, 173 Alter, Lloyd, 97 alternative food philosophies, 175, 189 Anderson, Benedict, 149, 150 Andrews, Geoff, 146 Angola, 21, 36, 128

anti-alcoholism campaigns, 193 Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC), 78, 82 Arab Levant, 166 Araújo, Daniela, 146 Archibald, Robert, 103 Argentina, 204 Arnaut, Salvador D., 149 Aromat, 68, 69 Atanassov, Georgi, 178, 181, 213 Aubaile-Sallenave, Françoise, 213 Aurier, Philippe, 159 Austrália, 23, 200, 204 Ayala Mora, Enrique, 44, 48 Aylwin, Nicole, 24 badjiki, 131 baobab fruit, 135 Baptista, Fernando Oliveira, 25, 26, 32, 36, 201, 207, 208 Barros, Afonso de, 194 Barros, Henrique de, 208 Barroso, J. M., 215 batarikh, 169, 173 Bauer, Rainer Lutz, 187 Baumann, Shyon, 158 beans, 8, 66, 115, 165, 166–8, 172, 173 beer, 37, 60, 62, 64, 66, 67, 189, 193 Beinart, William, 64, 65 Bell, David, 4 Bello, António de Oliveira, 151, 153 Bellonte, Alphonse, 73–88 Benjamin, Walter, 147 Bento da Maia, Carlos, 151 Berdegué, Julio A., 61 Berger, John, 84, 225 Bessière, Jacinthe, 24, 82, 83 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 110 Billig, Michael, 207, 219 biodiversity, 146, 193, 196, 197, 200

244 • Index biofuels, 3 bisar, 165, 166 Block, Peter, 95 Bolivia, 42 Bordonaro, Lorenzo, 136 botarga, 169 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 24, 52, 56, 149, 150 Boyte, Harry, 95, 96, 104 Braudel, Fernand, 198 Braun, Joachim, 108 bread, 2, 26, 29, 67, 150, 165, 166, 169, 172, 173, 175, 176, 182, 193, 194, 197, 212 breakfast, 66, 116, 171, 182 Brunnbauer, Ulf, 180 Buckland, Jerry, 4 Bulgaria, 16, 17, 175–90, 213, 214 cuisine in, 179 as homeland of yogurt, 175 post-socialist transition in, 175, 184 socialist era in, 176, 179, 181–5 urbanization of, 180 burghul, 172 Burlingame, Barbara, 196 Butler, Beverley, 82 butter, 66, 75, 165–7, 170, 172, 173, 194 cabbage, 2, 66, 115 Cabral, Amílcar, 136 Cairo, 16, 162, 163, 166, 169, 172 Caldwell, Melissa, 183, 184 Cammack, Diana, 110–12 Cape Verde Islands, 128, 137, 138, 140 capitalism, 5, 39, 148, 150, 156, 159 Carmo, Renato Miguel, 35, 208 Carneiro, Micaela B. de Sá, 149 Caro, Guy, 193 Carpenter, Nouvella, 94 Carvalho, Lino de, 26, 220 Cerezales, Diego Palácios, 33 cheese, 2, 7, 13, 73–88, 154, 165, 165, 167, 173, 179, 18, 194 artisanal production of, 13 73, 74, 75, 165 chicken, 2, 46, 47, 60, 66, 70, 75, 80, 104, 115, 136, 140, 165, 166, 171, 173 chickpeas, 167, 168 Chile, 204 Chilivumbo, 110 Chiweza, Asiyati, 111, 114 Chola Cuencana, 11, 12, 30, 41–57

as ideal type model mixed-race of peasant woman, 11, 43, 45 as marker of food quality in the city, 41, 42, 49 and performance, 51 Christmas food, 70, 75, 150, 156 city and civilization, 2, 147 as creative, 62, 103 as gastronomic centre, 2, 7, 150, 151 as hygienic, 110 linkages with rural, 109, 119, 124, 130 peri-urban agriculture in, 107, 108, 113, 133 ruralization of, 134 standardization in, 9, 15, 17, 155, 159, 184, 186, 189, 205, 213 as technological, 3, 9, 11, 28, 37, 95, 135, 176, 189 vice in, 147, 148 Clapp, Jennifer, 3, 217 class(es) bourgeoisie, 43, 46, 56, 151 creative class, 103 peasants, 2, 3, 8–10, 13, 16, 17, 41, 44–8, 50–3, 55, 56, 73, 75, 83, 84, 88, 137, 141, 148, 151, 161–73, 178, 179, 209, 213 rural workers, 25, 26, 30, 32–5, 37, 38, 208 urban middle class, 21, 27, 41, 46, 51–3, 63, 93, 96, 103, 151, 171, 199, 208, 212 urban poor, 109, 112, 114, 120, 124, 134 working classes, 7, 16, 66, 161, 176, 179, 180, 189, 212 Coca-Cola, 67 Cockrall-King, Jennifer, 4 Cohen, Marc, 3, 108 Coles, Benjamin, 74 Comaroff, Jean, 60 Comaroff, John L., 60 consumerism, 65, 67 consumption, 3, 4, 9, 11, 12, 14, 17, 26, 31, 33, 36–8, 46, 51, 52, 61, 62, 67, 71, 82, 86, 103, 115, 117, 127, 135–8, 145, 149, 157–9, 176, 178, 188–91, 194, 195, 200–2, 205, 213, 214 cooking, 60, 113, 114, 140, 146, 150, 153, 155, 157–9, 163, 165–7, 170, 172, 173, 195, 196 Coombe, Rosemary J., 24 coriander, 29, 166, 167

Index • 245 country artisanal food and production in, 8, 42, 52, 74, 107, 178, 187 as authentic, 2, 4, 9–13, 42, 48, 50, 60, 64, 65, 71, 73, 85, 88, 107, 145, 146, 148, 149, 155–9, 171, 175–7, 179–83, 185, 189, 192, 195, 196, 200 as backwards, 1, 148 as dirty, 45, 48, 164, 172 frugality in, 151, 197 honesty in, 9 as idyllic, 11, 30, 55, 177, 199 integrity in, 9 naturalness of, 162 as pastoral, 8, 11, 16, 23, 25, 30–2, 38, 147, 155, 162, 172, 176, 177, 178, 181 as place of healthy food, 8, 9, 12, 16, 17, 46, 47, 88, 133–8, 141, 159, 177–9, 182–90, 191–6, 198, 200, 204, 205 as place of ignorance, 1, 4, 62, 148 romanticized critique of, 4, 13, 14, 16, 41, 45, 46, 56, 73, 74, 84, 100, 128, 137, 141, 162, 163, 176, 180, 183, 188, 199, 205, 212 rural exodus, 26, 76, 82, 84, 198, 201 as savage, 29 simplicity of, 2, 8, 9, 16, 41, 48, 157, 162 as traditional, 4, 8, 11–14, 24, 29, 32, 36, 42–4, 46, 48–50, 53, 55, 61, 64, 65, 67–9, 71, 74, 86–8, 99, 133, 138, 145, 146, 149, 152, 154, 156, 158–60, 162, 175–90, 191, 193, 195 as wild, 29 Creed, Gerald, 177, 180, 185, 188 Critz, J., 204 Csergo, Júlia, 152, 218 cuisine, 15, 24, 145–60, 166, 176, 179 culinary cultures, 4 culinary festivals, 177 cultural homogeneity, 188 cumin, 84, 166 Cutileiro, José, 30, 39 Cyprus, 166, 168, 214 De Garine, Igor, 2, 217 DeLind, Laura B., 13, 14 Dell, Bernard, 204 Demireva, Maria, 179 Dernini, Sandro, 195, 196 Desmarais, Annette Aurelie, 4

De Soucey, Michaela, 146, 147, 159, 160, 212 Detroit, 104 D’Haese, Marijke, 61 Dias, Marina T., 212 Diáz-Méndez, Cecilia, 192, 199 Dicke, Willemijn, 203 Dimyat, 16, 162, 165 Dinis, Júlio, 147, 158 djagatu, 131 Domingos, Nuno, 11, 24 Dominy, Michèle, 177 Douglas, Mary, 7, 8, 42, 53 duck, 172 Dunn, Elizabeth, 189 Easter food, 150, 156 Eça de Queirós, José Maria, 147, 148, 158 economic protectionism and food, 153 Ecuador, 11, 12, 30, 41–57 Mestizo/a in, 42, 44–5 Spanish colonialism in, 11–12, 44 eggs, 67, 70, 115, 167, 169, 172, 173, 197 Egypt, 16, 161–3, 166–73 peasant food in, 161, 164–73 urban food in, 163, 164–73 Ellis, Frank, 107, 124 Embaló, Birgit, 130 Engels, Friedrich, 7 Espinosa, María Fernanda, 48 ethnicity and food, 43, 44, 61, 64, 65, 71, 128, 132, 138, 139, 148, 158 ethnographic engagement, 91–106 ethnographic exhibitions and food, 177, 186 ethnography, 1, 7, 8, 15, 30, 74, 94, 105, 109, 148, 152, 154, 156, 176–8, 186, 189, 213 European Union, 10, 16, 22, 34, 37, 76, 81, 111, 131, 146, 154–7, 175, 185, 186, 189, 200, 205 agriculture policies in, 22, 154, 185 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), 76, 146, 205 Liaison Entre Actions de Développement de l’Economie Rurale (LEADER), 81, 154, 155 Fabian, Johannes, 42, 55 family farm, 9, 13, 77, 78, 83, 84, 87 famine, 3, 26, 11, 128

246 • Index farm work (farm activity), 13, 54, 73–88, 91, 96, 97, 100–5, 111, 119, 120, 121, 124, 131, 153, 154 fast food, 12, 15, 52, 114, 145, 146, 159 fat, 86, 165, 166, 197, 201 fava beans, 165–8, 172 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 92, 99, 105 Féraud, Gilbert, 79 Ferguson, James, 109 Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst, 1, 149, 150, 153 Ferrão, João, 156, 198, 204 Fialho de Almeida, José Valentim, 148, 158 fish, 168–70, 197 Flandrin, Jean-Louis, 159 Florida, Richard, 103 Fonte, Maria, 146 food activism, 93, 106 as commodity, 8, 24, 76, 83, 157 cultural imperialism, 186 deserts, 4, 13, 96, 97 healing qualities of, 132, 181, 189 ideologies, 150, 183 insecurity, 67, 70, 107, 114, 123, 134 as language, 67, 71 markets, 1, 11, 46–51, 53, 75, 94, 104, 110, 131, 134, 138, 69, 178, 206 foodscapes, 8 Forrest, Joshua, 130–1 France, 1, 13, 28, 34, 35, 73–88 Astérix le Gaulois, 73 Auvergne, 13, 73, 78–80 Saint-Nectaire, 73, 75, 77–81, 83, 85–7 Paris, 1, 15, 74, 80, 85, 147, 163, 171 postwar rural-to-urban migration in, 76, 78, 82, 84 Freedman, Paul, 2 Freire, Dulce, 17, 25, 193, 194, 198, 203 French haute cuisine and civilization, 147, 149, 151, 157 fruits, 17, 41, 47, 63, 66, 96, 135, 180, 191, 196, 197, 203 Gade, Daniel W., 24, 28 Galli, Rosemary E., 128–30, 137 Gambia, 132, 139

game, 2, 8 garlic, 166, 168, 197 Garrett, James, 108 Gaspar, Jorge, 154 gastronomy, 29, 151, 153, 171 gender and food, 12, 26, 34, 41–57, 115–21, 124, 131, 132, 136, 139, 140, 151, 163, 169, 175, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 186–8, 211 Gerber, Mariette, 191 Gilmore, D. D., 192 global food system, 4, 8 Global North, 3, 9 Global South, 3, 9 globalization, 9, 145, 146, 157, 159, 175, 185, 186, 199, 200 antiglobalization, 83 Godinho, Paula, 208 Goffman, Erving, 31, 38 Goldstein, Darra, 146 Gómez-Benito, Cristóbal, 192, 199 Goodman, David, 93, 96, 175 Goody, Jack, 7, 177 goose, 172 grain, 17, 25, 39, 81, 164, 165, 172, 196, 197 Gramsci, Antonio, 6 Gray, John, 76, 82 Greece, 193, 204, 214 green revolution, 129 Grigg, David, 193 groundnuts, 110, 118, 128, 127, 135, 140 Guinea-Bissau, 14–15, 127–41 Bissau, 14, 15, 127, 129–39, 141 Bolama Island, 135, 136 Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo-Verde (PAIGC), 129 Guinea gumvine, 135 Guthman, Julie, 93, 96 Guy, Kolleen M., 150, 152, 153, 176 Halfacree, Keith, 177 Handler, Richard, 154 Harding, Sandra, 94 Harries, Patrick, 64 Harrigan, Jane, 110, 111 Hawkes, Corinna, 62 Hayes, Carlton J. H., 148, 153 Haykal, Muhammad Husayn, 163 Heasman, Michael, 4

Index • 247 hegemony, 6, 53, 96, 149, 153, 187 Henderson, Bethany Ruben, 94 heritage, 9, 10, 17, 53, 73–88, 146, 154, 158, 176, 186, 187, 191, 199, 209 as commodity, 82, 83, 157, 186, 187 national construction of, 9, 10, 146, 156, 176, 186, 188, 199 and tourism, 53, 81, 82–4, 176 Herman, Patrick, 76 Hill, Corey, 76 Hirata, Masahiro, 186 Hobsbawm, Eric, 43 Hoffman, Richard, 191 Holtzman, Jon, 188 homeland food, 127, 132, 137, 139, 141, 148, 160, 175, 183, 185, 188, 189, 209, 213 honey, 170 Hong Kong, 3 Hopkins, Angus, J. M., 204, 240 Hull, Elizabeth, 12, 13 hunger, 17, 107–25, 150, 161, 169, 170, 172, 194, 196, 199, 210 ideology, 5, 57, 176, 178 identity and food, 9, 10, 13, 17, 24, 25, 29, 44, 60, 61, 65, 73, 82, 102, 146, 149, 154, 155, 157, 158, 187, 193, 212 Iran, 169, 173 Jackson, Peter, 199 Jacobsen, Eivind, 8 James, Allison, 146 Jarosz, Lucy, 4 Johnston, Josee, 158 Jokisch, Brad D., 52 Jones, Jocelyn, 128–30, 137 Jung, Yuson, 184, 190, 213 Kalb, Don, 189 Kampala, 107 Kandaswamy, Priya, 105 Kandilarov, Evgenii, 181, 189 kandja, 131 Katrandjiev, Kosta, 178, 213 Kearney, Michael, 45 kebab, 166, 170, 173 Kelsall, Tim, 110–12 Kemmis, Daniel, 102

Kentucky Fried Chicken, 60 Khubayza, 167 Kinshasa, 107, 108 Kisban, Eszter, 176 Kishindo, Paul, 116 kishk, 164, 165, 170, 172, 213 Kneafsey, Moya, 4 Kondratenko, Maria, 178 Koran, 164 Kuper, Richard, 76 La Hausse, Paul, 62 Lains, Pedro, 192, 198 Lamont, Byron B., 204 Land Bank (the), 91, 92, 97–9, 105, 106, 210 landscape, 5, 7, 28, 29, 31, 39, 52, 53, 63, 78, 91, 101, 106, 133, 147, 155, 191, 203, 206 Lane, E. W., 173 Lang, Tim, 3, 4 Latin America, 42, 61 Lavin, Chad, 93 Leal, João, 30, 148 Lehtola, Minna, 3 lemon juice, 167 lentils, 8, 165–7 Lepri, Jean Pierre, 212 Lima Bastos, Eduardo de, 194 Lindholm, Charles, 157, 160 livestock, 3, 25, 68, 71, 85 London, 2, 3 Long, Lucy M, 159 Loren, B. K., 102 Lourenço-Lindell, Ilda, 131, 133, 211 Lowenthal, David, 82, 154 Lupton, Deborah, 159 Lynch, Kenny, 3 Lysaght, Patricia, 184 Lyson, Thomas, 4 Macdonald, Sharon, 188 Machado, Fernando Luís, 131, 139 Machel, Samora, 109 Madeley, John, 3 maize, 3, 14, 52, 59–61, 66–8, 109–22, 139, 140, 168, 172, 173, 194, 203, 208, 211 malagueta, 131 malaria, 118

248 • Index Malawi, 14, 109–12, 114, 116, 119, 121, 211 Banda, Kamuzu, 14, 110 Chinsapo, 112–16, 118–25 farming in, 113–25 Lilongwe, 14, 107, 109, 110, 111–15, 118–22, 124, 210, 211 mudzi (home village), 112, 113, 116–24 Mutharika, Bingu wa, 110, 111 Ntsiliza, 112–17, 119, 121, 124, 210, 211 malnutrition, 17, 62, 66 Manning, Paul, 189 Marcellino, Mother Noella, 85 Marxism/Marxist, 43, 109 Masharov, Ivan, 178, 181, 213 Matvejevic, Predrag, 198 Mbembe, Achille, 63, 64, 67, 71 McDonalds, 146, 155, 159, 186, 188 McKay, George, 93 McKnight, John, 102, 104 McNamara, Neal, 91, 98 meat, 7, 17, 46, 66, 67, 69, 114, 115, 136, 140, 165–8, 170, 171, 173, 179, 180, 191, 194, 195, 197, 198 Medeiros, Fernando, 212 Mediterranean diet, 191–206 as dietetic model, 191, 192, 194, 195, 205 as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, 191 megamalls, 105 Meiji (Japanese company), 175, 176, 178, 181, 182, 184, 214 Meisch, Lynn. A., 42 Melo, Daniel, 152 memory and food, 74, 83, 159 Menasche, Renata, 159 Mendy, Peter Karibe, 129 Mennell, Stephen, 1, 2, 7, 149–52 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 1 Merkle, Kathrin, 146 Metchnikoff, Elie, 16, 178, 214 Michelin Guide, 153 Michigan, 13, 91, 93, 97, 102 migrations, 5, 9, 13, 15, 35, 51, 54, 63, 76, 78, 82, 84, 88, 109, 110, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 135, 137, 238, 140, 141, 156, 180, 187, 208 Miles, Ann, 48, 51, 95 milk, 2, 16, 70, 73, 75, 77, 78, 81, 86, 164, 165, 173, 178–80, 182–5, 187, 189, 194, 209, 213

Miller, Darlene, 62 millet, 117, 139, 172, 173 Millstone, Erik, 3 Mincyte, Diana, 187 Minten, Bart, 62 Mintz, Sidney, 2, 150, 152, 177 mish, 164, 165 modernization, 3, 44, 48, 52, 86, 88, 108, 109 Modesto, Maria de Lurdes, 155, 156 Montanari, Massimo, 2, 8, 145, 146, 152, 153, 159 Moore, Sarah, 93 Morocco, 204 Mozambique, 109, 128 mullet roe, 169 Munro, William A., 4 Murdoch, Jonathan, 3 Murray, Colin, 63 Musil, Caryn McTighe, 105 mussels, 168, 170 Mvula, Peter, 111, 114 Nabhan, Gary Paul, 101 nation cookbooks and, 15, 149, 150, 155, 156, 158, gastronationalism, 159 imagining the nation, 6, 42, 145–60 invention of tradition in, 43, 158, 176, 177 nationalism, 12, 15, 61, 64, 71, 83, 148, 152, 157, 159, 183, 207 Nattrass, Nicoli, 66 néré, 135 Nestle, Marion, 193–5 New World staples, 15, 23, 168, 172, 173 New York, 3 Nickolson, Beryl, 187 Nile, 16, 162, 164, 165, 169 Norberg-Hodge, Helena, 4 nutritionists, 17, 159, 179, 192, 195 obesity, 8, 62, 66, 95, 194, 205 Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko, 155 Oldenburg, Ray, 105 Olmstead, A., 204 O’Neill, Brian Juan, 26 onions, 26, 114, 165, 167–70, 172, 173, 197 orange, 147, 204, 215 organic food, 141, 146, 183

Index • 249 Orland, Barbara, 176 outdoor picnics, 169 palm oil, 140 Pamuk, S., 204 Parkin, David, 109 parsley, 173 Patico, Jennifer, 184 peasant food, 2, 3, 8–10, 13, 16, 17, 41, 44–8, 50–3, 55, 56, 73, 75, 83, 84, 88, 137, 141, 148, 151, 161–73, 178, 179, 209, 213 Penfold, Steve, 159 pepper, 166 peppers (capsicums), 105 Peru, 42 Peters, Pauline, 116, 118, 120, 210, 211 Physiocrats, 16, 162 Picão, José da Silva, 25, 32 pickles, 173 pigeon, 171, 172 Pilcher, Jeffrey, 176, 186 Pinilla, J. Vicente, 192 pistachio-nuts, 173 Pitcher, Anne, 109 place-making, 102, 103 Plantier, Paulo, 149 Poole, Deborah, 45 Popdimitrov, K., 178 Popkin, Barry, 62 popular culture and food, 29–31 porridge, 2, 60, 67, 114, 116, 117 Portugal, 11, 15, 23, 26–39, 128–42, 145–160, 192, 194, 198–206, 207, 211, 212, 214, 215 authentic(ity) in, 145, 146, 148, 149, 155, 156, 159 colonialism, 14, 127–9, 134, 139, 141, 151 cosmopolitanism in, 145, 147, 151 Estado Novo, 25, 26, 32, 33, 39, 151, 152, 154, 155 heritage in, 154, 156, 157, 158 homeland in, 160 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 25, 151, 154, 201 potatoes, 7, 59, 66, 150, 162, 173, 197, 214 Pottier, Johan, 14, 107, 108 Poulain, Jean-Pierre, 145, 146 poultry, 114, 171 Pratt, Andy C., 3

Pred, Allan, 23 Pribilsky, Jason, 44, 208 Protected Designation of Origin (PDO), 82, 146, Protected Geographical Indication (PGI), 22, 24, 146 quality markers, 22, 24, 27, 37 rabbit, 172 Radcliffe, Sarah, 44, 45, 47, 53 raisins, 170, 173 Ramadan, 166 Ranger, Terence, 43, 122 Rauch, André, 2, 153 Reardon, Thomas, 61–2 region imagining the region, 13, 15, 17, 21, 24, 25, 28, 29, 32, 34, 41–4, 50, 53, 145–60, 190, 191–206 local cuisine and, 10, 13, 15, 73–88, 139–41, 146, 151, 167–72, 175, 176 regional development, 9, 11, 13, 17, 21–5, 28, 37, 47, 50, 53, 63, 73, 82, 85, 87, 88, 97, 102, 110, 129, 134, 136, 141, 146, 148, 153, 155, 175–7, 205 regional festivals, 177 restaurants, 15, 21, 43, 50, 87, 140, 149, 150, 154, 155, 158, 171, 172, 179 retail businesses, 37, 52, 54, 56, 61–4, 71, 78, 114, 154, 158 Rhodesia, 110 Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (Manchester School), 108 Ribeiro, Orlando, 192, 198, 203, 204 rice, 66, 128, 129, 131, 134, 136, 138, 140, 157, 158, 165, 170, 172, 173, 182, 194, 197, 211, 212 Ritzer, George, 159 River City, 95 Rodrigo, Isabel, 202 Roe, Gillian, 112, 113, 119, 210 Rogelja, Nataša, 188 Rogerson, C. M., 134 Roitman, Karem, 42 Rolo, Joaquim C., 156 Roque do Vale, Clara, 25, 208 Roshwald, Ariel, 152 Ross, Robert, 71 Rosset, Peter M., 3

250 • Index Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 2, 162 Rowe, Ann Pollard, 44 Ruel, Anne, 198 Sahlins, Marshall, 132 salads, 2, 173 Salomon, Frank, 45 salons, 171 salt, 68, 168, 169, 197 Saltmarsh, John, 96, 128 Santos, Rui, 25 saqat, 170, 171 Saramago, Alfredo, 212 Saramago, José, 31 sauce(s), 29, 66, 115, 117, 140, 167 Schlosser, Eric, 175 Schmidt, L., 199 Schnell, Steven M., 159 Scholliers, Peter, 175, 184, 190 Schurman, Rachel, 3 Scorgie, Fiona, 209 Seekings, Jeremy, 66 Selwyn, Tom, 187 Senegal, 128, 132, 139 Silbert, Albert, 192, 215 Silva, J. A. Oliveira, 194 Simões, Orlando, 23, 25 Siza, Álvaro, 29 Slow Food movement, 83, 145, 183, 212 Smith, Adam, 162 Smith, Alison. K., 159 Smith, Anthony D., 148, 152 Smith, Laurajane, 209 Sobo, Elisa, 8 Sobral, José Manuel, 15, 16, 28, 149, 156, 157, 194, 214 sorghum, 139 soup, 95, 146, 165, 166, 171, 182 South Africa, 7, 12, 59, 61, 72, 110, 204, 208 homelands, 61–5, 71 Izicoficofi, 59–61, 65–6, 70–2 Zulu food, 12, 59–60, 65 South Wales, 4 soya, 117 spinach, 166 stalls, 41, 48, 171 Steel, Carolyn, 2 Steinbrecher, Ricarda, 4

Stoilova, Elitsa, 178 Strathern, Marilyn, 132, 140 Stutzman, Ronald, 44 sugar, 128, 170 sukulbembe, 131 Sumberg, James, 107, 124 supermarkets, 9, 11, 12, 37, 47, 59–64, 73, 78, 155, 175, 182, 190 sustainability, 9, 155, 159, 192, 196, 200 Sutton, David E., 159 Swislocki, Mark, 159 Syria, 173 table, eating at, 191, 196, 199 ta’miyya ( falafel ), 168 taste, 1, 7, 21, 29, 36, 46, 136, 139, 140, 150, 158, 163–6, 173, 175, 176, 177, 182–5, 188, 190, 200, 204 authentic taste, 175, 188 legitimate taste, 1, 150, 163, 164, 177, 182, 188, 200 local taste, 38, 136, 40, 139, 158, 165, 166, 176 national taste, 178, 183, 185, 190 poverty taste, 7, 56, 165, 173 taverns, 32, 33, 35, 37 Taylor, Karin, 180 Teixeira da Mota, Avelino, 129 Temudo, Marina, 133, 135, 141 terroir, 29, 81, 158, 183 Thorne, Stuart, 186 Tierney, Roderic Kenji, 155 Tollens, Eric, 108, 229 tomatoes, 104, 114, 115, 117, 172, 173 tourism, 9, 11, 21, 23, 24, 27–30, 49, 50, 53, 82, 83, 85, 152, 153, 154, 157, 159, 175, 188 Traditional Specialty Guaranteed (TSG), 146 Trentmann, Frank, 67 Truninger, Monica, 17, 157, 199, 203, 214 Tunisia, 204 Turkey, 166, 171, 173, 204, 213 UNESCO, 10, 17, 154, 157, 191, 193, 196, 200, 203, 214 United Nations’ High Level Task Force on the Global Food, 107 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 194

Index • 251 urban agriculture, see agriculture food insecurity, 107, 123, 134 lifestyles, 50, 54, 65, 67, 69, 72, 146, 159, 181, 187, 205 malaise, 4 urbanites, 41, 45, 47–53, 56, 82, 212 urbanization, 3, 63, 107, 108, 112, 123, 148 Urbandale Farm, 91–106 U.S. Agency for International Development, 111 Valagão, M. M., 194, 199 Valentine, Gill, 4 Van Huylenbroeck, Guido, 62 Veblen, Thorstein, 52 vegetables, 2, 7, 17, 41, 47, 59, 66, 91, 96, 101, 102, 114, 115, 117, 133, 134, 139, 150, 165, 173, 180, 191, 196, 197, 203, 212 velvet tamarind, 135 vinegar, 167–9 Vitek, Bill, 102 Von Hassell, Malve, 93 Walsh, Kevin, 82, 85 Watson, James, 175 Weber, Eugene, 213 Weis, Anthony, 4 Weismantel, Mary J., 42–5, 47–9, 51, 208 West, Harry G., 13, 24, 82, 83 Westwood, Sallie, 44, 45, 47, 53 wheat, 21, 25, 39, 165, 172, 198 Whitten, Norman E., 44, 48, 51 Wilk, Richard, 146, 157, 159, 177, 190, 212 Williams, Raymond, 1–17, 23, 29, 32, 43–7, 53, 64, 69, 74, 82, 87, 88, 123, 127, 134, 148, 155, 158, 177, 191, 199, 205 biography, 4, 5, 6 class(es), 5, 6, 23, 38 and foodways, 1, 7, 8, 11–17 and hegemony, 6, 7, 43 and literary criticism, 7, 8, 23, 25, 27, 30, 74, 148

and lived experience, 8, 9, 23, 26, 30, 33, 38, 41, 87, 88, 177, 188 and the pastoral and counterpastoral, 8, 11, 16, 23, 25, 30–2, 38, 147, 155, 162, 172, 176, 177, 178, 181 and selection, 6, 43, 53 and structures of feeling, 5–7, 11, 25, 29–32, 34, 38, 39 and tradition, 6, 12, 13, 29, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 53, 62, 73, 86–8, 158 and tropes, 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 44, 47, 64, 69, 74, 123, 127, 148, 158 works The Country and the City, 1, 4, 5, 7, 23, 45, 49, 64, 74, 87, 88, 123, 127, 134, 148, 177, 191, 199, 205 The Long Revolution, 38 Marxism and Literature, 5–7, 43, 46, 47, 53 Politics and Letters, 23 Preface to Film, 23 Resources of Hope, Culture, Democracy, Socialism, 5 Williamson, J., 204 Wilson, Bee, 2, 10 Wilson, Godfrey, 108 Wilson, Thomas, 175 wine, 11, 17, 21–39, 75, 80, 147, 152, 158, 170, 191, 193, 197, 204, 205 phylloxera infestation, 25, 80, 207 production mechanization, 26, 36 tourist routes, 23, 24, 27, 29, 30, 39 World Bank, 14, 107 Wylie, Diana, 7 yams, 140 yogurt, 16, 165, 170, 175–90 Yotova, Maria, 16, 17 Zambia, 108, 110 Zubaida, Sami, 16, 212, 213