以小麦为食物以小麦为工业物外文文献

Wheat as food wheat as industrial substance comparative geographies of transformation and mobility Jennifer Atchison Lesley Head Alison Gates School of Earth and Environmental Sciences and GeoQuEST Research Centre University of Wollongong Wollongong 2522 Australia a r t i c l ei n f o Article history Received 12 December 2008 Received in revised form 19 August 2009 Keywords Agriculture Plants Cultures of nature Bodies Food Consumption Coeliac disease a b s t r a c t Wheat is the world s second largest crop supplies 19 of human calories and is the largest volume crop traded internationally Its uniquely malleable physical properties make it a valued industrial substance albeit often an invisible one as well as a food This combination of transformation invisibility and mobil ity demands new ways of thinking about wheat geographies In this paper we document and analyse sev eral moments in the life of Australian wheat at the supermarket in the lives of coeliac sufferers in laboratories industrial factories and on the farm We illustrate diverse patterns of interaction with wheat The major plane of differentiation is between wheat as food and wheat as industrial substance The expli cit connection of food to the human body tends to fi x the identity of wheat whether as healthy staple of the nation or harmful poison to coeliacs who must negotiate its presence using the regulatory regime of food labelling This is no small task given the ubiquity of wheat our survey of 10 235 supermarket items found it in 29 5 of labelled food items In contrast when wheat is physically and chemically disassem bled to become an industrial substance its presence and identity become mutable hidden and often invisible 2009 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved 1 Introduction A major challenge for contemporary agri food geographies is to work across and eventually dismantle a set of binary oppositions that have marked the fi eld culture and nature conventional and alternative agriculture global and local processes production and consumption political economy and cultural approaches foci on materiality and representation Morgan et al 2006 The com plexity of food security and agricultural sustainability questions in both developed and developing parts of the world demands more integrative and cross cutting thinking In this paper we contribute to this process by working across a further dualism that between food and industrial substance using the example of wheat We aim to contribute to a more dynamic spatiality of this major crop one attuned to the material qualities of the wheat itself Wheat s unique qualities enable it to be both food and non food product in very particular ways As the largest volume crop traded internationally the mobility of wheat commands attention How ever the craftable qualities of wheat can render it invisible defying attempts to follow the thing Cook 2004 using mobile methods Larsen et al 2006 p 6 So the question where is the wheat can not be answered without considering a further question what is wheat Our study examples come from several moments in the life of Australian wheat at the supermarket in the lives of coeliac sufferers in laboratories industrial factories and on the farm The comparison here between wheat as food and wheat as industrial substance shows quite different patterns of fi xing the identity of wheat Food tends to fi x the identity non food tends to hide make invisible and disassemble the identity of wheat We fi rst site the study in the food geography and mobility literatures then explain in more detail the signifi cance of wheat geographies 2 Agri food geographies and mobilities Becausefoodiscentraltotheinteractionsbetweenhumanbodies andthenonhumanworld itisnotsurprisingthatheateddiscussions aroundtheconceptsandpracticeofcultures natureshavebeencen tral to food geographies over the last decade Goodman 1999 ar gued that this fi eld where nature was abstracted from the social domain p 17 was in fact rather late to examine its basis in mod ernist ontology He advocated actor network theory as a potential way forward an argument challenged by Marsden 2000 who ar guedthatANT whileoffering abettermethodologicaltoolkit could notsuffi cientlyaccountforthe powerdifferentialsevidentthrough outagriculturalnetworks Marsdensuggestedthatempiricalstudies with a signifi cantly more micro sociological stance p 27 would providea way forward Goodman noted thatfood scares prominent in the Anglo American literature because of bovine spongiform encephalophy BSE and concerns over genetically modifi ed GM 0016 7185 see front matter 2009 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved doi 10 1016 j geoforum 2009 09 006 Corresponding author E mail address jennya uow edu au J Atchison Geoforum 41 2010 236 246 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage food are episodes when the hybrid co productions of natures cul tures that make up human food practices are revealed and re nego tiated Goodman 1999 p 28 Winter s 2003 2005 reviews identifi ed a number of promising connections across the divides including Whatmore s 2002 now classic work on hybridity He particularly drew attention to the discovery of culture in economic geography 2003 p 505 and to a series of ethnographic studies among farmers p 510 but noted the risk that this could prove just as essentialist as older political economy approaches A number of studies attempted to cross the acknowledged divide between production and consump tion Goodman and DuPuis 2002 including those that developed methodologies to follow the thing De Sousa and Busch 1998 Cook 2004 Cook et al 2006 A fl urry of studies on particular foods provided not only more mobile and multi sited ethnograph ies but attention to the material qualities of the nonhuman in question whether bananas papayas tomatoes or coffee The mate rial was frequently positioned in opposition to the representational turn in cultural approaches leading Kearnes 2003 to critique the way the material was often given a priori signifi cance and to argue that we need a notion of matter as simultaneously and unevenly discursive and physical 150 emphasis added The empirical context of Anglo American studies such as those reviewed by Cook et al 2006 was most frequently alternative food networks and fair trade movements A further relevant trend has been the link between embodied geographies and the way that things become food as seen in the work of Roe 2006a b Roe uses examples such as fi sh becoming sushi James preparing organic potatoes and focus groups engag ing with carrots Her works remind us that food should not be gi ven ontological status but rather that the process of becoming food involves relations between humans and nonhumans plants and animals Nor is that process even across all human groups as the coeliac example in this paper shows As mentioned above the methodology of following the thing is very similar to the mobile methods in human mobility studies Thelatterincludeboththeresearchermoving alongwiththepeople imagesorobjectsthataremovingandarebeingstudied andsecond capturing through observation questionnaires interviews map pingandtraces thecomplexmobilitiesofthepeople imagesandob jects under study Larsen et al 2006 p 6 Much recent mobility research has focused on the complex movements of people Cres swell 2006 for example in social networks and travel Larsen et al 2006 and in the process of migration Blunt 2007 Feather stone et al s 2005 collection on automobilities is helpful to us in two main ways conceptual and methodological In this work the driver car Dant 2005 pp 61 62 is explored as an assemblage a form of social being that produces a range of social actions driv ing transporting parking consuming polluting and so on Urry 2005 p 26 conceptualises the system of automobility which involves autonomous humans combined with machines with capacity for autonomous movement along the paths lanes streets and routeways of one society after another What is key is not the car as such but the system of these fl uid interconnections Infollowingwheatweaimtodosoinawaythatdoesnotreifyitas apreconstituted thing butisattunedto ontheonehand itsmaterial deconstructionandtransformationinto thingsotherthanwheat and ontheother toitsinteractionswiththebodiesofhumansandothers 3 Why wheat Wheat is immensely signifi cant in the global food supply being the second largest crop produced and consumed by volume Table 1 and supplying 19 of world calorifi c supply Mitchelle and Milke 2005 It is the crop with the largest production area and a lower global average yield than corn or rice making its pro duction more energy intensive It is the largest volume crop traded on an international scale the most signifi cant crop for interna tional food aid and the most signifi cant crop stored as a buffer against production shortages Mitchelle and Milke 2005 Perhaps surprisingly it has been less part of recent agri food conversations than for example soybeans De Sousa and Busch 1998 Whatmore 2002 Wheat has been turned into money since our ancestors recogni sed its starchy fl oury and kneadable qualities Its distinctive phys icalcharacteristicsarecentraltoitstransformabilityand contemporary industrial applications All conventional grain crops are signifi cant sources of carbohydrates both starch and sugar but wheat contains considerably more protein than rice maize barley or millet Pomeranz 1988 Although soybeans have a higher pro tein content they do not contain comparable quantities of carbo hydrates Wheat can thus become a component of hairspray paper and milk via contemporary agricultural and industrial modes of production and processing It moves in nonlinear ways hides and in turn transforms other things Australian wheat is a key component of this global industry representing about 15 of annual wheat trade ABS 2006 Although the area under production has waxed and waned Henz ell 2007 production today surpasses all historical highs In 2003 2004 the gross value of wheat production was estimated at around 5 6 billion about 26 million tonne in wheat ABARE 2006 repre senting about 15 of Australia s agricultural production ABS 2006 4 What is wheat The fl exibility of wheat Plant geographies are usually approached via different types of collectives or assemblages forests food commodities vegetation communities habitat biodiversity and more recently carbon stor age devices Wheat is another such collective one that defi es our efforts at defi ning and describing its geography in several ways First its botanical taxonomy is enormously complicated with all attempts at its systematic classifi cation proving very diffi cult Morrison 2001 Wheat is an ethnobotanical term rather than a specifi c taxonomic identity It encompasses two genera Triticum and Aegilops Morrison 2001 and approximately 600 species Cor nell and Hoveling 1998 The taxonomy is complicated by the exis tence of multiple genetic strains and by its huge genetic diversity which is about six times larger than the maize genome Huttner and Debrand 2001 the result of complicated historical and ongo ing interbreeding and hybridisation by humans over thousands of years of domestication Feldman 2001 Second the wheat grain or kernel itself can be understood dif ferently depending on the context in which it is examined and useful Evers and Bechtel 1988 In the fl our mill the kernel is sheared reduced or broken apart physically into components labelled in the commercial environment and also domestically as fl our semolina bran and germ Although these components are broadly applied and widely used Evers and Bechtel 1988 they have no strict or defi nitive meanings and are understood in this environment to be variable commodities because of the nat ural variations in the source grain BRI 1989 In the botanical text book the morphology of the kernel is understood via cellular struc tures identifi ed using microscopic imagery and labelled according to precise botanical terminology even though individual grains vary considerably from the gross average Evers and Bechtel 1988 In the laboratory and industrial factories fl our produced in the fl our mill is pulled apart isolated or fractionated via J Atchison et al Geoforum 41 2010 236 246237 chemical processes into substances which are understood as hav ing particular chemical properties such as the ability to form gels but which are themselves assemblages or categories of constituent things carbohydrates as different types of starches and sugars proteins as gluten fractions fats and lipids fi bres enzymes and many other compounds Pomeranz 1988 Each of these approaches to understanding and utilising the kernel underpin wheat s versatility to be broken down into constit uent parts or compounds and then also to be reassembled and reconstituted to make other things both food and non food prod ucts Cornell and Hoveling 1998 Milled fl our is used to make tra ditional food products such as bread noodles and pasta It is also processed into glucose or maltodextrin additives which are found in sweets and snack foods Additionally it is manufactured into food colours and food fl avours Milled fl our is also refi ned in the industrial factory into starch to make adhesives in box manufac ture additives in biodegradable plastic packaging source stock for renewable fuels like ethanol and alcohols for use in industrial textiles pharmaceuticals inks cleaners propellants for perfumes cosmetics and personal care products Manildra Group 2008 There is thus a central ambiguity in our work that challenges not only the essentialism of food but the essentialism of wheat it self We wrap a category around a taxonomically complex set of plants and call it wheat Just as other domesticated food plants emerge as countless impossible to avoid Cook 2004 and invis ibly ubiquitous Whatmore 2002 wheat is even more so simultaneously visible and invisible obvious and hidden every where and nowhere 5 Methods In keeping with the complexity of the networks under discus sion a combination of methods has been appropriate Our two main methods are a survey of supermarket products and their la bels for the presence and absence of wheat and interviews with people who negotiate the presence and absence of wheat in differ ent ways 5 1 Surveying the wheat A major component of market share in the contemporary Aus tralian retail industry belongs to the supermarket where thou sands of products are displayed Online supermarket shopping services present one opportunity to access and research a publicly available list of retail products Australia has one of the highest concentrations of market share in the retail food sector with com panies Woolworths and Coles controlling possibly as much as 80 ACCC 1999 of the industry These companies play signifi cant roles in both horizontal integration having branched into spheres such as petrol and perishable foods and vertical integration with investment in the supply chain Woolworths online shopping lists were selected for this case study primarily because there were more local retail outlets to fi eld check the ingredients of the items on these lists Wheat is an important component of supermarket products be cause it remains a central part of Australian diets Although con sumption of grain for food has decreased since the Second World War ABS 2000 a 1995 survey ABS 1999 found that adult Aus tralians consume about 11 1 kg of pasta 4 7 kg of sweet and savoury biscuits and 20 5 kg of cakes pastries buns muffi ns and scones per person per year Over 90 of Australians consumed cereals and cereal based products bread breakfast cereal pasta but also including rice and 67 81 of Australians consumed cer eal based products and dishes biscuits cakes pastries pizza lasa gne hamburgers etc ABS 1999 Food labels are not provided in virtual supermarkets and so we visited supermarkets to fi eld check product labels for the presence or absence of wheat Of the 12 034 items listed on the Woolworths online shopping lists 10 235 were available on the shelves to look at Availability varied according to factors including seasonality e g Christmas hampers locality preferences e g high propor tions of organic items were not available in some stores recalled and discontinued items and an item s suitability for home delivery service Unknown ingredients and additives were checked against the literature for potential wheat derivation 5 2 Interviews We draw on seven interviews undertaken in 2006 2007 with people involved in processing wheat food scientists stock feed millers a fast moving consumer goods merchandiser a starch sci entist dairy and pig farmers The semi structured interviews in cludedcommonquestionsaboutpeople sinteractionswith wheat and more detailed follow up questions relating to their par ticular circumstances All interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed People were interviewed in their workplaces Some of these were accessible to us for detailed observation but others were restricted due to health or security regulations or commer cial confi dentiality In presenting this material we aim to illustrate the ways in which wheat is physically transformed into food and other stuff and the diverse ways it becomes mobile We also endeavour to fl esh out the space time where wheat becomes af fected and thus altered by what is done to it in part exploring the meaning making enacted by how the foodstuff is handled Roe 2006a p 109 In this way we contribute to a more embodied experience of production Lockie 2002 For many Australians wheat is so much a part of daily life that we interact with it unconsciously In contrast sufferers of coeliac disease have to be highly attuned to its presence and absence Bell and Valentine 1997 have previously discussed the profound lim its to the everyday geographies of coeliacs arguing that they are in particular very sensitive to and therefore aware of the subtle and often unpublicised ways manufacturers continual