Week 22: The Bigger picture

Warren Belasco

• ‘We taste the spices of Arabia yet never feel the scorching sun which brings them forth” - Report on the East India Company (1701)

• “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run’ - Henry David Thoreau, Walden 1854

• Society in Europe/in the west has become dependant on migrant labour for its food security. Only 40% of the food in the UK is locally produced. We have become very disconnected from the food chain/how our food is produced

• Native American and Polynesian myths of natural disaster as response to the use of fire for technology

• Shelley - punishment for meat eating and its ecological costs.

Costs of Colonising America

• Native settlements, crops, animals cleared - replaced by white homesteaders

• Slavery fiercely protected for over 300 years

• Territorial expansion - official policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

• Draining of wetlands and the irrigation of drylands

• Development of transportation infastructure

• “Cheap food policy” paid for by Indians, African slaves, Mexican and Asian farm works, wildlife.

• Imperialists practiced cheap food policies on a global scale

Health: At what cost?

• Paul Rozin - food is “fundemantal” but “frightening”

• Cost of food borne illnesses

• Government promotion of domestic and export agricultural production and commerce

• Simple reforms reduce potential for contamination

• Higher wages, profit sharing, more breaks, paid sick leave, stronger unions improve morale and sanitation

• BUT Governments mindful of consumer’s desire for cheap and safe food

• Food safety may challenge the individual

Confronting the Externalities

• Entire communities entangled in filling our plates (unseasonably)

• Worldwide system

• “Carbohydrate colonialism”

• Vast armies of labour to supply extra calories that both nourish and fatten

• “Circle of poison” - meat and luxury crops eaten in Global North, Global south grain farmers unable to export stable crops

• Immigration

• “New Poor”

How is food powerful?:

• Food and trauma

• Food and ideology

• Food and identity constructs

• Food as a language, signifier and symbol

Key questions for discussion:

(Food) Still Life - Power and Meaning:

• Still life overlooked historically as a minor, domestic genre

• 1667:

• First art economy: bourgeois interest in buying art - position a connoisseur; good taste and showing off their wealth

• Disguised symbolism - allegorical, mythical and religious

Clara Peeters, “Still life with crayfish and artichoke”, c.1618. Oil on board

• Bread - Christ/host And simplicity

• Lobster - Luxury AND memento mori=death

• Grapes/wine - trade AND Christ’s blood/Christian values and earthly pleasures (Bacchus)

• All transient nature of luxury/virtue of temperance/warning against perils of gluttony

Beyond:

• Sugar - global and planetray responsibility

• Global market economics

• Colonialisms

• Gendered domestic labour

• Class distinction

• Inclusion and exclusion

• ‘Advertising’ - Successful traders would be able to have all the luxuries in the painting - advertising the potential power and success you can get by being a fortunate merchant

Patricia Smith (1955-) “When the Burning Begins” (2006)