Poor Man's Pizza Sauce and Fowl of the Bourgeois

Value is a concept that anthropologists spend a lot of time thinking about.   The social and economic value of food production and food consumption is something this anthropologist thinks a lot about. How do people decide the value of food?  How does the value of food change from one context to another?   When and why does the social value of food trump the economic value? 

For Thanksgiving I really wanted to purchase a turkey, have it smoked and take it with me to my Thanksgiving celebration in the Eastern Region. However, when $75 was quoted as the cost of a turkey and turkeys were referred to as “the fowl of the bourgeois” I decided that a turkey was not to be had for Thanksgiving.  $75 represents my budget for 1 month of food and other basic necessities in the Upper West.  My budget reflects my ability to partake in my Hobnob addiction.  The folks with whom I do my research have much lower food budgets, one that does not include packaged oaty biscuits. 

These birds could be yours for $225

Turkeys are not a commonly raised fowl in Ghana.  I’ve been told that they are ridiculously difficult to take care of here, thus the high price tag.  Free range, small-scale turkey production is the only kind of turkey production in Ghana. The social values that stand behind the production of the bird are never presented an opportunity to separate from the economic value.

I’m not sure what the going rate for a Butterball is these days in the States, but it’s safe to say that the scale of the industrialized food system that tends turkeys in the States can produce a fowl for much less.  In the American food context, those who can’t afford to purchase a heritage turkey reared by a small-scale farmer buy Butterballs even if their preference is to support the social values represented by the heritage turkey.

In a country where there are hundreds of renditions of spicy tomato stews/gravies used as a condiment at almost every meal..........may the US please introduce the merits of pizza sauce?  

I’ve seen a lot of food products in Ghana that make discerning the contextual value of turkey look like a piece of cake.   How these products even end up on shelves is a dissertation in and of itself.  The most baffling item I’ve seen is a jar of Kroger brand pizza sauce selling for $7. In a land where starchy porridges and rice are the daily go to foods, pizza sauce is not a staple food item and is definitely not produced in Ghana.  It's likely that this pizza sauce is a commodity geared toward the ex-pat community desperate for some semblance of food familiarity.  It could also be an item craved by Ghanaians who've spent a chunk of time abroad and developed quite a taste for pizza. In  the US, such sauce would probably cost $2 or less and be the provision of someone on a budget. The economic value of the good is what attracts some customers.  However, in the increasingly hyper-conscious American food culture, it is the social value that is so unattractive to other customers. In the circles where Mark Bittman is a reigning guru,  Kroger pizza sauce would bring shame as it would be judged as lacking all of the aesthetic properties of food as well as representative of all that is wrong with the American food system.  

For Ghanaians unfamiliar with pizza making, such sauce is an ingredient inducing curiosity and presents a way to feel, perhaps, more worldly and socially mobile or flexible. I definitely have purchased my fair share of ingredients from international grocery stores in the US for reasons of intrigue and a desire to expand my culinary horizon.   If purchased, a pizza sauce transaction reflects capability to spend on one item what could purchase enough high quality and diverse foods sourced from local ingredients that would feed a family for a couple of days. 

Where the social value of food in Ghana perhaps becomes even more convoluted is in purchasing staple foods that are sourced and processed out of country. Peanuts (groundnuts as they are known here) grow all over Ghana and are eaten all over Ghana. From a streetside vendor you can buy a canister of groundnuts for about $3.  They are nicely roasted and left unsalted and are almost always pretty reliably fresh. At a supermarket, if you want to pay for the global supply chain that is Planters, you can buy the equivalent amount of groundnuts for $10.  These groundnuts are guaranteed to be very un-fresh but masked with preservatives. But with them comes a Western brand and Western technology. The social prestige that comes in buying Planters trumps the loss of money.

There’s a passage in the awesome novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that is the very essence of what I’m trying to get at--how food can meet certain social desires.  The scene takes place in a restaurant in Lagos and a middle-class couple is ordering food.  The female half of the couple has spent a significant amount of time in the US and questions the origins of the potatoes that are used to make the chips that will accompany her sandwich. 

“Are your potatoes the frozen imported ones, or do you cut and fry your potatoes?”

The waiter looked offended.  “It is the imported frozen ones.”

As the waiter walked away, Ifemelu said, “Those frozen things taste horrible.”

Her partner replies with this brilliant statement:

“He can’t believe you’re actually asking for real potatoes. Real potatoes are backward for him.  Remember this is our newly middle-class world.  We haven’t completed the first cycle of prosperity, before going back to the beginning again, to drink milk from the cow’s udder” (444)

Shoprite is a South African grocery chain.  This is the newest branch in Accra and the golden halo seems to indicate heavenly approval.

It seems that it's not only what food you buy in Ghana that presents an opportunity to explore the social and economic value of food, but where you buy it. In 2002 there were maybe a handful of what would be labeled by Western standards as a grocery store or supermarket. As of today, there are now at least 15 of these large, enclosed, fixed price stores in Accra. Shopping at such stores is a good way to earn some social prestige.  In observing the purchases made by many of the customers in Shoprite, it seems that many are buying items that could be procured at any standard shop such as a Coke or a small package of biscuits.  Supermarkets such as Shoprite are places that invite people in for a shopping experience incredibly different from the typical open air market--that thing we have only recently re-discovered in the US  and think of as a way to be more socially engaged in our food system. As long as the security guards are not too harsh in their profiling of entering customers, it is a social experience anyone can partake in. 

Only the wealthy may walk away with carts of bizarre foreign foods, but the aspiring middle class can purchase a Coke (surely a prestige item of the recent past) securely enclosed in the branded and distinctively yellow Shoprite plastic bag and yearn for the day that they, too, can buy those frozen, imported potatoes even though they are a lackluster substitution for the local fried yam (seen below with one Ghanaian cook's rendition of tomato stew which rocks this ketchup loving Midwesterner's world and surely trumps any Kroger tomato product). 

Food meets our social desires just as much as it meets or biological need.