Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Showing 1 - 3 of 3 matches in All Departments
That rosy tomato perched on your plate in December is at the end of a great journey-not just over land and sea, but across a vast and varied cultural history. This is the territory charted in Fresh. Opening the door of an ordinary refrigerator, it tells the curious story of the quality stored inside: freshness. We want fresh foods to keep us healthy, and to connect us to nature and community. We also want them convenient, pretty, and cheap. Fresh traces our paradoxical hunger to its roots in the rise of mass consumption, when freshness seemed both proof of and an antidote to progress. Susanne Freidberg begins with refrigeration, a trend as controversial at the turn of the twentieth century as genetically modified crops are today. Consumers blamed cold storage for high prices and rotten eggs but, ultimately, aggressive marketing, advances in technology, and new ideas about health and hygiene overcame this distrust. Freidberg then takes six common foods from the refrigerator to discover what each has to say about our notions of freshness. Fruit, for instance, shows why beauty trumped taste at a surprisingly early date. In the case of fish, we see how the value of a living, quivering catch has ironically hastened the death of species. And of all supermarket staples, why has milk remained the most stubbornly local? Local livelihoods; global trade; the politics of taste, community, and environmental change: all enter into this lively, surprising, yet sobering tale about the nature and cost of our hunger for freshness.
From mad cows to McDonaldization to genetically modified maize,
European food scares and controversies at the turn of the
millennium provoked anxieties about the perils hidden in an
increasingly industrialized, internationalized food supply. These
food fears have cast a shadow as long as Africa, where farmers
struggle to meet European demand for the certifiably clean green
bean. But the trade in fresh foods between Africa and Europe is
hardly uniform. Britain and France still do business mostly with
their former colonies, in ways that differ as dramatically as their
national cuisines. The British buy their "baby veg" from
industrial-scale farms, pre-packaged and pre-trimmed; the French,
meanwhile, prefer their green beans naked, and produced by
peasants. Managers and technologists coordinate the baby veg trade
between Anglophone Africa and Britain, whereas an assortment of
commercants and self-styled agro-entrepreneurs run the French bean
trade. Globalization, then, has not erased cultural difference in
the world of food and trade, but instead has stretched it to a
transnational scale.
From mad cows to McDonaldization to genetically modified maize,
European food scares and controversies at the turn of the
millennium provoked anxieties about the perils hidden in an
increasingly industrialized, internationalized food supply. These
food fears have cast a shadow as long as Africa, where farmers
struggle to meet European demand for the certifiably clean green
bean. But the trade in fresh foods between Africa and Europe is
hardly uniform. Britain and France still do business mostly with
their former colonies, in ways that differ as dramatically as their
national cuisines. The British buy their "baby veg" from
industrial-scale farms, pre-packaged and pre-trimmed; the French,
meanwhile, prefer their green beans naked, and produced by
peasants. Managers and technologists coordinate the baby veg trade
between Anglophone Africa and Britain, whereas an assortment of
commercants and self-styled agro-entrepreneurs run the French bean
trade. Globalization, then, has not erased cultural difference in
the world of food and trade, but instead has stretched it to a
transnational scale.
|
You may like...
|