Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia

2. A Different History of the Present: The Movement of Crops, Cuisines and Globalization

29 Two A Different History of the Present The Movement of Crops, Cuisines, and Globalization Akhil Gupta Introduction Globalization as a phenomenon has captured the popular and scholarly imagination in the First World in the last two decades. Much of this discussion of globalization has turned on trade and economic issues, and on the very visible worldwide diffusion of media and popular culture. Thanks to a series of highly visible protests against the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, first in Seattle, and then successively in Prague, Washington DC, Genoa, and New York, globalization has become a contested term in popular discourse. Nowhere is this more evident than in recent controversies about the safety, reliability, and sustainability of food. Issues of food safety hit the headlines because of the export of contaminated milk from China, but have also been raised with regard to the long-term health effects of genetically modified foods. Concern about the reliability of food supplies was underscored by global food shortages that resulted in food riots in many countries for the first time in living memory. Droughts in food-exporting countries such as Australia, which may be caused by global warming; long and complex commodity chains, especially when they involve the processing and transportation of fresh meat, fruits, and vegetables; and the use of commodities such as corn for fuel and animal feed have all been identified as causes of global food shortages. Finally, a growing interest in sustainability, alongside concerns about safety and reliability , have prompted a movement to consume food that is grown locally. Known by several names—locavores, slow food—this movement emphasizes buying food directly from the farmer, thereby reducing the commodity chain to its minimum, and eating food that is grown sustainably (itself measured by 30 • Opening the Issues land conservation, the carbon footprint of the commodity, or the measure of virtual water that it contains).1 I will use the movement of crops, changing culinary practices, and shifting habits of food consumption to argue that food and foodstuffs have played a critical, and perhaps under-appreciated, role in the long history of globalization . In the contemporary moment, much has been made about the impact of the global circulation of news, films, music, and fashions. However, not enough attention has been paid to how cultures, histories, and identities have been shaped by the movement of cuisines and foods. What does a deeper history of globalization as seen through crops, cuisines, and consumption tell us about the historical shaping of identities? Food and Globalization I will begin by offering some theoretical reflections on the location of food in the broader debate about “globalization.” One can identify at least two broad positions on the phenomenon of globalization, which have to be understood sequentially. In response to the paeans to globalization that accompanied the neoliberal expansion of capitalism in the last quarter of the twentieth century, came the response that there was nothing new about globalization. Although the energy of the first position came largely from the business world (Friedman 2000, 2005), it found strong support in a kind of multiculturalist discourse that was unaware of its own imperial centrality, and it also received encouragement from commercial cultural production in spheres like film, television, and music. In academic fields, it produced broadly convergent positions between disciplines that normally are on opposite sides, like economics and literary and cultural studies. The opposition to this view also sometimes came from the same disciplines, but mainly from historians (Hopkins 2002; F. Cooper 2001). In food studies, these two trends coexisted, but while the globalization of food has attracted a great deal of attention in the last decade, it has not led to the dichotomies and polemics that characterize the literature on globalization more broadly. Why is that the case? I suggest that here we need to pay attention to the relative autonomy of intellectual fields. The rise of “fusion” food, exotic ingredients, and the relentless and never-ending search for the “new,” fueled by an enormous rise in popularity of food shows on television, food films, travel shows that were mostly about food, do draw upon some of A Different History of the Present • 31 the same energies of capitalist consumerism that have informed the celebratory wing of globalization in other domains. However, these trends have been accompanied by the enormous popularity of books on the history of food. The...