SAFN Anthro Day Photo Contest, Part 2: Eating Well in a World Gone Bad

Yesterday we announced the winner of the annual SAFN Anthropology Day Photography contest and posted the photographs they submitted. You can see them here. We are now happy to announce the 2nd Place winner of this year’s competition. Morgan Jenatton, a graduate student at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, in Marseille, France, and at  El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, in Chiapas, Mexico, submitted an impressive series of pictures exploring food in Mexico and France. The series looks at the supply chain that supports food production in both contexts, with photographs that show distinct steps and components in the process. Jenatton also submitted a text describing their work and we have included that, along with the photos, below. Congratulations, Morgan Jenatton!

Eating well in a world gone bad: everyday political ecology in the supply chains of bread in France and tortillas in Mexico

Morgan Jenatton

My research explores how ordinary people (Cefaï & Pasquier 2003; Dobré, 2002; Fasula & Laugier, 2022), unaffiliated with specific movements or organizations, contend with the challenge of “eating well^[1]” in the face of unbridled capitalism and growing ecological crises^[2]. It compares the supply chains of bread in France and tortillas in Mexico, to understand how the different actors in these chains – consumers, bakers/tortilla makers, millers, and farmers – invest notions of ecology and social justice in relation to their practices. I draw from a retheorization of the French notion of filière (“supply chain,” though more literally “wire maker”) that focuses on the structuring of power between socially or spatially distant actors who are nonetheless linked through dynamics of economic reproduction and situated in a larger mesh of ecological relationships (Cacchioni & Jenatton, 2022). My work ethnographically compares filières in two territories, Ardèche, France and Chiapas, Mexico, using the highly emblematic staple foods (Barnes, 2022) of bread and tortillas as a vantage point for understanding how social worlds are formed and reformed in the context of ecological crises.

This series of images centers a “lateral” comparative approach (Candea, 2018) of staple food filières between the rural regions of Chiapas and Ardèche. In early fieldwork in Mexico, interlocutors repeatedly asked me, “What are the tortillas like where you come from?” I have followed this intuitive parallel by placing comparison at the heart of my research, in the hopes that it builds “a particular kind of intricacy, in which analogies and contrasts build on each other” to produce more than the sum of their parts, in the words of Matei Candea (2018: 196). The years I have devoted to bringing together bread and tortillas ethnographically, illuminating one by the light of the other, have also been a way to confront the intricate ways in which food and eating are transforming today in the face of mounting ecological crises and neoliberal capitalism.

This series of photos attests to the deep sensory imbrication between the environment, food matter, supply chain professionals, and their tools. The know-how captured here is shifting and malleable, passed down from mother to daughter, influenced by emerging economic forms, or cobbled together in the quest to make products that break with capitalist logics. These changes in practices often mark an ontological shift in the relationship to the materiality of food, and involve processes of (re)learning new techniques (Paxson, 2012; Weiss, 2016) and nurturing more sensorial and affective relationships with the environment (Cabnal, 2010; Fals Borda & Moncayo, 2009; González-Hidalgo & Zografos, 2020; Nazarea & Gagnon, 2021). An assemblage of objects, gestures, and climatic conditions enters into an embodied dance, never twice the same, when bread and tortilla makers renounce uniformization and the ambition of retaining complete control in the production processes of these deeply emblematic foods.

A French baker, Yann, eloquently expressed this sensorial entanglement between human and non-human matter:

There’s a choreography to kneading. There’s a beauty in the gesture, for sure. If you stand up straight like an “I,” you’re going to hurt yourself. Your body has to move with it. It’s like when you play tennis, you need a certain timing. It’s like when you make love, to tell the truth, when you listen to your partner, it’s the same thing. It’s totally carnal. But in fact, it’s essential that it be carnal, because otherwise you’ll hurt yourself. Because bread gives, but it also takes energy from you! It’s a dance. It’s even in the loading of the oven, you know? It’s trying to control your body’s inertia so that each movement is as efficient as possible, while being as untiring as possible. It’s knowing your body, knowing your material. And finding the intermediary between the two. It’s an interface between you – the living, thinking matter – and the inert matter that’s there – mineral, vegetal – and that just wants to express the force it has within it. Because you’re not in a lab, all things being equal, in a white coat. You’re dealing with elements. One bag of flour is different from the next. December 25th is not May 15th [in terms of weather and temperature]. Your water is harder or softer, your salt isn’t necessarily the same, you don’t necessarily have the same flora on your hands. And you, you’re there with your ideas, your intention, your environment, the temperature… And you go for it and in the end, it makes bread. It’s the best.

Matter is acknowledged here as having a certain vital force (Bennett, 2010) that can orient how interactions unfold and inform the very possibilities open to staple food makers. This contrasts with a more fungible vision of food that values efficiency, positivist knowledge, and accumulation, perfectly suited to modes of operation that seek to amplify scales, source raw materials from an ever broader geographic range, and sell finished goods on an increasingly globalized commodities market. We can understand the production dynamics described by Yann as accepting a constitutive relationship to uncertainty (Boltanski & Esquerre, 2017) and vulnerability (Butler et al., 2016; Kulick, 1998), in which the outcomes of bread and tortilla-making sometimes lead to unexpected results. As attested in other studies of living staple foods (Sariola, 2021), actors seek to be attuned to subtle ambient fluctuations – temperature, wind, grain maturity, water minerality, yeast activity – that can influence the final nature of a product from day to day.

I call the practices aligned with this vulnerability and hopeful investment in vibrant matter as forming part of an “everyday political ecology,” drawing from intellectual traditions of political ecology developed in Latin America (Escobar, 2014; Jenatton et al., 2022; Leff, 2015; Martinez Alier, 2003). Lived experience in specific milieux is mobilized as a powerful resource, informing professional intuition and a multitude of meticulous food production choices. A number of fragile interdependencies are acknowledged within these filières and even cherished, seeing our human destiny as co-constitutive with the materials and beings around us, guiding mutual action and outcomes. Logics of care (de La Bellacasa, 2017) manifest through attention to shared vulnerabilities and the food products that result are attuned to the profound interconnectedness between producer and consumer, human and non-human, materiality and imagination.

Bibliography
Barnes, J. (2022). Staple Security : Bread and Wheat in Egypt. Duke University Press.

Barrios, R. E. (2017). What Does Catastrophe Reveal for Whom? The Anthropology of Crises and Disasters at the Onset of the Anthropocene. Annual Review of Anthropology, 46(1), 151‑166. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041635

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter : A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.

Boltanski, L., & Esquerre, A. (2017). Enrichissement. Une critique de la marchandise. Gallimard.

Butler, J., Gambetti, Z., & Sabsay, L. (2016). Vulnerability in Resistance. Duke University Press.

Cabnal, L. (2010). Feminismos diversos : El feminismo comunitario. ACSUR-Las Segovias.

Cacchioni, D., & Jenatton, M. (2022). Call for Papers « Filières. Matérialités, imaginaires et connexions socio-écologiques dans les chaînes de production ». https://centrenorbertelias.cnrs.fr/filieres_2022/

Candea, M. (2018). Comparison in Anthropology : The Impossible Method. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108667609

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de La Bellacasa, M. P. (2017). Matters of care : Speculative ethics in more than human worlds (Vol. 41). U of Minnesota Press.

Dobré, M. (2002). L’écologie au quotidien : Eléments pour une théorie sociologique de la résistance ordinaire. L’Harmattan.

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Paxson, H. (2012). The life of cheese : Crafting food and value in America. Univ of California Press.

Weiss, B. (2016). Real pigs : Shifting values in the field of local pork. Duke University Press.

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^[1] We can connect my articulation of eating well here with Garth’s (2020: 7) concept of a “decent meal,” expressing not only forms of providing nourishment but also intimate performances of living a good life and, I would add, embodying an array of internal and external expectations relating to health and sustainability.

^[2] I favor the term “crisis” as it more neatly captures the disproportionate impact of ecological upheaval in diverse contexts compared to overarching civilizational narratives like “anthropocene,” “collapse,” or even “global climate change.” While not inherently more optimistic, crises does have the ability to convey a multiplicity of situated experiences (Barrios, 2017) and with its somewhat blurry temporality (Knight, 2017), relays an outcome that is not wholly certain. A crisis can be resolved, or at least attended to.