Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart

1. Making Food Chains: The Book

Chapter 1 Making Food Chains: The Book Roger Horowitz I begin my food-history classes by drawing a simple line on the blackboard with the word “farm” at one end and the word “dinner” at the other. Then I ask the students to explain some of the steps that are necessary for food to move from one end to the other. Within a few minutes the simple line is a complex tree bristling with stages such as “processing,” “trucking,” “scientific research ,” “retailing,” and so on. When it starts to get too hard to read the board—which does not take long—I stop, to make the point of how complicated it is to bring food to our tables. Many students in my classes come with prior interest in food; often spirited discussions break out about the merits (and demerits) of particular Food Network chefs. Some are looking for careers in nutrition, others work in restaurants , and a few even cook themselves. Yet most have little knowledge of the complex chain of firms and social practices that are necessary to make our provisioning system work, and they want to learn more. A somewhat equivalent gap exists in the growing food-studies field. Among the steady outpouring of books much is written on the culinary and cultural dimensions of food and food consumption practices, along with an astonishing proliferation of books that combine recipes with eating philosophies. Studies that consider provisioning are growing in number but remain small in proportion . Yet there is considerable interest in histories of food that engage with larger patterns of social development, especially how we get the food that we eat. These insights informed the discussions between Phil Scranton, Susan Strasser, Warren Belasco, and me as we started planning a conference on food history at the Hagley Museum and Library, in Wilmington, Delaware, in the fall of 2006. As the nation’s leading business history library, Hagley has considerable resources for the study of food that we wanted to bring attention to scholars in the field. We hold one or two conferences on varying subjects each year; we felt it was time to do another one on food. A 1999 conference, “Food Nations,” had been a big success and was the foundation for a highly successful book in our Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture book series. While “Food Nations” dealt with—as the name implies—food, identity, and social practice, we titled the 2006 conference “Food Chains” as we wanted it to focus on the provisioning systems that supply our world with food. We defined “provisioning ” in the call for papers as “the complex institutional arrangements necessary for food to move from farm to the dinner table.” To complement the conference’s impact, we issued a guide to research materials at Hagley that can be used to study food history. This volume includes all the essays presented at the conference plus two solicited specifically for this publication. All are original, not previously published . The book’s structure emulates that of food chains, starting with animals from which food comes, moving to the processing necessary to turn natural products into palatable items, and concluding with the process of sales through which consumers obtain their meals. Some chapters hone in on one item each—pigs, chickens, crabs, ice, ice cream, or shopping carts—to show its role in provisioning systems. Other essays look at industry segments—foods processed in imperial nations, dog food, or Mexican food—to elaborate on their internally complex “chains” of acquisition, manufacturing, and distribution . A few consider places—kitchens or retail stores—where consumers make the decisions over what to buy and what to prepare for their families. The opening “Overview” section contextualizes the volume’s content through two synthetic essays. Warren Belasco surveys current literature in the food-studies field and suggests the contribution of taking food chains as an organizing principle to understand food in our society. Shane Hamilton looks closely at theoretical work by historians and social scientists employing commoditychain analysis. He assesses the value of taking a comprehensive approach to identify actors, technologies, forms of knowledge, and forms of capital involved in transforming a raw material into a consumable good. The section “Animals” follows with essays that discuss pigs, chicken, and crabs. The authors all consider how the nature of consumer demand and food distribution influences the use, and at times the very character, of these animals. J. L. Anderson charts how farmers and agricultural colleges...