The Global System (Or How a Merrill Lynch Golf Jacket Ends Up Being Worn By a Farmer in Ghana)

A story  in the New York Times from late September continues to irk me and bring out my inner Yosemite Sam.  I finally have the fieldwork metaphor try and explain why this piece is so damaging to how we think about Africa as a place and its position in the world.  

Following the Westgate Mall attacks in Nairobi, East Africa correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman stated that Nairobi presents an excellent context for watching the expansion of Africa’s middle class.  He elaborates:

“…new office blocks are rising above the tin-shack slums, new bistros are popping up all over the place and taxi drivers are getting on Facebook. It’s essentially Africa joining the world.”

This is a very problematic way of reporting on Africa.  First of all, we should not be surprised that Kenyans performing drudgerous work know how to use the internet and are inclined to participate in social media.  As a blogger for the site Africa is a Country recently snarked in reaction to a different Times piece (one bellowing the wonders of how artists in Kenya use the internet as a means to create and share), “If a Kenyan DJ uploads a mixtape to soundcloud and the New York Times isn’t around to hear it, does it make a sound?” 

My overarching issue with this reporting is that an emerging middle class in Africa and Africa “joining the world “are two very different things.  There is something going on in Ghana with class, though I’ve yet to come across a convincing definition of a new Ghanaian middle class.  I rather suspect that more people are inching into the wealthy category and more people are falling behind, creating an average that looks middle class.  

This is the size of the new houses that are going up in wealthy neighborhoods in Accra

This is what new apartment complexes look like in wealthy neighborhoods in Accra

This is where advertisements for new up-scale apartment buildings are put up--on existing middle class apartment buildings that show no signs of expansion. 

But more importantly, Africa has always been, and every person on this continent retains active membership in the world. 

Maybe Mr. Gettleman never had a world history class that talked about the trans-Sahara trade that was the economic feature of West African societies prior to European contact. That seems pretty worldly to me. Maybe he forgot about the slave trade.  The forced movement of people from one continent to other continents also seems pretty indicative of worldly transactions.  And then there’s colonialism, and the current era of development that many label as neo-colonialism. There is a lot of external presence inside Africa, and Africa has a lot of presence outside of itself. 

This narrative is so nefarious is because it negates to acknowledge just how globally interconnected this continent has been for a long, long time before Facebook became a thing, let alone a metric for measuring a common man’s place in the wider world.  By equating economic and technological strides with integration into the world, it can be assumed that Africans who are not able to access such resources (or who have no interest in accessing such resources) are, by default, not part of the world.

The farmers who I work with don’t have Facebook accounts.  But they’re sure as hell integrated into a global system that harnesses them into positions of minimal power.  As producers and consumers, they are at the mercy of a global market system that undervalues the goods they produce.  One farmer in my site of study is always wearing an oversized warm up jacket with the Merrill Lynch bull emblem, an item of clothing he inevitably got through the prolific used clothing markets in Ghana.   The fact that this jacket has traversed from the shoulders of a wealth manager prone to golf to the shoulders of a farmer prone to plowing his own fields because he can’t afford to hire the service of a tractor.…………that, to me, pretty much explains how farmers in Northern Ghana are members of the world even though they don’t eat at bistros or log onto Facebook.  

Hoes used by farmers in the Upper West for plowing and weeding

When I asked this farmer of the Merrill Lynch warm up jacket if he thought the price he was paid for his cashew harvest was fair, his response was, essentially, that beggars can’t be choosers.  He got paid $7 for a cashew harvest that will probably go on to gather $14 from the middle man who has the means to get the nuts to the processor.  The processor will go on to charge more, the distributor will charge more and the supermarket will charge more.  And Merrill Lynch will go on to work to ensure that those at the top,  who win the most, can keep on winning the most.  Then they will kindly donate old golfing jackets that can serve as work gear for farmers in Ghana.  That’s our global system that ensures that all people are part of the world, just not equitably integrated into it. 

Baggage

As all of the Groupons for gym memberships putrify my inbox, here’s a thematic posting on weight and health.

One of the ways I gauge the power of my own cultural context is body image. I do a fairly good job of ignoring it in the States, but in Ghana it emerges with full force because Ghanaians tell it like it is.  Over the past 2 weeks I have been told by 3 different people that I am getting fat.  Well actually 2/3 of the sample said fat.  1/3 indicated that I was getting plumpy.  Even if people were not commenting upon it, my snugger jeans have told me the truth.  I arrived in Ghana at the lower end of my weight spectrum and have now crept up to the higher end.  No big deal.  But to have it pointed out in such bluntness is punching my psyche in the face. 

This is a compliment in Ghana.  While we may pass pleasantries in the US by congratulating someone on weight loss, Ghanaians suck up by telling someone they look plumpy. For here, to have some meat on your bones is to show that you are taking good care of yourself.  A friend told me that people sometimes go to the pharmacist for pills that will make them gain weight.   Personally I am finding that switching to a starch and oil heavy diet, (with further supplement provided by reliance on Coke and HobNobs to make the toils and foils of fieldwork feel less bleh), is working wonders.   Though I try wholeheartedly to embrace the Ghanaian ideology, I can’t shake the American ideology when I’m faced with interpreting comments that make my weight gain publicly acknowledged.   Maybe when Jennifer Lawrence no longer has to serve as the ambassador for female weight and body image issues I’ll be able to embrace being plumpy.

60 Ghana Cedis (about 20 US bucks) for this derriere enhancing undergarment. 

It’s not that Ghanaians are promoting obesity or are immune from health issues that stem from too much weight and too little activity.  There’s a strong public health discourse to bring awareness about the non-communicable diseases (NCDs) that are on the rise in Ghana, including hypertension and diabetes.  People are concerned about maintaining a weight that reduces their risk for disease.  For those not involved in physically demanding jobs, intentional exercise is practiced and more cautious consumption adhered to.

Words from the Ghanaian Ministry of Health at a park where inevitably people will be playing basketball and some really great volleyball (not a popular sport here)

Ad for a walkathon promoting heart health in Accra, the largest urban center in Ghana and thus an area of the country where heart disease is more of an issue to do urban lifestyles

It’s that the weight you do (or don’t carry) in Ghana does not come to define you as individually in charge or weakly willed.  Food is not something that instigates emotions such as shame or is associated with characteristics such as will-power. When I eat with women in Ghana, never do we engage in the kind of self-congratulatory or self-loathing language reifying or vilifying our food intake that pads dining conversations in the States.  Here you aren’t what you eat. It is acknowledged that being self conscious about my weight whilst I pursue research on food insecurity is incredibly tacky. I regularly deride myself for my toolishness. But it’s hard to shake your cultural baggage, and sometimes you don’t even realize your cultural baggage until it is challenged in paradoxical ways.

"More Cowpea!"

If you eat black eyed peas for good luck on New Year’s Day, you are participating in a tradition linking American foodways to West African foodways via the trans Atlantic slave trade. For the past 7 years I have lived in (and eaten my way through) New Orleans and Georgia. Now I am residing in a region of Ghana that was lucrative for looting humans to sell into the Dutch and Portuguese slave markets that fed the plantation systems in the Americas.  I’m always seeking and contemplating the connections between these two settings.  Though I’m pretty convinced that the vibe I felt at a parade in Accra is the same vibe I felt when watching a Second Line in New Orleans, vibes are a little too subjective. Food is definitely a more objective connection to make. 

As a Stateside vegetarian, I’ve a bit of an affinity for legumes. The black eyed pea that we know in the States is one of many types of peas fitting in the category of cowpea. So a black eyed pea is a cowpea but a cowpea is not necessarily a black eyed pea.

Cowpea at market in Wa

 The cowpea is indigenous to Southern Africa and spread outwards to West and East Africa as well as Asia.  The cowpea is still important to farming and culinary practice in Ghana.  As a cultivar, cowpeas are important for fixing nitrogen in the soil.  For this incredibly variable climate, it’s also a relatively resilient crop to rains that can either be lacking or too intense.  As a food, cowpeas are an important source of protein for households that can only afford to integrate small amounts of meat into their diet. Cowpeas are eaten boiled and whole with rice to produce waakeye (a dish that must be a cousin to Hoppin’ John) and with fried plantain to produce a dish known as red-red.  The dried bean is also ground into a fine flour that is used to make fried bean cakes called kosi that make for a filling breakfast alongside a millet based porridge.   Even the leaves of the cowpea plant are used, consumed both by people (as a tasty leafy green in soups) and by livestock.  

Making kosi (note the antiquated US aid oil can in the background.....perhaps it is soy oil)

So in addition to being delicious, cowpeas fit comfortably into the local agro-ecology and promote food security for small scale farmers in Ghana.  That’s why it’s a bit frustrating to see and hear incessant buzz about soy.  Soy beans are being pushed fast and furious as the crop du jour that will end poverty for all Ghanaian farmers who partake in its cultivation. Soy is already grown in Ghana, but neither prolifically nor very profitably as it does not compose a substantial part of the local diet.  

Soy is not being pushed as a food crop in Ghana (or elsewhere in the new soy colonies that are already very expansive in South America) but as a commercial crop for processing into oil as well as animal feed that can quench an increasing global desire for meat.   The idea is that there is a global demand for soybeans and if small farmers in Ghana are able to meet that demand they will walk away with cash in their pockets that can be used to buy all needs (including food).  

In theory this sounds great.  In reality, it never really works out that well for the small-scale farmer. For at least the past 40 years, anthropologists and other social scientists have shown how this idea has failed to profit the people proposed to profit.  The reasons for failure can begin at production (when farmers are not given access to the inputs they need to produce the crop) or at harvest (when the market is so un-regulated that buyers are able to grossly under-pay or when the supposed demand is no longer there and the farmer is left with a commodity crop that is not consumable).  

The US is a prime harbinger of how scaling-up does not necessarily work out that well for most parties involved. We’ve already seen what happens when agriculture becomes more about a supply chain than about food that nourishes people.  This is why we hardly have any family farms left in the US.  Small farmers don’t profit in a farming system that is all about links in a chain.   Corporations processing the crops profit.  And those who profit can buy out the “failing” farmer. In the meantime, our food becomes really cheap, but at the cost of a diverse, fresh and nutritious diet.

Salvation soy projects are already unfolding across Northern Ghana. In visiting a community selected to participate in such a new agricultural venture, a major hurdle to success was already prevailing.  Two different varieties of soy were given to farmers.  One variety was not as drought tolerant as the other and the dried out shells of the soy burst, producing an audible popping sound and a visible shooting bean. Farmers who were given this variety decided that the only way the crop was salvageable was to harvest the plants whole and put them in a pile.  In a pile, the burst pods would at least provide an accumulation of beans in one spot rather than exploding all over the field.  However, because the farmers who were harvesting in this manner did not put a tarp down to capture the popped beans, they became vulnerable to demands of the buyer (a processor) looking for a pristine product.  Soybeans captured on the ground are soybeans that are likely to be mixed with detritus such as small stones and dirt.  Such sullied beans do not make processors happy because it messes with their system of efficiency.  So while small scale farmers are smart, adaptable and open to experimentation, they are not always equipped with foresight for all of the potential problems that can undermine their foray into commodity production. 

Soy plants piled to collect exploding beans

Production of soy in Ghana may or may not be of benefit to farmers here.  No matter what the outcome,  emphasis on soy is detracting farmer knowledge from important indigenous crops like the cowpea that are capable of growing in this increasingly variable climate and are enjoyably consumed in multiple, nutritious forms. If we get to make a wish for what kind of luck we’re seeking in our black eyed pea consumption, I’m hoping that there can be more praise for agricultural bio-diversity, and not just for the context that we individually live and consume in.  In the US, we’re starting to honor our diverse agricultural heritage by refining our knowledge of and palettes for the varieties of fruits, vegetables, and livestock that fell out of fashion when our farms turned into mono-croppers and all of our produce started coming from California. Just as we start to realize that our food system really doesn’t work out that well for us, we push the same kind of models across the pond. As citizens trying to re-define our own food system, we should acknowledge that people everywhere have the right to honor their own interwoven agricultural and culinary heritages.  Just because people are poor does not mean that the best and longest lasting solution to their poverty is integration into a global commodity chain that may boom now but bust in the near future.  

If I could re-write a catchphrase, it would be “More cowbellpea!”  It’d be awesome if some celebrity would make it their cause.

Should you be inclined to read some more in-depth anthropologicalness….

Troubled Fields by Eric Ramirez Ferrero is an ethnography that explores how the 1980s farm crisis came to fruition through political and economic means and how the crisis negatively affected farming communities and farm families in Oklahoma.

Silent Violence by Michael Watts is an ethnography that shows how a shift from subsistence to commodity farming in Northern Nigeria failed to procure wealthier farmers and instead produced hungrier families.

Though I haven’t read their work, Judith Carney and Jessica Harris are scholars who have written about the linkages between crops/food in Africa and the American South. 

Thinking about George Bailey in Ghana

As someone working within the sub-field of economic anthropology, it’d be ridiculous to overlook aspects of gifting and exchange during fieldwork.  Since tis the season, these are some rudimentary thoughts on how these elements of economy (for better or worse termed the “informal” components of economy) are part and parcel of Ghana and how they can really get the goat of an American anthropologist.

I owe the inspiration for this blog to a friend and fellow anthropologist  who totally gets the annoyance of being asked for things and who made me laugh over the fact that anthropology hadn't yet ruined my perspective on It's a Wonderful Life.  She pointed out to me that the ending is not all that wonderful because the conniving antagon/capital/ist is left to continue his plundering.  She, too, is blogging her way through fieldwork in Ghana.  Her blog is here and it is stunning.  

It is inevitable that at least once in any given day in Ghana a stranger will make a request of a gift from me.  Sometimes people want me to buy them food as I’m buying food.  Sometimes a child leaves a note on my bike requesting football shoes.  Sometimes the security personnel at the Kotoka International Airport in Accra ask me for the Ghanaian made and readily available chocolate that they saw as my bag was searched.   The requests can be incredibly polite, beginning with the Ghanaian English preface “Please, can you….?”  Sometimes the requests sound incredibly rude to my Midwestern American ears.  "Give me your phone" is a statement I find difficult to relativistically digest. 

Never do I not find this annoying.  When it’s a day of never ending requests, I come very close to cartoonesque meltdowns.   As an outsider, as someone consistently viewed as having more money than almost everyone in Ghana, I see these requests as an attack on my minimal means. Such requests only exacerbate my frustration over my inability to communicate my own incredibly minimal financial position in the world.  My own relative poverty is almost always on my mind (how am I ever going to pay off my student debt??) even as I conduct research with people with much less power to overcome their own poverty. As such, sometimes I react to requests by middle class town folk by pontificating that when cost of living ratios are taken into consideration, I am, in fact, poorer than them and am in no position to be giving away my things.  Though such speeches make me feel better, they rarely resonate.  Most Ghanaians continue to see their country as existing in absolute rather than relative poverty and the US as existing with absolutely no poverty. These speeches also miss what I suspect is the greater point of gifting in Ghana. 

This would be George Bailey's trogan
(a trogan is a slogan put onto diesel mini-vans that serve as public transit in Ghana and that are known as tro-tros)

When I return to my thinking rather than reacting brain, it becomes a bit clearer that such requests are not so much about the item, but about making some form of social connection with me.   I know that my status as an American does make me a unique target for requests (that are sometimes genuinely wanted or hoped for), but this is not the full story. There are different rules for ownership and usage of property in Ghana. As can be seen in the social protocol to invite people to share your food, the mantra often seems to be “what’s mine is yours.”  This implies a cyclical system of sharing.   It’s not necessarily about the equality of the exchange but the ability to meet someone’s immediate need or desire and the knowledge that your own future need or desire will be reciprocally met. As such, I hope people are often just wanting to incorporate me into local ways of being and doing. 

It's important to note that such aspects of economy do not categorize Ghana into some “traditional” economic system.  The country is, very much, capitalistic to the core.  Ghana wouldn’t be the envy of floundering economies if capitalism wasn’t fueling economic growth.  Economic systems don’t progress from informal to formal or from traditional to modern.  Charles Piot’s ethnographic work that is set in next door Togo demonstrates that exchanging within the Kabre society is not residual of tradition, but rather a feature of modernity. He argues that colonial era policy (ie taxation) made exchange with family and friends a more feasible way to engage in necessary transactions for food or services so that  monetary income could be diverted to the new demanding state. 

The gifting symbols of Christianity as they appear in Accra in early November

Formalities abound at this machine shop in Wa.  Don't even think about trying to barter. 

As the month of December is so good at reminding me, I come from a culture where gifts are demarcated for particular events and reciprocation is simultaneous. Perhaps that is why one of my favorite films is It's a Wonderful Life (a film I would like to point out, that is also beloved by everyone's favorite new it director David O. Russell). I love the story it tells of a good life as one experienced through everyday good deeds that are returned to you when you need help most. It's a story of how informal economy meets formal economy in America. 

But perhaps a more compelling ending, and one that suggests the necessity of overarching social change rather than individual problem solving, is the one brought to us by Saturday Night Live.  This ending suggests that if we focused a bit more on cultivating an economy based on reciprocity rather than capital gains, life could be a bit more wonderful for all. 

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. 

Fieldwork. Is. Slow.

I have to take it as a sign, that after my first failed meeting in the community of my fieldwork, I came across this guy.  Meet the official mascot of Team Jessica:

This approximates the pace I feel I’ve fallen into. 

Fieldwork. Is. Slow.  Fieldwork is meant to be slow.  But I’m battling some powerful demons that really want things to be going fast.  Though anthropology is unique in its in-depth approach to research, because it exists in the universe of academia, it is not removed from the pressures (one might say obsession) with the capability to quickly gather, analyze and publish data.  Add on top of that an increasingly indebted graduate student who is eager to have a real job and earn a salary above the poverty line, and a difficult scenario unfolds. 

I desperately want to do my fieldwork and to do it damn well.  However, my reality is always breathing down my neck.

I spent my first two weeks in Wa working on understanding how food insecurity is institutionally understood and addressed in the Upper West. I conducted interviews with NGOs and other bodies involved in food and farming interventions as well as went out of some field trips to the communities where they work.  Such work is vital to ethnography.  It provides context to the more particular description of the experience of food insecurity that I will demonstrate through my data collection.  Once I felt good about my integration into the institutional context of food insecurity, I took the steps to get myself into the empirical context.

The community where I will be living and working is a community I identified in preliminary fieldwork two years ago.   In my 2 preliminary field seasons I have met with and gained the repeated approval of the local presiding chief as well as the members of the community.  In conferring with my colleagues in Wa  about the most appropriate manner to finally get myself re-integrated into the community for the year ahead, I was told that I should hold a community wide meet and greet.  Team Jessica had in mind a focus group that would kick off her data collection.  Team Jessica thought that two previous meet and greets got the job done and that the community would very well remember me.  However, when I recall that it is common practice in Ghana to officially welcome someone into a room after they have been gone for a 5 minute errand, I caved to the meet and greet idea.   Having grown up in a small town, I know that adhering to the local social protocol and not being a pushy outsider is the best way to make a good and sustainable community entrance.    I sent word to the chief to organize a meeting. When I arrived on the morning of the meeting, I noticed that men were walking out of town with their farming tools.  That was not a good sign.  That indicated that people were not going to be hanging around for my meet and greet but rather going to their farms to work.  It turns out that the chief had failed to deliver the message for the meeting.  The meet and greet was a bust. It was the perfect beginning to what will, I'm sure be more busts.  It was also the perfect situation with which to feel all the more excited to board a bus for Accra to spend the Thanksgivingukkah week with a friend and attend the traditional engagement ceremony of friends. 

I thought a butternut squash would be a good substitute for pumpkin for procuring pumpkin pie.  However, said butternut squash was, in fact, a spaghetti squash.  Pie left the feasting picture, but donuts entered. These fabulous fried pillows of dough are called sufganiyot and are the official donut of Hanukkah.  They are 100% made from scratch-from the golden apple jam filling to the powdered sugar topping. 

Grated sweet potatoes for latkes 

Bread crumbs smothered in butter, oyster mushrooms, shallots and garlic and ready to be drenched in homemade stock

Engagement ceremony dancing.  

And now It’s  December and I’m 2 months behind my “official research schedule” and doing my best to be ok with that. Though I officially got nothing accomplished in my week away, I’ve returned to the Upper West with a renewed sense of grit and moxy.   It was a week vital to my mental health. I finally got to sink my teeth into the novel Americanah and got to do so in a beautiful house in the beautiful mountains of the Eastern Region where the sunsets are a stunning background to an early evening Earl Grey and the breezes are equally delicious. When I wasn’t reading, I was cooking delicious food and talking  through fieldwork follies with my anthropologist-in-arms comrade and friend.  And I got to take a hot shower.  It’s not just the hot part that is exciting about that statement.  It is also the shower part.  Never underestimate the power of a functioning shower head. 

This be fieldwork in Ghana.

How Does it Feel?

For the past 2 weeks I’ve struggled to write a post about food insecurity.  Food insecurity has been the core focus of my studies the past 4 years and is a fundamental aspect of my research. Not being able to write fluently about my engagement with the topic was a bit disturbing. Yesterday, after another attempt that left me agitated, I came home and begrudgingly began to do some ironing (a chore I NEVER do in the US, but Ghanaians always look well pressed and as you know, “I’m trying, oh!”).

To make the ironing less tedious, I put on some Bob Dylan.  At the outset of my research I “joked” that I was going to make What Would Bob Dylan Do? the mantra of my fieldwork.  I made this declaration because it is inevitable to have intellectual and logistical crises during fieldwork that necessitate some sort of spiritual guidance.   Because of my everlasting commitment to Mr. Dylan, WWBDD? seemed appropriate.

As the wrinkles in my blouse refused to un-wrinkle and my fated destiny of being an anthropologist who studies food insecurity but can’t even write about food insecurity seemed sealed, Like a Rolling Stone came on.  

WWBDD?  He wouldn’t struggle to regurgitate and explain the Food and Agricultural Organization’s definition of food insecurity.  He’d write a brilliant song that captures the very essence of food insecurity, that of an experience of poverty. Take the first stanza:

            Once upon a time you dressed so fine

            You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?

            People’d call say, “Beware doll, you’re bound to fall”

            You thought they were all kiddin’ you

            You used to laugh about

            Everyone that was hanging out

            But now you don’t talk so loud

            Now you don’t seem so proud

            About having to be scrounging your next meal

How does it feel to be scrounging your next meal?  It feels shitty. Being food insecure is more than feeling hungry.  It is feeling shame.  It is feeling worried about where that next meal is going to come from.  It is feeling left out.  As John Madeley puts it in his book Hungry for Trade: How the Poor Pay for Free Trade, “Lack of food is the ultimate exclusion.  When people don't have food they are excluded from what the rest of society is doing regularly--eating.”  My intent in researching food insecurity is to look at this experiential aspect of it.  I’m not so much interested in the nutritional consequences of food insecurity as I am the emotional, the psychological.  This first stanza so defines that experiential aspect of poverty. 

Being food insecure is to feel part of nothing, to feel all alone.  Perhaps nowhere in the world is this more apparent than the US.  I give myself a lot of grief because I’m not studying food insecurity in my own cultural context.  National food insecurity rates in the US stand at around 16% While I will eventually become more involved in food insecurity advocacy and research in my own country, I know that part of the reason I’ve decided to do the research in Ghana is because the concept of food insecurity is not segregated from the concept of poverty. In Ghana it is easy to engage with food insecurity as a topic because it is acknowledged and addressed.    Food insecurity in Ghana has its own aspects of politics and power to contend with, but at least it is not an issue swept under the rug. Food insecurity is conflated with poverty.  And poverty is talked about A LOT here.  Poverty is at least part of the national discourse, so there is at least an extension to engage. 

In the US food insecurity has to battle its way into the national discourse in order to be acknowledged as a piece of American reality. The fact that Lily, a food insecure Muppet introduced on a Sesame Street special on hunger induced scorn and controversy shows how we refuse to acknowledge the problem of food insecurity. The fact that Congress recently cut funding to food stamps shows how we deal with food insecurity.  In the US we conflate food insecurity with laziness. And laziness is punishable.

If I did my dissertation research in my own country I imagine I would become so mired within the discourse of ignorance and intolerance that I would burn out.  If I burn out before I earn these damn letters I’ll be terribly upset.

I’ve always used Like a Rolling Stone as a way to think about my own progress through life.  My interpretation of this song when I first really listened to it in my early 20s was about rolling through the ups and downs of life.  I was completely oblivious to the greater political and economic context. I know, I know--what a D’oh moment. But at the forefront of 33, and at the forefront of my research on inequality, what seems so apparent to me now is how this song is about how American progress is made and lost--how the winners take wherever they have leverage to take and make more losers.

Take stanza 3:

            You used to ride a chrome horse with your diplomat

            Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat

            Ain’t it hard when you discover that

            He really wasn’t where it’s at

            After he took from you everything he could steal.

American policy does not tolerate losers. This is the attitude we show to poverty despite the fact that the transition from winner to loser can be perilous and beyond your ability to control. 

What makes my Like a Rolling Stone epiphany all the more timely, is the recent release of the first official music video.  The setting of the video is a TV, and we the viewer of the video are also the viewer of the TV.  We control the channels and can change the channels—from The Price is Right to sports shows to programs that pass as news to housewives enmeshed in desperateness.  All along the way, the people involved in these shows sing the lyrics.  We change the channels and we watch our everyday TV programs relay powerful lyrics about everyday life in America. 

This so perfectly captures this moment in time.  As the Trans Pacific Partnership bulldozes over us what is the hope that inequality will ever be properly addressed? As the tar sand oil fields of Canada continue to be “debated” what are our hopes of doing what we can to slow climate change?  As citizens of our nation can’t afford to feed themselves, what are the hopes for health care?? 

We hear the music.  We know the music is there.  We flip channels.