Introduction: 'Out of the Strong Came Forth Sweetness' - Sugar on the Move

Abstract

To claim that food matters is perhaps to repeat the most obvious of statements. How could it not; it is essential for sustaining life. Yet, how it matters, and where and when it matters, invites a variety of responses. At its most urgently political the response would necessarily invite an analysis of the world-system's deployment of hunger as a weapon of global class struggle. At its most pleasurable, but often at its most facile and over-privileged, the response could see the world as a giant gastronomic possibility: a global food hall to be toured for new flavours, new combinations. The essays in this volume don't attempt the former and critically address the latter. The response that this essay and the ones that follow pursue is to treat the movement and mobility of food as an object of enquiry. Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind today when the words mobility and food are conjoined are terms like 'food miles' or food's 'carbon footprint'. The idea that food would travel vast distances as it moves from 'farm to fork' (as food lobbyists rather quaintly put it) seems injurious and irresponsible in a world facing the consequences of anthropogenic climate change. While excessive food millage might partly be explained by the over-developed North's appetite for, and sense of entitlement to unseasonal food stuffs (cherries in February in the UK, for instance) it doesn't explain the bizarre trips some food makes. The langoustines that are caught off the Scottish coast, for instance, travel roughly 17,000 miles (about 27,000 kilometres) to return to local Scottish pubs in the form of scampi. From the fisheries of Stornoway, the langoustines travel to the port of Grangemouth and from there to Rotterdam to be loaded into freezer-container ships where they will be sent to Bangkok where they will be hand-shelled by labourers earning a tiny fraction of the minimum wage in the UK. The de-shelled langoustines then travel back to Grimsby in England to become the breaded-scampi that has become a staple in British pubs. The 'environmental' argument that the frozen fish industry makes, is that in terms of a carbon economy the journey's emissions might be roughly equivalent to the emissions caused by mechanical de-shelling in factories located in Scotland (which is how they had previously been de-shelled); yet such equivalences take no account of the asymmetrical divisions of global labour. Food, moving to a capitalist beat, seeks out profit however far it has to travel. (1) The political arithmetic of climate justice is glimpsed in the background of some of these essays but is not their insistent focus. Similarly, the velocity of movement as it is figured in the 'slow food' movement or in the 'fast food' industry is not our immediate topic. Our more palpable concern is with the often congealed interconnections and intermingling of substances, human activities, and, what for want of a better word, we could call food's symbolic function. The term 'symbolism', though, often hides more than it reveals. One of the important reasons for studying food, culturally, is that it insists on the materiality of its sensual presence. While cultural theorists have often taken 'taste' to be a particular marker of social difference and distinctiveness, its symbolic function is often reduced to an ideational meaning: with food the symbolic and the sensorial coexist in a place where language often comes up against the difficulty of registering the 'meaning' of sensations as obvious and oblique as a particular smell and flavour combination. As food moves these tastes and their sensual meanings change too. The sensual-symbolic character of food alters in fundamental ways as it moves through space and time. The same substance that is consumed in one period or place can alter drastically as it moves into another time and place (local 'peasant' food, for instance, can become exotic and 'ethnic' as it moves, altering not just its cultural symbolism but its conjoined sensual performance). …