Spain: the pleasures and ethics of consumption and production

Travel consumes us, just as we consume the material and philosophical artefacts of the destinations of our desire. We bump onto foreign soil and commence imbibing difference with all senses, some more pleasant than others. We eagerly osmose saturated blue skies, reluctantly inhale the sourness of the unwashed on the train, and happily let the sweet and salty depths of jamón melt on our tongue…

Stuart and I have spent our entire shared life consuming culture, learning our way into other lands by eating churros in Madrid, gazing at Rembrandts in Paris and listening to sitars in Varanasi, reading Machiavelli and Balzac in the Tuileries, and ambling through centuries of Gothic flying buttresses and villages and cities planned and unplanned for habitation. 20 years ago we would read all the relevant novels we could lay hands on before traveling to a new country, and I would commence reading recipes and trying them out on family and friends even before our adventures, only to come home and improve on those dishes after having tasted their distinctions in situ.

So engrossed was/am I with understanding the ways in which we consume culture in pursuit of connectedness, and of a cosmopolitan ethic, that I spent eight years working towards a PhD on the topic, the formal study of which I’ve since abandoned, though it remains a lifelong preoccupation.

Since before becoming a farmer, my interest in consumption logically shifted to a more primary concern with production, ipso facto consumption’s supplier. Our recent trip to Spain, the home of jamón ibérico, exemplified this, as we searched for the roots of jamón, not just the taste. I’ll write more about our findings on jamón in a later post, as here I’d like to share my thoughts on our other observations throughout Spain.

We spent a scant 18 hours in Madrid, and in that time noted:

  1. carnicerías are everywhere in the centre with ceilings and walls lined with jamón,
  2. there’s a bottle of Spanish olive oil on nearly every table,
  3. Spanish olives are standard on tapas menus, but the quality is anything but standardised,
  4. the smoky spice of pimentón is as distinctive to Spanish cuisine as jamón.

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Where and under what conditions is all this produce grown?

As we dashed south out of Madrid in the motorhome we dubbed the Slothvan (unfair really as it was quite speedy on the autovía but lumbered around curves in a not-unpleasing sloth-like fashion), we couldn’t help but be struck by the endless monocultures of olives, seemingly Spain’s equivalence to the central valley of California’s almond groves without the obvious ecological disaster of irrigating a thirsty tree in a drought-prone land. There were rarely water pipes in sight, but also absolutely nothing but olive trees for hundreds of kilometres – no grass between the rows, no shrubs – just thousands and perhaps millions of trees dotting the rocky soils.

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I wondered who owns these orchards and just how big are they? What impact of the growth of Spain’s olive oil industry has there been on the land and local communities (let alone the Italian and Greek industries?) Surely the consequences are the same as anywhere agriculture scales up and smallholdings are lost – more chemical inputs in the name of efficiency and yield, subsequent land degradation, and reduced employment for rural communities who once relied on the viability of many small-scale farms… though a quick bit of internet research reveals that while Spain’s olive orchards are on average bigger than their neighbours’, they are still relatively small by Australian or American standards at 5.3ha (compared with just 1.3ha in Italy!). According to what I read though, lack of control of the value chain keeps the farmers from prospering, just as it does worldwide (the FAO has an entire workstream dedicated to connecting smallholders to value chains).

Dotted amongst the olive groves are huge solar and wind farms – in a dry, rocky land, the Spanish are very wisely harvesting the natural resources of which they have plenty – sun and wind. Something I read when we visited the windmills made famous by Cervantes’ madly tilting Don Quixote suggested the locals worked out a long time ago to harness these resources as their only reliablemainstays – if only Australian policymakers were so wise.

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As we rolled into the steep slopes of the southern tip of Andalucía, the olive groves shrank and seemed to welcome the presence of other species – aberrant oaks and life-giving figs poked up amongst the olives with an appealing diversity after so many homogeneous kilometres. Even grass is allowed between rows in many of the smaller farms, surely a welcome cover for hungry soils under the harsh Spanish sun.img_0178

It got me reflecting back on the abundance of Spanish olive oil available throughout the country (and indeed, in Australia and elsewhere) and wondering where the artisanal local oils are to be found? You know, that whole ‘just because it’s local doesn’t mean it’s good’. For example, the region in which we live in Victoria has an abundance of potatoes, most of them grown in big monocultures and sprayed regularly – not what I’d prefer to feed my family… (fortunately it is easy where we live to access the organic and chemical-free potatoes grown by the many lovely small-scale farmers with which we’re blessed).

And then we visited the lovely mountain region of La Vera in the northerly part of Extremadura and saw firsthand how small-scale growing can be aggregated, scaled, and become ubiquitous and still delicious and fair… through the collective model (which of course the olive growers also utilise). La Vera is the most famous pimentón (Spanish paprika) producing region in Spain (Murcia being the other). Back in 1937 the local growers formed a syndicate, and then in 1938 established a cooperative to reduce competition amongst themselves and to create an entity with a real opportunity for export.

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Drying and smoking sheds for the pimenton

img_0465 A niche artisanal (arguably non-staple) product like pimentón can quickly saturate a solely local market, and given it is sold as a dried powder in a tin, it is readily transportable without refrigeration – the perfect product for the age-old spice trade. And witnessing the relatively small-scale fields growing the crops and the old drying sheds where the pimentón are still taken to be dried and given their irresistible smokiness was heartening – I’m heading home with 3kg for my chorizo making – happy meatsmith!

But of course cooperatives aren’t all fair to everyone just because they’re fair to their members. At the recent launch of the Farm Cooperatives and Collaborations Pilot Program in Australia we heard from a number of very large case studies, including CBH, the huge grain cooperative in WA with an annual revenue of over $3 billion that export more than 90% of the grain produced, largely for livestock feed and fuel. We also heard from TSBE in Queensland, a cooperative with $5 billion in revenue that owns feedlots, intensive pig and poultry sheds, and apparently got its start with CSG revenue (food and agriculture are only 15% of their turnover if I noted that correctly).

We ate quite well in Spain – we had ready access to fresh fruit and veg and a variety of interesting Spanish cheeses (such as the lovely, stinky Torta del Casar and the plentiful queso de oveja – curado is much nicer than semicurado) – and made many of our meals in the Slothvan with beautiful views of the wealth of castles that litter the landscape.

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Foraged figs & grapes from a monastery we camped next to, paired with fried potatoes with smoked piment and white anchovies…

The milk was uniformly awful (we could only find UHT, as is the norm for much of Europe sadly), and aside from rare exceptions the bread was mostly terrible. Truck stop food was inspiring – made fresh and with obvious care – there are carnicerías in the truck stops (!), and vast deli options for local cheeses as well as the meat offerings. Of course the meat is almost entirely factory farmed, but with artisanal touches in the processing… more on all of this later in the jamón post.

Truck stops were the best road trip food!
Truck stops were the best road trip food!

Our time in Spain was too short and research was mostly observational and influenced by combining a learning trip with a family adventure, but driving across its vast, dry landscapes from which water must surely be rung out of stone to produce 50% of the EU’s olive oil was certainly more informative than merely scanning and devouring the menus of its cities as we did in previous lives. While consuming food is a central and critical part of life, focusing purely on taste can too easily get stuck on the aesthetic rather than the ethic, whereas following the chain back to where your food is produced can tell you so much more about the communities who grow it and the quality of what they grow.

Having just been to Slow Food’s Terra Madre and braved the crowds at Salone del Gusto in Torino, I have many more thoughts on the problem of privileging the aesthetic aspects of food over the ethics… as well as on the importance of democracy in the food sovereignty movement to effect real change… but just now the cliffs of Cinque Terre beckon. 😉

Authenticity: not ‘what’ but ‘why’

Authenticity measures the degree to which something is more or less what it ought to be. …is it an immanent norm, emerging somehow from the cuisine itself? Or is it an external norm, reflecting some imposed gastronomic standard? If is is an immanent norm, who is its authoritative voice: The professional cook? The average consumer? The gourmand? The housewife? If it is an imposed norm, who is its privileged voice: the connoisseur of exotic food? The tourist? The ordinary participants in a neighboring cuisine? The cultivated eater from a distant one? (Appadurai 1986, 25).

My first job as a recently-arrived Anglo-American migrant to Australia in 1992 was as a waitress in a bistro in Geelong, a provincial city an hour from Melbourne. On the menu, I was delighted to note, were burritos, a food Americans claim as our own. Whilst having my tour of the kitchen, I asked the chef how she made her burritos, to which she replied, “I use large roti bread, fill it with pieces of chicken I’ve fried with some onion, roll it up, and pour béarnaise sauce over the top. Then I serve it with salad on the side.” Aside from raised eyebrows, I withheld my feedback until I tasted said ‘burritos’ at the end of a long shift, “This tastes quite nice, but it’s definitely not a burrito.”

In a short piece On Culinary Authenticity, Arjun Appadurai suggests that “quality is typically the insider’s concern, authenticity that of the culinary tourist. We often admit that there is food that, though inauthentic, is good” (1986, 25). However Appadurai acknowledges that authenticity becomes the concern of insiders “when they (and the food) are far from home. […] The concern with authenticity indicates some sort of doubt, and this sort of doubt is rarely part of the discourse of an undisturbed culinary tradition.” (ibid).

I find Americans in Melbourne often lament the lack of Mexican restaurants, or the perceived ‘inauthenticity’ of those we do have. I myself have indulged in precisely this lament, and in my early years as a new migrant went to some trouble to seek out Melbourne’s Mexican restaurants, which were unequivocally disappointing when the flavours failed to conjure up a taste of home. (The dilemmas of finding ‘my’ food also extended to: a lack of Ranch dressing; unwelcome slices of beetroot on burgers; large, overly pliant pieces of bacon; and milk that tasted ‘funny’, to name just a few.)

I eventually accepted the absence of what I understood to be Mexican food, and subsequently resorted to only eating it at home. Due to a lack of quality tortillas here in the early 1990s, I learned to make my own. Were the tortillas I made at home ‘authentic’? Surely not – I had to piece together recipes from a few whole-foods genre cookbooks, and I don’t own a tortilla press, so my tortillas were inevitably too thick and quite chewy. It is now possible to find edible commercial facsimiles of tortillas for sale even at Coles, though they don’t compare with homemade or California’s ubiquitous locally made versions. As well as tortillas, I make my own refried beans as the tinned version readily available here is, well, depressing.

And yet this story of a search for authenticity has a complicated genealogy. My earliest experiences of burritos were in fast food franchises in southern California, namely Del Taco and Taco Bell. Later, our Mexican housekeeper made us quesadillas almost daily, Mexican style, without vegetables. In my last years in America, I was a fan of the local taquería style burritos, which are typically giant and filled with refried beans, rice, cheese, lettuce, tomato, guacamole, sour cream and red or green salsa and wrapped in aluminium foil.

Thus is the varied landscape of my burrito memories. There were (and are) plenty of other versions of burritos in America, including the ‘wet’ burritos, which must be eaten with a knife and fork, but my core notions of authenticity (which, as per Appadurai’s point, only surfaced after migration) involved the basics of meat, beans, cheese, salads, guacamole and sour cream wrapped in flour tortillas and eaten with your hands. The American versions of ‘authentic’ burritos actually differ significantly from their Mexican counterparts.

In northern Mexico there are burritos, which are made from fillings (typically rice, beans and/or a meat) wrapped inside an unleavened flat bread that the Mexicans call a tortilla. The tortillas can be made from wheat or corn, and come in a variety of sizes. They tend to be smaller than burritos found in the US, where the burritos are filled with an astonishing number of ingredients, many of which are not easily found in their northern Mexican states of origin, Sonora and Chihuahua. With the ever increasing popularity of burritos in America, they have made their way onto menus throughout southern Mexico as well wherever ‘gringos’ congregate, and more closely resemble American versions than northern Mexican ones. I do not have the space here to do justice to a discussion of the process of migrant foods ‘returning’ in hybridised form to the ‘homeland’ as an aspect of the broader process of globalisation, but it is a topic worth exploration in its own right.

My personal hunt for an ‘authentic’ burrito is just one version of identity work played out repeatedly around the world. In my narrative, it is the story of the migrant who unreflexively believes there is an ‘authentic’ essence to a dish from one’s original culture (even if it’s a transplant in the first place). Writing about multiculturalism and migrant tendencies to self-essentialise, Tariq Modood observes that “…when non-Chinese speak of Chinese civilization, their starting point is often that it has coherence, sameness over centuries and a reified quality” (2007, 93) and subsequently argues that sometimes we all speak of our own cultures this way (as per my own migration trajectory).

In my initial searches for an ‘authentic’ burrito, I didn’t clearly articulate for myself or others what that item might really be like if I found it, but I knew that I would know it, by sight, smell, texture and taste, when I did. In 20 years here I have never found ‘it’, but still enjoy (nay, devour) ‘homely’ burritos on every return trip to the States. And in Australia, I no longer pine for Ranch dressing, or American-flavoured milk, and have accepted beetroot, prefer Australian-style bacon, and adore Vegemite and lamb in any form.

Migrants and those recently returned from overseas often experience unsatisfactory encounters with the dish (or dishes) of their memories, and will tend to seek out restaurants run by ‘real Mexicans/Vietnamese/Italians/[insert migrant group]’ in hopes that they have been ‘true’ to the cuisine and can offer one cultural succour and fulfilment of nostalgic desires by matching taste to memory. When this fails, if one is resourceful, one attempts to cook the foods at home, even if they were foods that one traditionally only ate ‘out’ back home, or for which key ingredients were always purchased ready made, such as tortillas in California.

But in my view, arguing about whether something is authentic isn’t very interesting. Rather, understanding what it means to those seeking or producing ‘it’ is my motivation for interrogating the concept. In my experience, it is common for Melburnians to express pride for their/our cosmopolitan city, a melding of cultures where people from all over the globe are living “togetherness-in-difference” (Ang 2001, 14), particularly in the food scene.

Yet there is an obvious tension between the (potential) symbolic violence of insisting on the performance of authentic identity and the associated very real desire to be challenged and stimulated with a multiplicity of ideas, flavours and ways that is at the heart of cosmopolitanism. As I have written elsewhere (Jonas 2008), at the heart of this is a desire for fluency in many vernaculars and to know the world’s many ways of being-in-the-world, which also has the consequence of distinguishing one as possessing a great deal of cultural capital within most fields, whether intentional or not.

So the important question is not whether it’s possible to determine whether something is authentic, but what does the search for it mean to different people, insiders, outsiders and those in-between? And what one finds upon probing is that it is a useful concept by which people assert and maintain ethnic and cosmopolitan identities that allow them to settle homely identities in new lands, or new identities in homely lands. It is a means to achieving social distinction and accruing cultural capital, and it is a way to engage with Otherness as a cosmopolitan principle. It is a way for migrants to strategically mobilise their own ethnic identities in order to accrue economic capital from the outsiders who seek it, and an essentialist assertion that can exclude those perceived to be ‘authentic’ from the project of modernity.

A final rhetorical flourish to highlight the instability of authenticity as a category then – some years ago I asked a focus group in Saigon, ‘what is the essential ingredient that makes phởauthentic?’. One woman responded, ‘MSG’.

Oregon – the End of the Road Trip

A captured moment of cousins capturing an image...

I forgot to share my final Crikey post on Road Trip USA: Breathless in Oregon Rivers in the wonderful madness of returning to Oz and moving directly onto Jonai Farms! Watch soon for a new website and farm blog…

As for Road Trip USA, it was an incredibly enriching, grounding experience for all five Jonai, bringing us closer and teaching us things together in a sustained way that just doesn’t happen in the banal confines of home, with all its attendant work, school and social distractions.

Would we recommend driving across a country in a small RV with three kids? Absolutely – we adjusted rather quickly to living in a small space, cooking with limited gear, and coping without air-conditioning in a heat wave. Okay, we never *really* adjusted to that, but we did learn to put up with it.

Having sold the RockVan at the end of the trip on eBay for slightly less than we paid for it, the trip didn’t turn out to be *too* expensive – cheaper than if we’d hired an RV and cheaper than staying in hotels as well as hiring or buying a car. Being in between paying rent and a mortgage also made the trip achievable (not to mention Stuart working two jobs for the previous 2 years…).

Thank you to the wonderful people we met along the way who made the trip more interesting, warm and full of great learning, and big hugs to my extensive mob of family in Oregon and California.

So that’s a wrap, armchair travellers. The Jonai have settled in on the farm, and your next reality show is about to begin. 🙂

Jonai Farms view from the house
Jonai joy at the bottom of our volcano

Breathless in Oregon rivers

Dictionaries should define ‘breathtaking’ as ‘Oregon rivers’, an obvious double entendre for the initiated.

And if it’s not the rivers that make you gasp, there are the mountains — either steep or rolling bristling with acres upon acres of deep-green conifers.

Unlike Colorado or Utah’s eye-popping grandeur though, Oregon’s beauty is exquisitely banal — it’s perfectly inescapable, joyfully simple, and utterly lovely.

Continue reading Breathless in Oregon rivers

Be-Utah-ful

Here’s my Crikey piece on Utah, one of the most beautiful and pristine parts of America.

And the usual bonus pics:

Twin Rocks
Love that palette

Chicken parmigiana on balsamic raddichio with cous cous 🙂
Cosy spot
Balancing rock in Arches National Park
Strong boy, eh?
Arches
heh
Strong girl!
Great picnic spot in Canyonlands
Antigone's on top of the world
That's a 1500-foot drop off behind Oscar...
Steak & arancini
Fun on the salt flats
Salty feet

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Be-Utah-ful

When Brigham Young stopped in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 and said ‘This is the place’ to his Mormon followers, thank goodness he was too worn out to head south. For the quite beautiful but heavily populated valley in northern Utah, home to the largest community of Mormons in the US, pales in comparison to the awe-inspiring landscapes of southern Utah, which have remained sparsely inhabited and relatively unknown to ensuing generations of American travellers.

In fact, I prevaricated over whether to even write about the southeastern corner of Utah we explored, as it feels like the sort of place that should remain unscathed by the relentless traffic of a highly mobile population — its emptiness is an essential aspect of its overwhelming appeal.

Continue reading Be-Utah-ful

High Adventure from Taos to Mesa Verde

My post on New Mexico and Colorado went up last week. Here are a couple of bonus photos for that one. 🙂

Dried chilies selection in Santa Fe!
Found the tortilla presses for me & @crazybrave!
Mmm... tamales anyone?
When you can't decide between salsa verde or roja, have both!
Parking at Taos Pueblo
High desert fun
Roast vegies & chevre from the Santa Fe farmers' market

High Adventure from Taos to Mesa Verde

If intense colours, imposing mountains and rich indigenous histories are your travel must-haves, then the 260-mile stretch between Taos, New Mexico and Cortez, Colorado will deliver your dreams in spades.

The relief of climbing into high altitude after traveling across Texas in a record heat wave matches that of a cool and cleansing shower after a week of dry, dusty camping. And once we hit elevations above 5000 feet, we didn’t descend until southern Oregon, meaning no matter how hot the days, the nights were blessedly cool.

Stuart made some adjustments to the RockVan to keep it from gasping for oxygen and we all wished it were so simple for us as we swam, hiked and revelled in the grandeur of the southern Rockies.

Continue reading High Adventure from Taos to Mesa Verde

Swimming across Texas

My latest piece on Crikey is up: Swimming across Texas. 🙂

Here are a few bonus photos of our time in vorTexas:

We'll take what water we can find, like so many before us...
West Texan gardening
Off to the Big Texan, Texan style
The Jonai were here - to be painted over momentarily by the Jones...
Cadillac Ranch - 'cos Texas is good at farming cars
Blowout in the RockVan - disaster art. 😉

Swimming across Texas

To really experience Texas, you have to drive across it without air-conditioning in the middle of July.

No, not really. But we did.

The unrelenting heat may have coloured my impression of the biggest state in the Lower 48 somewhat, but now that I’m sitting in cool evening air at 7100ft high in the Rockies, I like to think I’ve regained a little perspective. The twitches have completely stopped too, which is a good sign, right?

Continue reading Swimming across Texas