Freidberg, Susanne. 2010. Fresh:
a perishable history. Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Ch. 5 Vegetables: hidden labor
What's fresh and where does our sense of what's fresh come from? Is it pasteurized or irradiated? How is orange juice fresh after it goes through the amount of processing required to put it in a carton and deliver if from Florida to Wisconsin? How have we come to understand what freshness is and why it's important? At first ice used to maintain freshness was seen as immoral, cheating but as life changed, the US slowly came to be the first refrigerated society. Fresh comes to embody something pure, natural and closer to the farm, idealized as a place of crickets, warm bread and green acres. As an ideal, it led the way to thinner bodies with regular bowel movements; it promised brainier brains, vigorous virility and caring convenience for the packed social and domestic life of modern women. The freshest food brings the most distinction meaning it's not affordable to everyone. It requires hidden labor and inequitable trade relations that enable the convenience of cut, bagged and seasonless fresh that our fast lives demand. These days the local food movement elevates fresh as a solution to a food system deemed unhealthy, just as fresh been elevated before to solve other problems like extracting profit from agriculture on expensive land.
Does 'fresh' have meaning anymore? Is fresh more than nutrition and taste? How does it mean different things for different foods? What is the cost of fresh--the hidden labor? What is the link between Burkina Faso and fresh? Is 'pink slime' fresh? I anticipate you'll say no, but why not?
Deutsch, Tracey. 2010. Building a housewife’s paradise: gender,
politics, and the emergence of supermarkets, 1919-1968. Chapel Hill, University
of North Carolina Press. Ch. 2 Women and the social politics of food procurement.
Tracey Deutsch documents the shopping practices, gendered norms, retail sellers' claims and state policies underlying the rocky path to the rise of supermarkets. Associated with domesticity, supermarkets encourage the idea that procurement is not actually work, something that Deutsch shows to be far from true. Ultimately, shopping was understood then and should now be seen as "necessarily disruptive, profoundly worklike and obviously political" (p.226). Though not to be dismissed, this is not politics in the sense of choosing humanely raised bacon. Instead, it is political in the sense of the gendered relations in the history of shopping, the capitalism requiring an obedient consumer, the geopolitics of global food trade, the belief in the primacy of the market and the structural racism evident in procurement options past and present.
The chapter you will read reveals women's shopping lives when markets, peddlers and small grocers dominated the world of retail. Grocers puzzled over the conundrum of women's wants and bemoaned the need to cater to women's whims. But there is no coherent group of women with a single shopping desire, but rather women differentiated by class and race with different wants associated with how they are positioned in societal hierarchies. Nonetheless, in a depoliticization of history, supermarkets were portrayed as 'what women want' when state policy and grocer desires to avoid assertive shoppers were behind their rise. Local food, by focusing on consumer desire as the key component of retail shifts makes a similar mistake in assuming that structural food system change can come from the exercise of individual desires. Moreover, "[w]hat people buy and how they buy it does not reveal, and never has revealed, the boundaries of what they want" (p. 228).
Today in these same Chicago neighborhoods of Deutsch's study, there are few options, an idea that would have been unimaginable at the time because how would you eat each day? Then, households had small ice boxes meaning that food had to be preserved or used quickly and bought often. Class status was not marked as it is now by "simple access to fresh food" (222, her italics). For women in the so-called food deserts of today, the first problem is the time and effort necessary to get to a store. Today, One Stop Food & Liquor opens at midnight on the first of each month to allow food stamp recipients to shop when they get their new allocation of benefits (p. 222) that are only one small part of networks of food banks, church pantries, friends and hunger. Supermarkets, by becoming the dominant model for food retail, added to the decrease in options for food procurement among the poor. This was a spatial move away from certain consumers and it was also a move that limited the possibilities for politically fraught encounters between assertive women shoppers and store owners and the demands of shoppers' movements for policy change. Supermarkets are, in this way, a device to discipline women making them less of a threat to consumer-driven capitalism. The romanticized story we are routinely told is that women want supermarkets, they are happiest putting home-cooked meals on the table and the whole experience of shopping is a "seamless commercial interaction" (p. 224), which obscures the significant work required. The supermarket, in this rosy rendering, can be understood as one piece of the neoliberal discourse that says the market is uniquely suited to satisfying consumers' needs and individual consumption is the way to distribute all goods (p. 227).
What do you know about shopping from your own family's experience? How is shopping portrayed by the mass media? What were women shoppers like? As with Fresh, state the argument, the evidence and something that makes sense (or doesn't). Why are these readings important to our understanding of food systems of the present? In your answer, engage with the quote above "what people buy..."
