Brad Weiss - Configuring the Authentic Value of Real Food.pdf

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BRAD WEISS College of William and Mary Configuring the authentic value of real food: Farm-to-fork, snout-to-tail, and local food movements ABSTRACT The partibility of pigs and the circulation of their parts—from snout to tail, as the popular culinary phrase puts it—are routinely celebrated in communities committed to eating “local.” In this article, I explore how different kinds of totalities are configured in the practices of such “locavore” actors with respect to pigs and pork. Approaches as varied as Sausseurean structuralism, functionalist sociology, and actor network theory characterize their objects of inquiry as totalities constituted by relationships among component parts. So too the totalities in relationships forged via pigs become (mis)aligned with the totality of pigs as embodied, complex organisms. Such wholes from parts reveal the overdetermination (or fetishization) of the “connections” (between farmers and consumers, chefs and diners, humans and animals) extolled by “local food” actors. [local food, totalities, pigs, animal–human relationships, value] W hat is the appeal of totalities? Why do people find wholes, completion, and integrity compelling, in aesthetic as well as analytical terms? 1 As anthropologists, we need to recognize the long history of the “whole,” totality, holism, and struc- ture’s assumption of invariant relations among elements— that unity, greater than the sum of its parts—that has marked most of the history of the social sciences, to make sense of contemporary interest in partial connections, multiplicity, rupture, and the fragmentary (Haraway 2008; Strathern 2005). All of these singularities carry the weight and plausi- bility they do precisely because they presume (or presume our presupposi- tion of) the force of totalization, understood as a kind of mastery or dom- ination (perhaps fictive, undoubtedly contested) that can be productively suspended, interrupted, or interrogated. In what follows, I consider the kinds of alternative totalities that are proposed and enacted in contemporary “local food” activism. And, as wholes are always a relation of parts that can only be understood in terms of the significance that derives from their dynamic organization (Weiss 1996:155ff .), these novel totalities are equally composed of reimagined el- ements (the new parts for new wholes). The totalities considered here in- stantiate a particular vision of circulation, a model of food as a means of promoting unification and integration in and across a range of different do- mains: spatial, social, ecological, and culinary. Each of the twinned modes of integration I examine, a farm-to-fork producer–consumer nexus and snout-to-tail cookery, instantiates a complex whole. They do so in paral- lel if inverse fashion. Farm-to-fork, a theme that is taken up by restaurants, grocery stores, specialty food purveyors, and a number of events (picnics, dinners, wine tastings, etc.), is a spatial process that incorporates a range of actors, set in motion (and, so, taking place) and brought together through productive consumption. 2 Snout-to-tail as a mode of butchery and cookery (Henderson 2004) is also a spatial process, but here the space is an embodied animal—almost always the pig (blessed of snout and tail) now AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 614–626, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01384.x

Transcript of Brad Weiss - Configuring the Authentic Value of Real Food.pdf

  • BRAD WEISSCollege of William and Mary

    Configuring the authentic value of realfood:Farm-to-fork, snout-to-tail, and local food movements

    A B S T R A C TThe partibility of pigs and the circulation of theirpartsfrom snout to tail, as the popular culinaryphrase puts itare routinely celebrated incommunities committed to eating local. In thisarticle, I explore how different kinds of totalities areconfigured in the practices of such locavore actorswith respect to pigs and pork. Approaches as variedas Sausseurean structuralism, functionalistsociology, and actor network theory characterizetheir objects of inquiry as totalities constituted byrelationships among component parts. So too thetotalities in relationships forged via pigs become(mis)aligned with the totality of pigs as embodied,complex organisms. Such wholes from parts revealthe overdetermination (or fetishization) of theconnections (between farmers and consumers,chefs and diners, humans and animals) extolled bylocal food actors. [local food, totalities, pigs,animalhuman relationships, value]

    What is the appeal of totalities? Why do people find wholes,completion, and integrity compelling, in aesthetic as well asanalytical terms?1 As anthropologists, we need to recognizethe long history of the whole, totality, holism, and struc-tures assumption of invariant relations among elements

    that unity, greater than the sum of its partsthat has marked most of thehistory of the social sciences, to make sense of contemporary interest inpartial connections, multiplicity, rupture, and the fragmentary (Haraway2008; Strathern 2005). All of these singularities carry the weight and plausi-bility they do precisely because they presume (or presume our presupposi-tion of) the force of totalization, understood as a kind of mastery or dom-ination (perhaps fictive, undoubtedly contested) that can be productivelysuspended, interrupted, or interrogated.

    In what follows, I consider the kinds of alternative totalities that areproposed and enacted in contemporary local food activism. And, aswholes are always a relation of parts that can only be understood in termsof the significance that derives from their dynamic organization (Weiss1996:155ff .), these novel totalities are equally composed of reimagined el-ements (the new parts for new wholes). The totalities considered here in-stantiate a particular vision of circulation, a model of food as a means ofpromoting unification and integration in and across a range of different do-mains: spatial, social, ecological, and culinary. Each of the twinned modesof integration I examine, a farm-to-fork producerconsumer nexus andsnout-to-tail cookery, instantiates a complex whole. They do so in paral-lel if inverse fashion. Farm-to-fork, a theme that is taken up by restaurants,grocery stores, specialty food purveyors, and a number of events (picnics,dinners, wine tastings, etc.), is a spatial process that incorporates a range ofactors, set in motion (and, so, taking place) and brought together throughproductive consumption.2 Snout-to-tail as a mode of butchery andcookery (Henderson 2004) is also a spatial process, but here the space is anembodied animalalmost always the pig (blessed of snout and tail) now

    AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 614626, ISSN 0094-0496, onlineISSN 1548-1425. C 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01384.x

  • Farm-to-fork, snout-to-tail American Ethnologist

    understood not simply as a source of meat but as a once-animate creature with specific life functions (an actual pig)as well as a field of material forms that offer a range ofculinary possibilities (snouts, tails, and all the cuts in be-tween). In both instances, though, these totalities are notmerely groups of related, substitutable elements but dis-tinctive structures, whose distinctiveness lies in both thespecificity of the particular parts and the reconfiguration oftheir proper relationship to one another. There is both anaesthetic and an ethics at work here, for, as I shall demon-strate, not just any parts will do, and not all relationships aregiven equal weight. My aim, then, is to think through howand why these wholes are constituted as appropriate con-figurations of relations among particular, identifiable partsand thereby to understand the forms of value that they gen-erate.

    My approach to these matters is informed by efforts tounderstand the production of value in ways that take ac-count of the specific materialities and concrete qualitiesof the entities given value within wider sociocultural or-ders. Related studies (Fehervary 2009; Keane 2003; Meneley2008; Munn 1986; Weiss 1996) that draw on Peircean semi-otics consider such perceptual and qualitative dimensionsof objects as partibility, culinary uses, or gustatory appeal asqualisigns of the value, or value potential, of those objects.This approach to value allows us to consider production asa material and qualitative process through which subjectsdefine attributes of themselves through their engagementwith objects in the world. This perspective is, therefore, byno means incompatible with a political-economic analysis.Indeed, in what follows, I demonstrate how the political-economic implications of farm-to-fork and snout-to-tailactivities, as well as of the local food movement moregenerally, are articulated precisely in terms of the concretequalities not only of things edible but also of the array ofpersons, animals, things, and the relations between themthat constitute the contemporary U.S. food system and itspossible alternatives.

    Political economy and demographic(re)alignments

    In political-economic terms, local food alternatives areroutinely advanced as a challenge to received wholes, adisruption of the prevailing forms of totalization man-ifest most clearly in the agriculturalindustrial complex(Niman 2009; Pollan 2007; Schlosser 2001). These chal-lenges nonetheless depend precisely on holism and amal-gamation, as an analytic and aesthetic, to demonstrate theircritiques. Opposition to industrial agriculture decries thedamage wrought by food conglomerates but nonethelessembraces integration as an esteemed dimension of social-ity and action. This embrace can be seen quite clearly inthe way that advocates for local food highly value, at the

    most abstract level, a range of what are deemed connec-tions forged between elements and actors, producers andconsumers, terrain and technique, seasonality and suste-nance. As Heather Paxson notes, the American Raw MilkFarmstead Cheese Consortium claims that raw cheeses re-flect the connection between the land, the animals, andthe cheesemaker (2008:24), and the New York Times de-scribes the burgeoning interest of chefs in slaughtering live-stock as part of a new intimacy with the animals theycook (2008).3 This privileging of linkage and interconnec-tion is vital to contemporary ethicsand contemporarymaterialismat a number of levels. It weaves through con-cerns with sustainability in agriculture and environmen-tal practice; with health, animal welfare, and food security;and with community-building efforts in new food politicalmovements. Such interconnections are further critical to anoverarching motivation and organizing principlea lead-ing valueof the food reform movement, namely, peoplesdesire for authenticity in the foods they eat and the socialprocesses throughwhich this food is produced. I discuss thevalue of the authentic at length below. What should beclear is that the globalized consolidations of vertically inte-grated Confined Animal Feeding Operations (or CAFOs) arealso a complex set of manifold relations, which (somehow)do not constitute connections to be valued in the sameway. Which connections count, then? How should properconnections be forged, and what distinguishes the kinds ofcomplex wholes locavores aspire to assemble? How do weconfront vertical integration with a food ethics of integrity?What kinds of linkages are displaced, and which are val-orized by these projects?

    In asking about both displacement and replacement ofthis kind, I might also note that this new holism and thetotalities wrought are compelling to a certain kind of com-munity that is itself displaced and replaced. Although thesenewmodes of totalization are not a prominent concern (es-pecially in the region of central North Carolina that is thefocus of my research) among those industrial and agricul-tural laborers gripped by the ruptures of the present high-industrial moment, contemporary cosmopolitans have em-braced them. What I hope to demonstrate, then, is howsuch highly mobile and well-resourced communities seekto reimagine the spaces they inhabit, cultivating an appre-ciation of valued connections in a well-integrated, and re-configured domain. In so doing, I also show how the sameprocesses that have forged industrial agriculture (and es-pecially animal production) have promoted the alternativeconnections that critics of such industrial processes nowpromote.

    My project focuses on pasture-raised pork and the net-works forged through it in central North Carolina (or thePiedmont). My field research has been multisited and mul-tiform. I have done actual field work with pig farmers acrossthe region; interned in the prep kitchen of a leading Slow

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    Food restaurant that regularly features local pork on itsmenus; and sold pork chops, bacon, andbratwurst (to nameonly the best sellers) at my neighborhood farmers mar-ket each week. Working across these diverse sites providesa vantage point from which to grasp the changing demo-graphics of the Piedmont and, so, appreciate certain crit-ical political-economic dimensions of the newly config-ured totalities that constitute the regions efforts to pro-mote an alternative food system. North Carolina has thefastest-growing population in the United States east of theMississippi (United States Census 2010) and the fastest-growing Latino population in the country (Learn NC n.d.).This shifting population has had a wide-ranging, if un-even, impact on the food systems of the Piedmont. I be-gin with the demographic particulars: Many recent arrivalsto central North Carolina are drawn by a combination oftax incentives;4 the educational resources of the three ma-jor research universities that constitute the Triangle (theUniversity of North Carolina, Duke, and North CarolinaState); and the presence of so-called right-to-work laws thatweaken unions abilities to recruit workers and bargainwithmanagement. This coordination of factors has contributed,for example, to the growth of IBM in the Piedmont, whosecampus in the Research Triangle Park (RTP, established inthe late1950s), although subject to widespread layoffs in re-cent years, employs 11,000 people, making it the corpora-tions largest operation in the country. Many of these em-ployees have been relocated from such regions as southernMinnesota, Californias Silicon Valley, and the Hudson RiverValley in New York. This pattern of shifting capital intoNorth Carolina, and the Piedmont in particular, is repli-cated in other industries, like pharmaceuticals, software en-gineering, communications, and electronics, that inhabitthe RTP.

    The influx of a population drawn to high-tech indus-tries (and their relatively high salaries), as well as universityemployment that expanded in the region through the firstdecade of this century, helps to define the cosmopolitancommunity that has attempted to take root in the region.Many of its members do so, in significant ways, throughtheir commitments to local foods and so provide a well-resourced and well-educated consumer base for the growthof the burgeoning alternative food movement in the region(Weiss 2011:441). That process of finding a place throughfood is a central focus of this article, and of my work in theregion more generally (Weiss 2011). But, at the same timethat these demographic shifts have generated a powerfulclientele for alternative food producers, they have alsotransformed the character of production itself. This is truein ways that often seem contradictory. The same regulatoryenvironment that motivates shifts of capital in the high-tech (and related) sectors has also led to the expansionof industrial agriculture in the state. This expansion hascontributed directly to the influx of Latinos to the region,

    where the meatpacking and processing industry was re-sponsible for the largest growth in North Carolinas CentralAmerican and Mexican population from 1993 to 1997(North Carolina in the Global Economy n.d.). The foodservice industry more generally in the Piedmont (as in agreat many U.S. regions; National Council of La Raza 2011)employs Latino immigrants in sizable numbers. Indeed,my fieldwork with restaurant staff across the Piedmontindicates that almost all of the prep work, as well as most ofthe cooking, is carried out by a Latino (almost exclusivelyMexican) labor force in restaurants that explicitly endorselocal foods.

    It is interesting to note, however, that many of theserestaurants (in contrast to the meat-processing indus-try) often celebrate their immigrant labor force. ConsiderMiguel Torres, the chef de cuisine at the James Beard Awardwinning, locavoracious Chapel Hill restaurant Lantern.Torres has been featured in local newspaper accountsdescribing his self-taught mastery of restaurant work(Weigl 2011) and further extolled in Slow Foodorientedcookbooks (Reusing 2011; Roahen and Edge 2010). In thesemediated representations of his culinary skills, Torres of-fers his recipe for carnitas (Reusing 2011:235336; Roahenand Edge 2010:143). This is a telling form of representa-tion. It clearly acknowledges the significance of Mexicancraftsmen in the Piedmonts local food scene and evenreframes the local as a place that incorporates Mexicanculinary heritage (carnitas, like tamales, are now branded aSouthern food). Nevertheless, offering Torress recipe for aMexican fiesta dish like carnitas as a demonstration of hiscontribution to local foods belies the fact that his (andhis many Mexican coworkers) daily labors are spent cook-ing Lanterns Beard-award-winningmeals, which present amarriage of Asian flavors and North Carolina ingredients(Lantern n.d.). In other words, the inclusion of Torress (andother Mexican cooks) skills as critical features of the Pied-monts culinary world simultaneously excludes Torres bysituating him at a remove from that locality, as accounts ofhis expertise in local cuisine represent him primarily as abearer of Mexican heritage (even as his skills are honed inthe Asian-fusion cuisine he cooks each day).

    The movement of capital produces a widespread dis-placement and relocation of populations, even across classand racial divisions. This movement, in turn, generates acharacteristic social and cultural dynamic in which rela-tionships within and across communities establish modesof belonging that are simultaneously inclusive and ex-clusive (a widespread feature of neoliberal restructuringaround the world; Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000; Weiss2004). Erstwhile New Yorker software engineers perusingthe Durham or Carrboro Farmers Markets for artisanal ba-con, as well as immigrant line cooks from Celaya, Mex-ico, are all participants engaged in remaking an alterna-tive, local food system. And they do so in ways that

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    reveal how the cultural forms of such local foods are con-stituted by practices that valorize certain relationshipsorconnectionsand incorporate certain participants intothese new totalities, even as they marginalize their verypresence in them. The cultural forms of the local, then,bespeak a process that is at once inclusive and exclu-sive.5 The political-economic implications of this dynamicare, of course, many and varied. In what follows, I fo-cus on the forms of value present in the connectionsthat constitute local food (more specifically, pastured-pork)markets. These esteemed connectionsbetween cus-tomers and farmers, animals and humans, and the con-stituent elements of animals (i.e., their parts)are icons ofthe sociocultural processes of value creation through whichthey are produced.

    Connecting with Carolina pigs

    The Carrboro Farmers Market, where I work, celebrates itscommitment to connection in its bylaws, which requirethat farmers or their immediate family members be presentat the market to sell their products. The market further re-quires that farmers actually produce what they sell, a stric-ture enforced by examining receipts for seeds and feed andthe occasional surprise inspection of a farm. All of this ismeant to ensure, as the presiding officer of the market putit, that customers make that connection with our produc-ers. Customers confirm this commitment. I like that ev-ery week I can look my farmer in the eye, know her name,and feel good about my purchases, is what one recentlyreported to me about this market activity. These commit-ments by farmers and customers to such face-to-face con-nections are central to the ways that authenticity is materi-alized in this alternative food system. Both producers andconsumers seek to demonstrate that such connections pro-vide the assurance that they are trafficking in real food.Such food is the product of uncompromising discernment(Weiss 2011) on the part of consumers and the tactile,hands-on character of labor, personified by the farmer atthemarket. Such direct, indeed, bodily immediacy and self-evident quality (as registered by knowledgeable consumers)are central to theway that authenticity is constituted by, andworks effectively within, this alternative food system.

    This kind of commitment to materialized sociality isdeeply connected to the demographic transformations de-scribed above. Much of the Triangle population is look-ing to localize itself precisely through such highly per-sonalized links. More generally, this kind of commitment,and its celebration in such a shifting locale, is part andparcel of what Robert Foster (drawing on Giddens 1991and Tomlinson 1999) describes as a dialectical process ofdisembedding and reembedding (2008:19). Under condi-tions of (post)modernity, systems of abstraction (like in-dustrial production) that amplify social distance and de-

    tachment are simultaneously reintegrated into regional life-worlds (or appropriated), reflecting, in Anthony Giddenss(1991)words, the mutability of local circumstances and en-gagement (Foster 2008:19).

    Yet, far from a triumph over the disembedding forcesof alienation of the sort anthropologists routinely ascribeto cultural appropriations, these face-to-face connectionscan also be a source of anxiety, as the labor required offarmers at the market, and in marketing more generally,is a constant topic of discussion among producers. Di-rect marketing has been the preferred method for smallfarmers hoping to bring their produce to market, and mosthave discovered that the demands of such marketing intransport, infrastructure, and, especially, time often out-strip the demands of on-farm activities. Moreover, the ap-parently straightforward requirement that vendors sell onlywhat they produce turns out to be rather contentious, es-pecially for meat producers. Pigs, for example, are regularlygrown out from feeder pigs often sold by larger breed-ers to pastured-pork farmers (see Figure 1). Moreover, thevalue-added productssausages and cured meatsthatare a staple for many meat vendors are subject to addi-tional scrutiny. Many meat producers have recounted thechallenge of assuring customersand other vendorsthatthey can vouch for their products when they have been pro-cessed, manufactured, and packaged by a third (and oftenfourth) party. Such are the carnivorous challenges to a farm-to-fork ethos.6 These challenges are ameliorated by cer-tain producers who, on occasion, process their meat them-selves and add their own value, producing what is oftencalled bootleg sausage. As the term implies, such unreg-ulated efforts are almost always illegal, and necessarily sub-rosa, but they also confirm the value of connectedness,as only those in the knowusually through direct, trusted,personal ties to the farmercan participate in such under-ground circulation.7

    The privileged connections of the farmers market andrelated venues suggest that there is a kind of enhancedvalue to the circulations that are forged at various levelsbetween producers, consumers, and the objectshere, themeatwhose transaction constitutes these connections. Isuggest that this authentic value is an organizing princi-ple of these connections that unites them into totality, aswell as a concrete quality that is materially present in theobjects themselves. Thus, the kind of value given to thesocioeconomic relationships formed between farmers andcustomers is also present in the meat. The authenticity ofthe former, we might say, is authenticated by the qualitiesof the latter. This parallel, and the point of correlation be-tween farm-to-fork and snout-to-tail, was illustrated for mein a not uncommon discussion that took place at my neigh-borhood market. The pig farmer with whom I work eachSaturday, Eliza MacLean of Cane Creek Farm, was chattingwith one of her regular customers, a well-regarded chef at

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    Figure 1. Pasture-raised heritage breed pigs in the Carolina Piedmont.Photo by B. Weiss.

    a premier area restaurant, when she was approached by acouple whowere hoping to begin a culinary tourism servicethat would take clients to restaurants across the region aswell as to farmers markets where they could meet andin their wordsmake a connection with local farmers. Inthe course of this discussion, they asked Eliza a very specificquestion: What is the message youre trying to get acrossto customers? Ever ready with a reply, Eliza answered thather customers need to know that connection to the an-imal. And they, further, need to be aware that theres acomplete disconnect in the confinement operations wherethe pigs are treated like car batteries, each bred to uniformstandards under inhumane industrial conditions. At whichpoint, the chef added that, from a chefs point of view, hewants people to see that connection and to make themthink about how they use that animal, and what can bewasted and what isnt wastedand so, how every piece ofthat life that was sacrificed for us needs to be made use of.

    Here is a clear concatenation of contemporary foodactivism, coordinating producers and consumers; farmersand chefs; tourists, towns, and markets; animals and hu-mans; the agrarian and the industrial (although this last el-ement is less included in the picture than recognized asa condition that is actively excluded, as the standard prac-tice that is negated by pasture raising) into an organizedwhole, itself a virtual hieroglyph of the farm-to-fork prin-ciple. What is given value in these accounts are preciselythe kinds of privileged connections that are both generatedby the transactions among these various actors and pre-supposed as a premise of the orientation and motivationof their practices. Why else would a farmer be presumedto have a messageand not just a pork chophe or shewanted to get across to customers, were it not for the priororientation toward creating a connection that underliesthese encounters. Note, in particular, that these privilegedconnections are not just features of the social relations and

    transactions described, as these forms of value are also em-bedded in the objects themselvesthe living, breathing an-imals raised on pasture as well as every piece of that lifethat becomes the meat that customers consume. In effect,the qualities integration and linkage (if the porcine ad-jective can be forgiven) are qualisigns of the modes of so-ciality and production that are materialized in the pork thatconsumers desire.

    Revaluing desire and virtue

    Inwhat follows, I consider twomore-complex ethnographicevents. The first is an annual fund-raising picnic held inthe North Carolina Piedmont fortuitously entitled Farm toFork; the second was an underground butchery programthat was arranged for discerning pork aficionados in a smalltown in the same region. My purpose is threefold. First, Iwant to unpack some of the complex ways in which thesemodes of totalizing connection are concretely manifestedin practice and, more specifically, how they are experiencedas features of reality itselfthat is, how food has value thatmakes it part of awider array of things and people inmotion(Farquhar 2006). Second, by describing the concreteness ofthese qualities, I hope to specify the formof value that circu-lates through and is objectified in what I have called priv-ileged connections. And, finally, I suggest how this formof value might relate to the wider questions of cosmopoli-tanism as a mode of practice and political economy.

    The Farm to Fork picnic is a kind of gourmands statefairbut, instead of turkey legs and deep-fried Twinkieson a stick, it matches over 200 farmers and chefs fromacross the Piedmont of North Carolina, who offer up sea-sonal products expertly prepared. Attendees pay $60 towell, pig out is too obvious a turn of phrasesupportfarm apprenticeship programs in the region. Not surpris-ingly, pork figures prominently on the menuas one chef Iworked with in 2009 put it, Hey, its North Carolina, peopleexpect to have pork at a picnic (Weiss 2011:456). What wasespecially noteworthy about this eventwas theway the porkwas prepared. In May 2010, half a dozen pig farmers partic-ipated in the event, but only one of eight chefs who offeredpork served barbecue, usually a de rigueur componentof a Carolina picnic. There were, though, three differentpreparations of headcheese and two applications of braisedpork-belly sandwiches. In 2009, a chef I worked with at apan-Asian restaurant offered braised, grilled pigtails. Thesnout-to-tail aesthetic, and its implications, is exemplifiedin the following encounter at the 2010 Farm to Fork.8 Acustomer looks at an offering on a picnic table at a boothmanned by a leading chef in the region:

    Customer: What is that?

    Chef: Its headcheese.

    Customer (grimacing): Uhhh.

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    Chef: If I would have said pork terrine you wouldhave tried it?

    Customer: If you had said what?

    Chef: Its nothing youve not ever had in a hot dog.

    Whereupon the staff starts to laugh, and one of them (thesous chef) chimes in, Thats for sure, only its better.

    If youve ever had a hot dog, continues the chef,youve had everything thats in that. And waaay more!

    The sous chef goes on to describe the dish to the nextcustomer: Its a terrine, or some people call it headcheese.Its made from the jowl of the pig.

    Its a flat hot dog! someone pipes up from the staff inthe booth.

    So, why the prevalence of headcheese? And why nota hot dog? Just to be clear, farmers and chefs in the re-gion produce ample artisanal sausageincluding some ofthe worlds finest hot dogssome of which was availableat Farm to Fork. Yet, clearly, there is something compellingabout offering headcheesewhich has everything youveever had in a hot dogin such abundance and with suchadvocacy at a fund-raiser designed to promote local farmproducts and chefs skills. If headcheese is just like a hotdog, only different, there are a number of factors that playinto that difference. The sociological indexicality of the twofoods is a somewhat complicated matter (Bourdieu 1984;Silverstein 2004). Although it might seem that the hot dogis the more plebeian of the two, in fact, headcheese isoften lauded by the chefs who prepare it, and occasion-ally by their patrons who eat it, as an old-timey con-coction, known by local North Carolinians (following theirPennsylvanian Dutch antecedents, who brought it to thePiedmont, alongwithmost things porcine) as souse (fromtheGerman Sulze). And souse is remembered, by those whostill remember it, as a meat of hardship, an admixture ofaccumulated meat trimmings, boiled and congealed in thenatural gelatins of animal bone and sinew. According to thepeople who recall eating it as souse, it is not consumed asan appetizer, like a terrine or pate would be (Farm to Forkstyle), but as a bit of side meat, sometimes fried for break-fast with grits and eggs. All of which is to say that the so-cial positioning of headcheese is rather complicated. On theone hand, the economizing praxis of the dishscrap ele-ments prepared formaximumpreservation and providing ahearty energy source for agricultural laborsand the socialfragment with which it is prominently associated bespeaka decidedly rural, working-class habitus. Here headcheeseseems a classic amor fati, as Pierre Bourdieu describes it,the choice of destiny, but a forced choice produced by con-ditions of existence which rule out all alternatives as meredaydreams and leave no choice but the taste for the neces-sary (1984:178).

    At the same time, however, headcheese has plainly be-come emblematic of a rather different class fragment, a cos-mopolitan cognoscenti that can afford to pay substantiallyfor the privilege of sampling a crackerful of handcraftedheritage terrine. And yet, this culinary valorization is nota simple act of sociological distinction, merely an embod-ied taste of luxury reserved for the dominant class. I wouldargue, instead, that the prominence of headcheese at a lo-cal foods fair (and on a range of menus across the region,where it is now found with some regularity) is a form ofrevaluation motivated by producers and consumersthatis, by their tasteswho do not seek to distinguish them-selves from plebeian necessity but, rather, to reincorporatethe very values embedded in the necessary (e.g., econo-mizing, heartiness, richness, robustness vs. delicacy) intonovel modes of gastronomic practice. From this perspec-tive, headcheese is, indeed, just like a hot dogso long asthat hot dog is an emulsified artisanal sausage of grass-fedbeef and heritage-breed pork fat offered up at $8 a pound.Each preparation is less about making a virtue of necessitythan about crafting an aesthetic that appreciates the neces-sary as virtuous.

    This kind of revaluation is widespread among loca-vores. To assess its significance and specify more concretelywhat kind of value is involved, it is helpful to look directlyat the materiality of the tastes that are desired in this way.Headcheese, to consider this offering again, is, in its sub-stantive form, just like a hot dog only different, in thatthe dish is composed of various tidbits and remnants (likea hot dog) but the form of the preparation draws atten-tion to its composition (unlike a hot dog). It is plain tosee, that is, that headcheese is a collection of odds andends, of parts, that have been assembled into a totality (seeFigure 2). In this respect, it is an apt illustration of the com-mitment to snout-to-tail cookery, a truly iconic dish in thestrict Peircean sense, one clearly showing that every ele-ment of the once-living animal has been incorporated intothe final application. Again, this visible parsimony is pre-sented not in keeping with the constraints of frugality butto demonstrate an interest in caring for each bit of theanimalevery piece of that life, as chef Mike put itasa form of inventive virtue, both desirable and caring. Therecognition of a regional narrative of hardship and the frankincorporation of visceral pig parts both contribute to an ap-preciation of headcheese as a real food, an embodimentof the authenticity that animates the wider foodmovement.Note, as well, that this kind of preparationin its concretequalities, its historical recollection of economizing tastes,and its performance within the setting of a fund-raisingpicnic, where it can be offered to a highly discerning (andwell-heeled) clientelealso substantiates the dynamic ofinclusion and exclusion discussed above. The thrifty culi-nary practices of rural, working-class communities can beincluded and even valorized but only by transformations

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    Figure 2. Headcheese. Photo by B. Weiss.

    (even in the simple recategorization of souse as head-cheese) that decisively excludeworking-class participationin the actual eating of the dish, served up by the cracker tocustomers who have paid a tidy sum for the sample.

    The meats of the matter: The qualitiesof substance

    This is how David Chang of Momofuku in the New YorksEast Village begins his recipe for pigs head torchon:

    Pigs have heads. Every one of them does. Farmers donot raise walking porkchops. If youre serious aboutyour meat, youve got to grasp that concept. And ifyoure serious about sustainability and about hon-estly raised good meatwhich is something that weredeadly serious about at Momofuku and we try to getmore in touch with each dayyouve got to embracethe whole pig. [Chang andMeehan 2009:201, emphasisadded]

    Here, the cataloging of animal parts draws attention to thewhole beast, the living animal, and the connections amongits parts that make such committed cookerycommitmentto taste, to animal welfare, to sustainability, to communitywell-beingpossible. These same manifold concerns canalso account for the prevalence of a host of animal, andparticularly pig, parts that, until recent years, might neverhave graced the menus of fine dining establishmentslong braised shanks, the aforementioned tails, an array ofporcine offal, and the truly ubiquitous pork belly. As afarmer with whom I work put it, Id make a fortune if Icould figure out how to raise a pig with four bellies; in fact,her pigs bellies are regularly presold to restaurants beforeher animals are even processed. For ingredients like these

    to achieve the attention they have, there must first be anappreciation of the distinctiveness of animal parts that bothderive from and contribute to a complex whole. The recog-nition of this wholepart relationship is, further, away of ex-tolling the carefor community, for animal life, for tastethat is both embedded in the concrete parts and meant tobe characteristic of the cuisine, indeed, of the productionand provisioning process as a whole.

    In all of these ways, snout-to-tail cookery, with its em-phasis on understanding the specific character and quali-ties of all the various cuts, and regions, and purposes of theonce-living pig and how to properly prepare them (which,in the pork industry, is known as the utilization problem),is a way of reconfiguring the relationship between the an-imal as a whole and its body as an assemblage of parts. Inthis way, highly prized distinctive pork cuts become icons ofthe sociocultural process that produces them (Munn 1986).They are imbued with the qualities of a kind of esteemedconnectivity, for they are the revalued elements that makeit possible to enact an alternative food system that is ac-tively seeking to energize a social field committed to inte-gration, linkage, and reconnecting parts and wholes, farmto fork and snout to tail.

    This kind of revaluation runs directly counter to theoperational understandings of the meat-processing indus-try during the last century. As Noelie Vialles puts it in herstudy of the French abattoir, We demand an ellipsis be-tween animal and meat (1994:5). This ellipsis is achieved,according to Vialles, by procedures that are designed to de-animalize the body of a steer, or pig, and so to make of thecarcass a foodstuff, a substance; all the links that attached itto a once living body [are] severed (Vialles 1994:127). Thisis the distinguishing feature of meat; it is a substance,uniform, homogenized, and devoid of evidence of links,qualities that serve to distinguish it from the idiosyncraticcontingency of a living animal.

    It should be clear that this demand for an ellipsis,which I think Vialles astutely identifies and describes, is ananathema to contemporary locavoracious consumers, par-ticularly those interested in pastured pork. In response tomy survey question What do you like best about pasturedpork? (September 2010), one person wrote, I like the ideathat Im eating meat from an animal that had been treatedwell and then turned into food, rather than food which justhappens to have been attached to an object which unfor-tunately had to be fed and watered so it would turn intomeat. This sentiment is routinely offered by customersat the farmers market stands where I work each week.Clearly, the presence of the animaland in some regards, acontinuity of the animals life into the act of consumption,rather than an ellipsis between themis valued by suchconsumers. Such preferences are also evident in culinaryperformances like the underground butchery program Iattended in May of 2010. The program was arranged on a

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    strictly charitable basis, as it is illegal to process and dis-tribute meat for sale in the kind of facility where the eventwas held. Over the course of two nights, participants,9 eachof whom paid $40, were given the opportunity to watcha pig broken down into its component cuts, the meats tobe prepared for a fund-raising picnic later in the week.On the first night, the crowd was also able to help dressa live pig for barbecue (i.e., to slaughter and clean theanimal carcass so that it could be slow-roasted whole). Inaddition to emphasizing the seamless connection betweenthe living animal and its ultimate consumption, this eventwas notable for the way that the pigs parts were madeuse of. To begin with, the head had already been spokenformeant to be rendered into headcheese, of course.This, in itself, required special attention, as pigs heads arenot easily procured. Pigs processed in the Animal WelfareApproved facilities of nonindustrial slaughterhouses areshot in the head with a .22 to stun them prior to bleeding,and U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations prohibitthe sale for consumption of heads that have been shot.At this event, because the pig was not for sale, the headwas saved for one headcheese aficionado; two other par-ticipants were disappointed to hear that the head wouldnot be available for them to use. As parts were divided upamong the participants for their culinary experiments, itwas interesting to see the preferences expressed. Two ofthe participants, themselves budding farmers and longtimechefs who catered events around town, brought samples oftheir charcuterie for the group to sample. They took a largejowl home. The bellies were subdivided into enough piecesto provide for everyone who wanted some. I was fortunateto get a jowl on the second night.

    Just as interesting was that, on one night, the full rackof the pig went unclaimed. A length of ten pork chops, anexport rack incorporates the loin and tenderloin cut fromthe lean and tender lower back of the pig. It is the very def-inition of eating high on the hog, and it is significantlymore expensive than any other cut of pork sold at any farm-ers market, or grocery store, for that matter. But it was allthe organizers could do to cajole someone into preparing itfor the fund-raiser. The pork in a rack most closely resem-bles that deanimated, homogenized substance describedby Vialles. The pork industry has bred hybrid pigs and pro-moted the sale of exactly this cut of porkthe Other WhiteMeatfor the last generation. Leaner than any other cut ofthe pig, with no connective tissue or other viscera runningthrough it, the loin iseven in a niche-market, heritage-breed piga uniform slab of meat. It scarcely suggests theanimal from which it is removed, in name, function, or ap-pearance, unlike the belly, head, jowl, tail, or shankthat is,the cuts that have been revitalized on menus motivated byan interest in snout-to-tail cookery.

    In his well-known discussion of La PenseeBourgeoise, Marshall Sahlins details the symbolic

    logic whereby edibility is inversely related to humanity(1976:175). He writes,

    Americans frame a categorical distinction between theinner and outer parts which represents . . . the sameprinciple (of inversion), metaphorically extended. Theorganic nature of the flesh is at once disguised andits preferability indicated by the general term meat(and) conventions such as roast steak and chops;whereas the internal organs are frankly known as such.The internal and external parts . . . are respectively as-similated to and distinguished fromparts of the humanbody. [Sahlins 1976:175176]

    In the contemporary practices I am describing, the logicremains the same, but the signs are exactly reversed. It isprecisely because the frankly known cuts of pig are as-similable to the human body that they acquire their edi-bility. Not, I hesitate to add, because humans are on theverge of a cannibalistic binge but because the characterof the living animalwhose welfare and material standingare iconic of the wider processes of ecological well-being,healthy eating, artisanal craft, and honestly raised goodmeatis most plainly expressed in such parts. The totalityof the pig includes all aspects of the animal, not just thoseprominently associated with providing meat but those as-sociated with sustaining life. Those parts of the animalsnout to tailthat confirm and contribute to this newlygrasped and reconfigured whole are the parts that are nowhighly desirable (see Figure 3). Such parts emphasize theway that meat is always embedded in a series of con-nections at once anatomical, agricultural, sociological, andculinary. The configuration of these parts, then, embod-ies a contemporary ethics and aesthetics that is simultane-ously dependent on a particular materialization. This ethi-cally informed materialism plays on the concrete qualitiesof animal forms, at times revealing a profound relationshipwith the vitality andwelfare of the animal (a relationship re-vealed by directly confronting the death of the animal), attimes demonstrating the ecological and economizing com-mitment to eating the totality of the animal, and at times al-lowing the culinary virtuosity of chefs and foodies attractedto the challenge of making flavorful meals from what wereonce overlooked, or discarded, forms of flesh to flourish.Each of these material qualities permits the elaboration ofvalues that derive from the concrete configuration of partwhole relationships. Such connections are both ethical andaesthetic commitments, whose form is determined by thequality of these connections, now understood with respectto food in particular as forms of virtue, of caring, and of de-sire.

    Circulation, exclusion, and revitalization

    It is interesting to contrast this current fascination withthe partible pig with Deborah Gewertz and Frederick

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    Figure 3. Anatomical authenticity, snout to tail. A pigs head to renderfor stock and headcheese. Photo by B. Weiss.

    Erringtons exegesis of cheap meat in the South Pacific.Here, New Zealanders, prohibited from exporting wholelamb carcasses to the United Kingdom, have broken downtheir ovine offerings into expensive legs and racks forEuro-Americanmarkets and the cheapmeatsespeciallyfatty lamb flapsfor the Papua New Guinea (PNG) trade(Gewertz and Errington 2010). Such trade has not beenstraightforward and is rife with ambivalence. PNG resi-dents have welcomed a cheap source of succulent, savory,if fatty, meat and an opportunity to expand their economicprospects though the resale of cooked flaps, even as theyacknowledge the detrimental effects of this meat on theirhealth and the insult to their national character and stand-ing in the wider world. As one PNG snack-stand owner putit, lamb flaps are waste-products being sold to us (Gew-ertz and Errington 2010:95).

    How can we account for this apparent discrepancy be-tween lamb flaps that circulate as an omen of diabetesand an emblem of second-class citizenship across PNG andpork bellies and jowls that promise restored well-being forfarmers, diners, and pigs alike across the Carolina Pied-mont? New Zealander meat traders working in the PacificIslands find that they are severely limited in their ability tosell even to a fatty-meat-consuming market. Gewertz andErrington write that traders

    would like to be able to work with their clients todevelop their marketto encourage greater sophis-tication in their customers and expand their salesfrom flaps to necks, chops, and legs (if not racks!). Inso doing, traders and clients would develop ongoingrelationshipsmutual commitments that transcend,at least somewhat, the precise price of a product at aparticular moment. [2010:6869]

    What such ambivalence indicates is that the partibility ofanimals stands in relationship to a wider whole. In the Car-olina Piedmont the farm-to-fork and snout-to-tail orienta-tion of local food consumers situates animal parts withina set of concerns that works to demonstrate how these partsfit together into a wider patternof well-being, sustain-ability, vitality, and so on. Yet it is precisely the way lambparts fit together in the Pacific Island tradewith flaps forPNG and legs for Britainthat materializes and confirmswhat Papuans and New Zealanders already knew, evenprior to the recent circulation of cheap meat, namely, themarginal standing of the former relative to the latter and,indeed, the wider world.10 The disembedding of meat pro-duction in the region is reembedded in Papuans experiencein ways that heighten their sense of exclusion. Yet in boththe Pacific and the Piedmont case, it is the character of theconnections that determines the configuration of the total-ity and the value of its constituent parts.

    How, then, might we characterize the connectionsthat are so central to these contemporary reconfigurationsof totalities in the realm of food? As I asked above, whichconnections count? How are proper connections to beforged? The connections of farm-to-fork and snout-to-tailpractices are clearly multidimensional. These practicesinsist that there are linkages at a series of levels thatare, on the one hand, intrinsic to food provisioning andpreparation and that, on the other hand, need to be care-fully cultivated through committed social action. Thus,pigs themselves offer a veritable font of connections:living, breathing animals whose well-being, growth, evenfat-producing physiologywhat I have elsewhere calledtheir very pigness (Weiss n.d.)is at once a biologicalprocess (certified by animal welfare guidelines) and anecological boon, as pigs rototill the pastures they inhabit,offering nutrients to the soils and the species who sharetheir paddocks, the very model of sustainability. At thesame time, the same pig literally embodies connectionsin the quirky parts it possesses. These parts permit theculinary expression of two critical and related forms ofconnection: a commitment to creative parsimony, to usingevery last bit of the animal as a whole, and a recognitionthat this economizing use of distinctive parts is informedby a taste for the necessary and so pays its respects toculinary techniques that are being recuperated from lessdistinguished cuisines. Indeed, the pigs themselves arebeing modified in keeping with this commitment to recov-ering such tastes and cuisines, as pastured-pork farmersrevitalize older breeds and crosses of animalsBerkshires,Tamworths, Gloucestershire Old Spotsthat both adaptbetter to outdoor living and provide well-marbled,unashamedly fatty meat reminiscent, as many farm-ers market customers put it to me, of the way that porkused to taste (see also Behr 1999). Pigs that are suited torecapturing ancient techniques of swine husbandry and

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    the forgotten gustatory pleasures they provide are aptlyknown as heritage breeds. These heritage breeds not onlypermit the restoration of cultural modes of raising andeating animals but they also make a statement in favorof genetic diversity in agriculture (American LivestockBreed Conservancy 2010). According to the AmericanLivestock Breed Conservancy, Each breed has uniquegenetics, offering variety and biodiversity to our food andbiological systems (2010). Connections over space andacross timefrom ecological commitments to sustainable,well-cared-for animals to culinary commitments to recall-ing lost foodways and animal breedsare, thus, fixed inthese pigs.

    Genuine pigs

    This potent combination of connectionsin animal vital-ity and culinary revitalization, genetic diversity and culturalheritagecan be summarized as a commitment to au-thenticity, a term I have used to characterize many of thesociocultural processes described in this article. This is aterm that is widely and regularly used by farmers, breeders,chefs, and consumers themselves to describe their prefer-ences for pastured pork. A chef whos cooked 2,000 sheepshould kill at least one, otherwise youre a fake, notes thecelebrated Jamie Oliver on his Channel 4 television series(Robertson 2005). Real foodthe sort of food our greatgrandmothers would recognize as foodstands in need ofdefense from the food industry and nutritional science,writesMichael Pollan (2008:dust jacket). When I asked Elizawhat she thinks most moves her customers to buy the un-car-battery-like pigs she raises, she tells me, Im authentic.I control the entire process from genetics to slaughter. Theseamless connection among all dimensions of production,one not generated by an industrial division of specialized,repetitive tasks but carried out by the direct application ofunmediated, skilled labor, is critical to confirming the au-thenticity of this process. This tactile labor is extolled, forexample, in the discussions that farmers routinely havewithone another at markets about the kinds of physical tasksthey perform. Livestock farmers, for example, inevitablydiscuss the challenges of coordinating all of the tasks theyperform, moving animals, building fences, corralling ani-mals for slaughter, even the grueling work of driving ani-mals to processing facilities.11 What makes such work ev-idence of authenticity is that it is all (putatively and, often,actually) carried out by the farmers themselves, whose dailyactivities demand the ability to engage in this diverse arrayof skilled tasks. Such capacities for real work are seen inno less trivial ways in the pictures of farmers out in theirfields, among their animals, adorned in overalls and base-ball caps, that grace the websites, menus, and entrywaysof many Piedmont restaurants. These farmers and chefsalso know their customerswell:My recent survey confirmed

    this. One respondent tomy question, What do you like bestabout pastured pork? wrote, with perfect economy of lan-guage: Authenticity.

    Real, living animals are cared for as animals shouldbe cared for, allowed to express all of the physiologicaland anatomical characteristics appropriate to the animalsthemselves, and processed into a product whose vital qual-ities are present in each and every last part of the animaltaken as a whole. Discerning consumers can also partakeof these qualities, confirming the character of these pigparts through their direct, face-to-face encounters with thefarmers that provide assurance of the virtue of the trans-action. In all of these respects, and at multiple levels, es-teemed connections are forged, integration is materialized,and the disruptions of the agriculturalindustrial complexare reconfigured. The central value of this reconfigurationis authenticity, whose form is materialized in the modes ofconnectivityamongproducers and consumers andwithinthe parts of the animals themselvesthrough which it cir-culates. Authenticity is a value that serves to motivate bothconsumers and producers who aspire, as one Piedmontfarmer put it to me recently, to live an authentic life. Thisauthenticity is characterized by an unmediated link to an-imal life as well as a grounding in an imagined historicalconnection with recuperated cuisines and tastes. It is en-acted in the performance of frugality, subverting distinc-tion through a celebration of the necessary, now revaluednot as a formof restraint but as amode of thoughtful and in-novative culinary and gustatory practice. Heritage breedsare at once a natural and historical alibi and embodimentof these authentic ambitions.

    Conclusions

    In all of these ways, farm-to-fork and snout-to-tail practicesaim to reconfigure a dynamic totalityat once cultural andnatural, social and zoologicalcomposed of iconic partswhose dense and multiple connections allow participantsin these totalities to experience authenticity, understood atonce as an objective feature of productive life and as a sub-jectively cultivated taste and appreciation for good things.I am an eager and hungry advocate of these connections;and it is not hard to see how a highly mobile community,migrating into the Piedmont at an accelerated rate, mightimagine a heritage for itself that is embedded in regionalcookery and agriculture and in old-fashioned tastes com-posed of the rustic pieces of pigs whose names and lin-eages evoke English yeoman farmers, Spanish galleons, andHungarian peasants. Critiques of foodie sensibilities as eli-tist and hierarchical are legion, especially within the foodactivist community itself. But it should come as no sur-prise to find that many peopleeven consumersinspiredto reclaim and elevate the plebeian tastes of homespuncooking also hope to expand the appeal and availability of

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    such local foods. Grants have been procured across thePiedmont, for example, that provide matching funds forpatrons to use Electronic Benefits Transfer creditfoodstampsat farmers markets, as Women and Infants withChildren (WIC) coupon recipients are targeted at a nationallevel by the Farmers Market Nutrition Program. These ef-forts aim to reach and incorporate consumerslike themi-grants from Central America and Mexico I mention above.And there have also been projects intended to reach un-derresourced and minority farmers in the region and to en-courage them to produce andmarket their crops andmeatsas local foods.

    These efforts have been a mixed success, at best.12

    At the same time, the overall demographic and economicchanges in this region leave open the question of the extentto which the kinds of connections I have been describing asfoundational to these new social wholes can be made fullyavailable to everyone in any community. Economic inclu-sion of consumers with sufficient, if subsidized, funds, aswell as programs to promote producers who comply withconsumer expectations of animal welfare and ecologicalsustainability can be cultivated. But so much of the workin this reconfigured economy is done through the revalua-tion of experience, and bodies, and memoriesin the formof heritage breeds, of recuperated cuisines, of performedfrugalityin forms and practices that are often not evenlegible as such to underresourced communities.Wemightask, what happens when a taste of necessity is not only de-sired but also felt to be necessary? Or when your family hasstruggled to raise and slaughter a few pigs for winter meatover many generations, without benefit of any recognizableheritage? As Foster has shown in his exemplary study ofCoca-Cola, a network of perspectives among distributed lo-cal social relations is crucial to the way producers and con-sumers collaborate to generate the value of commodities.At the same time, it is precisely through such networks thatsome participants become aware of the ways in which theirperspectives on themselves are shaped by others misrecog-nition of themand so come to devalue their own perspec-tives (Foster 2008:3031). To be sure, cosmopolitan loca-vores are conscious of and concerned about the barriers tofull inclusion in their activities. Yet the efforts made to ex-pand participation may provide access to this new econ-omy at the cost of satisfying the expectations of those hop-ing to render authentic value from the lives of others.

    Notes

    Acknowledgments. Earlier versions of this article were presentedto the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago,the American Anthropological Association meetings in 2010, andthe Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. I want to thankall of the participants in these venues for their instructive com-ments. I also received invaluable advice on this article fromHeather

    Paxson, Anne Meneley, Alison Leitch, Laura Lewis, and the anony-mous reviewers for American Ethnologist. As ever, I owe an enor-mous thanks to the many farmers, chefs, and customers I haveworked with since early 2009 in North Carolina. In particular, thefarmers and staff of Carrboro Farmers Market have been incred-ibly generous and welcoming. The manager of the market, SarahBlacklin, has taken a good deal of her time to talk about a rangeof food issues with me, and I am grateful for her continuing in-terest in this research. Jennifer Curtis of Farmhand Foods also of-fered encouragement and support on this project and this article.Above all, I am immensely thankful to Eliza MacLean, and to herstaff and family at Cane Creek Farm. I chasedmy first pigs, wateredbirds, tagged cattle, and took on innumerable other exhaustingand exhilarating chores on Cane Creekand followed that up withour weekly collaboration at the Carrboro Farmers Market. WithoutElizas willingness to indulge my interests this research would havebeen all but impossible.

    1. Virtually every social scientific perspective in the 20th century,in approaches as varied as Sausseurian linguistics, Durkheimiansociology, British functional structuralism, and Gestalt psychology,emphasizes the necessity of holism and totalities for analytical co-herence (Durkheim 1950; Levi-Strauss 1966; Radcliffe-Brown 1952;Saussure 1916).

    2. So pervasive is this farm-to-fork model that a Google searchof the phrase produces 2,780,000 results.

    3. See also the intrigue that currently surrounds Facebookfounder Mark Zuckerbergs commitment to eat, for one year, onlymeat that comes from animals he has slaughtered (InternationalBusiness Times 2011).

    4. For example, the recruitment of Dell Computers to the Triad(the Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point region) through theoffer of $260 million in state and county tax breaks (WRAL n.d.).

    5. I am grateful to Laura Lewis for helpingme to clarifymy think-ing about these processes.

    6. For a widely circulated, pitch-perfect rendering of this ethosand its anxieties, see Independent Film Channel 2011.

    7. See Sula 2009 for a detailed discussion of the unregulatedcharacter of such operations and the intimate knowledge necessaryto maintain them.

    8. For a video of this exchange, see https://picasaweb.google.com/1bradweiss/Headcheese?locked=true#5619190714268066978.

    9. The participants in this butchery event were more diversethan the attendees of the picnic. The group on both nights waslargely, but not exclusively, male. The butchery group was also no-tably younger than the picnic groupin part a reflection that theorganizers of the eventwere youngmenworkingwith local farmers.A few chefs and farmers attended, hoping to enhance their workingskills as well as offer their wares.

    10. I recently found that lamb belly is being cured by U.S. homecurers interested in precisely the snout-to-tail practices I have beendescribing (Royer 2011). This counterexample demonstrates theway that the circulation of lamb flaps confirms Papuans under-standings of their marginality relative to a wider whole; this is notto dismiss the materiality of a fatty cut but, rather, to confirmthat the qualisigns of tastea taste for fatty stews as opposed tocured, desiccated meatcontributes to the sociocultural and po-litical economic sense of marginalization.

    11. This is a particularly common topic of discussion given thenarrow range of options for small-scale animal processing in NorthCarolina and, indeed, most of the country.

    12. Efforts to expand pastured-pork production in NorthCarolina, and specifically to target minority farmers, are ongoing.They have been funded, primarily, with grants from the GoldenLEAF Foundation, established in 2000 with funds from the national

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    tobacco buyout settlement (Golden LEAF Foundation North Car-olina 2009). It is also important to point out, though, that very fewAfrican American livestock producers sell their meat at Trianglefarmers markets. Moreover, Mexican and Central American immi-grants have been targeted as consumers by innovative marketingprograms, but very few of them (even though many come from ru-ral, agricultural regions in their home country) work as farmers oreven as farm labor on the small, sustainable farms where pas-tured animals are raised in the Piedmont. I am grateful, again, toLaura Lewis for discussions on this point.

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