Food Journeys: Ruminations

I’ve been collecting bits and pieces about food journeys because I’m soon giving a presentation in a Farm to Table Conference organized by the SoFAB Institute and The LSU AgCenter in New Orleans the first few days of August.

Most of these won’t go into the talk but I thought I’d invite your thoughts on food journeys.  As anyone who reads this blog regularly will guess, I’m a huge fan of the long distance transport of food.

Nothing concentrates the mind more on the long journey from farm to table than living as we did for ten years in a high-rise overlooking Honolulu Harbor.

Matson ship outside Honolulu Harbor in Hawaii. Matson site.

Every couple of days a Matson container ship edged in under the cranes, after a three- or four-day, two thousand plus mile journey from Oakland, Long Beach or Seattle.  Soon after, a barge would make its way past Waikiki, pulling the containers for the outer islands. “Dinner” we’d say as we watched from our lanai.

Although the containers coming in to Honolulu Harbor make food journeys so obvious, forces thought about provisioning that is not provoked by the many trucks and rail cars coming in to most cities, it’s not clear that it’s really that different.

Mexico City, for example, has only five highways leading in to the city. Everything has to come in along one of these highways.

Ships in Honolulu Harbor in 1881. The mountains in the background are bare, thanks to the cutting of sandalwood, Hawaii’s first export crop. Hawaii State Archives

In any case, food’s journey to Hawaii is not as long as once it was. In the second half of the nineteenth century, ships sailed out of Boston and round Cape Horn carrying flour and other foodstuffs for Hawaii.

Ice harvesting in Massachusetts, 1852. Note the specially built railroad in the background for shipping the ice. And think of the quantities of sawdust, brought from Maine, to insulate it on its long voyages. Gleason’s Drawing Room Companion, 1852, p.37

Thus ice, of all things, harvested from ponds in New England, cooled drinks in the middle of the north Pacific, or so Hi’ilei Hobart told me over a leisurely lunch last week. She grew up in Hawaii, and we’ve been corresponding for some time. She is now writing her Ph.D. thesis on ice in Hawaii. What she says about the politics of ice in Hawaii promises to be interesting indeed.

The World Ice Trade in 1856. Shipments to Hawaii were just starting and not shown on this map. Wikimedia

Hi’ilei and I continued our ongoing debate about what should be grown in Hawaii now? Shouldn’t Hawaii be more self-sufficient rather than relying on those Matson ships for more than 85% of all its food?

Or should Hawaii take advantage of its tropical climate to grow crops for export to the mainland?

For most of the time since the arrival of the Europeans in the Islands in the late eighteenth century, the answer has been an overwhelming “yes” to the latter. Hawaii had no bounty, far too remote for most food plants to have reached it. The first settlers brought with them a dozen or so edible plants, notably taro, as well as pigs, chickens, and dogs.

For over a thousand years their diet was pretty much restricted to these plus fish and limu (seaweed).  Additions to this limited diet were welcome.

And then the people of Hawaii want more than subsistence.  They want cars and cellular phones and education for their children.  And there isn’t enough good employment in tourism and on military bases to provide that income.

So Hawaii has been involved in “agricultural prospecting,” searching the world for possible crops, figuring out which can be added to the local diet (from rice to mangos to marungay), which can be exported (not so easy).

I just love a book published in 1937 called Hawaii’s Crop Parade.  It’s by David Livingston Crawford who ended up as President of the University of Hawaii, after a career that included a Mormon childhood in Sonora, Mexico, a stint as the University football coach, ventures into international relations, and A Monograph of the Jumping Plant Lice.

For two hundred and fifty pages, he lists the trial crops from A to Z.  To pick at random a couple of those two hundred and five pages, the list (and my brief summary of his longer commentary) goes:

Salsify. Very small demand.

Salt. Not a crop, but locally-made salt much in demand.

Saltbush. Might be useful for forage in coastal areas.

Sandalwood. A plant native to the islands, once very valuable and sold to China, now depleted. Replanting.

Sanseveria.  Fibre plant.  Might have a future.

Sapota.  Custard apple. Not yet grown commercially. Too difficult to ship.

Sapucaia nut. Supposed to be superior to Brazil nut, experimental plantings.

Sheep. Sheep ranching for wool once profitable but in decline.

Silk. Repeated efforts to get silkworm industry going, thus far without success.

In short, every conceivable agricultural venture had been tried.  And, I suspect, in this Hawaii is actually typical of every other cultivable spot on the earth’s surface.

Shortly after my lunch with Hi’ilei, Sarah Murray’s Moveable Feasts landed on my desk, a whole book dedicated to the “incredible journeys of the food we eat,” full of interesting stories, facts and figures, just waiting to be woven into a sharp and pointed argument.

Polytunnels (plastic greenhouses) made ripening strawberries in Britain’s dicey summer climate a breeze in the early 1990s.  Instead of welcoming this local food, many British denounced the fields of shiny plastic sheeting as a blight, quite at odds with the arcadian image of local food.

Polytunnels at Park Style Farm, Derbyshire, Great Britain. www.geograph.org.uk

Or how about bananas carried in the 11,000 containers stacked on the  Emma Maersk? Each container holds 48,000 bananas.  And I am thinking of driving the twenty-mile roundtrip to the farmer’s market tomorrow to buy peaches.

Well, Texas peaches are one of the joys of life.  And worth the extravagance of the local.

Or barrels, which from the time of the Roman Empire until recently were constructed dockside by coopers to carry wine around the empire, then later rum and sugar from the Caribbean, rice from the Carolinas, cod from New England, and flour from New England to Hawaii.

Barrels on a brewer’s dray, 1946. Wikimedia.

Today the humble pallet works together with the container to replace barrels.

Pallets waiting for their loads. One of the twentieth century’s major inventions, and low tech as can be. Wikimedia.

For more than half a century, pallet futurists have announced the next big thing, only to see the basic wooden variety remain the workhorse of global logistics. “Lots of people have tried to invent a better pallet,” Robert Bush, a professor at Virginia Tech affiliated with the school’s Center for Packaging and Unit Load Design, told me. “We see them almost every day at our testing lab. But it’s harder than people think. It’s surprisingly hard. It’s one of those things that people got pretty close to right the first time.”

via CABINET // Whitewood under Siege.

Moving along, supposing you live in Vietnam, Malaysia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt.  Chances are that you eat beef or water buffalo meat exported from India, which is the world’s largest beef exporter.

The BJP, the Hindu Nationalist Party, which has just swept the Indian elections, has a long-standing policy of opposing the killing of cows. So the technical journals have been full of articles speculating about what will happen to this export trade.

And as to the diet in India itself. The always entertaining (and very well-informed) Vikram Doctor points out that milk plays a very important role in Indian diets and hence India has a huge dairy industry.  A huge dairy industry depends on cows calving every year. And what happens when they are too old to calve?

So Vikram Doctor suggests investing in cashew nuts, on the off-chance that cashew nut milk may be a hot new item.

Before you rush off to look up cashew nut futures, try this link to The Miracle of Feeding Cities. It’s a new site run by Robyn Metcalfe, my friend and colleague here at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Miracle of Feeding Cities is off to a good start with strikes and food in Buenos Aires, how the ingredients for simit get into Istanbul, and the sake revolution in Tokyo.

And Robyn’s looking for contributors so if you’ve got a great story about how food gets into cities, take a look at her guidelines.

So how do I pull all this (and processing, which is in the title of my talk) together into a clear and convincing argument?  That will come. But one thing is clear, as I said donkey’s years ago. Through most of history, only the rural poor put up with the tyranny of the local.

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