Ethical Eating in the Postsocialist and Socialist World

By Yuson Jung and Melissa L. Caldwell

Current discussions of the ethics around alternative food movements--concepts such as "local," "organic," and "fair trade"--tend to focus on their growth and significance in advanced capitalist societies. In this groundbreaking contribution to critical food studies, editors Yuson Jung, Jakob A. Klein, and Melissa L. Caldwell explore what constitutes "ethical food" and "ethical eating" in socialist and formerly socialist societies. With essays by anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers, this politically nuanced volume offers insight into the origins of alternative food movements and their place in today's global economy. Collectively, the essays cover discourses on food and morality; the material and social practices surrounding production, trade, and consumption; and the political and economic power of social movements in Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Lithuania, Russia, and Vietnam. Scholars and students will gain important historical and anthropological perspective on how the dynamics of state-market-citizen relations continue to shape the ethical and moral frameworks guiding food practices around the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Feb 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9780520958142

Book preview

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ETHICAL EATING IN THE POSTSOCIALIST AND SOCIALIST WORLD

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the General Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Barbara S. Isgur Public Affairs Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

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ETHICAL EATING IN

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THE POSTSOCIALIST

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AND SOCIALIST WORLD

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Edited by

Yuson Jung

Jakob A. Klein

Melissa L. Caldwell

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BerkeleyLos AngelesLondon

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

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University of California Press, Ltd.

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© 2014 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ethical eating in the postsocialist and socialist world / edited by Yuson Jung, Jakob A. Klein, Melissa L. Caldwell.

pagescm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27740-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-95814-2 (ebook)

1. Food—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Food—Social aspects. 3. Food consumption—Moral and ethical aspects. 4. Food consumption—Social aspects. I. Jung, Yuson, 1972– II. Klein, Jakob. III. Caldwell, Melissa L.

TX357.E842014

178—dc232013034545

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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

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CONTENTS

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Earlier versions of the chapters in this volume were presented at an international workshop on Ethical Foods and Food Movements in Postsocialist Settings, co-organized by the editors and held on May 11–13, 2011, at the Food Studies Centre, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. The project has benefited greatly from the many insightful and constructive interventions made by the workshop discussants: Peter Jackson, Peter Luetchford, Ruth Mandel, Marina Marouda, Susan Pattie, Hans Steinmuller, and Harry West. The editors wish also to thank all of the workshop presenters for their contributions, including those whose papers do not appear as chapters in the volume: Katy Fox, Zsuzsa Gille, Petr Jehlicka, Nadezhda Savova, and Joe Smith. The workshop was funded by generous grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Award BCS-1101655, and the SOAS Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of London. We would like to express our special gratitude to Deborah Winslow, the Cultural Anthropology Program Officer at NSF, whose support from the inception of the project has been instrumental. During the editing process we have been fortunate to benefit from the support and wise suggestions made by our reviewers, who have identified themselves as Elizabeth Cullen Dunn and James L. Watson, and by Kate Marshall, our patient and generous editor at the University of California Press. Finally, we thank our families for their unflagging support without which this project and collaboration would not have been possible.

Yuson Jung, Jakob A. Klein, and Melissa L. Caldwell

INTRODUCTION

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Ethical Eating and (Post)socialist Alternatives

JAKOB A. KLEIN, YUSON JUNG, AND MELISSA L. CALDWELL

In spring 2013, alternative food activists and their supporters took to the streets around the world to protest against GM (genetically modified) foods and Monsanto, arguably one of the most visible symbols behind the spread of genetically modified seeds. Organizers claimed that more than two million people throughout the world, but primarily in Western capitalist countries in North America and Western Europe, participated in the demonstrations, although the figure was not necessarily verified by independent media. In market socialist (or reform socialist, Hann and Hart 2011: 137–39) and postsocialist countries, the response seemed to be much more muted, with few details in local or international media about any noticeable anti-Monsanto activity. In Russia, a rally in Moscow, a city with a population of approximately fifteen million, drew only fifty people, mainly to protest Russia’s recent membership in the World Trade Organization, which requires Russia to relax its existing regulations against the importation of genetically modified products. Similarly in Bulgaria, which has the most stringent law against GM farming in the European Union (it is virtually impossible to plant GMO (genetically modified organism) seeds in Bulgarian soil), only dozens of activists and citizens joined in the global protest in the two cities of Sofia and Veliko Turnovo, demanding better GMO labeling for imported food. In China, where Monsanto has a formal joint venture with the state, although some citizens have expressed concerns about the importation of GMO products—what one Chinese natural sciences professor described as an impending biological invasion—there is no evidence of any noticeable awareness of or participation in these larger global protests.

Yet this relative silence from market socialist and postsocialist citizens should not be interpreted as a lack of concern over the ethical dimensions of the contemporary food system. Rather, market socialist and postsocialist citizens have been extremely vocal and visible in questioning the ethics behind food production and consumption and demanding high standards for eating right, whether that is in terms of diet and nutrition, farming practices, animal welfare, production and distribution systems, or social obligations to reduce hunger and poverty.

How market socialist and postsocialist citizens have articulated ethical concerns may not, at first glance, appear to align with the approaches and demands presented by their counterparts in the more advanced capitalist societies. In the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, consumers prefer foods that have been canned through industrial manufacturing rather than through traditional practices of home canning because they consider the industrially produced canned food safer, with less chance of botulism (Dunn 2008). In the case of Russia, transnational food and agricultural corporations such as McDonald’s and John Deere have been key players in the improvement of farm animal health and welfare, the revitalization of small farms, and the introduction of environmental sustainability practices. And in some Chinese supermarkets, in-store advertisements for ecologically certified Green Foods display images of packaging plant staff wearing white lab coats and face masks, but not images of farmers as one might find in the United States or Great Britain, or maps of the world indicating the far-flung places to which the company airfreights its ecological vegetables, an image that in Euro- American contexts might draw shoppers’ attention to the thorny issue of food miles.

Even though such cases would appear to contradict the aims of Western proponents of alternative food movements who frame their critiques and goals in opposition to industrial food production dictated by neoliberal capitalism, they are in fact deeply embedded within ethical value systems concerning health, safety, labor, access, autonomy, and democracy. Yet market socialist and postsocialist citizens may not think about these issues in precisely the same ways as their counterparts elsewhere in the world. For example, the embrace of industrial food manufacturing is a response to the real and potential dangers of canning by home cooks who have lost necessary knowledge about food safety. During socialism, these home cooks relied on industrially produced canned food that was managed and controlled by the socialist state, which bore the ultimate responsibility for food safety. Furthermore, various food contamination scandals in the market socialist and postsocialist world provoked a complex debate about the role of the state and the market in shaping the ethical and moral frameworks of contemporary food systems. At the same time, the growth of conglomerates like McDonald’s and other transnational food corporations has in some of these societies facilitated financial, social, and moral support for small- and medium-sized farmers who would otherwise be swallowed up by speculators in the frontier zone of postsocialist real estate privatization. In real and profound ways, market socialist and postsocialist consumers are constantly making deliberate choices that reflect their understanding of whether the present food systems are good for their health, their families, their communities, their businesses, and their nations. In other words, the ethical dimensions of food in everyday life are shaped by historical experiences of state socialism, including particular relationships to the state and to markets.

By taking up the question of what constitutes an ethical food system through the lens of market socialist and postsocialist societies, the contributors to this book share a commitment to understanding not only how people in market socialist and postsocialist countries articulate a sense of what is good, right, and necessary, but how these perspectives challenge existing paradigms in both scholarly and activist circles about the nature of alternative food systems. In many ways, the contributors to this volume are positioned as alternative voices to an alternative movement by virtue of focusing not on advanced capitalist societies in the West or Global North, but rather on China, Vietnam, Cuba, and the formerly socialist countries in Europe—countries that have been marked in geopolitical terms as developing, emerging, Second World, or Third World (Creed and Wedel 1997). As the chapters variously demonstrate, market socialist and postsocialist conversations about ethical foods and alternative food movements and consumption practices frequently take on forms and meanings that differ significantly from those found in the more familiar, advanced capitalist contexts. By focusing on (post)socialist contexts we thus aim in this volume to provide a politically more nuanced and historically more accurate understanding of ethical foods and alternative food movements. This approach challenges some of the key notions that popular discourses of alternative food movements in the advanced capitalist societies uphold, including the widespread notion that such movements are inherently oppositional to the industrialized agriculture and food processing, practices of standardization, and regulatory systems that typically characterize capitalist agrifood systems.

The societies covered in this volume include both former socialist countries in Eurasia and increasingly market-oriented, communist party–ruled countries in Asia and Latin America. These countries all share a common legacy of state socialism, which continues to affect the ways in which citizens experience daily food practices. While recognizing the problematic nature of the term postsocialist to describe these countries (Buyandelger 2008; Hann, Humphrey, and Verdery 2002), the individual authors have also taken this term as a provocation to think critically and ethnographically about how particular configurations of politics, economics, and culture in these countries have produced particular ethical values and practices associated with food. In turn, this approach raises critical questions not just about whether postsocialist societies are similar or dissimilar to one another, but also whether postsocialist approaches to ethical foods and alternative food movements share anything with their counterparts in established market capitalist democracies and offer new insights on contemporary food systems. Through ethnographically grounded studies from Bulgaria, Lithuania, Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cuba, the anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers collaborating here shed light on the political economies, regulatory regimes, and discourses surrounding ethical foods and food movements, and on the ways in which these are interpreted and shaped in the everyday life practices of citizens of market socialist and postsocialist countries.

BRINGING ETHICS TO THE POSTSOCIALIST DINNER TABLE

In market socialist and postsocialist societies, ethical foods have taken a variety of forms, ranging from popular demands for natural, organic, and safe foods to organized social movements seeking to reconnect urban consumers with rural producers, and from new local models of personal and civic healthfulness to state-led development initiatives involving export-oriented agriculture and morally charged nutritional guidelines. Shared sympathy, solidarity, and collective action are springing up between social actors involved in the provision and promotion of these new ethical foods. These social actors include the more expected peasants and urban farmers as well as unionized foodservice workers, migrant farmworkers, health care workers, welfare officials, animal rights activists, consumer rights activists, environmentalists, and ordinary consumers. For their part, many market socialist and postsocialist consumers now couple their focus on ingredients and dietary criteria of foods with careful attention not just to the conditions under which foods are grown, harvested, produced, and distributed, but also to the ideological values associated with particular foods, labor relations, and the impact of harvesting, production, and consumption on the planet and its inhabitants.

Despite this revolution at the dinner table, the burgeoning social sciences literature on ethical (food) consumption and alternative food networks (e.g., Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Ankeny 2012; Carrier and Luetchford 2012; Goodman et. al. 2011; Gottlieb and Joshi 2010; Guthman 2011; Kneafsey et. al. 2008; Lewis and Potter 2011; Lyon and Moberg 2010; Nicholls and Opal 2005) has focused almost entirely on advanced capitalist economies, or on those societies that have long been the objects of colonial intervention by those same capitalist economies—namely, Third World and developing communities in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. As if the need or desire to explore ethical and alternative food practices is solely the privilege and responsibility of capitalist states, scholars, activists, and policy makers have yet to pay serious attention to analogous consumer practices and social movements in postsocialist and other emerging market economies and to understand their different shapes and meanings. This oversight is especially noteworthy, given that the alternative food networks that these food activists are promoting as antidotes to capitalism are often laced with themes that have long been familiar in state socialist societies: peasants, labor unions, labor reform, farmers’ markets, hand-to-hand distribution channels, agricultural revolution, and even ideological revolution, to name just a few. Within this body of literature, an anticapitalist socialist fetishism masquerades as progressive social justice without any clear link to socialist-inspired food justice movements.

Even more intriguing is that many of the forms of agriculture, food processing, distribution, and consumption that are associated with these alternative and ethical food movements have clear precedents in state socialist societies and their successor states. North American practices such as Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) have their analogue in the collectivist food gathering and redistribution of state farm food in the former Soviet Union. Similarly, the informal networks of trust between small farmers and individual consumers that are promoted as the ideal economic model for North American farmers’ markets replicate the informal exchange practices that have constituted socialist informal economies of barter within and across socialist geographies (e.g., Mandel and Humphrey 2002; Ledeneva 2006; Yan 1996; Yang 1994). The push for organic foods that are free from pesticides and industrial agriculture has been the norm in state socialist societies, where farmers have long been unable to afford modern farming technology and chemicals and continued with pre-industrial forms of farming (Jung, this volume). Anticapitalist animal welfare activists and back-to-the-land proponents, with their call for humane treatment of animals through practices that allow animals to retain their autonomy as distinct from their roles as raw materials in factory farms, also have important interlocutors in their socialist counterparts who have maintained livestock as part of their personal households and not as alienated commodities. As a result, many of the foods and food practices classified as alternative in the capitalist world have been an ordinary part of everyday life for decades in the socialist world.

Much of the discussion surrounding ethical consumption and food movements thus far has, importantly, been concerned with revealing the often problematic relationship between stated ethical goals, on the one hand, and the actual social and environmental effects of ethical consumption and production practices, on the other (e.g., Doob 2010; De Neve et al. 2008; Goodman et al. 2011; Guthman 2004; Lewis and Potter 2011; Nicholls and Opal 2005). These discussions frequently start from the presumption—usually proposed by research subjects but sometimes even by analysts themselves—that food is intrinsically ethical or unethical, with little attention paid to how foods, and by extension personal food practices such as eating and sharing, come to be ethical or unethical.

By contrast, because the contributors to this volume engage critically with the question of how foods become entangled in ethical projects, their analyses demonstrate how food movements may involve the negotiation of competing ethics between activists and consumers (see the chapters by Klein and Mincyte in this volume) or how calls for more ethical foods may be shot through with and reinforce geopolitical and social inequalities (see the chapters by Avieli, Oxfeld, and Wilson in this volume). Our collective aim is neither to condemn such movements nor to celebrate them, but rather to understand them and the roles they play in postsocialist and market socialist contexts, thereby contributing to a better understanding of alternative global food systems.

To this end, we adopt a broad, working definition of ethical foods. Food is ethical when it becomes the subject of deliberations in which its production, distribution, preparation, or consumption intersect with moral notions about the human condition and how humans should treat themselves, one another, and their nonhuman surroundings. In other words, ethical foods are those foods that symbolize and convey particular value systems that are often presented in terms of rightness and justness. Accordingly, ethical foods may be the domain of social movements, businesses, state programs, or regulatory regimes concerned with improving the social, environmental, public safety, or health dimensions of food and drink. Equally important is that ethical foods also emerge out of the most ordinary, everyday social interactions and ritual behaviors, in which the ethical values at stake may be about proper human conduct and the correct relationships between individuals and social group.¹

An explicit argument that runs throughout this volume is the idea that in order to understand the social movements and institutions that invoke ethical foods, it is important to pay attention to the sometimes less explicit articulations between codes of propriety and justice that inform food use in everyday and ritual practices (see especially respective chapters by Avieli, Caldwell, and Mincyte in this volume). Lambek (2010) uses the term ordinary ethics to highlight that the ethical is part of the human condition, grounded in practice and tacit understandings. While ordinary ethics may be expressed through a wide range of objects and linguistic and material practices, food and drink typically play an especially important part in ethical deliberations and moral evaluations. Food is, of course, necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and thereby a precondition for the existence and reproduction of any human society, from the family and household level up to the nation-state. Similarly, how we procure our food informs relationships between humans and the environment and influences how we perceive nonhuman surroundings. As generations of anthropologists writing on commensality, hospitality, ritual, and myth have demonstrated, food has an enormous symbolic value in delineating and communicating across boundaries, not only between social groups but also between humans and the nonhuman, including supernatural domains (e.g., Allison 1991; Appadurai 1981; Counihan 1984; Douglas 1966, 1975; Goody 1982; Lévi-Strauss 1966; Meigs 1984; Ohnuki-Tierney 1993; Thompson 1988). It is the centrality of food to human biological, social, and symbolic processes that makes it such an integral part of our ordinary ethics.

In considering food’s central role in ethical deliberations, it is important also to consider the strong emotional feelings that food and its uses as markers and mediators of relationships and identities may engender in individuals. These are heightened by the materiality of food itself. As Fischler (1988) points out, food is a substance that crosses the threshold between the outside and inside and is physically incorporated into the body itself, thereby easily giving rise to anxieties as well as being central to the construction of selves. Further, as Sutton (2001, 2010) argues, the emotional force of food emerges in part from its links to memory, stemming not least from the multisensory nature of eating and the ability of smell and taste to evoke concrete times, places, and situations from the past with an uncanny, nonlinguistic directness. In other words, there is a crucial emotional dimension to ethical food movements—a dimension that is evident in many of the chapters in this volume but often overlooked in studies of food movements. This needs to be understood against the backdrop of food’s wider symbolic and emotional significance, as evident in many ritual and everyday behaviors (see, for instance, Oxfeld’s chapter in this volume).

This is not to argue that the kinds of ethical practices and discourses that emerge through alternative food movements necessarily are consistent with ordinary or everyday ethics—the domain of ethics that is grounded in daily practices and tacit understandings, and which may or may not be verbally articulated. In some contexts, the demands of everyday ethics and ethical consumption may be in conflict. Miller (1998, 2001), for example, contends that while ethical consumption demands that choices be made on the basis of care for distant others, what he calls the morality of everyday food shopping puts the household first, with the result that any purchases made in terms of the former need also to be legitimated in terms of the latter. Yet, as Dombos (2008, 2012) argues in the case of postsocialist Hungary (see also chapters by Oxfeld and Caldwell in this volume), the boundary between the intimate and the distant cannot be assumed to be coterminous with the household. Such boundaries may shift according to context, and individuals’ practices as shoppers, eaters, or activists may be enabled and constrained by emotionally charged, moral commitments to communities such as villages, ethnic groups, or nations. Indeed in some cases, it may be legitimate to follow Kneafsey and her collaborators (2008) who discuss ethical food movements in terms of an extension of an ethics of care from the immediacy of the household to distant human and nonhuman others who thereby become incorporated into one’s moral universe (for a critical discussion see Klein’s chapter in this volume).

THE ROLE OF THE STATE IN ALTERNATIVE FOOD MOVEMENTS

One important factor that makes food central to ethical considerations is its historically long-standing significance in relationships between people and states. Throughout the ancient world, rulers’ legitimacy rested on their ability to provide the populace with adequate food. In Imperial China, the moral requirement to nourish the people underpinned an emperor’s mandate of heaven and gave rise to successive dynasties playing a highly proactive role in agriculture and in the development of an extensive system of ever-normal granaries (Will and Wong 1991). And as Scott (1976) famously argued, a subsistence ethics underlay the economic and social practices of Southeast Asian peasantries, and peasant rebellions against the state occurred only in situations when this basic moral economy had been undermined by excessive taxation and other predatory state practices. Indeed, the moral commitment of the communist party-state to provide adequate sustenance to the people, although infamously broken in the mass famines in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and in China around 1960, was absolutely key to the relationship between state and people throughout the socialist world and underpinned the food systems of these countries. Typically, the emphasis, at least in principle, in these systems was on the production of basic staples over surplus foods (although these categories were variously defined); on equitable access to food resources through state redistribution rather than market mechanisms; and on the suppression of individual desires in favor of frugality for the benefit of the greater collective (e.g., Caldwell 2009; Croll 1983; Glants and Toomre 1997; Li 2007). Of course, these principles were upheld to varying degrees in different times and places, and there was frequently a tension between, on the one hand, commitments to the provision of basic necessities and, on the other, the desire to demonstrate (to citizens and to the outside world) that socialism was working by attempting to create access to good, surplus foods, treats, even luxuries (Farquhar 2002; Gronow 2003; Klein 2009; Patico 2002). Nevertheless, throughout the socialist world, party-states instilled an ethics of frugality, equality, and self-denial. Feeding the people was crucial to the popular legitimacy of communist party rule, yet citizens were at the same time expected to suppress present desires for the benefit of the collective and for future rewards once communism had arrived (Ci 1994; Croll 1994; Feuchtwang 2011; Glants and Toomre 1997).

Understanding the role of the party-state in shaping socialist ethics and the vital importance of food in this ethics is crucial to grasping a core argument of this volume, which is that the ethical debates and movements surrounding food in the postsocialist and market socialist states often reflect the experiences, legacies, and memories of state socialism. They do so in a variety of ways, ranging from the significance of social divides entrenched under radical socialism (Klein, this volume) to the ongoing mistrust of market vendors and other petty entrepreneurs (Blumberg, this volume) as well as certification regimes (Jung, this volume). But to different degrees, citizens of these states have all experienced, in tandem with the introduction of market mechanisms in the food system and the wider economy, a recent shift from an officially promoted ethics of self-sacrifice and collectivism to one of individualism and self-realization through consumption (Yan 2009, 2012). Even in Cuba, where the party-state continues to emphasize economic self-sacrifice, this is challenged by a growing space for notions of personal gain (Wilson, this volume). Yet socialist citizens have not reacted to this shift according to any uniform plan. In some contexts, memories of an earlier ethics continue to inform dispositions and explicit values (Blumberg, this volume). In others, the memories of the socialist state and its shortcomings continue to inform a critical approach to the postsocialist state and to other regulatory institutions (Jung 2009 and in this volume).

Market socialist and postsocialist experiences with food movements bring out the role of the state in ethical deliberations, which studies of alternative food movements thus far have overlooked. The neglect of ethical foods in market socialist and postsocialist countries has profound consequences for our wider understanding of ethical foods and, by extension, of the global food system itself. Much of the existing social sciences literature has, quite appropriately, presented movements such as those advocating organics, Fair Trade, Slow Food, locavorism, agroecology, and even nutritionism