Food, long supply chains and “gastro-anomie”

As I walked around the warehouse looking at the thousands of colourful cans and plastic packages, I couldn’t help feeling a sense of melancholy. The highly processed products’ expiration dates were so far in the future that they resembled more something that you would eat in space rather than what, I personally, would consider a “nourishing” meal. Beyond having doubts about the health properties of these products, the fact that I had no familiarity with the processes involved in their production and didn’t recognize many of the ingredients that made them,  made me feel a deep sense of disconnection.

“When I was young, the food I ate came either from my garden or, at most, from the farm at a few kilometers from my house” said one of the retired ladies volunteering in the bank during a brief exchange that we had while Lily walked me around the warehouse “Everything has changed now, we don’t know where any of our food comes from!”. Of course, we both understood the challenges of storing and distributing fresh food. But are there really no other ways of doing this, especially considering the amounts of surplus food that go to waste on a daily basis? When I inquired about it, Carly mentioned an initiative called The Felix Project, that has exactly the mission of collecting and redistributing fresh food that can no longer be sold in stores. My next step will be to reach out to this organisation, in order to better understand what their activities involve and why it is so difficult for the UK to guarantee affordable fresh food to its population. Walking through the isles of a supermarket, in fact, isn’t that different from walking through the isles of a food bank. They are both packed with cheap, processed food that have gone through incredibly long supply chains before getting to the UK.

Our diet has in fact changed drastically in the past few centuries. Today, since most of our food comes from distant countries, it has to be packed and treated in certain ways in order for it to survive the trip; we also have all sorts of ingredients available to us, even when they are out of season (Pelto and Pelto, 1983). Is food becoming merely a capitalist commodity? Is the function of processed products solely the one to give us calories and to make a profit?

Marx explained how capitalism is based on alienation: when goods are assigned a market value, they become commodities, completely detached from the place and the people who made them. 

Supply chains have become mechanised, long and efficient. Food gets “enhanced” by flavourings and conservatives, and it comes to us wrapped in plastic, or in a metal can. Food anthropologists have been using the term “gastro-anomie” – coined by Fishler (1988) - to indicate the increasing disconnection between us and the food we eat, valued mostly in terms of nutrition and price, rather than its social and cultural meanings. Gastro-anomie is a word to describe the extreme delocalisation and mobilisation of ingredients characteristic of modern society, and its effect of disorienting consumers who struggle to make choices when faced with overwhelming global variety. Gastro-anomie also captures a supposed loss of pleasure to be gained from food and eating. Processed foods are in fact often designed to be prepared and consumed “fast” rather than with pleasure, according to the patterning of time of an increasingly capitalistic society (Crowther, 2013).