Malawian Cornish Pasties
This week, Oxfam released a report on the world’s favourite food. Based on a survey of 16,000 people in Australia, Brazil, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Kenya, Mexico, the Netherlands, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Tanzania, the UK and the USA, it tabulates the top three meals in each of these countries. In South Africa, pasta, pizza, and steak are favourites, while it’s chicken, pizza, and Chinese (whatever that may be) in Guatemala. Pasta rules supreme as the world’s favourite food.
Although fun, I think that the conclusions drawn by the survey, which is part of Oxfam’s Grow campaign, are pretty dubious. I don’t think that the likes and dislikes of sixteen thousand people – of a global population of six billion – count for terribly much. I am very surprised that Oxfam reports that most South Africans list pasta as their favourite food. Pasta isn’t included in the Medical Research Council’s list of the most widely foods consumed in South Africa – the top five of which are maize meal, white sugar, tea, bread, and milk. It seems to me that the people included in this survey were mainly middle-class urban dwellers – precisely the people who would list pizza, pasta, and steak as their favourite food.
But the purpose of the survey, flawed as it may be, is to demonstrate
the spread of Western diets across the world. Although national dishes are still popular – such as paella in Spain, schnitzel in Germany and biryani in India – pizza and pasta are now the favourite foods of many, with more than half of the countries (nine out of 17) listing one or both in their top three foods.
I doubt that, as Oxfam suggests, all ‘people’s diets are actually changing, with many not eating the same foods as they did just two years ago.’ Diets change slowly over time. It’s more accurate to suggest that food preferences are changing. It’s only the affluent who can afford to change what they eat. As in Western Europe after 1945, the Chinese and Indian middle classes are eating more animal protein than ever before. In South Africa, pasta remains prohibitively expensive for most people – who still base their diets around maize meal.
It’s worth considering how the meanings of particular food stuffs change over time and space. Particular dishes may mean one thing in the region in which they originate and something quite different in the countries to which they are taken by immigrants, fashion, or supermarkets and restaurants. We tend to assume that this ‘globalisation’ of food or taste is a relatively recent and pernicious phenomenon. But it’s far more complicated than that.
In response to last week’s post on cupcakes, feminism, and gentrification, our woman in Bangladesh comments:
I am also thinking about the term ‘gentrification’ in Dhaka‘s context. We have cakeshops here but they didn’t pop up as precursors to gentrification. They tended to set up shop near urban dwellings (lots of birthday cakes to be sold?) and later on they became common near office areas, since cakeshops in Dhaka these days also sell fried chicken and chicken patties (pronounced chicken petis) that office people love to eat, along with pastries (pronounced pess tree). Given that, what does gentrification connote in Dhaka and what are the precursors to it?
Shahpar had noted previously:
I was with Bangladeshi friends while chasing cupcakes. We noted how different cupcakes were in NYC than in Dhaka. Here they are made with the cheapest quality ingredients and sold in roadside shops. No frosting. Just a chunk of cake in marigold yellow, sitting in a greasy pleated paper skirt. We used to get them in our school canteens and kids in Bengali medium schools like the one I went to probably still eat cupcakes. It’s the food to go with roadside tea and is a quick snack for the blue collar workers. Rickshaw wallahs and bus ticket sellers and garment factory workers all eat it. Nothing girly about it.
In Dhaka, cupcakes and cake shops mean very different things than they do in Cape Town. Can you imagine a more heavenly combination than cake and fried chicken?
A cupcake in Dhaka
Cupcakes, cake, and pastries are the, now entirely assimilated, products of the long British presence in Bengal. As I wrote a few weeks ago, colonialism gave rise to imperial cuisines – the fusion of foreign and domesticated cooking – all over the world. It also caused a range of British or European foodstuffs to take on new meanings once exported to the colonies.
Set in Rhodesia in the 1960s, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions (1988) is a bildungsroman which focuses on Tambudzai, a little girl sent from her parents’ impoverished homestead to be educated by her middle-class, town-dwelling aunt and uncle. Upon her arrival at her new home, she has afternoon tea with her aunt, Maiguru:
There was food too, lots of it. Lots of biscuits and cakes and jam sandwiches. Maiguru was offering me the food, but it was difficult to decide what to take because everything looked so appetising. We did not often have cake at home. In fact, I remembered having cake only at Christmas time or at Easter. At those times Babamukuru [her father] brought a great Zambezi slab home with home and cut it up in front of our eager eyes, all the children waiting for him to distribute it. This he did one piece each at a time so that for days on end, long after the confectionery had lost its freshness, we would be enraptured. We would spend many blissful moments picking off and nibbling, first the white coconut and then the pink icing and last the delicious golden cake itself…. Biscuits were as much of a treat as cake, especially when they were dainty, dessert biscuits with cream in the middle or chocolate on top.
For Tambudzai, cheap cake and biscuits were part of annual celebrations. But for her wealthier, well educated aunt who had lived abroad, afternoon tea is indicative of her sophisticated, middle-class status. It’s also a marker of her assimilation of ‘western’ (or ‘civilised’) values and patterns of living.
One of the most striking features of the diets of British officials and expats living in southern Africa and southeast Asia during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was their rigid adherence to the menus and diets of ‘Home’. In publications like the Kenya Settlers’ Cookery Book and Guide, readers were urged not to go native. Eating roast beef, porridge, custard, and dumplings was a way of demonstrating civilised, European status. Local cooks were taught how to cook British staples. In White Mischief James Fox describes the eating habits of Kenya’s aristocratic expats during the 1930s:
The astonishing African talent for cooking European food, in particular hot English puddings, provided undreamed-of comfort. For their part, the Africans were astonished at the number of meals required by Europeans every day, and the quantity of food consumed. Europeans seemed always to be eating.
These attitudes towards food persisted even as – or possibly because – imperial rule came to an end in Africa in the 1960s. My father was a little boy in Olifantsfontein – then a mining village between Johannesburg and Pretoria – during this period. His mother, whose interest in food, cooking, and eating was minimal, employed a Malawian cook to take care of the kitchen. The strange set of cultural and racist prejudices of the time decreed that Malawians were particularly good cooks. Luckily for my grandmother, Frank Nyama conformed to stereotype. (In a pleasing coincidence, ‘nyama’ means meat in Swahili.)
For my father and his friends in the village, Nyama achieved minor celebrity status on the grounds that his brother had been eaten by a crocodile. (A pointless way to go, as Dad notes.) He cooked the ‘British’ food demanded by my grandparents. In fact, the Cornish pasties that we make at home are from his recipe. Yes, Cornish pasties – from Cornwall – made from a recipe written by a Malawian chef. And they’re fantastic – they’re as good as the (excellent) pasty I ate in Cornwall. Nyama cooked local dishes for himself, sharing them occasionally with Dad and his brothers. For my grandparents, Cornish pasties and other ‘European’ food was the cooking of civilisation, of ‘whiteness’, and of cultural superiority. To eat Nyama’s regional faire would have been, in their view, to admit a kind of racial defeat.
The point is that food has been globalised for as long as human beings have travelled around the world. It has been used to bolster and construct colonial, local, and foreign identities, and as a result of this, the meanings which we attach to particular dishes and food stuffs have changed over time. There is nothing inherently wrong with the globalisation of food. Food is adapted to suit local tastes and to fit into existing attitudes towards cooking and eating.
The change in contemporary diets and food preferences identified by Oxfam is not, then, anything new. I think it’s worth remembering this as we rethink the ways in which we grow and consume food: that there’s no mythical and ‘authentic’ regional food past for us to return to, and that there’s very little point in stopping people from borrowing cuisines and tastes from other countries.
Further Reading
Texts quoted here:
Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (London: The Women’s Press, [1988] 2001).
James Fox, White Mischief (London: Vintage: [1982] 1988).
The Kenya Settlers’ Cookery Book and Household Guide, seventh ed. (Nairobi: Church of Scotland Women’s Guild, no date).
Other sources:
Janet M. Bujra, ‘Men at Work in the Tanzanian Home: How Did They Ever Learn?’ in African Encounters with Domesticity, ed. Karen Tranberg Hansen (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
Timothy Burke, ‘“Fork Up and Smile”: Marketing, Colonial Knowledge and the Female Subject in Zimbabwe,’ in Gendered Colonialisms in African History, eds. Nancy Rose Hunt, Tessie P Liu, and Jean Quataert (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in the Colonial Nigeria (London: Macmillan, 1987).
Jean and John L. Comaroff, ‘Home-Made Hegemony: Modernity, Domesticity, and Colonialism in South Africa,’ in African Encounters with Domesticity, ed. Karen Tranberg Hansen (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
LeRay Denzer, ‘Domestic Science Training in Colonial Yorubaland, Nigeria,’ in African Encounters with Domesticity, ed. Karen Tranberg Hansen (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
Nancy Rose Hunt, ‘Colonial Fairy Tales and the Knife and Fork Doctrine in the Heart of Africa,’ in African Encounters with Domesticity, ed. Karen Tranberg Hansen (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
Elizabeth Schmidt, ‘Race, Sex, and Domestic Labour: The Question of African Female Servants in Southern Rhodesia, 1900-1939,’ in African Encounters with Domesticity, ed. Karen Tranberg Hansen (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
Karen Tranberg Hansen, ‘White Women in a Changing World: Employment, Voluntary Work, and Sex in Post-World War II Northern Rhodesia,’ in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, eds. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Tangerine and Cinnamon 
Nov 27
Which Formula?
So this is my blog’s thirty-sixth post. And, wow, what a year it’s been. Thank you, dear readers, for staying the course, and I promise more for 2012. This, though, is going to be the last essay for 2011. I’ll be spending December eating, cooking, researching, and teasing the cat. Really, it’s going to be wild. But before the fun begins, I’ll be in the UK for ten days, to present a seminar paper and to do a little research at the amazing Wellcome Library.
My real, live academic research pertains to the history of childhood in the British Empire. My PhD thesis traces the ways in which ideas around childhood and youth changed in the Cape Colony during the second half of the nineteenth century. It pays particular attention to the role and impact of Dutch Reformed evangelicalism in this process. But my postdoctoral project – which is being funded by the National Research Foundation (peace be upon it) – looks at the work of the Mothercraft movement within the British Empire between 1907 and 1945.
Mothercraft was pioneered in New Zealand in 1907 in response to concerns about the very high child mortality rates among the country’s Pākehā population. Dr Truby King devised a twelve-point programme to teach specially-trained nurses – known as Plunket nurses in New Zealand and Athlone nurses in South Africa – how to encourage mothers raise healthy babies. The success of Mothercraft was such that King was invited to establish a Mothercraft Training Centre in Britain in 1917. First called the Babies of the Empire League, it sent its nurses around the Empire: to Canada, Australia, India, east Africa, the Caribbean, and South Africa. My project focuses on the work the South African Mothercraft Centre and League, which were established in the mid-1920s.
But what, I hear you say, does this have to do with food? Well, a surprising amount. One of the main emphases of Mothercraft was on the proper feeding of babies. King was an enthusiastic promoter of breastfeeding.
We have a misconception that most babies were fed by wet nurses during the nineteenth century. It bolsters the view we have of middle-class Victorian ladies who were so terrified of their own bodies that feeding their babies was simply beyond the pale. This wasn’t strictly true, though. To begin with, wet nurses were expensive to hire and only the very wealthiest families could afford them. Most middle class women fed their own babies, as did many working-class women too.
In fact, the majority of women who relied on others to feed their babies were poor. In a time when working hours were yet to be properly defined by law, long days in factories or shops were the norm for female urban workers. Those without relatives, paid ‘baby farms’ – a house run by a woman who would care for babies and young children – to care for their offspring, often for weeks at a time. The quality of the care in these early crèches was variable: some were good, but many neglected the babies kept there. All over the world, baby farms had astonishingly high mortality rates.
Most of the popular childrearing manuals of the 1800s recommended that women breastfeed their babies. Thomas Bull, the author of the very popular Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease (1840) recommended breastfeeding on the grounds that it benefitted both mother and baby.
If the mother could not breastfeed, then the best alternative was to hire a wet nurse. Only if this was an impossibility should the child be raised ‘by hand’:
Bull acknowledged that the various concoctions fed to babies tended often to undermine, rather than fortify, their health. Popular recipes for baby formulas usually included corn or rice flour mixed to a paste with water or milk. This had little or no nutritional value, and would have been very difficult for immature digestive systems to process. Other popular substitutes were cows’ or goats’ milk, tea, and thin gruel.
It’s little wonder, then, that the Mothercraft programme placed such emphasis on breastfeeding. Many Mothercraft Centres provided beds for new mothers, who could spend up to a fortnight there, learning how to feed their babies.
At around the same period, infant formulas were beginning to improve in quality and producers, most notably Nestlé, began to promote them as a healthy – even the healthier – and clean alternative to breast feeding. Nestlé is credited – rightly or wrongly – with the invention of formula milk in 1867. The popularity of powdered baby milk only began to grow during the 1940s and 1950s. Nestlé promoted Lactogen through recipe books, pamphlets, and free samples. Problematically, these were usually distributed at hospitals and clinics – at precisely the places where women would be taught how to breastfeed. By the middle of the twentieth century in the west, it was increasingly the norm for babies to be bottle fed.
I don’t particularly want to address the fraught debate over whether women should breastfeed or not. I am, though, interested in the politics of bottle feeding in the developing world, where big companies – like Nestlé – have promoted formula assiduously since the 1950s. Here, the issue with bottle feeding is not so much the quality of the formula, but the fact that it’s mixed with dirty water or fed to babies in unsterilized bottles. Also, many of the women who use formula can’t afford it, so they water it down, meaning that their children don’t receive adequate nutrition.
In 1974, War against Want published a pamphlet accusing Nestlé of profiting from the deaths of millions of children in poor countries. Three years later, an international boycott of Nestlé began, causing the World Health Organisation to proscribe the promotion of Lactogen and other formulas in its 1981 International Code for the Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes.
But the Code has been poorly policed, and even in developed nations, compliance has been slow. In Australia, for instance, the advertising of baby milk powders only ended in the mid-1990s. There is much evidence to suggest that Nestlé and others continue the practice, albeit under different guises. In the United States, for instance, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Programme for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) distributes more than half the formula sold in the US every year. Companies provide this formula to the WIC at a discount.
All over the world, governments are endorsing breastfeeding in the first six months of life as the best – the healthiest and the cheapest – way of feeding a baby. Companies like Nestlé are actively undermining this, despite the best intentions of the WHO. The implications of the continued use of formula in the developing world are devastating:
A few weeks ago I wrote a post which criticised the World Food Programme’s decision to go into partnership with a range of exceptionally dodgy multinationals – Cargill, Vodafone, Unilever, Yum!Brands – to reduce world hunger. I really don’t have anything against public/private partnerships, and am an enthusiastic supporter of corporate social responsibility (when it’s done well, though). But it’s deeply concerning that the WFP is providing unwitting PR to a group of particularly nasty businesses.
In a recent article for the Guardian, Felicity Lawrence discusses growing concern about big food companies’ decision to shift their focus to developing markets:
SABMiller, Unilever, and Nestlé have developed campaigns to target poorer markets:
This is Nestlé’s strategy in Brazil:
Even if Nestlé does respect the terms of the International Code for the Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes, and I hope it does, not only is it selling unhealthy processed non-foods, but it also gains legitimacy via its partnership with…the United Nations. Earlier this year, Nestlé supported the UN’s ‘Every Woman Every Child’ initiative, which aims to improve child and maternal health. So an organisation implicated in contributing to the high rate of child mortality in the developing world, and in facilitating a global obesity epidemic, is working with the UN…to improve child health.
Merry Christmas.
Further Reading
Texts quoted here:
Thomas Bull, The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1840).
Christina Hardyment, Dream Babies: Childcare Advice from John Locke to Gina Ford. Revised ed. (London: Frances Lincoln, 2007).
Virginia Thorley, ‘Commercial Interests and Advice on Infant Feeding: Marketing to Mothers in Postwar Queensland,’ Health and History, vol. 5, no. 1 (2003), pp. 65-89.
Other sources:
Linda Bryder, ‘Breastfeeding and Health Professionals in Britain, New Zealand and the United States, 1900-1970,’ Medical History. vol. 49, no. 2 (2005), pp. 179-196.
Linda Bryder, ‘From breast to bottle: a history of modern infant feeding.’ Endeavour, vol. 33, issue 2 (June 2009), pp. 54-59.
Linda Bryder, Not Just Weighing Babies: Plunket in Auckland, 1980-1998 (Pyramid Press, Auckland, 1998).
S.E. Duff, ‘What will this child be? Children, Childhood, and the Dutch Reformed Church in the Cape Colony, 1860-1894’ (PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London, 2010).
Nancy Rose Hunt, ‘“Le Bebe en Brousse”: European Women, African Birth Spacing and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo,’ The International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 21, no. 3 (1988), pp. 401-432.