Introduction: Provisioning Politics and the Making of Imperial Food Industries

Every October, thousands of tourists, residents, vendors, and entertainers gather in the small, Southern California coastal town of Carpinteria to celebrate the avocado. For three days each year, visitors stroll down Linden Avenue listening to music, stopping to sample dozens of avocado delicacies, and eat foods or sip drinks served up by local businesses and nonprofits. Although it is one of four similar festivals of this kind held annually in the state, this gathering in Santa Barbara County is known as the “California Avocado Festival.” In 2023, this celebration of “Peace, Love & Guacamole” concluded with a guacamole contest and avocado auction held at the “Guac & Grotto Stage,” and proceeds supported the Carpinteria Education Foundation and the Future Farmers of America.¹ Promoting and building on a progressive, laid-back image of California, this festival unintentionally effaces the colonial and capitalist histories that initiated and nurtured the California avocado industry. Organizers, vendors, and consumers did not consciously participate in this erasure, but as we learn from Viridiana Hernàndez Fernàndez’s contribution in this issue, the avocado was the product of “U.S. agricultural imperialism.” Taking a comparative approach, this issue explores both the imperialistic nature of modern food industries and how those industries often deny the exploitive realities that produced and continue to produce modern food systems. The articles in this issue demonstrate how imperial networks, policies, capital, and ideologies shaped foodways and political economies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also demonstrate how and why it often so difficult to taste exploitive pasts as we savor a ripe avocado while sipping a crisp, light lager at a food festival.

Like the California Avocado Festival, this issue of Global Food History originated in Santa Barbara, California. The first draft of these articles were circulated at “Imperial Foodways: Culinary Economies and Provisioning Politics,” a virtual workshop we hosted at the University of California, Santa Barbara held on Zoom May 21−23, 2021. Only a portion of the work discussed at the event appears in this issue; the workshop included papers that considered collaboration within and across imperial divides, foregrounding issues of race-making, the formation of colonial identities, and the ways in which advertising was as much about suppressing knowledge as it was about selling goods. The authors published here, as well as commentors and audience members, read and remarked on each other’s work verbally and in the Zoom chat. In fact, the Zoom chat was so productive that we saved transcripts to share with participants after the fact and encourage collaboration and discussion beyond our workshop weekend in May. This issue then is truly a product of collective insights from a diverse group of very generous scholars. We are very grateful to everyone who attended the event and to the anonymous readers of the articles in the issue whose work made this volume a success.

While there has been a dramatic increase in scholarly works that have explored the histories of food and empire, at the workshop we were especially interested in scholarship that recovered the power dynamics of provisioning and withholding food and drink in colonial spaces.² We hoped that participants would delve into how states, businesses, and intermediaries, such as missionaries, scientists and Indigenous dealers collaborated and/or fought over determining what was considered good to grow, raise, trade, cook, and eat in colonial settings. The scholars we gathered together in May 2021 explored imperial foodways within and between the British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, and US Empires from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The collective group defined empire, colonialism, and food as broadly as possible to find points of comparison across time periods and European, Asian, American empires. For example, by including the United States, as well as Japan and Britain in this issue, we can see movements and exchanges between formal political and “informal” economic empires.³ Scholars from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds took up this challenge, and wrote about how mercantile companies, armies, navies, merchant marines, plantations, households, universities, trade associations, shops, and booster organizations provided and/or removed or withheld food and drink from others. The program showcased the role of food in the strategies of agricultural imperialism, the formation of colonial identities, the subversions of imperial rule, and the ecological consequences of colonialism. We had papers that examined the meanings of food in literature, advertising, and popular culture, considering these texts as forms of imperial propaganda and expressions of soft power by imperial metropoles. The program ultimately asked questions such as: How have colonial and metropolitan intermediaries shaped global foodways? How has the state, religion, business, and private efforts played a role in determining what is considered good to grow, raise, trade, cook, and eat? And finally, but centrally, how have contests over producing, distributing, and consuming food been key to revising, maintaining, and creating racial, gender, class, local, and imperial identities?

Following a similar methodology and set of questions, the articles in this issue unpack the local, national and transnational politics and practices that produced imperial food industries specifically in settler colonies, ranging from California to Korea, Palestine, Western Canada, South Africa, and Australia and in metropoles, especially but not exclusively, Great Britain and Japan. Through tracing the diverse actors and agencies that grew, manufactured, refined, sold and consumed sugar, wine, beer, beef, pigs, camels, and avocados, this issue raises questions about the role of empires in the creation of modern diets, businesses, and landscapes. The period covered here is conventionally regarded as the apex of European, American, and Japanese imperialism, and a highpoint as well in the globalization of foodways. This era witnessed the emergence of modern transnational food and promotional industries in many regions of the globe. New forms of communication, transportation, agricultural science, and migrations enabled rapid and intensified movements of people, animals, food and foodways. Imperial nation states supported some colonial industries in service of metropolitan consumers, which in the short- and long-term increased malnutrition and starvation and narrowed the biodiversity in the colonies.⁴ Imperial policies and state-sanctioned violence encouraged land grabs and enforced labor regimes, while fiscal strategies paid for promotional techniques that nurtured and cultivated imperial products and tastes. Some industries, such as the British-owned South Asian tea industry was almost entirely supported by imperial laws, finances, and tastes. Others such as the camel industries in World War II Palestine, had shorter and more limited successes.

The authors in this issue demonstrate how advertising, marketing, and promotional events like food festivals were imperial technologies, which altered tastes, profits, and the identities of the people and places that produced and consumed foods. Australian wines, for example, were exhibited, along with Indigenous populations and exotic botanicals at the Adelaide Jubilee Exhibition in 1887 and were intended to show the world what Australia could produce and sell the world. Wines were among the trophies on display that, as Chelsea Davis shows us, “confirmed the expanse of the globalized world” of the era and toasted Britain’s imperial project as a civilizing mission. At the same moment, thousands of Parsi-owned refreshment rooms across India found a large market for European stouts and lagers. Despite the extensive reach and power of its empire, Jeffrey Pilcher demonstrates that British pale ales ultimately lost out to the lighter German lagers in markets across the globe by the early years of the twentieth century. Advertising and imperial policies thus mattered but were not the only determining factors shaping global beer tastes. Tastes, states, and empires did not neatly overlap, though the growth of European empires transformed beer into a standardized global commodity.

Promotion nevertheless shaped meanings, even during austere times. In 1932 at the height of global Depression, Tel Aviv’s Trade and Industry Company initiated the Levant Fair to showcase Palestine’s economic development, including food production. As Efrat Gilad reveals in her article, this was only one space in which food and eating contributed to place and identity making. Like the markets and shops Gilad writes about, at the Levant Fair industrialists, retailers, colonial administrators and consumers shaped tastes and habits in unexpected ways. While food helped create boundaries and ideas in ways that branded urban, national, and imperial identities, advertising could also expunge the violent and unsavory aspects of colonialism, as Donica Belisle similarly demonstrates in her article on corporate sugar publicity in Western Canada. The need to sell a particular product inevitably inspired the invention of appealing narratives, which in the past and the present have occluded the distasteful aspects of colonialism. While scholars have interrogated how food and drink advertising justified imperialism and defined people in racial terms, Belisle’s article traces how B.C. Sugar Company, known as “Rogers,” advertised its refined white sugar in ways that disavowed the centrality of enslavement, indenture, plantation landscapes, and imperial supply chains in the creation of pure, white Canadian sugar. This disavowal built on ideas of civilization, modernity, and race that justified British imperial rule, but it was also part of the rejection of empire as Canadians used foods such as sugar to help invent a postcolonial Canadian national identity. Similarly, as Pilcher demonstrates, beer could be a marker of class and racial distinction and a means to challenge hierarchies of difference. European brewers such as Guinness and Bass often used local dealers to seek out “Native” markets, and nationalist movements such as the Young Bengal movement sought out European foods and customs to challenge generational and caste restrictions in India.

While the British Empire was at its territorial peak during the time, similar ideas about race, nation, civility, and food shaped Japanese imperial food regions, as we see in Tatsuya Mitsuda’s article. Colonial science, state policies, and the British imperial example turned beef into a colonial food increasingly produced in Japanese colonies, such as Korea, to feed the Japanese metropole. Agricultural science has expanded biopolitical controls of cattle and people in Korea, avocados in California, and wine in Australia and the Cape colony, and indeed authors like Chelsea Davis increasingly argue that the inclusion of science into agricultural pursuits like viticulture contributed to their industrialization and standardization. Different versions of the civilizing mission also promoted wine, beer, and beef as a marker of civility and an active tool in the civilizing of colonial subjects in the Japanese, British, and American empires. In Japan and U.S. state-supported science literally disconnected plants and animals from their place of origin. As Hernández Fernández argues in her article, bioprospecting has been central to the imperial project since the early modern period. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, a combination of corporations, trade associations, booster organizations, and state-funded organizations such as universities and the United States Department of Agriculture collaborated to extract plant diversity from the Global South and protect young plants and industries from pests, competition, and other threats. As with sugar in Canada, the avocado thus came to represent a Western settler colonial state.

This issue contains six articles that make a start toward redressing the whitewashing of economic networks and food practices that have so often characterized imperial histories of foodways. By centralizing questions of production and advertising, our authors showcase how imperial powers used and reused “civilizing” rhetoric to justify their exploitation of colonial labor and racializing of colonial consumers. The workshop from which these articles came out of used Sidney Mintz as a starting point, whose framing of Sweetness and Power (1985) is still valuable since it does not privilege either the demand or supply side of sugar’s history but rather saw both labor and consumption as generating meaning. But our authors who attended the workshop, and the six authors represented here in this special issue, have pushed the field of food history beyond this initial framing, considering the number of different ways we can think about foodways, global history, the history of empires, and the history of capitalism.

Tatsuya Mitsuda’s “From Colonial Hoof to Metropolitan Table: The Imperial Biopolitics of Beef Provisioning in Colonial Korea,” investigates how Japan exploited the bovine resources of colonial Korea by using a collaboration of bureaucrats, scientists, merchants, and more to construct a “technoscientific regime” that prioritized Korean cattle’s suitability for metropolitan Japanese bodies. Mitsuda argues that it was technological advances in the shipping of live animals from Korea to Japan that contributed to the discourse around Korean vs. Japanese beef, convincing consumers that although they were eating Korean “bovine bodies,” there was no threat to Japanese superiority since the animals were of Korean stock but reared in Japan via a “technoscientific” process of refinement.

Chelsea Davis in her article “The Contradictions of ‘Civilizing’ Consumption: Colonial Wine and Race in Britain’s Nineteenth-Century Imperial Project,” similarly argues that the discourse around wine was key in reifying racial stereotypes through conversations about both colonial consumption and colonial labor in Britain’s colonies of South Africa and Australia. Although wine was associated with rhetoric about its power to “civilize,” both in the practice of viticulture and in drinking it, the reality was that metropolitan scientists, producers, merchants, and bureaucrats remained skeptical of the progress of civilization in colonial spaces via the wine industry. Ultimately Davis argues that, in practice, wine production in colonial spaces was forever attached to the colonized populations and “revealed the hollow nature” of wine as a civilizing tool.

From wine we move to Jeffrey M. Pilcher’s “Imperial Hops: Beer in the Age of Empire,” which considers the “civilizing” properties of lagers in the context of global technological advancements and capitalist expansion within and across empires. As Pilcher writes, although colonizers considered their beer drinking as setting them apart from native populations, indigenous communities in colonies around the world incorporated European lagers and stouts into their local drinking cultures, while still retaining indigenous brewing traditions. Furthermore, even if metropolitan brewers tried to force their tastes and preferences on colonial consumers, they depended on indigenous networks of growers and mercantile networks to distribute their beer. In other words, Pilcher argues that beer is the perfect commodity to showcase how “European empires functioned as much as extensions of global capitalism as of metropolitan power.”

Donica Belisle’s “Is Cane Sugar ‘Canadian’? The Disavowal of Global Lives and Lands within Canadian Sugar Marketing” returns to our question of the power of advertisers in masking global origins of consumable commodities. Belisle argues that, although 90% of Canada’s refined sugar today is made from imported cane, international labor, and lands have been purposefully erased from sugar’s history in Canada to serve a racist and nativist agenda. Between 1890 and 1931, Rogers sugar advertising emphasized its Canadian-based sugar refineries, manned by white Canadian laborers, in order to promote discourse about sugar’s “healthfulness” and cleanliness derived from wholesome, white, Canadian bodies.

In “Camel Controversies and Pork Politics in British Mandate Palestine,” Efrat Gilad shows how World War II shortages of meat in Palestine led to a surge of “marginal meats” like pork and camel for consumption. In a nation primarily filled with Muslim and Jewish populations, the rise of pork and camel are particularly “noteworthy because neither is kosher and only camel is Halal.” But the transition from Europe to Palestine for Jews during World War II “fundamentally altered [their] ecological, economic, political, cultural, and social settings,” forcing them to reexamine the laws if kashrut which defined observing Jews by what they do not consume. This essay also inspired the cover illustration by the journal’s artist, Roxane van Beek, which reveals the emotional sacrifices of this wartime exigency for a Bedouin who affectionately strokes a camel that he has tied down for slaughter. British imperialism thus produced tension on multiple levels, as a working animal offered a solution to the problem of starvation, but at the cost of losing a way of life, and for Jews at least, as an act of disobedience.

Finally, we return to the question of the avocado. Virdiana Hernández Fernández closes out our issue with her article “The March of Empire: The Californian Quest for Avocados in Early-Twentieth Century Mexico.” Describing what she calls “U.S. agricultural imperialism,” Hernández Fernández argues that the rise of an avocado industry in early twentieth-century California “disconnected the fruit from its origins in Mexico and Central America.” The alliance between scientists, Californian growers, the USDA, and the University of California Division of Agricultural Scientists effectively erased the Latin American origin of the avocado, creating the Californian “Hass” strain and federally blocking the importation of Mexican and Central American avocados through the imposition of quarantines to create and then protect the Californian avocado industry.

This issue’s focus on how imperial production of consumable commodities intersected with discourses of race, civilization, science, technology, and capital represents the strides food studies scholars have taken since Sidney Mintz published Sweetness and Power in 1985. The six articles in this issue showcase how imperial agents are not always government bureaucrats, but also often merchants, scientists, and advertisers. In almost all these articles, authors show how a collaboration of these agents either enforced racial stereotypes or erased colonial origins of particular products. The call for papers for our workshop in 2021 asked authors to consider what role food, drink, and other ingestibles played in establishing the rules and boundaries of colonial encounters; our title encouraged scholars to especially think on “culinary economies and provisioning politics.” The benefits of this framing highlighted public and collective forms of consumption rather than always assuming consumption happens in domestic spaces. Much of the work of our participants also showcased how hunger in the colonies, and the need to feed the colony and metropole, shaped empire as it was approached as a problem to solve. Ultimately, as exemplified by the six articles here, the focus on provisioning highlighted the way in which large-scale food problems shaped trade flows, investments, and meanings which were built into structures of formal and informal empires.

Notes

1. “California Avocado Festival”

2. There has been a steady stream of scholarship focused on the relationship between food and empire at least since the publication Mintz, Sweetness and Power. Some key works, include Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures; Earle, The Body of the Conquistador; Heath, Wine, Sugar, and Modern France; Collingham, The Taste of Empire; Bickham, Eating the Empire; and Durmelat, “Food and the French Empire.” There is quite a bit of work on specific food or drinks, such as Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire; and Regan-Lefebvre; Imperial Wine.

3. There is a great deal of work on U.S. agricultural imperialism, including Cullather, The Hungry World; Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage; Sackman, Orange Empire; and Olmstead and Rhode, Creating Abundance.

4. Seikaly, Men of Capital, especially chapters three and five; Siegel, Hungry Nation; Otter, Diet for a Large Planet.