by | April 21, 2019 · 1:42 pm

Review: Baking, Bourbon and Black Drink

Baking, Bourbon, and Black Drink: Foodways Archaeology in the American Southeast. Edited by Tanya M. Peres and Aaron Deter-Wolf. The University of Alabama Press. 2018. ISBN: 978-0-8173-1992-2

Kimberley G. Connor
(Stanford University)

As Tanya M. Peres and Aaron Deter-Wolf point out in their introduction to Baking, Bourbon, and Black Drink: Foodways Archaeology in the American Southeast, it is no longer sufficient for archaeologists to just identify food remains in the past; they must “look beyond the data tables and pursue the larger picture of food and its role in human cultures—that is, the foodways of past societies” (2018:1). In practice, this is a difficult task. The nine chapters in this edited volume show both the great potential for using archaeology to study social practices and cultural meanings related to food, and the challenges for those who try to move beyond ‘laundry lists’ of animal and plant species.

Baking, Bourbon, and Black Drink responds to a growing interest in modern and historic cuisine from the Southeastern United States (from the Atlantic Ocean into Arkansas and Louisiana, the Gulf of Mexico to the Ohio River Valley), but expands the genre by introducing a range of archaeological approaches and increasing the time-depth to include the past 14,000 years. The temporal and methodological diversity of the chapters is one of the great strengths of the book, although that multiplicity also makes it difficult to bring them all together in a coherent narrative. While the chapters are arranged thematically in sections—feasting, social and political status, food security and persistent places, and foodways histories—the divisions often feel rather arbitrary.

The first section on feasting contains only one chapter by Megan C. Kassabaum on the importance of integrating ceramic, faunal and botanical datasets for studying feasting. The evidence she presents from Feltus, a Woodland period ceremonial mound site, raises questions about the role of feasting in pre-agricultural societies with low levels of social differentiation. This poses a challenge to traditional models which assume that agriculture is necessary for large-scale feasting, and that feasting is inherently linked to the creation and maintenance of social inequality. The emphasis on quantity rather than rarity of food items is welcome, although it is difficult to rule out the presence of labor-intensive foods without more evidence about food preparation techniques.

The second section deals with social and political status in southeastern foodways. Two chapters, one by Tanya M. Peres, and one co-authored by Peres and Kelly L. Ledford, provide zooarchaeological evidence for social stratification at Moundville in Alabama. One of the great highlights of the volume is Thomas E. Emerson’s chapter on Black Drink, a beverage made from caffeine-containing yaupon holly and very hot water used as both a social drink, and as an emetic for ritual purification. Emerson combines historical and ethnographic accounts with ceramic analysis and iconography to contextualise recent residue analysis which identified Black Drink at Cahokia. Following on in the vein of beverage studies, Nicolas Laracuente provides a strong introduction to the archaeology of whiskey production in Kentucky. As Laracuente notes, the role of women and enslaved African Americans has been sidelined in histories of the distilling industry and it would be very interesting to see a development of archaeological work which could illuminate the contributions of those groups.

The third section deals with food security and ‘places which persist’ as food preparation and consumption areas for long periods. Stephen B. Carmody, Kandace D. Hollenbach and Elic M. Weitzel use a diet breadth model—which predicts that foragers will preferentially go after higher ranked food products (based on the net cost of the caloric return minus the cost of energy to acquire and process it) but that as resources become rarer they will turn to a broader range of lower ranked products which provide less calories and/or require more processing time—to suggest that foragers at Dust Cave, Alabama shifted from a more general subsistence strategy to intensive mast collection and processing during the Middle Archaic in response to a changing climate. Meanwhile, Lauren A. Walls and Scot Keith look at the transformation of earth ovens from Woodland Period sites in Tennessee and Georgia as a sign of broader social changes.

Finally the section on foodways histories contains two chapters using “new methods of examining foodways to challenge the idea of monolithic cultural continuity during the Woodland and Mississippian periods” (9). Both deal much more with meals and cuisine than do the previous the chapters. Neill J. Wallis and Thomas J. Pluckhahn use shifts in the size and wall thickness of ceramic vessels to suggest changes in food preparation techniques that have not yet been recognised using faunal or botanical studies. The importance of considering food preparation techniques is reinforced by the final chapter, by Rachel V. Briggs on different forms of the hominy foodway. She uses a historical anthropological approach to demonstrate why the Native American technique of nixtamalization for maize was adopted within the African American hominy foodway, but not the European one.

The chapters which really stand out in this volume, especially those by Emerson and Briggs, are those able to really get at what Briggs calls “the vital relationship between what we eat and who we are” which “is not simply that we make choices about what we eat, but that the practices involved in what we eat, those we reproduce every day, are also generative” (161). It is no coincidence, I would suggest, that it was the chapters focusing on meals, cuisine and cooking rather than diet and subsistence which were particularly successful. Offering an excellent overview of archaeological work in the region, this book will clearly be important for those studying or teaching about southeastern foodways. However, it is also an interesting model for any archaeologist trying to figure out not just what was eaten in the past but what it means.

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by | April 16, 2019 · 1:21 pm

Review: The Unending Hunger

The Unending Hunger by Megan A. Carney

Carney, M. A. (2015). The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity Across Borders. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN: 978-0520285477

Rachael McCormick
University of South Florida

In The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity Across Borders, Megan Carney frames the city of Santa Barbara, California’s paradoxical problem as “hunger in the land of plenty.” Despite the region’s affluence and agricultural wealth, food insecurity occurs at a high rate. Carney attributes this problem to a neoliberal food regime which views food as a commodity – able to move across the southern border – while people lack both mobility and food. Rather than addressing the structural causes of food insecurity (evidenced by the high rates among women and people of color), food assistance typically consists of emergency relief and handouts.

Carney argues state approaches to food security, as to migration, are embedded in biopolitics. Food assistance agencies act as proxies of the state, bringing up questions of deservingness and surveillance. In the neoliberal context, the burden of procuring food falls on the individual. But not all individuals experience this burden equally: women, as the primary performers of caring labor, are tasked with feeding their families.

Carney, a critical medical anthropologist, is a faculty member at the University of Arizona with interests in migration, food systems and biopolitics (Carney, n.d.). The Unending Hunger is based on her dissertation at the University of California – Santa Barbara. Since then, her interest in migration has expanded into the Mediterranean region.

In The Unending Hunger, Carney characterizes her position as both insider (referring to her food-related activism during graduate school) and outsider (in relation to migrant women). Participants in her study were adult women who had migrated from Mexico or Central America and had experience with U.S. food assistance. Carney uses semi-structured and life history interviews, focus groups, dietary surveys and participant observation with both the population of interest as well as public health and nonprofit professionals. She draws heavily on feminist methodology, especially in her use of empowering methods like photo elicitation and focus groups. Based on these data, Carney found that concern for food is a central part of the migration experience for women. This was reflected in the terms alimentarse and comida saludable which women use when talking about the caring labor they perform. Carney also reports that subjectivities are altered through post-migration suffering and its embodied effects. Food insecurity in the migration context interacts with existing health vulnerabilities, increasing social suffering. However, rather than focusing on lack of food access, Carney calls attention to the ways she observed women strategically “making do,” cooperating, and resisting.

Carney’s book has a particularly strong gendered perspective which seeks to address a gap in the literature on migration: the experiences of women, as care workers, in addition to men as laborers. In some ways, The Unending Hunger can be thought of as a counterpart to Seth Holmes’ Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies (2013). Holmes analyzes the health consequences of farm labor on migrant men engaged in food production, while Carney turns to women as consumers whose “caring labor” is not valued by a capitalist system.

Carney’s heavy-handed critique of the neoliberal food assistance paradigm seems unproductive at times. There is plenty of room for improvement in both the overall structure of food assistance as well as the individual sites where it is implemented. However, food assistance in its many forms (consider food banks, faith-based organizations and federal programs) is a vital support system for food-insecure populations. While Carney acknowledges the limits imposed upon these organizations by bureaucracy, donor funding, and policy, a more productive critique might include concrete ways for food assistance services to improve their interventions.

In The Unending Hunger, Carney provides a nuanced view of mobility – both of people and food – that brings in the under-analyzed gendered elements of migration and food procurement. The book will be of interest to medical anthropologists, food system planners and other professionals engaged in food security projects. It may not be received as warmly by the organizations Carney criticizes; these would benefit more from research that generated specific suggestions for mitigating food insecurity within the neoliberal context. Nevertheless, Carney’s book is a valuable addition to the literature on migration, gender and health.

 

Works Cited

Carney, M. (n.d.). About Megan Carney. Retrieved April 7, 2019, from https://anthropology.arizona.edu/user/megan-carney

Holmes, S. (2013). Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press.

 

 

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by | April 11, 2019 · 8:36 pm

Review: White Bread

whitebread

Bobrow-Strain, Aaron. White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf. Beacon Press, 2012. ISBN: 978-080704467-4.

Laura Valli
Washington State University

Aaron Bobrow-Strain in White Bread follows specific dreams of “good” bread in the US’s 20th century to demonstrate how these ideals, seemingly nutritional judgements, were shaped by politics, economy and social issues. The book is organized by those ideals, rather than chronology, and presents dominant and countercultural discourses side by side. This structure, although making the stories a bit hard to follow, highlights how diverging ideas of good bread coexist and recur. For instance, contradictions around whole wheat bread come and go–and re-surge over and again. This poses an interesting thought experiment: what could have been the potential alternatives to Wonder Bread if different kinds of decisions had been made?

Chapter 1 opens the book by exploring how industrial bread production came to be preferred over small-scale bread baking in home kitchens and so-called cellar bakeries. The main problems with the cellar bakeries were dishonest practices (cutting the flour with cheap filler), disregard for hygiene, and employing immigrants, ‘polluted’ labor. The new industrial bakeries made the bread-making process transparent: people were invited to come and witness the sanitary baking in factories where machines did most of the work and the few workers were meticulously chosen for their health, habits and moral character (p. 41).

Chapter 2 explains that the resulting factory-produced white loaves, equal in size, uniform in shape, pre-sliced with precision, were the perfect example of the modernist aesthetic. These were considered far superior to home-baked bread that always varied in look and taste. No mother baking at home could match the industrial bakers’ control over ingredients, formulas and production processes. To choose to eat white bread was to participate in the process of ‘building a better nation’ (p. 64). And the whiter the bread, the better, because whiteness symbolized (racial) purity and control over disorder.

But support for white bread was not unanimous, and some even called it ‘the staff of death’ (p. 73). Chapter 3 presents three alternatives to the white bread movement. First, there was Sylvester Graham, the charismatic spokesman praising whole wheat bread baked from freshly milled locally grown grains. Graham’s teachings were further popularized by Alfred W. McCann who combined a Graham-influenced diet with ‘relentless exercise’ and ‘heroic fasts’ (p. 91). Many decades later, Christian Vande Velde, a cyclist from Chicago, promoted giving up (gluten-containing) bread altogether (p. 73). Initially popular among other athletes, gluten-free living is now all the rage.

Chapter 4 shifts the focus from the health of the individual to the health of the nation. On the eve of World War II, malnutrition was a serious issue in the US. White bread was now the primary source of calories for Americans; the easiest way to improve the nutrition of the population was to improve white bread- synthetically. Enter enriched white bread and the golden age of Wonder Bread in the 1950s and 60s (p. 109).

Chapter 5 demonstrates the importance of white bread in US foreign policy. In the 1940s, Americans were advised to save wheat to help starving (European) populations. Offering bread to the malnourished was seen as a way of supporting the war effort, fighting communism and securing democracy. The US was to be seen as the land of plenty. The export of industrial agriculture and industrial food (‘dietary imperialism’) during the Cold War radically changed the way the world ate (p. 135). White bread diet was promoted as nutritionally and politically superior (with great luck in some countries, such as Mexico), but this did not have universal global appeal (rice remained the staple food in Japan).

Chapter 6 documents how white bread, once the aspiration of many, is now considered white trash food, the icon of poor choices and narrow lives (p. 164), while the artisanal sourdough loaf is the marker of educated and ethical consumption.

Bobrow-Strain concludes his book with a call to problematize the preconceived boundaries of good and bad (p. 194) and unhelpful dreams of purity and naturalness (p.195) that reinforce social hierarchies. He acknowledges his own prejudices in considering that artisanal loaf as superior to Wonder Bread. He is prescient in holding up fermentation as the most progressive frame for thinking about the social world and food politics through the mindset of fermentation. It is a ‘natural’ process of making sourdough bread, but not ‘pure’ and ‘controllable’, as it involves the microbiome of yeast and bacteria that we cannot really see. Fermentation requires us to live with and benefit from impurity.

White Bread’s focus enables the author to deal with a wide range of issues, ranging from foreign policy (Green Revolution in Mexico) to national politics (creating a healthy nation through bread) to immigration and feminism. There is plenty of food for thought here, but the author advances no major theoretical arguments. Instead, White Bread addresses complex issues through food and makes these more relatable and ’digestible.’

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by | April 5, 2019 · 3:57 pm

Food for Thought: Nourishment, Culture, Meaning

logos cfp

Call for papers

The Food Studies Program, New York University (NYU),

the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Communication (CIRCe)

and the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University of Turin,

in collaboration with the EU Program Marie Skłodowska   -Curie (MSCA – GA No 795025),

encourage submissions for the International Conference

Food for Thought: Nourishment, Culture, Meaning

dirs. Dr. Simona Stano and Prof. Amy Bentley

October 14-15, 2019

It was 1962 when Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced his famous idea that, in order to be “good to eat” (bon à manger), a substance must be first of all “good to think” (bon à penser): as the French scholar reported in the pages of Totemism, food must nourish people’s collective mind — i.e. their systems of values, beliefs, and traditions — to be considered suitable for their stomachs. Since then other theorists have weighed in on the nature of food and culture, including cultural materialists (Marvin Harris 1985), and practice theorists (including Alan Warde 2014, 2016) who assert that a focus on practices and actions provides a third way to think about culture and meaning, sidestepping tensions between emphasis on ideas and things. While materialism and practice theory have enriched and decentered discourses of food and identity, for example, the value of ideas, beliefs, and symbols remains salient in food studies.

While food habits, preferences, and taboos are partially regulated by ecological and material factors, research has shown that all food systems are structured and given particular functioning mechanisms by specific societies and cultures, either according to totemic (such as in animistic religions), sacrificial (such as in ancient history), hygienic-rationalist (such as in contemporary Western dietetics), aesthetic (such as in gastronomy), or other types of symbolic logics. This provides much “food for thought.” The famous expression has never been so appropriate: not only do cultures develop unique practices for the production, treatment and consumption of food, but such practices inevitably end up affecting also food-related aspects and spheres that are generally perceived as objectively and materially defined. Let us consider, for instance, dietary prescriptions, which are undoubtedly based on the material composition of food products, but are also dependent on the values and meanings conferred on specific food constituents by the narratives and discourses circulating within each culture; or food safety regulations, which are related to the concepts of dirtiness and hygiene — whose perception, as Mary Douglas (1966) effectively showed, is intrinsically related to cultural diversity.

Drawing on these premises, the conference “Food for Thought: Nourishment, Culture, Meaning” intends to enhance the cultural reflection on food, calling into action various theoretical approaches and analytical methodologies, also in the aim to offer new insights on how the study of food can help us understand better what we call “culture.” Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

a. Food, Taste, and Global Cultures

Food and taste have always represented crucial means of construction and expression of sociocultural identity, as Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958, 1964, 1965), Roland Barthes (1961), Mary Douglas (1966, 1972, 1984), Pierre Bourdieu (1979) and a number of other scholars have effectively pointed out. What is more, in contemporary societies, migrations, travels and communications incessantly expose local food identities to global food alterities, originating remarkable processes of transformation that continuously reshape and redefine such identities and alterities. This originates a series of interesting questions: how can the cultural meanings and values associated with food be identified and described in today’s fast-changing food systems? How do the processes of hybridization (and domestication) of food and taste affect such meanings and values in different contexts and environments (e.g., creole home cooking, “ethnic” restaurants, fusion cuisines, diasporic foodways, culinary tourism, etc.)?

b. Nutrition and Cultures

Nutrition evidently relies on the material dimension of food, since it makes reference to its physical composition (in terms of nutrients, calories, etc.), but is also strongly influenced by the sociocultural sphere: not only do sociocultural factors such as ethnicity, class, education, gender, etc. affect eating habits, but the very ideas of health, beauty, safety and a series of other concepts playing a crucial role in the definition of dietary regimes are culturally defined. Furthermore, contemporary foodways have increasingly emphasized the connection between nourishment and aesthetics (mainly as a result of the generalized process of aestheticization of food and taste), as well as the link between nutrition and ethics (as a dominant position supporting meat-free dietary regimes clearly shows). The conference invites reflection upon such issues, and also consideration of the decisive role played by communication, and especially by the mass and new media, in the establishment of specific collective imaginaries and the association of particular values and meanings to food products, habits, and practices.

c. Food and Law: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Both at the local and global scale, nutrition is ruled by a complexity of laws regulating very diverse aspects — e.g. quality, safety, ecology, etc. — related to the production, trade and handling of food. Such aspects, exactly as any other facet of law, cannot be disentangled from culture (see in particular Geertz 1983; Rosen 2006). This explains the difficulty that might be encountered in establishing transnational regulations on food, as recently proved by the discussed case of food treatment within the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the European Union and the United States, which reflects not only differences in legislation on food production and handling, but also cultural divergences related to its valorization and perception. The conference focuses on the cultural conceptions underlying food regulations and the way by which they contribute to activate specific meaning-making processes.

Submissions, including an abstract (250-400 words), affiliation and a short bionote (100 words), should be sent to conference@comfection.com no later than June 23, 2019.

References:

Barthes, Roland. 1961. “Pour une psychosociologie de l’alimentation contemporaine.” Annales ESC, XVI, 5: 977-986 [English Translation 1997. “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption.” In Food and Culture: A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 20-27. New York and London: Routledge].

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. La distinction. Paris: Éditions de Minuit [English Translation 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London and New York: Routledge].

Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

——. 1972. “Deciphering a meal.” Daedalus, 101, 1: 61-81.

——. 1984. Food in the Social Order: Studies of Food and Festivities in Three American Communities. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Geertz, Clifford. 1983. “Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective.” In Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, 167-234. New York: Basic Books.

Harris, Marvin. 1985. Good to Eat. Riddles of Food and Culture. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1958. Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon [English Translation 1963. Structural Anthropology. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books].

——. 1962. Le totémisme aujourd’hui. Paris: PUF [English Translation 1963. Totemism. Boston: Beacon press].

——. 1964. Mythologiques I. Le cru et le cuit. Paris: Plon [English Translation 1969. The Raw and the Cooked. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press].

——. 1965. “Le triangle culinaire.” L’Arc, 26: 19-29.

Rosen, Lawrence. 2006. Law as Culture: An Invitation. Princeton, NJ and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press.

Warde, Alan. 2014. “After Taste: Culture, Consumption and Theories of Practice.” Journal of Consumer Culture, 14, 3: 279-303.

——. 2016. The Practice of Eating. Cambridge: Polity.

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by | April 2, 2019 · 2:57 am

Thomas Marchione Award 2019

Graduate Students! Are you doing or have you recently completed research related to food and human rights? Food security? Food justice? Do you consider that these and related issues are among the most pressing issues facing humanity? Would you like your work to be recognized? SAFN wants to hear from you!

The Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (SAFN) is seeking applications for the Thomas Marchione Award, which recognizes graduate student research on topics including food security, food justice and/or the right to food in both international and domestic contexts. Any field of study is eligible, and the winner will receive $750 and a year’s membership in both the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (SAFN).

Complete application information is here.

Deadline: July 26, 2019.

Recent Award Winners:

2018

Miguel Cuj (Vanderbilt University), Violence, Nutrition, and Health Issues: Maya Memories in Guatemala.

2017

Paula Fernandez-Wulff (UC Louvain, Belgium), Harnessing Local Food Policies for the Right to Food.

2015

Jessie Mazar (University of Vermont), Issues of food access and food security for Latino/a migrant farm workers in Vermont’s dairy industry.

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by | April 2, 2019 · 2:34 am

Christine Wilson Awards for 2019

Students! Are you writing great research papers on food and/or nutrition? Want fame and recognition? We want to hear from you!

The Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (SAFN) is seeking applications for the Christine Wilson Graduate Student Award and the Christine Wilson Undergraduate Student Award for outstanding student research papers on food and/or nutrition. The winner of the graduate award and the undergraduate award will receive $300 and be recognized at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association and receive a year’s membership in SAFN.

Complete application information is here.

Deadline: July 26, 2019.

Recent Award Winners:

2018

Christine Wilson Undergraduate Award: Jared Belsky (Hamilton College) and Mackenzie Nelsen (UNC Chapel Hill), Cultivating Activism Through Terroir: An Anthropology of Sustainable Wine Makers in Umbria, Italy.

Christine Wilson Graduate Award: Alyssa Paredes (Yale University), Follow the Yellow Brix Road: How the Japanese Market’s Taste for Sweetness Transformed the Philippine Highlands.

2017

Christine Wilson Undergraduate Award: Kate Rhodes (Macalester College), Having a Steak in the Matter: Gender in the Buenos Aires Asado.

Christine Wilson Graduate Award: Sarah Howard (Goldsmiths College, University of London), Coffee and the State in Rural Ethiopia.

2016

Christine Wilson Award Undergraduate Award: Cynthia Baur (Dickinson College), An Analysis of the Local Food Movement in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Christine Wilson Graduate Award: Imogen Bevan (University of Edinburgh), Care is Meat and Tatties, Not Curry.

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by | March 25, 2019 · 10:36 pm

From Jute Harvests to Mall Food Courts: Fostering Discourse through Food Spaces

Sarah Fouts
American Studies, UMBC

Blog editors’ note: This is the spring edition of the Latinx Foodways in North America series, which looks at different approaches scholars use to analyze foods and food production with Latinx communities. Latinx is broadly defined to include the United States and other countries in North America. If you would like to contribute or know of someone who does work in this area, please contact Sarah Fouts.

An inevitable part of all field research is cooking and eating. Food activities—in both the raw and cooked stages—help ease potentially awkward encounters through interaction and conversation. Gathering ingredients to make the dish, asking about a dish, listening to the stories that emerge while cooking can be as illuminating as a semi-structured interview. It provides a space that is inductive, informal, and allows for intimate exchanges. For me, rich discussions with Honduran women deeply affected by the diaspora emerged while we work together on food.

My research on Central American food vendors in post-Katrina New Orleans led me to Honduras for two summers. In 2013, I made my first visit to the department of Santa Bárbara to visit my friend and his family. A year prior, my friend had returned to his hometown, a small coffee-growing community of just under 1,500 people. He used earnings from work in construction and community organizing in New Orleans to buy land for coffee production and to build a large home for his family.

One afternoon, I was invited to tag along on a jute harvest with women of the household—my friend’s wife, his sister, their mother, a young cousin, and an eight-year old neighbor. Pachychilus, or jute snails, are freshwater gastropod mollusks, with a shiny, black-coned shell—and an overlooked yet integral protein source. The act of gathering jute links today’s peoples to centuries of Maya practice. Archaeological digs in middens and sixteenth century Spanish historical accounts show how the ubiquitous jute provided vital nutrients and barter power in the Maya lowland subsistence economy.[1]

We headed down the dirt road with our plastic bags.  The road became a path. We ducked under barbed wire, then picked up a trail along a quebrado (gully). As we walked, we told stories (I mostly listened), joked (I usually willingly bore the brunt of them), and learned about local flora from my friend’s mother. One of the women commented that she had never ventured beyond the soccer field at the base of the mountain. The journey was special. And rare.

Fouts1

We climbed a small mountain towards the headwaters. Stagnant basins where kids swam quickly became fast-flowing streams and then, terraced waterfalls feeding pools. These pools were our destination:Fouts2

We descended upon the pools peeling the jutes from the submerged rock surfaces. We filled bags with jutes ranging from ½ inch to two inches in size, along with the occasional small crab, which were more annoyance than treasure. It wasn’t until the end that I realized that cosechando jutes was a competition. I had lost by a landslide.

We descended the small mountain with our bounty, and my friend’s mother collected large leaves from plants growing along the gully. The plant, juniapa, also known as hoja santa and scientifically named Piper Auritum, was the seasoning for our dinner—sopa de jutes.[2] With a flavor that blends sassafras, tarragon, anise, and black pepper, and a potency used medicinally to cure colds, juniapa added depth to the chicken broth base which also featured chunks of guineo verde. Jutes were added last, cooked briefly.

Fouts 3

To eat the jute, we removed the iridescent, plastic-like membrane cap of the snail, then sucked the meat from the shell. Jute shells piled next to our plates and formed contemporary middens. As we enjoyed the fruits of our venture, the women teased me for losing the harvest competition to an eight-year-old.

In 2015, I visited my friend’s family again, but I first met his sister in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’ second largest city. She had moved to join her two older sisters who worked in the food industry—the oldest sister owns a fried chicken restaurant, Riko Pollos y Licuados, located in a mall food court while the other sister is a server in a popular restaurant. We went directly to Riko Pollos y Licuados and caught up over a meal of pollo con tajadas (fried chicken on a bed of fried plantains with shredded cabbage drizzled by Russian dressing). She left their small village,after the murder of her child’s father made her feel that she no longer belonged there. She was also bored and there were no jobs for her. In the city she takes classes, does odd jobs, and cares for her son and a nephew. She even contemplated briefly a trek to the United States, following her brother. She decided against it.

The next morning we took an early bus for the four hour schlep to their village in Santa Bárbara. Once there, we caught up, played with new babies, and: set the date to go jute harvesting. A chance to vindicate myself and my defeat two years earlier!

Again, we headed out the dirt road and past the soccer field. Children splashed in the basin as we climbed the small mountain. My main rival—now ten years old—talked about school and nail polish. We arrived at the terraced waterfalls and began the hunt. I filled my bag quickly as the rest of the gatherers joked and splashed each other. I kept my eyes on the prize.

And after a couple of hours, when we compared our bounties, my bag over-filled with jutes clearly outdid everyone. I reveled as we hiked back, the banter drowning out my friends’ mother’s explanations of various medicinal plants as she collected juniapa leaves.

Later, as we ate, my fellow diners set aside some snails, uneaten, separate from the mound of empty jute shells. I didn’t pay much attention and like a “good guest,” I emptied my bowl, talking, reminiscing and joking along with everyone else. We finished our meals, cleaned up, and I packed my bags for the early bus ride to my next destination. The jute expedition was my despedida (farewell party).

In the wee hours of the night, my stomach began to gurgle. I brushed it off as travel belly. A few hours later, on the bus, my stomach (I’ll spare the details) made clear why the family had set aside uneaten jutes—these were bad. In my quest for victory I had unknowingly picked dead jutes. And then ate them.

While my second jute harvest illustrated my overly competitive spirit (and its consequences), it also shed light on the importance of these spaces for these women. The jute journey provided a playground for competitive banter and even bawdy humor. It was an escape from the routine and, for some, a venture into the unknown. For the mother, as the elder, it served as an opportunity to pass down her knowledge, teaching recipes and the properties of plants, lessons she had likely learned from similar trips with her elders. The second trek served as a homecoming for one sister, estranged from the community, and, for me, a familiar activity through which to reconnect.

Fouts4

In the city, Riko Pollos y Licuados demonstrated the oldest sister’s mobility from campo to urban entrepreneurship, transferring skills bestowed by her elders. Riko Pollos y Licuados and plates of fried chicken anchored a space to catch up on tough issues such as violence in their community and questions of belonging. Observing, listening, participating, receiving in these processes—the not-so-subtle jabs, the laughter, learning, play, savoring, respecting tears of sadness—brought me into the family’s intimacy. And these women, so central to food production, elevated their voices and expertise, no longer relegated to the background.

[1] Healy, Paul F., Kitty Emery, and Lori E. Wright. “Ancient and Modern Maya Exploitation of the Jute Snail (Pachychilus).” Latin American Antiquity 1, no. 02 (1990), p. 175.

[2] Not to be confused with the traditional Honduran dish, sopa de caracol, which is conch soup and flavored with coconut milk.

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