Hopedance

The Changing Politics of Food: Remaking "Tradition"

Harriet Friedmann

Food flows constantly through our bodies. It flows steadily, too, through the arteries of highways, railways, waterways and airways. Money flows in a. reverse network through the veins of finance. Food, therefore, can reveal changes in the world economy. The most intimate daily practices of people around the world who are unknown to one another are connected — and disconnected — through growing, processing, transporting, selling, buying, cooking and eating food.

Here I offer an overview of historical changes in the structures and practices that shape our lives as workers, shoppers, preparers and consumers of food. I examine two key practices and structures now considered to be "traditional" are international patterns of food production and trade, and family relations that facilitate acquiring and sharing food.

People use the word "traditional" to name what they are used to. This word allows us to avoid thinking about how, when and why our patterns of work, trade and family life came to be. When we think of something as "traditional," we make it seem natural or divine rather than historical. But everything has origins and causes. In this chapter, I use quotation marks around the word "tradition" because I want to encourage the reader never to use the word again as if she knows what it means. Every "tradition" was once constructed. Today we are experiencing rapid and comprehensive change.

If we simply use the word "non-traditional" to name changes, we miss the opportunity to ask questions about the history of "traditions" that are changing. Many practices and relations are being (re)constructed, and they will eventually seem "traditional." That will give us a historical perspective for understanding the present construction of new practices and relations.

Our connections are deepening across the continent and the globe. As we shall see, the most important connections now, supported by new government policies and by international agreements, empower corporations to link workers and consumers in distant places. I have identified changes in international trade and personal life, which are linked to one another, in the hope that we may better choose those practices that suit our needs.

Changes in the Political Economy of Food

Changes in many "traditions" of food production and trade are rapidly unfolding in all parts of the world. "Non-traditional" exports have been, or promise to be, intensified through the unfolding of international political and economic events. In 1982, the international debt crisis officially began, and in 1994 the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect, hard on the heels of the new World Trade Organisation (WTO). After many difficult years of negotiations, the WTO replaced the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The GATT was one of several sets of international rules that supported national economic development. In that framework, some types of food production were encouraged, such as maize in Zimbabwe, and also some patterns of trade, such as bananas from Honduras. Both now seem "traditional" even though maize and bananas had been introduced to those countries by colonial rulers. What is changing now is the national basis of food consumption and production. That national framework was in its time constructed, too. For that perspective, we must turn to the history of colonial production and trade.

"Traditions" Rooted in the Colonial World Order

Let us begin with the local side of the global-local relationship. "Traditional" agricultures and cuisines often refer to two distinct patterns, dating from two earlier periods of colonial integration. One is called peasant. In the 1500s, some ancient peasant societies were transformed and some new ones created. Whether in France, the Punjab, Zaire, Japan or Mexico, peasant societies integrated their farm systems and food cultures1 and grew their food locally. Even though linked by world markets, they continued the old peasant features. The mix of cultivated and wild ingredients supported a reasonably healthy population, barring any disasters in the local ecosystems. (Overpopulation could culminate in sudden crisis as it put extreme pressure on the ecosystem to produce enough food.) Most of what was grown was eaten locally by people or their dependent animals. Wastes were absorbed locally, usually entering as decayed vegetation or manure to renew the soil. When crises prevented continued evolution of "tradition," communities died out, changed or moved on. If they relocated successfully, they adapted to a new social and ecological environment, creating new "traditions" of farming and cooking. Peasant societies were at the bottom of agrarian hierarchies,2 which played a role in colonial conquest and changes in production. Local landlords usually demanded extra crops and animals, or special ones, and usually had a separate, elite cuisine. These landlords could be incorporated or replaced by colonial rulers, who often required peasants to produce export crops, sometimes introduced from other parts of the world, such as coffee from North Africa (via the Middle East) produced in Java (Indonesia). By the 1800s, in many parts of the world, this led to specialisation in a single crop (called monoculture) that was sent away from the community to the colonial country.

Monocultures were introduced from the outset in the second pattern of "traditional" agriculture — plantations, which were created by colonial rule. Less extreme forms of plantation agriculture used indentured workers or locally hired workers, who also produced their own food in small plots. The most extreme cases were slave plantations, which introduced new plants and people to replace local social and ecological systems. For example, sugar from Asia and people from Africa were put at the service of English, French or Dutch plantation owners, who seized the land from Indigenous peoples. The sugar was sent back to Europe, and luxury goods for the plantation owner and often food for the slaves were imported. This was the beginning of a now familiar state of affairs: what was grown became disconnected from what was eaten, and for the first time in history, money determined what people ate and even if they ate.

This shift, which is now over five hundred years old and which still exists today, finally broke the patterns of diet and cultivation that had been in place in many parts of the world for thousands of years.3 The production of specialised exports came to be experienced as "traditional." By the 1800s, Ghana specialised in cocoa; Honduras in bananas; Martinique in sugar; Java (Indonesia) in coffee; and Saskatchewan (Canada) in wheat. These export monocultures were the result of colonialism. For example, Ghana, an African colony of Britain, began to specialise in cocoa, a plant native to Central America and which English colonisers introduced. Spanish colonial rulers brought Asian plants to the "new world" — bananas to Central America and Mexico and sugar to Cuba. Coffee, introduced by European merchants and planters to Latin America, originated in Ethiopia. European settlers brought wheat to Canada, a crop long familiar in Europe, but adapted over many centuries from its origins in the region now contained by Iraq and Iran.

These patterns of food production we now call "traditional," then, resulted from massive movements of people, plants and animals, which began in the 1500s with colonisation. In the many "new worlds" initiated by these massive colonial movements, foods were exchanged from one country to another and people adapted what they grew and how they prepared it, melding the knowledges of newcomers and native peoples into "creole" farming and food systems. As "traditional" foods began to change, so did diets and cultivation. Mexico contributed tomatoes for sauces and corji for polenta to Italian "traditional" cuisine and farming. Mexico also gave Spanish and Portuguese cuisine capsicum (hot pepper), which Columbus introduced as a replacement for black pepper. It wasn't long before Mexican capsicum reached India via the Portuguese colony of Goa and became a "traditional" spice there. Potatoes, which originated in Peru, became "traditional" (after long resistance) not only to South Asians, but also to Irish and Poles.4 Mexican corn became the staple of peasant communities in Zambia and other parts of Africa. As African-Caribbeans were freed from generations of slavery, they formed communities of peasant cultivators in the Caribbean and sent the corn back to their home country. Jamaican gardens and prepared dishes came to include mangos, carried by indentured workers from India who replaced freed slaves on sugar plantations.

At the same time, diets in non-producing countries began to depend on foods grown in producing countries and stimulated the growth of export monoculture. Merchants not only carried plants from one place to another to sell for profit, but also encouraged plantation owners to export exotic goods in order to build up trade. Europeans and North Americans, for example, came to consider coffee, tea, chocolate (from cocoa), sugar and bananas "traditional" to their diets. To meet this need, peasant communities over generations built "traditions" around earning money from these monoculture crops.

In this context, Mexico has an unusual history of self-reliant peasant communities, growing and eating native plants, and enduring until the late twentieth century. Spanish America gained independence from Spain between 1810 and 1820. Spanish elites in each new country set themselves up as landlords and governors, building on the estates of forced labour created during colonial rule. But Mexico had another series of revolutions beginning in 1910, parallel to the Russian Revolution. The outcome was to create (or to recreate) legal communal landholdings called ejidos. On these lands, peasant cultivation and cuisine, both based on maize, beans and squash, were protected from pressures to grow export crops.

The impetus behind the Mexican revolutions was the redistribution of land and culminated in the organisation of large areas of land for collective agriculture in the 1930s. Unlike Soviet collective farms under Stalin, however, the Mexican ejidos 5 removed land from the market not to serve the state's central plan but to provide the economic basis for self-governing communities of Indigenous peoples. Plantations, supermarkets and other aspects of a "modern" food system had to operate around the edges of a national agrofood system centred on self-governing Indigenous communities. Over time, however, the population outstripped self-provisioning, and many people, especially men, departed for seasonal migrant labour in other parts of Mexico or the United States. Eventually women also left the ejido to find work in cities, in export processing zones called maquiladores on the U.S. border, or in the US.

Unmaking and Remaking "Tradition": The U.S. and Development

The unmaking of "traditions" rooted in the colonial world order began with decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s. Not only food but the whole political and economic system of the world had been dominated by British power during most of the 1800s and even into the early 1900s. But the First and Second World Wars hastened the relative decline of British power and the ascendancy of the United States, Germany, Japan and eventually the Soviet Union. During and after the Second World War, the United States finally took military and political leadership of the world economy and filled the vacuum left by the decline of British power. By the 1950s, however, the Soviet Union emerged as a rival power and the world was reorganised into two massive competing blocs led or dominated by either the U.S. or the Soviet Union — the "superpowers." These superpowers competed for political legitimacy, which came to be understood as which economic system could offer the most rapid development. Since development in practice meant industrialisation,6 peasants and farmers who still produced food for themselves and local markets were pushed from centre stage.

Two American initiatives restructured the world food economy during this period. In its first initiative during the 1930s Depression, the U.S. government established a policy in which it promised to buy wheat from American farmers at a higher than market price, if the price fell below a level set by Congress, to keep farmers from going bankrupt. After the Second World War, American farmers were having a difficult time exporting their wheat because their customers in Europe could not afford to buy it after all the destruction. The government imposed import restrictions to prevent farmers in other countries from selling to the US. The U.S. policy thus separated the American market, where it offered high prices to its own farmers, from the rest of the world.

As a result, the U.S. government wound up with a surplus of wheat, which it couldn't sell at home. If it tried to do so, the "market" price would go ever lower, and the gap between the falling "market" price and the government price would ever widen. The solution was to dispose of it abroad. Of course, markets were limited abroad for three reasons:

in Europe and Japan, both devastated by the Second World War, hungry people and their governments lacked dollars to pay for wheat;
the two superpowers would not trade with each other; and
in countries outside the superpowers most people still lived in agrarian communities, so that in most years they were able to provide themselves with enough food.

These countries came to be known as Third World nations (countries not part of the U.S. or Soviet systems), Less Developed Countries (LDCs), or the South (countries not part of the "rich" industrial North, either capitalist or socialist). However, with the development of food aid policies, these independent countries soon became dependent on food imports subsidised by the US.

The second initiative of the U.S. government was as innovative as its farm program — the invention of a particular type of "foreign aid" designed to overcome obstacles to trade. It began in 1948 with the Foreign Assistance Act to Aid European Recovery, also known as the Marshall Plan. Through this scheme, the U.S. would send goods to European countries (and Japan) to help them rebuild their war-torn industries and to make their agriculture more industrial, or "modern." Since the receiving countries had little to trade in return (except for raw materials from "their" colonies), they couldn't earn dollars to pay. Instead the U.S. would accept payment in local currencies. These were called "counterpart funds" and were only good in the countries that issued them, but the U.S. could spend that money on helping refugees, paying for military expenses and the like. Between 1948 and 1951, some US$13.5 billion was distributed through the Marshall Plan, helping to rebuild European economies so that they could export again in return for U.S. imports. It achieved its purpose in restoring trade by rebuilding trading partners' economies.

The law that created aid to Third World countries was modeled on the Marshall Plan, but it did not have the same effects. Public Law (PL) 480, called "Food for Peace," was passed by the U.S. in 1954. Like the Marshall Plan, it was also designed to create markets abroad for U.S. wheat, and was also part of the U.S. competition with the Soviet Union for allies. But unlike the Marshall Plan, it did not end by creating self-sufficient trading partners. Instead, the U.S. chose Third World recipients for a variety of reasons, both humanitarian and strategic. It helped receiving governments, which were able to distribute cheap food, and industries in Third World cities, which were able to pay lower wages than if workers had to buy more expensive food. The U.S. disposed of its surplus wheat abroad, but farm programs kept the supplies and the surpluses growing.

As a result of these foreign aid initiatives, the U.S. outstripped other large export countries and became the dominant "breadbasket" of the world. Because the U.S. dominated world food markets, adopted national protection and subsidised its own food exports, competing export countries such as Canada, Argentina, Australia and Brazil slipped behind. Because the governments of emerging Third World nations wanted to "develop," many accepted American food aid. These subsidised imports, produced by highly mechanised American farmers, often made it impossible for their own farmers to sell similar food products in local markets. Very soon many Third World countries moved from a situation of food self-sufficiency to one of food dependency. Peasants who could no longer farm were encouraged to move to cities where they were available to work for low wages to encourage industrialisation. Food aid often kept food prices and wages lower than they would have been otherwise. While farming for local food markets became more and more difficult, export monoculture of sugar, pineapples and the like continued to be encouraged. The pattern of trade changed, then, from the old pattern of foods going to colonial powers from colonies, to a new one of food coming to the former European colonies, now called the Third World, from the hegemonic power (the U.S.).7 (An important exception was Mexico, where corn produced on ejido land was not in competition with U.S. corn or wheat.)

During the period from 1954 to 1973, "Food for Peace" helped the U.S. dominate the world wheat market and helped keep world prices low. The U.S., at the centre*of the network, subsidised its farmers and exports and refused to allow agriculture to be part of international negotiations to reduce tariffs. Other countries adopted similar policies, changing them according to their place in the world economy. The European Community (now the European Union or E.U.), for example, which integrated agriculture long before its other industrial sectors, greatly subsidised its farmers, as did Japan. By the 1970s, the European Community subsidised exports, too, bringing itself into direct competition with the U.S.

Third World governments combined the defensive imitation of the European Community and the acceptance of foreign aid to "modernise" peasant farms. Under the rubric of the "Green Revolution," which offered hybrid seeds bred in special international research institutes, farmers were encouraged to switch from mixed farming to monocultures of wheat (Mexico), rice (Philippines, India) and a variety of other staple food crops. The goal was to increase productivity by using machines and especially chemicals (fertilizers and pesticides). When the goal was successful, farmers were able to produce more per unit of land. However, they had to import equipment and chemicals from the U.S. instead of importing grain. The Green Revolution also created greater inequalities among farmers — some farms grew at the expense of others — and it simplified agriculture so that rural communities lost many long-standing sources of food, medicine, fuel and natural fertilizers.8

Oddly, since wheat is native to the old world, the international Green Revolution research centre located in Mexico was devoted to wheat. The corn-based food system of Mexico was difficult to "modernise" as long a farmers were protected by the ejido. Indeed, the whole Mexican food system moved towards ever greater national self-sufficiency under the direction of its own government policies. The Mexican government offered price supports and marketing assistance to its farmers, much like those of the U.S., Europe and Japan. This protection allowed a vast network of small masa (wet corn flour) and tortilla (corn flatbread) makers to supply consumers even in the largest cities. The Mexican government also owned factories to process and sell basic foods such as sugar and cooking oil. In the final stage of this integration, undertaken in the 1970s, just prior to the debt crisis of 1982, the Mexican government introduced CONASUPO, a system of local shops in areas too poor to support private merchants. It was a food system organised by the government to subsidise, and keep alive, small farmers and low-income consumers.

The Debt Crisis and Globalisation

Contradictions in international relations of food began to emerge in the early 1970s. Just as competition between U.S. and European export subsidies was beginning, and as Green Revolution agriculture was reducing demand for imports in some Third World markets, a new factor appeared: economic ties between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, countries which had not traded during the Cold War. The main feature was a mammoth grain deal, which removed so much wheat, corn and soy from world markets that prices tripled between 1972 and 1974. This stimulated what was then called a "food crisis." (When food surpluses returned to the markets in the 1980s, however, the crisis faded from the front pages of the press.) This food crisis coincided with the tripling of oil prices. For Third World nations dependent on importing both oil and grain, these food shortages and escalating prices put greater strain on their economies and made the possibility of borrowing money to feed their countries very attractive. At the same time, oil exporting states, which had little room to invest at home, deposited their increasing profits in the private banks of the West. The private banks, in turn, found it difficult to lend all this extra cash at a time when oil prices put western factories into recession. The banks pressed Third World (as well as socialist) governments to borrow money, without caring how it would be used or how likely it was that the governments would repay the loans. Governing elites of these borrowing nations took the money as a way to avoid dealing with the deeper problems of solving their import dependence. In 1982, less than ten years later, after the food and energy crises, Mexico defaulted on its loan payment and the debt crisis was officially- on.

Another key factor came to the fore in the 1980s: the growth of transnational corporations (TNCs), which had grown up within the framework of the national, and international, structure of the food system. They began to push the"new U.S. agenda of including agriculture in free trade instead of protecting U.S. farmers and pursued this new agenda in the GATT negotiations of 1986-1993 (often referred to in the press as the Uruguay Round). The agrofood corporations, which were TNCs, promoted an agenda of trade and financial liberalisation. After growing for three decades within the elaborate framework of government subsidies, these corporations now found government support for farmers, consumers and national markets to be an obstacle to further profit.9 Their new project was to dismantle subsidies to farmers and consumers in all countries.10 Now that farmers and consumers were linked into food markets, the corporations no longer needed the trade subsidies designed to create those markets, tncs anticipated a world free of national restrictions on their power to relocate production wherever they wished and to reshape consumption, especially of Third "World consumers. The new rules were to be made and enforced by international institutions.

The leading institution forcing a shift from national to international rule-making was the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF, created in 1944, was not a very powerful institution until the 1980s. Banks and Northern states, which did not want to accept the losses, searched for a way to co-ordinate responses to the impending default of many Third World and socialist governments. They decided to empower the IMF for this purpose. Since the beginning of the debt crisis in 1982, the IMF has gone into one country after another on the verge of default and presented an increasingly standard list of "conditions" the country has to meet if it is to receive more loans or extensions of payment dates. Since the point is to earn foreign currency to pay the debt, one goal is to increase exports, including agricultural exports. Another is to cut subsidies to farmers and consumers, including food, both as a way to reduce government spending (which can go to pay foreign debt) and as a way to force a shift of land and labour from protected food production into export production.

The changes demanded by the IMF are called "conditionalities" and the set of conditionalities imposed by the IMF and its sister organisation, the World Bank, are called "structural adjustment programs" (SAPs). They are also often called "austerity measures" because they have such dire effects (believed by the imf to be short-term) on the majority of poor in these indebted nations.11

In order to comply with the IMF's conditionalities or SAP requirements, governments must devalue their currencies, which reduces the spending power of everyone in the country and makes it easier for foreigners to buy up local properties. They must privatise public industries and marketing agencies, which makes it harder for governments to support national farmers. They must reduce or abolish subsidies to consumers and farmers, which drives out local farmers and makes it easier for locals or foreigners to produce agriculture for export. Abolishing subsidies also makes it difficult for people to obtain basic foods that were previously subsidised and often leads to a new form of food riots, which sociologists call "IMF riots."12 Similar constraints are felt by other countries with budget deficits, such as Canada, mainly through the flight of capital and the fall of the country's currency, or if investors do not approve of government policies. In Northern countries, trade agreements will soon make it difficult to continue with marketing boards and other institutions that have supported farm sectors in wheat, dairy and other foods. Governments will then be forced to encourage exports, including converting local agriculture to grow crops to sell abroad, to earn dollars to repay debt. And so "structural adjustment" and its effects are not limited to the South, but can be seen in the erosion of the public sector in the North, including in agriculture.

Under both NAFTA and World Trade Organisation agreements, Canada has begun to convert its supply management structures. The first stage is "tarification" — converting import controls to tariffs. The next is to reduce tariffs in the direction of free trade. As elsewhere, the move to remove national (and provincial) regulations coincides with concentration of production, particularly of animals, into larger and larger units. Farmers are either driven out by giant factories that are able to supply produce on a nearly continental scale or are incorporated into these giant production systems. Both trade rules and corporate concentration, along with shrinking consumer incomes and other factors, have contributed to growing distress among farmers in Canada.

Mexicans suffer in two ways. The abolition of the ejido, which came with the implementation of the SAPs and in anticipation of NAFTA, opened peasant farmers to competition from American corn farmers (who had industrialised their production under the protection of U.S. farm subsidies). And the increasing impoverishment of Mexican farmers and workers/consumers makes them accept employment at very low wages in the growing export industries, including industrial export agriculture. Some export agriculture is farmed on areas of land that once grew food for local consumption; some is being farmed on land not previously farmed before, such as the dry northwestern regions of Sonora and Sinaloa.

As the commodification of food is intensified nearly everywhere, more and more people in Mexico and in other countries around the world, many of them from peasant communities, work to produce food that they may not ever eat themselves. Instead, they are supplying world markets and often eat what comes back to them from world markets. For example, tomato workers in Mexico cannot afford to buy the fruit they pick and pack for U.S. and Canadian markets. They cannot produce their own food either. They will use their meagre wages to buy food. As cheaper U.S. corn moves into the Mexican market, they will likely buy it, even though it tastes different and makes a different type of tortilla from what they have eaten in the past. As tastes change, by desire or necessity, corporations target new consumers in the Third World with whatever product they can afford, from cola drinks to hamburgers. Taco Bell has opened branches in Mexico to serve industrial tortillas to Mexicans uprooted from their village and urban networks through which they are made the old way(s). The "non-traditional" export of tomatoes and the "non-traditional" diet of purchased foods are created out of large-scale transformations in the political economy of food. The old links between local agriculture and local cuisines are being replaced by a new dependence on distant buyers and sellers. Abundance comes to mean not what rich people in a local or national culture eat, but what is best for transnational corporations to manufacture and sell.13 The lives of the workers the TNCs employ and the customers they entice are changed in the most intimate ways.

Changes in Intimate Relations between Families and Food

These profound changes that have taken place in the international political economy of food have affected how people work and how they live their daily lives outside of work. What people do to get food, how they prepare and share food, what food they eat, when and with whom are all influenced by shifts in the food chain. These in turn are intimately connected to the shape of family life. How people work and eat involves gender relations and family relations. Changes in women's and men's roles and in the family are a local counterpart to the global changes in the political economy of food. Of course, family structure is one of the most specific aspects of local cultures. Still, certain ideas of what is "traditional" link many parts of the world, especially in urban areas which now account for the majority of the world's population.

The type of family we name "traditional" in North America and Europe is some variant of the "breadwinner-homemaker" model that emerged in the nineteenth century.14 Before money came to be the main means of securing food, most people in the western world lived in simple, extended or joint family households dominated by a male "head" or "master." (Many peasant and immigrant communities today still organise family life and subsistence in this way.) The growth of industrial capitalist relations changed this food production — as we have seen — and introduced the practice of using money to buy food. Money entered the household and became central to people's lives. To gain food, one now had to work for wages rather than farm one's own land or trade one's crafts or services for food in the local markets. The workers who spent their wages became consumers, customers of commercial farmers. Commercial farmers, in turn, were part of a new (eventually industrial) system of agriculture, the ones who could survive the competition to sell food for profit.

The need to have money to buy food brought other changes to the family. Family members had to go outside the home to work. In addition, thousands of people had to leave the countryside because they could not continue to have the kinds of families they had had as small farmers or villagers. They fled to cities where new industries were flourishing. In England, during the Industrial Revolution (1700s to 1800s), these new industries hired whomever they could for the lowest possible wages. Industries and other employers (such as those hiring private servants) hired people as individuals (and not family units) to work for long hours at low wages. Employers found they could hire women more cheaply than men, and children more cheaply than women. Child labour was common, as was illness and early death. It was difficult for many people to form families at all in these new urban contexts. Children were born outside of marriage in large numbers and many were abandoned by parents who could not care for them because they were too poor, too overworked or unemployed^ With the spread of industrialisation to North America, these conditions afflicted working families in the U.S. and Canada, though not to the same degree. Similar conditions accompany displacement from the countryside in Third World countries today, as severe as those of early industrial England.

In the face of such suffering and inability to settle into stable lives and create stable families, working people (largely working men) in England, the U.S. and Canada demanded changes to regulate working hours and wages. Landowning members of Parliament, who understood that capitalism could not continue if it slowly killed off its workers, supported the passage of laws restricting hours of work. The hours of work for men were limited to ten a day, six and a half days a week. Hours as well as types of work were greatly restricted for women and children. These laws drastically reduced the competition for jobs by women and children, and men, therefore, were able to demand higher wages, usually through unions.

The result was the idea of a "family wage," earned by a man and sufficient to support a dependent wife and children. As men formed unions and bargained for higher wages, women were relegated to the home where they performed domestic labour for no pay. Even when women did work for wages, they were much lower. In a situation of social breakdown, then, the family wage allowed the formation of a particular type of family in an economy in which individuals earned not "bread" but the wages to buy it.15 And it was the breadwinner — usually the male head — who earned the wage.

This breadwinner-homemaker family of the working classes modeled itself after the bourgeois family of the capitalist class, whose traditions differed from those of the aristocracy, or landowners. The bourgeois family created a division between men, who went out to work in the new public sphere, and women, who stayed home in what remained the private sphere. The home was no longer recognised as a workplace but became idealised as a "haven" to which the husband could return. Women were considered too frail for the vicious worlds of commerce and politics (something different from the aristocratic or villager view of women), and they were seen best suited for "motherhood" (also a departure from the aristocratic and village "traditions" of the times). Of course, the bourgeois family was supported by servants, sometimes an army of servants. This part of the family structure could not be modeled by the working classes, who were themselves either servants or factory employees of bourgeois families. But the male (the husband) did go out to work and the woman (the wife) stayed home. In the working-class version, the woman shopped, cooked and cared for children without servants. In some sense, she was the servant, except she was not paid for her domestic work.

In actuality, the family wage never really provided an adequate income to the breadwinner. Only a minority of men actually achieved wages high enough to support their families. Many women had to work for wages even if they were married. A married woman's wages were considered "pin money," something extra to contribute to a family whose main income came from a husband (even if she didn't have one!). Single, separated or widowed women, with or without children, also had to work to support themselves, and always at lower wages than men — usually one-third of a man's wage. Rather than insist that women be paid as much as men, trade unions usually excluded women.16 Quite apart from the injustice to women, who were forced into various combinations of dependence and poverty, this was a fatal flaw in the family wage system, because women were always potentially available to employers at lower wages.

The family wage was a very partial and unequal "solution" to early capitalist poverty and instability. It was also a trap that set men against women at home and in the labour market. Logically, it would have made sense for men to support equal wages for women; this would have reduced the temptation for employers to hire women more cheaply. Instead, men often found ways to exclude women from unions and collaborated in keeping them out of high-paid jobs. Low pay made it less desirable for women to work for wages and more desirable for them to stay home and care for the family. Women, therefore, became an unpaid support system for employed men — whether they also worked for wages or not. As long as certain industries remained stable enough to support exclusive contracts between unionised men and employers, those men could aspire to, and even achieve, a family wage. The family wage system deepened and spread to many countries, in one way or another, with the spread of industrialisation and stayed in place well into the 1960s. It became "traditional."

By the 1950s, the family wage had become the standard in many of the main industries of North America and Europe, such as the automobile and steel industries. By this time there was also a formality about it. Key jobs were negotiated by unions and employers or regulated by minimum wages and other government policies. Different rates still existed for men and women. (This wage gap fuelled a major goal of feminism in the 1970s — pay equity.) The family wage was also based on the existence of a "core" of relatively stable workers. In Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, these workers were native-born males of European descent. Immigrants, Indigenous people and women were largely absent" from key industrial sectors. Thus both sexism and racism were structurally entrenched in the work practices and wage systems of this period. In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, when employers faced falling profits and became serious about reducing wages, they undercut the family wage system by hiring women or men of colour. They could do this by "restructuring" or relocating their industry.

In the 1970s, work began to be "restructured" in the food sector, and here, too, restructuring exploited the flaw in the family wage system. Women and young people, the marginal labour force, were assumed to work "flexibly" and more cheaply than men. This "flexibilisation" changed the nature of work and conditions of employment and shifted gender relations in the workplace and family relations in private life. The hiring of women and young people to work in the fields for export crops and in fast-food outlets (what Deborah Barndt refers to as "maquilisation" and "McDonaldisation") contributed to undermining the "traditional" family/work nexus. It reversed the process by which the tradition of breadwinner-homemaker family and the family wage were constructed: today, people are once again facing the world as individual competitors for jobs, women can be hired more cheaply than men, and teenagers and even children more cheaply than women. The effect is to undermine unions, reduce men's wages and men's employment, and ultimately undermine everyone's economic well-being.

Food remained at home as part of women's roles in the "traditional" family. Expansion of food industries and especially services, penetrated this non-market domain in two stages. First, two economic growth sectors in the 1950s and 1960s— "durable" goods such as refrigerators and freezers and "durable" food commodities such as frozen ingredients and meals — deepened the market penetration of food practices within the home. The post-war reaffirmation of women's domestic roles included a new definition of housewife as consumer of domestic goods. This saved time for women who, paradoxically, were entering the paid labour force in greater numbers. Second, food services grew in the 1970s and after, both employing women and young people outside the home and offering individually prepared meals to replace home cooking. Cooking for wages instead of at home and buying meals that used to be made at home led to deeper market relations in food. Thus "traditional family values" — symbolised by the family meal — are giving way to individual life trajectories. Family members work long and odd shifts, especially in food retail and services, and buy meals.

Family and trade "traditions" are linked, in both origin and decline. The breadwinner-homemaker family grew up together with the divide between markets that organise production and families that organise consumption. Now they are changing together. This historical view helps us to see through an important illusion, which has run like a thread through both the stories of trade and families. The idea of "development" sounds very positive, but it hides complex changes which have negative features. In practice, "development" means deepening market transactions. From an economic accounting, this always sounds positive: more jobs, more goods, therefore better off.

But consider the situation concretely. If a hamburger is cooked at home, only the ingredients count in economic production. If the person who used to cook it at home now works instead at McDonald's, where it is sold, then both the making and the receiving count as "productive" contributions to the national economy. Yet the same human work is done, and the same number of meals are created.17 The backward-looking question is, Are the work*and the meals more life-enhancing when organised by McDonald's than by unpaid mothers at home? The forward-looking question is, Are the meals more life-enhancing when organised by McDonald's than by other ways of organising our making and eating of meals?

Considered in this light, it is possible to ask whether making all work and all goods into market transactions is the best way to achieve a better life. The corporations that employ people to create food at all links in the chain from field to table are destroying old "traditions" of trade, work and family structure. Many aspects of these old ways are not to be regretted. Indeed, the creation of low-paid work at long and odd hours in the food sector and the breaking down of nationally organised food sectors were possible because of flaws in the family system, which kept women working for free at home, and in the international system, which kept people poor, especially in Third World countries. Corporations understandably seized opportunities to sell products never before sold and then found ways to produce them more cheaply and sell them more widely. In pursuit of cheaper labour and larger markets, corporations pressed for changes in international rules that favoured their mobility and expansion. As a result, we have become more dependent on corporations for our food, both as workers and as consumers.

What Future Will We Construct — Global or Local?

Today, the ideal global meal may be the hamburger.18 Although it is often assumed to be "traditionally" American, the hamburger has permeated U.S. culture more recently than Mickey Mouse has. Its ancestry includes the sort of ground beef patty eaten in part of Germany, and variations appeared in county fairs in parts of the U.S. settled by northern Europeans.19 In general bread and beef derive mainly from European agronomy and cuisine, itself a descendent of larger Mediterranean cultures. The widespread use of the hamburger, however, accompanied the rise of fast-food industries. These marked a change of life from family to individual meals.

A recent magazine advertisement exemplifies the combined effects of corporate-guided changes in food practices. A young girl is offered a doll to help her learn to be a mother, a way girls have learned in many human societies. What exactly is she learning from this doll? To feed her baby, who is wearing a "Happy Meal" bib, a McDonald's burger, fries and shake! Another doll might teach her to breast feed her baby or to mash bananas. But the food she is learning to serve her baby is bought from McDonald's. And the girl herself is not the blond child, typical of ads until quite recently. In the context of this book, her dark hair and eyes could easily be those of a Mexican child, who might otherwise be expected to think of food as tortillas and beans (and from the village rather than from Taco Bell). A toy company uses McDonald's to sell its product to children, which in turn advertises the corporate meals. Parents who buy this toy are paying for advertising that encourages their children to buy meals from the corporation! And as we will see in the chapters in this book, corporate meals are increasingly made and sold internationally, spanning the continent and even the globe.

As suggested by the "Happy Meals" doll, the hamburger is more a corporate food than an American one. It is part of the project of globalisation pushed by corporations to replace the "traditional" project of "development" once regulated by national states, with the United States at the centre. The corporate hamburger marks a shift from what had by the 1970s become a "tradition" of regulated (male) employment and unpaid (female) preparation of home meals. The fast-food hamburger also marks a shift from US-centred food production to a world where ingredients are contracted from farmers and outlets are created by corporations which have escaped controls by governments. The corporate hamburger is prepared by casual, part-time workers for people who are eating out in deregulated markets. The new workers and the new customers are often the same people and they now spend less time with their families. "Industrial" prepared food is served hot and ready to eat immediately, and individuals "graze" meals — eat when they can, often from ubiquitous fast-food outlets. Corporations are trying to create a new global "tradition" for a culturally diverse world.

New patterns of production and trade accompany the eating changes creating new inequalities. Year-round fresh fruits and vegetables are now the fastest growing "non-traditional" exports. The new markets in exotic fruits, which include apples in Mexico as much as mangos in Canada, have been global from the outset. New workers, especially women, are hired to tend and process monocultures of tomatoes or strawberries in areas once devoted to peasant farming for local foods. These workers have less time and fewer ingredients to prepare "traditional" foods. They have little money to buy either corporate versions of their cuisines, such as Taco Bell in Mexico, or imported corporate foods such as hamburgers. A new pattern emerges in which local companies contract to transnational corporations and hire different workers; this in turn reconfigures family life, changes diets and, with it, cultures. This is what Vandana Shiva calls the globalisation of western local knowledge. A truly cosmopolitan world culture would consist of many local cultures existing together, mutually and respectfully exchanging and learning from one another.20

The new patterns of work, trade and home life on offer are not the only ones possible. Indeed, they create such problems of exploitation, environmental damage, ill health and destruction of community life and local cultures, that sources of opposition and survival strategies are emerging everywhere. The alternatives to corporatisation are necessarily local and particular to that area of the world, but they are not isolated from the alternatives in other areas of the world. Their success depends on individuals linking strategies and building mutual support across localities. These efforts require different rules of the game internationally than the deregulation of trade and investment presently rampaging across the globe, which only serves to ''free" corporations at the expense of democratic institutions, communities, workers and consumers of food. New coalitions of groups concerned with, food security, environmental degradation, labour rights, women and health are forming to propose new sets of rules that are more equitable and democratic.

Many local, regional and national alternatives still remain to be identified and connected. As a beginning, each of us can become aware of what is changing, where "traditions" came from, and what is possible — learning from the past and from others. The shift over time from an agriculture-centred to a food-centred system, with most people hired for wages and buying food, opens possibilities. For instance, community shared agriculture (CSA) is a new way to link farmers with eaters. In one model, eaters buy the crop in advance, help out on the farm and learn to eat what is good for the land to grow. Supported by their customers, Canadian farmers threatened with the loss of government protection can be more attentive to what is good for the soil, making a new science of ecological agriculture and developing a new source of employment on the land. They can also experiment with crops appropriate to immigrant cuisines. Similarly, community kitchens are not only a survival strategy for self-provisioning communities in Mexico which are losing their protections, but also a model for multicultural communities in Canada.

In both agriculture and eating practices, we have much to learn from places such as Mexico. Ironically, just as Canadians are becoming aware of the need to relocalise our food systems, trade liberalisation and related changes in land and labour laws are threatening self-provisioning communities long in tune with local ecosystems in Mexico. We are learning from the experiences of community kitchens in Latin America. But we need also to learn about laws and practices that support farmers and farming communities, and to learn how to use the land wisely and sustainably.21 In a time of growing unemployment and urban distress, particularly among young people, it seems wise to look to more labour-intensive — but also more knowledge-intensive — agriculture, to support life and provide food. Mexican land and labour practices may well have needed change, but the wholesale adoption of problematic practices of industrial agrofood systems seems ill-advised. It also deprives us of an example to consider in Canada.

Conscious buying is another place to start. Food co-operatives and even local governments can try to support local, environmentally sound farming through food purchases (buying supplies for schools and hospitals, for example). Individuals can participate in "fair trade," organised by organisations such as OXFAM, to buy directly from co-operatives in other countries. Organising and supporting local initiatives (such as the Good Food Box, farmers' markets, local food processors using local ingredients) helps ensure access for all to healthy food, grown in a sustainable way. International rules to support local empowerment rather than undermine it could allow communities at all levels of scale to use their organised powers to manage their own affairs to the maximum. Co-ordination among self-governing communities, including respect for the effects of one region on another, is more reflective of democracy, justice and sustainability than the present rush to corporate freedom.

It is worth remembering how and when changing "traditions" began. History helps us to track changes, to identify forks in the road, to grasp the interconnections among aspects of social life from the very small to the very large, and to know how our small choices, even the unconscious ones, contribute to this or that direction as the present unfolds into the future. If we make our choices conscious ones, each of us can do our part to take the path we want for everyone.

Notes

T. P. Bayliss-Smith, The Ecology of Agricultural Systems (Cambridge: The University Press, 1982), 69-82. See also, Sidney Mintz, "Eating and Being: What Food Means," in Barbara Harriss-White and Sir Raymond Hoffenberg, eds., Food: Mul-tidisciplinary Perspectives (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 102-115.
Eric Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966).
See Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology (London: Zed Books, 1993); Mintz, "Eating and Being"; Harriet Friedmann, "Going in Circles: The Political Ecology of Food and Agriculture," in Raymond Grew, ed., Food in Global History (Boulder, CO: Westview, forthcoming).
Richard Schweid, Hot Peppers: Cajuns and Capsicum in New Iberia, Louisiana (Seat-Ue, WA: Madrona Publishers, 1980), 12-16.
The ejidowas a Mexican form of collective ownership by self-governing communities, understood as a way of recreating Indigenous ways of life in conjunction with modern forms of collective property. Ejidos developed differently from one another, with various combinations of common and individual rights to use and dispose of land. In general, ejido members were able to remain on the land and farm, buffered from national and international markets.
Philip McMichael, Development and Social Change: A Global Analysis (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 1996), 35-36.
Harriet Friedmann, "The Political Economy of Food: The Rise and Fall of the Postwar International Food Order," American Journal of Sociology 88 (1982), special supplement.
See Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind.
Harriet Friedmann, "International Relations of Food," in Harriss-White and Hoffenberg, eds., Food, 174-204. This article also appears in New Left Review 197 (1993), 29-57.
McMichael, Development and Social Change, 145-178.
See Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalisation of Poverty: Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms (London: Zed Books and Penang, Malaysia: Third World Network, 1997).
John Walton and David Seddon, Free Markets and Food Riots: The Politics of Global Adjustment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 37-50.
Marvin Harris, Sacred Cow, Abominable Pig: Riddles of Food and Culture (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 120-129.
Bonnie J. Fox, "The Rise and Fall of the Breadwinner-Homemaker Family," in Bonnie J. Fox, ed., Family Patterns and Gender Relations (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1993), 147-158.
Jane Humphries, "The Working-Class Family, Women's Liberation and Class Struggle: The Case of Nineteenth-Century British History," Review of 'Radical Political Economics 9 (1977), 25-42.
Martha May, "Bread Before Roses: American Workingmen, Labor Unions and the Family Wage," in Fox, ed., Family Patterns and Gender Relations, 135-145.
This is the reasoning developed by Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990).
George Ritzer, in The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge
Press, 1993), uses the McDonald's hamburger as a way to understand a vast array of changes in work and daily life.
Harris, Sacred Cow, 121-122.
Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind, 61—62
See Colin Duncan, The Centrality of Agriculture: Between Humankind and the Rest of Nature (Montreal: McGill-Queens, 1996); David Ehrenfeld, Beginning Again: People and Nature in the New Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)