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Chapter 7 Anchovy Sauce and Pickled Tripe: Exporting Civilized Food in the Colonial Atlantic World Richard R. Wilk Sustainability and Supply Chains The opening of discussions about the long-term sustainability of present consumption patterns in developed countries has focused some attention on the general characteristics of long-distance supply chains. These chains are important because of the way they shift the environmental impact of production far away from the final location of consumption. In particular, those living in rich countries are often able to consume with little or no regard for the social and environmental costs of production, which may be borne by people in poor countries and regions. To use the language of ecological economics, the “externalities ” of production—the costs that are borne by the public, the environment , and governments instead of the producing firm—end up on one side of a border, while corporate profits and benefits to consumers are on the other. While finance and products flow freely through international trade, those who seek redress for the environmental and social costs of their production run into all kinds of legal and political obstacles. These displaced impacts of production have been called an ecological “shadow” or “footprint.”1 This kind of analysis has mostly been done on the flow of modern industrial commodities and finished consumer products, but it has the potential to be useful in thinking about the historical development of food chains. Longdistance trade in raw and processed foods separates the environmental and social contexts of production, processing, and consumption. Just as importantly, extended food chains create a setting where the cultural meanings attached to food products are segmented, so that products can change their cultural significance as they move from place to place. Some anthropologists and social historians have adopted the “social life of things” approach advocated by Igor Kopytoff, which tracks objects as they change their social positions and cultural contexts. Generally these transformations consist of movements back and forth across the boundary between gifts and commodities as cultural property is alienated and commoditized and as market goods are reintegrated as inalienable wealth through ritual.2 However, these authors have not paid equal attention to the transformations of goods that take place along commodity chains, because the objects remain commodities throughout—they may never become anything more than consumer goods that are bought and sold commercially, and consumed prosaically without fanfare or ritual. I argue that this neglect is unwarranted. Instead, the transformations that goods go through as they move along industrial commodity chains are just as mysterious, dramatic, and significant as the conversion of cultural property into commodities that anthropologists have typically studied (usually in the realms of “tribal” art, music, and traditional medicine). My argument will be illustrated by showing how foodstuffs are transformed in substance and meaning as they move through trade networks, focusing particularly on the crucial role of processing and packaging, which alter and recombine both substance and meaning. Shading and Distancing Another way to think about the role of food processing and packaging is in terms of the flow of information in the commodity chain. Thomas Princen, who works primarily on the environmental impacts of consumption, has recently developed two concepts, shading and distancing, which point to the important role of trade intermediaries in blocking or altering the information content of goods.3 Princen’s goal is to show how trade can sever the feedback connections between consumption and production, so that signals about environmental or social damage caused by production are blocked from consumers and are not transmitted as price signals. As we will see, food-processing intermediaries play a similar role by shading and distancing the geographic and social origins of raw food materials. Princen uses the term “shading” to refer to the process of slanting or highlighting certain kinds of information, particularly those that shift attention away from externalized costs. Shading highlights benefits and minimizes costs, sometimes by shifting the costs onto another party or measuring them only in the short term. For example, on the one hand, Chiquita’s plantation-produced bananas are cheap, and they contribute export earnings to Honduras, Ecuador, and other Latin American countries that desperately need the foreign exchange. On the other hand, the cheapness of these bananas is driving thousands of small farmers in eastern Caribbean islands such as Dominica out of business, and local government agencies or international donors will have to pay the costs of helping those farmers find new occupations...

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