Author Archives: dsutton20

by | July 5, 2019 · 9:19 pm

Review/Interview: Food and Animal Welfare

Food and Animal Welfare 

Food and Animal Welfare Henry Buller and Emma Roe. Contemporary Food Series, Bloomsbury Academic, London. 2018. ISBN 9780857855787

Sharyn Jones
(Northern Kentucky University)

Most people in Western countries eat meat and consume at least some form of animal products every day. Yet, pausing to consider the animal lives involved in our food systems and the complex web of human and non-human interactions that produce what we ingest is a rare occurrence. We have a long history of segregating food animals from our lexicon of items on the table and in the supermarket aisles. For example, cattle products are referred to by the generalized terms “beef” or “steaks”, or “burgers”; pigs are referred to as “pork”, or “bacon”, or “ribs”. One rarely notes that one is eating a “steer” or a “barrow” or “gilt”. Moreover, the way that animal food products and animal lives (their value and quality) are described, marketed, and sold reflects a distancing of living creatures from animal products and human consumption practices.

Henry Buller’s and Emma Roe’s new book, Food and Animal Welfare deals directly with this disconnect and the “de-animalization” of food animals from products and consumers. Buller’s and Roe’s central thrust, and their most fundamental argument, is that a concern for farm animal life and welfare is the critical link between consumption and production. Their text provides ample support for the assertion of essential human and animal interconnections and the prevalence of animal welfare issues which permeate our global food chains. I intentionally read this book slowly, digesting the details over several months and I relished every moment of it (as an aside it should be noted that my husband and I co-manage a humane, small-scale heritage hog and poultry farm, a fact which makes the subject of this book particularly important to me). After reading Buller’s and Roe’s book I had many questions for them. They generously agreed to share their thoughts with FoodAnthropology readers and I have included my interview with the authors below, following my general summary and impressions.

Buller and Roe, who are geographers, take a broad interdisciplinary approach to their subject, integrating information from economics, ethics, agriculture, politics, policy, animal science, animal studies, veterinary science, post-humanism, and ethnography. The perspectives presented in the text are primarily focused on the UK and Europe, however case studies from China, and Hungary are also provided and the authors often mention comparative situations in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world. Importantly, the book incorporates narratives and participant observations from farmers, animal caregivers, and animal welfare specialists in the UK and China.

This dense yet compact text includes seven chapters and 222 pages. The first chapter focuses on the disciplines of food studies and animal studies and explores the idea of animal welfare as a link between these academic fields. Buller and Roe advocate for bridging the divide between production and consumption via recognition of animal subjectivities (their lives, realities, relationships, and roles in food systems). The second chapter explores three formal trajectories of concern and measurement for animal welfare, including: scientific, ethical, and economic. In the third chapter, Roe’s observational and ethnographic fieldwork on farms and with animal caregivers is shared. The fourth chapter is entitled, “Selling Welfare” and it addresses how animal welfare materializes into commodified, marketed, and consumed products. The fifth and sixth chapters take a comparative global view of the evolution of social interest in food-animal well-being as it relates to production and consumption. Finally, the last chapter returns to the idea of how producers and consumers might ethically engage with the lives of animals who become human food.

In general this book presents a case for the deep connection, affiliation, and mutual dependence between nature and culture, humans, animals, and our environments. The major strengths of this text are many, but several stand out to me personally. First, the authors’ skillful use of ethnography provides insights into the deeply empathetic and challenging relationships that animal carepersons have with farm animals. This approach contributes a provocative dimension to the research presented elsewhere in the book and it adds a great deal of detail about real life situations that animals and their carepersons experience. Roe worked with animal caregivers on a mixed-use farm in the UK for several weeks. In the process, specific on-farm practices of animal care, welfare assessment, daily maintenance, inter-species (or animal-human) communication, and decisions about animal killing were documented are described through participant observations and interviews. The day-to-day demands of caring for animals are explored in relation to how these practices are embodied in the animals themselves, and how they later translate into the value and quality of food products. Buller and Roe intentionally use the term “careperson” vs. “stockperson” in order to illustrate a shifting understanding of farm animals from mindless objects of property to sentient feeling beings. This ethnographic approach allows us to empathize and to better understand farm animals life on a daily basis.

Second, Buller and Roe masterfully incorporate massive amounts of data from many lines of evidence. At the same time, they succulently make a powerful case for valuing and thinking deeply about the relationships we all have with food animals as well as the materiality and sentient nature of these creatures. Third, the authors have a great deal of empathy and concern (both for carepersons and the animals for whom they care) which is clearly expressed throughout their work. In this way they straddle the line between being objective social scientists and humane, caring, real people. This approach has become increasingly common and it supports their case as well as enhancing their writing, making this book easy to read and enjoyable.

Appropriate audiences for Food and Animal Welfare include anthropologists who study food or human-animal interactions; scholars interested in post-humanist approaches; anyone who wants to understand the nuts and bolts of what processes and practices deliver animal products to the table; graduate students, and advanced undergraduates. I think this book, in all or part should be required reading for students of food anthropology, economics, animal science, biology, and food systems ethics. Somewhat less traditionally, individuals who are either directly participating in, or perhaps simply interested in the sustainable food movement would find this book to be extremely revealing.

As noted at the beginning of this review, Henry Buller and Emma Roe answered my inquiries about their text and work. Here are the questions that I asked them and their thoughtful responses regarding Food and Animal Welfare:

  1. In a couple sentences please explain your approach (multi-disciplinary and theoretical?) to studying human-non-human interactions.

“Our approach is to study the sentient materialities of animal bodies as they are mobilized by the agro-food supply chain, along the process of going from a living farm animal through to becoming a packaged and labeled food product which is then bought and eaten. We are interested in bringing attention to care practices in the supply chain from stockperson, regulator, retailer, consumer, that has developed the market in higher animal welfare meat and dairy products. We also bring our interest in studying the performance of how farm animal welfare is being known, made and performed by discussing the sociology of animal welfare science as it has developed to offer scientific credibility for a topic that has had considerable civil society concern that farm animals have feelings that matter to them.”

2 . What personal experiences motivated you to write about this subject and the issuescovered in Food and Animal Welfare?

Emma Roe – “My mum has always been passionate about caring for animals and to try to improve the quality of animal lives’. We had a pet rabbit when I was growing up that she felt was unhappy in its cage, it ended up running wild in our Norfolk garden and mating with a wild rabbit. For her it has been about putting quality of life before health and safety. However, her concerns were never directed towards farm animals when I was growing up. Meanwhile my dad was the village shop keeper and so I became interested in food retailing, and where our food comes from, from quite an early age. I remember him boiling a leg of ham in the back of the shop. Growing up in Norfolk the connection between the food we eat and what was growing in the fields and the hens/veg patch/fruit trees in our garden definitely made an impression on me.”

Henry Buller – “I have long been fascinated by the role of veterinary medicine and veterinary action in mediating forms of human/animal relations. My mum wanted me to be a vet but I couldn’t do the math. So I have returned to it, many years later from the angle of social science.”

  1. What has the response been to your book in the UK and elsewhere?

“Silence! Amongst the community with which we work, there has been some (though limited, response). The social science of farm animal welfare sits uneasily between disciplines and ideologies. Although that is a space we enjoy occupying, others find it problematic.”

  1. What research findings that you share in the book do you consider to be the most profound or surprising?

“The men and women who actually work with the living farm animals and who work to give them a better quality of life are often having to negotiate the cultural, social and personal challenges of improving the life experience of the farm animal whilst keeping within the constraints of what the food market is willing to pay for higher welfare farmed food and caring for their own sentient sensibilities. These people understand a lot about the animals they work with, they are sensitive to what the animals may be communicating through bleat/cheep/grunt or moo. The same is often true for those men that handle and manage the living animals in the abattoir. These folk are too often forgotten or represented as complicit if there are occasions of poor animal welfare.”

  1. Based on your research and experiences what predictions do you have about the future of animals as food in the UK and/or beyond?

“The growing momentum behind finding alternatives to animal-based protein to address the environmental damage that livestock production is doing to the planet coupled with the ongoing concern about the welfare of animals produced by the meat and dairy industry, offers the prospect of a future with a reduced number of farmed animals. It may take some time to get there however, currently meat consumption is steadily rising in China for example, despite high-profile adverts urging reduction primarily from links to non-communicable diseases. In the short term we wonder how the market in higher welfare meat and dairy products may be affected by ‘so-called’ ethical consumers opting to not eat, or to eat less meat and dairy and what the consequence will be for work to continue to raise welfare standards. Meanwhile there are many low and middle income countries in the world with still much work to address farm animal welfare and to meet UK/European animal welfare standards and where the western diet of high-meat and dairy consumption is an aspiration which at a planetary level seems deeply undesirable.”

  1. What do you think is the single most effective change that the average consumer of meat and animal products could make to improve some of the problems you have identified in the book?

“To always buy higher welfare meat and dairy products and to ask if something is not labelled – not only in the supermarket but also when you eat outside of the home whether fast food van, cafe or restaurant chain. And perhaps ultimately to eat less meat and dairy and if one does ensure it is from a higher welfare production system.”

Leave a comment

Filed under anthropology, ethics, farming, food policy, United Kingdom, United States

by | July 2, 2019 · 6:15 pm

Food Without Borders

Food without Borders: Proustian Anthropology and Collaborative Storytelling with an Experimental Sixth-Grade Class in Paris

Dr. Christy Shields-Argelès, in collaboration with Beth Grannis

“Food without Borders” is a collaborative ethnographic film project that I, along with filmmaker Beth Grannis and students from the American University of Paris, carried out with a mixed bi-lingual/mono-lingual sixth grade class in Paris. In this blog post, I discuss the manner in which David Sutton’s work on food and memory provided a theoretical and methodological frame that allowed us to identify and use co-feelings related to the shared experience of displacement as both a platform for collaboration and a frame for storytelling. In the conclusion, I also discuss collaborative tensions that characterized the project and make suggestions for using the project’s films in food anthropology classes.

***

For the past six years, Maurice Ravel, a public junior-high school in Paris’ twentieth district, has been engaged in a civic experiment of sorts. At Ravel, bilingual students who test into an International Baccalaureate program in English (OIB) share all but their English literature and history classes with local sector students who follow the traditional French Baccalaureate pathway (OFB), and are therefore learning English as a foreign language. As such, these classes contain at least two groups of global youth: the OIB students, who generally travel across borders as the children of middle and upper class professionals, and the OFB students, who are often the children of working-class and immigrant families. Bringing these students together is done with the idea that working together will benefit all, and yet class participants also struggle to live and learn together in a context that is, of course, also shaped by wider social, political and economic structures and inequalities.

I am a food anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Global Communications department at the American University of Paris (AUP). Beth is a filmmaker and Deputy Director of the non-profit Filmmakers without Borders, and at the time of the project was also an MA student in AUP’s Global Communications program. During the 2017–18 school year, we designed and directed a collaborative ethnographic film project for the OIB-OFB sixth grade class at Ravel. AUP’s Civic Media Lab and Filmmakers without Borders provided support for the project. Over the course of several months, we led the class through a series of anthropology and filmmaking workshops, in French and English. Together, we produced a class film, which consists of twenty-eight ethnographic vignettes (one for each student), and is in four languages (French, English, Chinese and Italian). In each vignette, a child tells the story of a food or a dish that connects them to the past, a place, a people and a sense of belonging. The film’s stories were collected within reciprocal OIB-OFB interviewing pairs, and each student took a small camera home to film the preparation and/or consumption of their dish, using the filming techniques taught to them in class.

Working within the traditions of participatory filmmaking and collaborative anthropology, Beth and I aimed at privileging the sixth graders’ voices. We felt this to be particularly important in the current context. Following the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015, the centralized French education system became an arena of intense institutional reform. President François Hollande immediately instated mandatory “civic and moral instruction” for grades K through 12, and Emmanuel Macron’s government has followed suit with a series of important structural changes, including an overhaul of the central (and strongly symbolic) baccalaureate exam system. Within this context, OFB-OIB class participants are instructed on civic values like mixité (social mixing) and vivre ensemble (which might best be translated as “living together harmoniously”), but have little opportunity to speak of their own experiences and knowledge of living with difference, within their families, their communities and their school. Beth and I did not want to speak at these sixth graders, but help them to tell their own stories, and reveal the rich and dynamic identities and relations they are building within multi-lingual and multi-cultural environments.

From the onset, we designed the project as a collaborative process. We aimed to work in dialogue with community members (students, teachers, families) as well as encourage collaboration among the sixth graders, who had only just met four weeks prior to our arrival. We framed and modeled collaboration in a variety of ways. For example, as an anthropologist, I paid particular attention to language. I used folk concepts (like vivre ensemble) to create space for the discussion of different experiences and perspectives. Language was also central when teaching in-depth interviewing techniques. Are your words expressing judgment? Do you formulate open-ended questions so your partner can respond in their own terms? Beth relied more on movement and visual imagery. She drew from a Common Core curriculum developed by Filmmakers without Borders in 2014 for students who do not speak English. She adapted this pedagogy to the Ravel classroom. So, when teaching different camera shots, she stood in front of the class and called out technical terms, like “close up”, while framing her face with her hands. The children copied the movement, and repeated the term. They then worked in pairs, and moved around the classroom to practice the different camera shots with a partner. In such activities, a student’s literacy (in English or French) was not an issue, as they were learning together and working towards a shared goal.

 

Beth and the class gesturing a “close-up” shot.

Another important component of the project was getting AUP undergraduate and graduate students involved as “student-mentors”. AUP students are a decidedly international group (with over 100 nationalities represented in a student body of 1200 students). In this particular project, five students were American, one was Columbian, and another was French. They all spoke English (though two were non-native English speakers), had varying levels of French (fluent to beginner), and often spoke one additional language (including Chinese, German and Spanish). In the Ravel classroom, the AUP team modeled a multi-lingual and multi-cultural learning commons as well as positive, global identities. At the same time, however, AUP students learned a great deal from the sixth graders. The experience brought them to reflect on their own childhood experiences and encouraged them to formulate questions concerning the role of education or food in current debates and processes of change.

Collaboration was also built on “co-feelings” related to the experience of displacement. My understanding of co-feeling is inspired by the work of Renato Rosaldo (1989). He writes about how experiencing the death of a loved one – and, in particular, the rage that accompanies it for a time – repositioned him in the field, and allowed him to understand the people he was working with, as well as human death rituals, in a new manner. So, by co-feeling I mean that different people can share a set of feelings that result from a shared human experience. In this way, co-feeling can help form a bridge of understanding and empathy. Of course, this bridge must be built and navigated with care because emotion can also mislead in a number of ways. For thinking through the feelings associated with displacement, and then conceptualizing them as a platform for co-feeling within this project, I also drew inspiration from David Sutton’s work on food and memory in Greece. In what he calls a “Proustian anthropology”, Sutton theorizes the processes first described in Proust’s “madeleine” passage, drawing particular attention to the feelings of estrangement and loss that accompany displacement. He also examines how “foods from home” temporarily assuage these feelings by allowing for a ritual “return to the whole”, or a mutual tuning-in and sense of connection.

In France, sixth grade is the first year of junior high and so involves changing schools and sometimes neighborhoods, as well as changing rhythms and workloads. In addition, in this particular class, many students (and their families) had moved across (or currently lived across) national borders. So, French sixth graders in general – and this group in particular – can be a nostalgic bunch, in the midst of missing other places (e.g. old schools, other countries) and times (“when I was a kid”). We therefore hoped that this particular topic would be equally engaging and meaningful for all. We also hoped in this way to reposition the students away from all sorts of opposed identity categories that frame their daily interactions (e.g. OIB/OFB, English speakers/French speakers, good students/bad students) into a shared subject position of a 6th grader in a new school, who loved a tasty dish that connected them to people they loved.

“Madeleine foods” spoke to other project participants too. I have long included Sutton’s work in my AUP classes because my expatriate students are usually experiencing similar emotional difficulties, and are also toting suitcases filled with foods from home. Their ability to identify with the Greek migrants on this topic often spurs their interest and engagement in class. Within the frame of this project, AUP students tended to see the Ravel kids as fundamentally like them, in large part due to their similar experiences of displacement and food as a powerful vector of reconnection. This, I felt, was an important first step towards working collaboratively. Finally, this entire project took place in France, where “Proust’s madeleine” is a common cultural reference. In initial meetings, for example, when I explained to teachers and administrators that the project aimed at helping the children tell their own “madeleine” stories, this was instantly recognized as culturally and intellectually meaningful. It enabled teachers to become active participants from the on-set and develop, even before we had fully designed our own workshops, a series of related lesson plans.

Of course, it is one thing to use shared experience and feeling as a platform for mutual understanding and investment, but it is another to construct a story, or in our case a set of twenty-eight stories, with a common narrative form and force. Here I was guided by Sutton’s assertion that such “madeleine” foods help us “return to the whole”. I began the first anthropology workshop with a three-minute film Beth made for my Food, Culture and Communication class entitled “This place doesn’t exist anymore: Food and memory among Syrian refugees”. The film is focused on Saad, a Syrian refugee, who talks about his life in France through the lens of cooking and food, and speaks in particular about a dish he calls “rice with peas” in English. After watching the film, I wrote “Saad” and “rice with peas” in the center of the whiteboard, and asked students to share what they had learned about him in the film. Student responses were written on the board. After they were done sharing, I circled groups of words, and named each bubble: people, places, activities, objects/ingredients, time, senses, and emotions. I then gave students a worksheet with an empty “mind map” similar to the one I had just drawn on the board. There was a space for their name and their dish in the center and then bubbles around this center circle in a daisy pattern labeled with the descriptive category names. The AUP student-mentors and Ravel teachers moved around the class and helped individual students brainstorm their ideas and fill out the map. In this way, the first anthropology workshop was spent reflecting upon the self (though in relation to a Syrian refugee). In the second anthropology workshop, I turned to interviewing and drew on Spradley’s descriptive interviewing techniques in particular. I identified the same descriptive categories (people, places, etc.) as areas for which they could elaborate open-ended questions for their interview partners. In other words, the second anthropology workshop was focused on reaching out to another and encouraging him or her to tell their story. During the interviewing sessions themselves, which took place in a separate, longer session, OFB-OIB students, working in pairs, interviewed one another while an AUP student-mentor took detailed notes so as to help the students develop ideas for b-roll images to collect in their homes. B-roll provided a unique opportunity to layer sequences of images that evoked these same descriptive categories. In short, the twenty-eight vignettes in the final film are a product of a collaborative storytelling process that used anthropological perspectives to first frame self-reflection and then an encounter with an “other”.

The “mind map” used in class to help students identify and describe a memorable food.

The project was successful in many ways. In February 2018, when we turned on the lights after the community screening, parents, teachers and administrators alike were dabbing at the corners of their eyes. This suggested to us that co-feeling was extended to the audience as well (a topic to be elaborated in the future). “Build bridges not walls”, a phrase that quite unexpectedly became the project’s motto, found its way onto the cakes and into the mouths of participants at the final banquet. At a time when Trump’s border wall was all over the French media, this seemed a small but cathartic response. The sixth graders were rightfully proud of their production, and numerous friendships were formed which, I’ve been told, have endured. The class was also invited to present the project at the Premier Festival des Arts de la Scène et du Goût, organized in partnership with the French Ministry of Education and held at a Michelin-starred restaurant and theater, La Scène Thélème. Here the students were able to present their project to other Parisian students and teachers, as well as to the restaurant staff, who then gave them a guided tour of the kitchens and wine cellar. I also feel that the project played a small role in helping Ravel teachers and administrators imagine additional sorts of OIB-OFB collaborations: for example, this year, for the first time, joint OFB-OIB class trips were organized. Beth also went on to write a successful MA capstone thesis about the project, and AUP student-mentors developed a series of “field-based” questions, which some went on to examine in other contexts.

A cake made for the final banquet

However, to represent the project as singularly successful would be both disingenuous and counterproductive. In the future, I hope to also examine the multiple tensions at play in such collaborations. In a recently published article, Yates-Doerr (2019) writes of “awkward collaborations”, where participants use the same words, but mean different things by them. She develops the notion of “careful equivocation”, joining her voice to others who are examining the nature of collaborative work as not necessarily entailing unity of purpose. In the Food without Borders project, “Proust’s madeleine” functioned as both folk and analytical concept throughout, and certainly did not always mean the same thing to all participants. Likewise, as food scholars well know: foods and commensal practices both unite and differentiate. Such tensions were at play through out the project. For example, in an initial meeting, several children expressed the desire to work on crepes. In the final film, however, only a few speak of them. Who came to “own” the crepe stories was part of a negotiation that involved both individual choice and group pressure. The “crepe dilemma”, as we came to call it, could therefore be examined in the future as a space of tension and a process of negotiation. Finally, scholars have recognized the transformative power of emotion, but also examine the manner in which it can reproduce and normalize unequal power relations. What are the limits of co-feeling within such a project? Such questions have yet to be examined for this project.

 I’d like to end with an invitation to SAFN readers to view the project’s films and integrate them into their classes. These days, I assign them in a class on food, memory and identity, along with the readings that originally inspired them, including: Proust’s madeleine, Nadia Seremetakis’ The Senses Still, and Sutton’s Remembrance of Repasts. The class allows for a nice diversity of materials and, when including the films, the opportunity to discuss participatory filmmaking and collaborative anthropologies too. I also ask students to carry out a descriptive and narrative interview with a person they feel might share the experience of displacement (in time and/or space). Sometimes students also produce short films from these interviews (in the style of the Food without Border project), and sometimes they produce a story and a recipe, which we bring together into a kind of narrated and illustrated recipe book.

Finally, I am also curious as to how your students might view the class film. In September 2018, Beth and I presented the project to an audience outside of France for the first time (at a food and communication conference in Edinburgh). After spending so much time navigating complex identity questions among this group of sixth graders, who often do not feel entirely French – either because of their own travels or because others question their “Frenchness” – it was surprising to hear an Anglophone Canadian colleague exclaim after the screening: “I found the film to be sooo French! I mean look at all that cooking! And all those vegetables!” And so it goes in the world, I suppose, as we make sense of each other and our times, in an endless cycle of overlapping identification processes.

View English and French versions of project’s films here: https://www.aup.edu/academics/research-centers/civic-media-lab/food-without-borders

References:

Grannis, B. 2018. Food without Borders: A Collaborative and Participatory Ethnographic Film Project with a Bilingual Sixth-Grade Class in Paris. Capstone Thesis, M.A. in Global Communications, The American University of Paris.

Korsmeyer, C., ed. 2005. “The Madeline.” (excerpt from In Search of Lost Time, M. Proust) The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink. Oxford: Berg Publishers.

Rosaldo, R. 1989. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Seremetakis, C.N. 1996. The Senses Still. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Spradley, J. 1979. The Ethnographic Interview. Belmont, CA : Wadsworth Group/Thomson   Learning.

Sutton, D. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Oxford and London: Berg Publishers.

Yates-Doerr, E. 2019. “Whose Global? Which Health? Unsettling Collaboration and Careful Equivocation.” American Anthropologist 121 (2): 297-310.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under anthropology, anthropology of food, France, methods

by | May 18, 2019 · 3:49 pm

Review: GMOs Decoded

GMOs Decoded

Krimsky, Sheldon. (2019) GMOs Decoded. A Skeptic’s View of Genetically Modified Foods. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 161 pp. + 9 pp. References Cited. Forward by Marion Nestle. ISBN 9780262039192

Ellen Messer (Tufts University)

“What risks are acceptable and at what cost?” (p.14). These are the motivating questions of scientist-philosopher Sheldon Krimsky’s latest writings on GMOs, for which his findings can be summarized: much remains “uncertain.” As a corollary, he questions the widely touted “scientific consensus” of the benefits and safety of GMOs, rejected by European publics and policy makers who resist more widespread GMO approval and usage in the absence of greater certainty. This short book considers what additional evidence must be supplied before he and other skeptics would join the consensus.

The book is well organized. In an eight-page introductory overview, Krimsky lays out recurring questions that characterize the debate pitting GMO proponents against opponents, then chapter by chapter clarifies the logic of the frameworks, arguments, and evidence favoring one or the other viewpoint. Chapters 1 and 2 define and explicate, respectively, “traditional” vs. “molecular” plant breeding, and chapter 3 evaluates the “differences … and their significance for evaluating crops”. The next four chapters consider the evidence for qualities and safety of “early products in agricultural biotechnology” (Ch.4) and Herbicide-Resistant, Disease-Resistant, and Insect-Resistant crops (Ch’s 5-7). He explains how initial products included Calgene’s high-solids content, delayed ripening tomato, which was produced by “antisense technology … a small step in the move toward genetically engineered (GE) crops. No new genes were introduced into the tomatoes: the gene for one enzyme was removed and inverted” (p.34). The selected agronomic traits, by contrast, were constructed by engineering gene-transfers into multiple crops. Krimsky’s critical risk assessment comparing and contrasting molecular versus traditional breeding encompasses all GE.

Chapters 8 and 9, “Genetic Mechanisms and GMO Risk Assessment” and “Contested Viewpoints on the Health and Environmental Effects of GMOs” systematically probe the many uncertainties that still surround these manipulations of plant biology, genetics, and transformations, after more than thirty years of scientific evaluations. Krimsky is selective in citing sources for his skeptical analysis; for example, he finds particularly useful three points raised by David Schubert, a geneticist at the Salk Institute: (1) the same gene introduced into two different types of cells can produce two very different protein molecules; (2) the introduction of any gene can change gene expression and phenotype of the recipient cell (and by extension, organism); and (3) enzymatic pathways that synthesize small molecules (e.g., vitamins) can interact with endogenous pathways and produce novel molecules. All serve to question whether “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) or “substantial equivalence” evaluations are adequate to judge identity and safety of GMOs (pp.69-70). Krimsky additionally uses Schubert’s uncontested scientific reasoning to argue that all products produced by molecular breeding, including gene editing that does not involve foreign gene transfers (GMOs), should be safety- regulated by method of breeding rather than final product. This is because molecular breeding entails potentially more unexpected changes in the new GE product; new molecules or enzymatic pathways resulting from genetic introductions or rearrangements may not be so easily recognized by the laboratory or commercial breeder who is not looking for such variants. U.S. and European authorities largely disagree on how to respond to all these uncertainties. U.S. regulators have moved more quickly in the direction of deregulation of additional plant varieties and products that involve processes and outcomes that have previously been judged GRAS or substantially equivalent to conventional products whereas European authorities have decided to withhold safety approval until risks, including GE procedures that do not involve foreign gene transfer, can be exhaustively evaluated. Such contradictory judgments call for additional chemical-component compositional and ecological analyses, animal feeding trials, or both.

There follow three short chapters summarizing: (10) the arguments for and against GMO labelling, (11) the carefully balanced evidence and concluding uncertainties of the largely pro-GMO 2016 National Academies Study on agricultural biotechnology, and (12) “The Promise and Protests of Golden Rice,” the one crop designed to meet micro-nutrient nutritional needs of low-income consumers in developing countries. Chapter 13 shows where “Science Studies” cultural-political arguments against GMOs diverge from the preceding science, and provides a good summary of the social issues in which conflicting views on GMOs are embedded. These public and social-science positions can be summarized that (1) there is no value-free science so “it is neither unreasonable nor irrational for there to exist disagreements because the value judgments are not premised exclusively on scientific authority”; (2) non-scientists appeal to religion, folk wisdom, family values, among other “non-scientific beliefs … “ in their judgments; and (3) “individuals who are inclined to follow scientific advice exclusively on matters of risk and health benefits may accept the knowledge claims or statements highlighting uncertainty by outlier scientists who(se) … views fall outside the mainstream.” (p.xviii). Krimsky throughout embraces the principle that “The history of science teaches us that minority positions sometimes become validated and should not be discarded at the outset, especially when questions remain unresolved.” (Ibid). Carefully and thoroughly, he shows how GMO proponents have done their best to squelch any negative findings reporting risks, either of gene transfers into non-target crops, health damages to experimental animals, or unanticipated gene products and outcomes.

The final chapter summarizes answers to his initial questions. Scientists and the general public and policy makers disagree with each other on the risks and implications of GMOs, he concludes, because they are asking different questions and framing the issues and requirements for supporting information in different ways. Critical public discourses are not based exclusively or mainly on authoritative science, but motivated by cultural and political-economic, including “food sovereignty” considerations and public opinion. It follows that “science-based” evaluations on the safety and advisability of GMOs in general or specific food-crops in particular, can never satisfy all scientists or the public at large.

As someone who began exploring agricultural biotechnologies in the mid-1980s, with the motivating question, “what opportunities might GMOs present for ending world hunger?” I found Krimsky’s presentation both lucid and frustrating. As scientist and philosopher, he carefully defined terms and analyzed ecosystem, organism, cellular, and molecular dimensions of transgenic processes and products in exquisite detail. These specifics showed the relative controllability of each step in the transformation process, and indicated how uncertainties arise in GE products, outcomes, and impacts. New transgenic seed varieties that have been extensively but not exhaustively tested are attractive to farmers because they promise higher yields with lower labor, chemical, and environmental costs, which potentially raise incomes. As anthropologists, among others, have shown, such alleged benefits appear to atrophy over the longer term, because the pests particular transgenics were designed to protect against develop resistance, or the introduction of new GE varieties paired with agricultural chemicals raise new ecological challenges. These foreseeable consequences put the farmers and the product developers on a dangerous treadmill that, in addition to making farmers dependent on additional products of ever more concentrated seed-chemical companies, may increase, rather than decrease, chemical loads, costs, and damages.

The thoroughness of his hypothetical questions and answers, however, offer the reader little guidance to answer the overarching questions. How much information is enough? Complete biochemical compositional analysis might be desirable; but would anything less suffice? Scientists and policy makers obviously disagree about how much uncertainty is tolerable, so what should non-experts think? For example, he insinuates that animal toxicity studies are always flawed. Yet his uncertainty assertions keep harking back to animal studies that indicated GMO toxicity, but which have never been replicated. Similarly, how valid are assertions that new allergens must always be considered a threat in GE products because the scientific community understands and has identified only a narrow range? Polarization on the dangers posed by known vs. unknown allergens continues; Krimsky gives no guidance on how to negotiate this divide.

Some arguments against GMOs, which Krimsky cites as worthy, can also be applied to non-GMO agricultural innovations. Changes in soil microbiome composition, for example, could be expected to accrue not only from GMOs, but from all new varieties and many of the new non-GMO seed dips, whose aim is to transform the microbial mix and benefit plant growth in expectable ways. Most frustrating, I wished that Krimsky had considered more carefully the management and monitoring issues. As a case in point, the virus-resistant papaya in Hawaii not only required development of protective seeding materials by molecular breeders, but also precise and vigilant management. Planting strategies kept ringspot viruses at bay by positioning more and less vulnerable and resilient varieties that successfully created buffers to virus co-evolution.

On balance, I finished the book with a clearer understanding of the debates, renewed skepticism about the scientific consensus, but the above frustrations. Ultimately, I think GE will be limited by the unsustainability of particular products and processes and farmer push-back against Big Ag industry strong-arm tactics and influence on farmer decision-making and management. In addition, health and environmental claims against the companies that produce GE seeds matched to ag-chemicals like glyphosate can be expected to multiply, along with damages connected to excessive, injudicious, wider-spread, and longer-term usage.

Leave a comment

Filed under agriculture, anthropology, farming, GMO food

by | May 6, 2019 · 9:59 pm

Review: Greek Whisky

Greek Whisky: The Localization of a Global Commodity

Tryfon Bampilis. Greek Whisky: The Localization of a Global Commodity. Berghahn Press. New York: 2013. ISBN: 978-0-85745-877-3.

Richard Zimmer (Sonoma State University)

The Greeks do not make whisky, but they surely drink a lot of it. Why they do and how that came to be is the subject of Tryfon Bampilis’ wonderful book. Greeks, Bampilis contends, have come to associate whisky with things “modern.” Whether it be in Athens or Skyros, an island in the Northern Aegean, whether it be in a modern restaurant or a traditional gathering place, Greeks are showing their connection to a larger world of sophistication. They arrived at this point as they became more oriented towards Western countries, especially after World War II, and also because well-crafted advertising and merchandizing helped this change.

Bampilis first sets his discussion by placing Greek whisky consumption in the larger issue of modernization and commoditization. It is an excellent discussion, and I would recommend it to people unfamiliar with this literature. Bampilis places whisky alongside other items in Greece as a growing marker of how, where, and when a person chooses to establish both a statement and a preference for this drink. He sees drinking whisky as a statement of a stylistic identity, of a person saying: “This is who I am.” Moreover, this identity is established, often regardless of the individual’s ability to maintain a lifestyle that the identity of drinking whisky entails. In other words, many people spend more on whisky than their incomes can support. (p. 18, et seq.)

How did the Greeks get to this place? Largely till the period before WWI, Bampilis argues, Greeks drank “traditional” spirits, such as ouzo–a licorice liquor, and they drank them in traditional settings, such as neighborhood bars and music venues. If the drinking was outside the home, it was mostly men who drank in these settings. Men generally drank the harder liquors. When women drank, they sipped sweeter liquors, and they did so at home.

Yet many Greeks also had an historical and spiritual connection with England, dating, in part from the early nineteenth century War of Independence and England’s help in it.   Things English began to be considered as modern and sophisticated. That included whisky. As the drinking of whisky became more widespread, Greek advertising featured English text in addition to Greek text in its promotion of whisky (see, for example, p. 41.)

Bampilis sees the popularization of this drink arising in many ways, adding to the richness of this book. The ways included movies, music, the increasing inclusion of Greece into the Common Market. Movies featured sophisticated men and women dressed in Western clothes, sitting in bars, drinking whisky. Bampilis reviews the history of the Greek movie industry to show precisely this association of whisky and modernism. He ties it to the history of Greek contemporary music as well, and he situates each kind of music in different settings where whisky is consumed. This discussion is fascinating in and of itself, for it features the ways in which media can and do change tastes–and styles.

Furthermore, he places all of this discussion within the larger history of the last several centuries. After the Second World War and the Greek Civil War, the conclusion of which saw Greece remaining within the Western sphere of influence, more Greeks identified themselves as part of the West. Greece became part of the larger European trading block and large corporations edged out smaller distributers of Western spirits. As the subtitle of the book suggests, many distributors targeted not just the modernization aspirations of more affluent and urban Greeks, they also featured local ways of appealing to these markets.

One intriguing discussion is the way in which the drinking of whisky brought together two contradictory styles and traditions. After the First World War, most Greeks living in Turkey were forced to move to Greece in the “Population Exchange” following the defeat of the Greek Army in Asia Minor in 1922. These Greeks played different types of music from what had existed in the country before. Initially, many Greeks saw these ‘musics’ as ‘tainted,’ affected by Turkish music and not suitable for people exploring their own traditions. Over time, however, these different styles of music came to be played not just in lower-class venues but eventually in nightclubs where Greeks came to display their taste for sophistication. Images of this were featured in ads and movies were set in these venues (p.112, et seq.) Bampilis’ discussions of Greek movies and music are delightful and informative, especially to people not familiar with Greek history and culture.

Bampilis then delineates how gender roles, stylistic presentations, and rituals accompanied these transformations in drinking and changed over time. He goes into substantive detail first about the drinking life in Athens. Bampilis, who claims he is Athenian on one side of his family, and Skyrian on the other side, used his family and school contacts to investigate Athens and Skyros for his informants and for their locales.

The picture he paints of the role of whisky and other drinks in the drinking life of Athens is complex and nuanced. In Athens, those men who drink whisky do so to signify modernism and masculinity Moreover, these men compete in several areas–spending money on the liquor itself, on how much liquor they can consume without appearing out of control, (p.141,) and of spending money on associated rituals, such as throwing flowers onto the stage for the performer (p.142.) The flower ritual, in recent times, replaced an earlier ritual of breaking bottles. Women who consider themselves modern also consume whisky, often as their sole drink (p.135.) As a general rule, single malt whiskies are the drink of choice. In addition, little food, except for nuts and similar edibles, is consumed when drinking whisky.

Bampilis paints a different role of why whisky and other alcoholic drinks are consumed on Skyros, his other research site. He presents a detailed portrait of an island from an historical and ethnographic perspective, giving both the specialist and non-specialist a rich view of the social life of the island. Despite its small population of less than three thousand, there are many public and private venues for liquor consumption, including whisky. The choice of liquors to drink and where to drink them is another debate between modernism and traditionalism (p.177.) For the most part, traditional Greek liquors are drunk in the home and for certain occasions. Women drink ” …a sweet liqueur, which is homemade and is considered a female drink…(p.173.)” Alcohol consumed in the home is accompanied by different kinds of foods. Meze on Skyros is usually local cheese, olives, and bread and is “…consumed outside the home…(pp.174-5.)” It is symbolically opposed to “real food” which is “…made in the household by the housewife (p.175.)” The household is the domain of the “feminine (p.175.)”

The above examples are just a small picture of Skyros’ social life and the role of alcoholic beverages in it. Bampilis covers older families, people who have spent time in Athens, shepherds, laborers, single men, single women, married women with children, married women without children, and prostitutes. Each group has its own choices of drinks, how much one can drink, what to eat with which drink, and what music to listen to when doing all the above. As Bampilis notes, “The modernism of whisky on Skyros Island in the North Aegean is associated with an imagined Athenian style, which opposes the values of shepherhood [sic] and domesticity and is widely shared by the laborers of the island pp.210-11.)”

Moreover, gambling is one of the ways men engage in competition and reciprocal exchange in Skyros (and, as Bampilis notes, other North Aegean islands (p.189 et seq.) Like drinking whisky and other beverages, men play different card games in different venues, with different kinds of interactions, including how to deal with the people who lose at cards. It is also a way for laborers “…to make their style with ksodema (spending) and identify with the popular culture of Athens (p.197.)” Bampilis concludes his analysis of the role of whisky in Skyros society thusly: ” [whisky consumption} is for those who want to break apart from the matrifocal rules and extended matrifocal kinship obligations (p.213.)”

Greek Whisky is of importance for those anthropologists studying the ways food and other products become both globalized and localized in neo-liberal economies and societies. It is of further importance because of the ways in which Bampilis portrays how politics and media create reinforce these lifestyle changes, how they become genderized, how they express styles of identity, and how they relate to social life, including different kinds of food, movies and music. It is also useful for students of economics and business, and it is appropriate for upper division undergraduates. And it is a delight for the general reader. One suggestion for future editions of this book is that, given the large number of Greek words, a glossary be provided in addition to the Index.

Leave a comment

Filed under anthropology, anthropology of food, Greece, whisky

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under anthropology of food, archaeology

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.

 

 

Leave a comment

Filed under anthropology, anthropology of food, food security, hunger, migration

by | March 6, 2019 · 9:22 pm

Review: From Virtue to Vice

From Virtue to Vice: Negotiating Anorexia

Richard A. O’Connor and Penny Van Esterik. From Virtue to Vice: Negotiating Anorexia. Food, Nutrition, and Culture Series. V. 4. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015.  ISBN: 978-1-78238-455-7 hardback; ISBN: 978-1-78238-456-4 ebook

Richard Zimmer
Sonoma State University

Richard O’Connor and Penny Van Esterik have written an excellent and very readable book on anorexia nervosa using anthropological perspectives.  Anorexia occurs when a person “obsessively chooses” not to eat. A person then puts her/himself at medical and psychological risk. It is extremely difficult to treat. Because anorexia relates to food in general and to many foods in particular, and because anorexia is a very “modern” disease (as is explained by the authors) this book is of importance to those interested in the anthropology of food and nutrition, as well as in medical anthropology and psychological anthropology.  It is also of use to medical and behavioral personnel treating patients/clients with anorexia.  Lastly, because of the way it is formatted, it can serve as a helpful resource for people struggling with anorexia, including those recovering from it.

Before proceeding, I need to make several disclosures.  The first is that I am an anthropologist and a licensed psychologist. In the latter role, I have treated many clients with anorexia.  Whatever the procedures are for treating anorexia, the standard of care mandates that the clinician work with the client’s/patient’s physician because of the health risks involved, including malnutrition.  Furthermore, I also do pre-surgery psychological assessments for gastric bypass surgery for people with severe obesity. This assessment is a necessary pre-condition for getting the surgery. In the near future I will be reviewing another book in the Berghahn series about obesity.  Moreover, I have been a long-time board member for an agency which services people with disabilities–Disability Services/Legal Center, in Santa Rosa, California.  As a board member, a psychologist who works with people with disabilities and as an advocate for people with disabilities, it should be known that the politically correct and acceptable term is “a person with anorexia,” not an anorectic person, the term employed in the book. The reason is simple: the focus is on the person first, the disability second.  For the sake of simplicity and readability, however, I will use “anorectic” or “anorectic person” in this review. Lastly, the question arises: is anorexia a disability?  According to our agency’s legal center, it is, when it actually impacts major life functions.

By taking an anthropological and historical focus, O’Connor and Van Esterik bring a holistic, person-centered, and behavioral dimension to understanding and treating anorexia. Before detailing how they do this, it is important to review some current understandings about the causes and treatments for anorexia–which they review.

1. There is no single accepted etiology for anorexia.
2. There is no single, acceptable cure/treatment for anorexia.
3. Certain kinds of approaches can backfire, worsening the situation.
4. Anorexia is believed to have become a recognized issue in modern times, seemingly starting in the nineteenth century.
5, Anorexia seems to be more common among children/adolescents who are affluent and been given educational opportunities.
6. Conversely, it seems to be less common among less educated and less affluent and in minority communities.
7. While often portrayed in the media as a feminist issue, anorexia is found among teenage boys and young men at significant rates, although it is less prevalent than among teenage girls and young women.
8. While anorexia is often understood as an extreme reaction to modern ideas about body image, especially for girls and women, the subjects/informants that O’Connor and Van Esterik interviewed were less concerned and less influenced by contemporary images. Rather, they were motivated by other considerations, as will be discussed shortly.
9. O’Connor and Van Esterik situate their discussion about anorexia in a larger discussion of the emergence of Cartesian dualism and its effects of splitting mind and body. Anorectics thus act on this split, using mind over body. Coupled with this, anorectics preoccupy themselves with cleanliness, following Mary Douglas’ ideas about purity in general. This preoccupation is complemented with rituality in preparing and eating foods.

These considerations revolve around the idea of control.  Briefly, the young person who is becoming anorectic becomes entranced by the idea of control over her/his body, about the idea of perfecting this control, about the daily process of not eating, of getting “high” from a self-reinforcing feedback loop in the same way the authors say that ascetics do.  The anorectic person eventually loses control of the ability to control–control becomes an end in itself.  The anorectic withdraws from much social interaction, usually rejecting any parental, friendship, and sexual interaction.  According to the informants, this, too, becomes self-fulfilling.

The informants interviewed in this book were drawn from Canada and the US.  The authors give these informants the opportunity to express themselves at length throughout each chapter, addressing different aspects about their anorexia, including their family life, their starting point for not eating, their social life, their decision to address their condition, and their recovery. They all said that they enjoyed experimenting with food, including eliminating fats, sugars, and eating more vegetables and fruits.  To paraphrase the authors, the anorectic becomes what s/he eats and does not eat.

Because this is a contemporary study, these anorectics indulged in “Virtuous Eating (Chapter 10.)” They thus shared the modern preoccupation with food–what to eat, what not to eat, how many calories, how large the proportions should be, and the provenance of the food. As Poulain notes, the anorectic fits into the category of the “fearful eater” (2017:165.)

This preoccupation with the kinds of food one ate in the West arose from historical movements begun in the early nineteenth century, such as those started by William Kellogg and Sylvester Graham:  “Diet reform emerged from a distrust of 19th century medical practices, as well as the temperance movement led by Protestants which gained popularity in the United States at the same time (https://www.lib.umich.edu/janice-bluestein-longone-culinary-archive/diet-reform-and-vegetarianism.)” Moreover, as Jonathan Kauffman notes throughout his book, Hippie Food (2018), modern and post-modern society promotes experimentations with food as a virtue in and of itself.  Consequently, the anorexia informants in this book talk endlessly about which foods to eat and how much of them they eat.

These extremes of virtuous eating were coupled with religious beliefs and asceticism. For many they were tied up with ideas about “purity” and “danger,” after Mary Douglas. They were also tied up with notions of attractiveness and thinness (Chapter 12). Thinness became another virtue for people, particularly women in many Western societies after WWI.  One need only look at the Flapper craze in the 1920’s.

The authors note that the informants said that they began their practice of control in their adolescence.  Whatever the causes, the informants noted that they saw their practice as an emerging practice of creating identity, one that differentiated them from their families and friends because of the prime focus on what they ate and did not eat.  So-called “traditional” societies, where one has a socially given identity and close monitoring, do not see the presence or rise of anorexia as modern societies do.  Furthermore, the authors note that the prevalence of anorexia increased in post-modern times in part because the number of different identities available to an adolescent multiplied. The anorectic person is the one who does not eat, just as the Goth dresses in black.  What is striking, from a psychological point of view, at least for the informants in their survey, is that they were all “good” kids, not prone to rebellion, successful in school, and most were involved in sports or dance.

The informants the authors have chosen have all recovered. They do note that their sample is skewed. (It would probably be difficult to find anorectics who have not recovered and who would be so willing to talk about their history, a point they address as well). The lessons learned from this sample, because not all anorectics do recover fully or partially, are that recovery is an individual choice.  No one intervention worked to get someone to change.  Overmedicalization and stigmatization were counter-productive.  Sometimes it was just “accidental”–the person decided one day that not eating was not working for her or him.

These lessons are clinically useful because they enable the physician and therapist to see the person as a whole trying to form an identity, rather than as a problem with medical issues.  The professional can have the anorectic strike a path forward that s/he chooses, giving that person agency.  The self-reports of the informants give those who treat anorectics sensitive ways to help the person.   The case examples, including statements about reasons to change and successful outcomes, provide resources that speak to the anorectic in language and sentiment to help her/him become their own change agent.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

n.d.  https://www.lib.umich.edu/janice-bluestein-longone-culinary-archive/diet-reform-and-vegetarianism (accessed March 5, 2019.)

2018 Kauffman, Jonathan. Hippie Food: How Back-To-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Ways We Eat.  Harper Collins. New York.

2017 Poulain, Jean-Pierre. The Sociology of Food: Eating and the Place of Food in Society.  Bloomsbury: New York.

 

 

Leave a comment

Filed under anorexia, anthropology, anthropology of food, psychology