Scarcity in Abundance: Food and Non-Food - )

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Anne Murcott

Introduction

The title of this essay puts the words "scarcity" and "abundance" together in a deliberate effort to make them grate against one another. "Scarcity in abundance" is designed to provoke recollecting the maldistribution of access to food. Shamelessly trading on a double meaning, the intention is to make us think of both "an abundance, a vast amount, of scarcity" and "scarcity in the midst of abundance." Thus, we are reminded that only too often Europe or America's evening television news reports chronic shortages, hunger and famine in far flung parts of the globe, the profitability of food retailers and the glitzy opening of fashionable new restaurants; that all too commonly newspapers report both the persistence of hunger on the streets and sumptuous dinner parties of Washington or London; and that each medium carries news stories of rising rates of obesity and continuing anxieties about anorexia and bulimia nervosa. The extremes of scarcity and abundance seem all too easy to spot, as is this grating juxtaposition of the two. Equally, we reckon to understand very well that in the irony of their co-existence, scarcity and abundance lie in opposition to one another: either obese or anorexic; either going without or spoilt for choice; either starving or stuffed. Therein, we realise, lies the poignancy of the maldistribution of access to food; poverty in affluence. One social group has, but another has not.

Though persisting in thinking about scarcity and abundance, this essay opts for a somewhat different standpoint. Consider the following quotations. The first is an observation made some sixty years ago by Audrey Richards in her classic of social anthropology about the Bemba in southern Africa:

   I have watched natives eating the roasted grain of four or five maize cobs
   under my very eyes, only to hear them shouting to their fellows later,
   `Alas, we are dying of hunger. We have not had a bite to eat all day ...'
   (Richards 1939, quoted in Mintz 1985: 9-10)

Closer to home in place though not time, is Steven Kaplan's reminder about France at the end of the eighteenth century, where

   The Encyclopedia ... affirmed that, even if there are other things to eat,
   `people think they will die of hunger if there is no bread' (Kaplan 1995:
   42, emphasis added)

Suddenly, scarcity in abundance stands in a different oppositional plane. The balance tips from quantitative considerations to qualitative: from "how much of it?" to "what is it?" Instead of concentrating on amounts and their distribution between different groups of people, the focus shifts to types of food--in these instances--for the same group. The emphasis tilts. "Scarcity in abundance" of this essay's title now gives way to "food and nonfood" of its sub-title.

Without wanting to lose sight of the maldistribution of food, the discussion to follow centers on the distinction between food and non-food. This is a distinction that is a matter of social context and of the attribution of meaning; what is to count as food is cultural, both in its material and its abstract aspects. In the quotations just presented, Kaplan is discussing the manner in which bread was, as he says, "at the core of the material and symbolic organisation" of French society, whereas, similarly, Richards is talking about the way that, to the Bemba, "millet porridge is not only necessary, but ... is the only constituent of his diet which actually ranks as food."

What now needs to be considered, it is proposed, is how far there is a modern set of notions in parallel terms, and whether and how far they are aligned along the classic fault lines of maldistributions of income, cultural capital and social opportunity within industrialised nations. Is there not a hint that the socially and economically disadvantaged tend to define foodstuffs that may be cheaper and more nutritious, less highly processed and freer of saturated fats, salt and sugar as some version of non-food in comparison at least with tempting, quick, heavily manufactured items that can sometimes be more expensive? Discussions of uneven access to food at some stage need to take closer account of the social distribution of taste, in which social discriminations as to what counts as food lie at the core. In the present context, incidentally, reflecting on what is to count as food is generic and thus includes drink; it is to encompass, not prejudge, cultural distinctions between the two. The extent to which liquids are reckoned to be food, along with social discriminations between solid and liquid, are themselves part of the topic for investigation in enquiring about definitions of food and nonfood.

This essay attempts to make a start on leading a grasp of the cultural distinction between food and non-food into areas where rather often it has been left muted and vice versa, bringing concerns in those areas into the scholarly field of vision of sociologists who have long tended to neglect them. One vital purpose in so doing is to move toward seeing if there are any lessons that can be learned the better in the future to deal with the maldistribution of foods and unequal access to them. Thus, what follows tries to initiate a line of enquiry that thinks out loud about whether fastening onto the qualitative aspects of scarcity in abundance might pave the way for further useful thoughts about the quantitative. But let the reader beware! One thing at a time; doing much in the way of evaluating the virtues or vices of this line of enquiry is postponed for another occasion. All that can be attempted here is just a beginning.