Academic literature on the topic 'Fruit baby food'

Scotland has always been part of my origin story, though I never lived there before my fieldwork. My father is Scottish and my parents met as a consequence of both studying at St. Andrews University. When they divorced, whilst I was a baby, my father moved up to Edinburgh. I made regular trips to see him and, later, my stepmother, half sister, and half brother during the school holidays whilst I was growing up. He would often take us to see the sights of Scotland, its landscape of villages, castles, forests, and mountains. The Scott Monument, Culzean castle, the pretty painted houses of Tobermory, ham sandwiches and fruit cake eaten in the back of the car, the music of The Corries, the smell of the Caledonian brewery hanging over western Edinburgh (sometimes sweet and malty, sometimes strangely akin to cat food), the train through to Glasgow, the small glass of (Dow’s) port I was allowed at Hogmanay—this was the Scotland that was part of my childhood and I took it with me when I went to do fieldwork....

In February 2002, the Financial Times ran a full-page article on the dangers posed by excessive “food miles.” It was written by the editor of Country Life, a magazine dedicated to the preservation of “the British way of life.” Like many critics of food globalization, the author argued that the cheap food policies that originally drove the United Kingdom to import much of its food had hidden costs and posed grave risks both at home and abroad. The article noted that the United Kingdom, despite its experience of mad cow and foot-and- mouth diseases, still imported meat from countries known to be “breeding grounds for killer plagues”—in particular, species-jumping pathogens such as AIDS and the Ebola virus. Despite Britain’s capacity to produce many kinds of fresh fruits and vegetables, supermarkets imported them from countries where, the article said, export farming “deprived” hungry people of land for their own food crops. The airfreight transport of such foods consumed huge quantities of fossil fuel, which drove global warming, which might, the article implied, hasten the onset of geopolitical conflict over increasingly scarce farmland. To avert this dark future, the author called on “concerned shoppers” to use their buying power to “force supermarkets” to purchase and promote more local foods. And, to make perfectly clear who was to blame for burning all these food miles, the accompanying illustration featured two cartoonish characters, one a businesslike carrot wearing the brand of Tesco, the country’s biggest food retailer, and the other a Zambian green bean dressed as an ugly tourist (Aslet 2001). In turn-of-the-21st-century Britain, countryside preservationists were among the many activists who saw the African green bean and “baby veg” as symbolic of food globalization gone wrong, and who called on shoppers to help make things right. The supermarkets that stocked these petite, prepackaged vegetables intended, of course, a very different message—namely that convenient, novel fresh foods belonged in the British way of life, ideally 365 days a year. Yet this marketing strategy had a paradoxical payoff.

Dean Okimoto is a farmer and president of Nalo Farms. Established as a family business in 1983, Nalo Farms initially specialized in local fruits, daikon, and green onions. A fortunate meeting with Chef Roy Yamaguchi resulted in the creation of “Nalo Greens,” a signature mix of baby greens and edible nasturtium flowers. Today, over one hundred restaurants and farmers’ markets carry Nalo Farms products. This narrative is written by Nicole Milne, based on an interview with Dean Okimoto in July 2012....

Experiencing everyday life in another culture places your own in stark relief. Assumptions stand revealed, often by utterly minor objects and events. Consider, for instance, bananas. Bananas? We Americans take them for granted, we even trivialize them—playing second banana, being driven bananas, going bananas, and on and on. But not so in Germany. To Germans, bananas are not such a light-hearted matter. As one well-known Cologne artist who has stenciled his Andy Warhol–style, Day- Glo bananas on the outer walls of hundreds of art galleries has proclaimed: “Bananas are almost a holy object in Germany.” Banana-crazed Germans, joked Der Stern in 1992, are “the apes of the EC.” These exaggerations warrant our attention. For bananas are an impossibly overdetermined symbol in Germany, signifying justice, national self-determination, cultural pride, deprivation, prosperity, communist tyranny, capitalist luxury, unity, and economic and even sexual freedom. The banana occupies a special place in Germany’s national psyche and in the history of German re-education, given its role in both early postwar reconstruction and recent reunification. Let us therefore examine that role at some length here, for it turns out that “banana politics” bears revealingly, if unexpectedly and often amusingly, on the issues of German identity and German re-education—and reflects Teutonic tensions both within and outside reunited Germany. Ever since hunger overtook war-torn, occupied Germany in the mid-1940s, when even basic foodstuffs were unobtainable, bananas have symbolized Plenty to both western and eastern Germans—the plenty western Germans eventually obtained, the plenty eastern Germans always lacked. In West Germany, the early postwar generation endured rationing and shortages until mid-century. As children, many of them knew of bananas only through the reminiscences of their elders. For them the fruit still evokes childhood memories of humiliation, dispossession, and hunger. All this began to change in West Germany with the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) of the 1950s. West German parents delightedly weaned their infants on “Banana Salad” baby food, the leading seller of Hipp, the Gerber’s of West Germany.

For many years, urban planners’ description of the Zambian capital Lusaka as a “garden city” seemed a cruel and even preposterous misnomer. Potholed and polluted, the city was more colloquially described as a pit. Indeed, parts of town rang with the sounds of a quarry, though the country’s main mineral wealth lay several hours drive to the north. Lusaka’s roadside rockbreakers, men and women who hammered limestone into gravel, epitomized to foreign journalists the disintegration of Zambia’s once-booming economy. But by the year 2000, the old planners’ term for Lusaka had taken on an unanticipated truth. The rock-breakers were still there, and probably not earning much more than the eight dollars a week they earned several years before. But now the roads they worked alongside led, in fact, to vast gardens—thousands of verdant acres producing the down-sized vegetables found in London’s upscale supermarkets: baby corn, baby carrots and baby patty pan squash; miniature chilies, mangetout peas, and, of course, fine-grade green beans. Lusaka had become a garden city on an industrial scale. Agriculture on the margins of Lusaka was by no means new (Sanyal 1987), but now that it contributed to export earnings rather than simply the urban food supply, it fueled new hopes for economic recovery. Even though the horticultural sector (encompassing roses and fruits as well as vegetables) comprised only a small part of the national economy, it was by far the most dynamic part, growing at 20 percent a year. Zambians had witnessed double-digit growth rates before, when postwar demand for the country’s copper fueled what some observers saw as the African Industrial Revolution, a period of economic and social change “not seen in thousands of years” (Mitchell 1951, 21). The reversal of Copperbelt fortune from the mid-1970s onward gave cause for skepticism about any kind of boom, and the successes of the horticultural sector appeared particularly fragile. Apart from the intrinsic fragility of the commodities themselves, Zambia’s vegetable export firms had to contend with supermarket clients who demanded much and brooked no slipups.

My first direct encounter with feng-shui came soon after I arrived in Hong Kong in 1965. A new hospital was being built on a hill overlooking Castle Peak Bay, where my family and I lived. The hospital foundations cut deep into the slope. Several old peasants told me, “This is very bad; the construction has cut the dragon’s pulse.” I learned that the hill had a dragon in it, whose blood circulation had been cut by the foundation trench. This seemed strange to me. I noted it down as a fascinating local belief, and thought no more of it. Soon afterward, a typhoon dumped two feet of rain on Hong Kong within a few days. The oversteepened, undercut slope failed, and a torrent of mud descended, washing out the hospital foundations and burying a house or two at the hill foot. “See?” said my friends. “This is what happens when you cut the dragon’s pulse.” A light went on in my head. The Chinese peasants, pragmatic to the core, had described the phenomenon in terms strange to me; but the phenomenon they described was perfectly real. I reflected that the geologists’ terms “oversteepening” and “slope failure” were not much more empirically verifiable than the dragon. Any Chinese peasant would find them even stranger than I had found that eminent serpent, since I had already learned from reading that ancient Chinese saw dragons in the scaly, ridged contours of mountain ranges. As time went on, I learned that I had found more than a different way of talking about obvious facts. Chinese site planning seemed more and more rational. I learned that villages protected the groves of trees that ringed them, because trees attract good influences and also provide shade, firewood, fruit, leafmold, timber, and other goods. I learned that roads to villages were made crooked to discourage evil beings—and that the evil beings included not only demons but also soldiers, government officials, and (other) bandits.