Yi-Fu Tuan - Dear Colleague

May 10, 2005

Dear Colleague,

I've just read Nick Bauch's MS thesis, Food and Place: Consuming Parma, Italy, and it has stimulated me to think along the following lines. (By the way, not many MS theses do that for me!) The point of departure for Nick is that the European Union has taken the step of designating certain foods as the unique product of their region, nonreplicable elsewhere. Not only that, even the attempt to do so is to be discouraged. As Nick has pointed out, this step occurs in the face of two contrary forces: globalization and the rise of bioscience, including the genetic alteration of food. Europe, like North America, is trying to hold on to the local and the past even as they are about to be swallowed by the universal and a Promethean but uncertain future.

What is special about Prosciuto di Parma (a ham) or Parmigiano Reggiano (a cheese)? Answer: both embody the virtues of a particular place--Parma, Italy--these virtues being Parma's rolling topography, gentle climate, proud past, and a hard-working people who lived in the city and its environs from generation to generation. When the Italian makers of ham or cheese want to promote their product, they emphasize nature, tradition, and artisanal skill. As against what? As against artifice, science, and technological wizardry. Porsciuto di Parma is processed, of course, but not too processed! Local spices and salt might be added, but, please, no chemicals from a distant lab. The human hand might knead the ham at some stage of its manufacture, but God forbid that it should know only the hook of a robot.

Foods such as ham and cheese are transportable. In Wisconsin's supermarket, I might find a bit of Parma, Italy--a slice of Parmigiano Reggiano in a sea of Kraft--and when I eat the imported cheese I take into my body a bit of the sunshine, soil, tradition, and people of Italy. At this point in following Nick's argument, I suddenly become acutely aware that a human being is also the product of a particular place, time, and custom. We say, for example, "Here is a nice young man--Wisconsin born and bred!" We can envisage him moving to New York and living there--at least for a while--as an island of wholesomeness in a sea of glitzy sophistication.

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) knows what I have in mind, for he wrote in his famous poem "The Soldier":

         If I should die, think only this of me;
            That there's some corner of a foreign field
         That is forever England. There shall be
            In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
         A dust whom England bore, shaped, and made aware,
            Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam
         A body of England's, breathing English air,
            Washed by the rivers, blest by the aura of home.

This soldier, to be England, has to be natural, someone who roams English fields and breathes English air. He will be spoilt for marketing and consumption if he turns out to be also a Liverpool MBA.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu