French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age Review

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French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age ReviewThis book was a pleasure to read. Part of the enjoyment derived from the delightful writing style which is rare in academic books explaining complex topics like this. However, a great deal of the pleasure came from the author's comprehensive research, including extensive interviews, and her extremely sophisticated analysis. Among other things, she explores the historical bases of two contemporary global networks trading in highly perishable vegetables and clearly demonstrates the continued influence of colonial ties in the contemporary links between African vegetable growers and European retailers. This is something often mentioned but rarely demonstrated in such convincing detail as it is here. I was also particular impressed with the author's detailed exploration of the contemporary social and cultural factors (including media influence) that have produced quite different fresh vegetable retailing behavior in France and U.K. She shows how this, in turn, contributes to different sets of relationships between growers, middlemen and retailers and among African growers themselves. It is one of the most interesting books I have read to date in the area of global horticultural chains and networks and establishes a very high standard against which to measure similar publications. Anyone interested in globalization, food studies, horticultural production in Africa, contemporary European food retailing and supermarket chains, would learn a great deal from this book.
French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age OverviewFrom 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.French Beans and Food Scares explores the cultural economies of two "non-traditional" commodity trades between Africa and Europe--one anglophone, the other francophone--in order to show not only why they differ but also how both have felt the fall-out of the wealthy world's food scares. In a voyage that begins in the mid-19th century and ends in the early 21st, passing by way of Paris, London, Burkina Faso and Zambia, French Beans and Food Scares illuminates the daily work of exporters, importers and other invisible intermediaries in the global fresh food economy. These intermediaries' accounts provide a unique perspective on the practical and ethical challenges of globalized food trading in an anxious age.They also show how postcolonial ties shape not only different societies' geographies of food supply, but also their very ideas about what makes food good.

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