Money and food: Towards divorcing the unhappy marriage?
In almost all parts of the world today, we need to pay money in return for receiving a meal or the ingredients to make one. That means people who can’t pay for adequate and healthy food will be left to suffer malnutrition. This text is going to explore the relation of money and food, and the possibilities to look beyond this relation.
The commercialization of food, besides the morally objectionable fact of causing suffering through malnutrition, also limits our ability to connect to each other based on food. That is because food is a symbolic aspect of our collective existence just as a material aspect. Symbols organize our social world: from utterances of words, bodily gestures to shared objects, they convey social meanings in their material being. They play an essential part in how we make each other into human beings as both biological and social creatures.
Most of us accept that we live in a material world, and that money is the representative of material interests in our society. Contrary to this commonly held notion, the very medium of material interest, money, also acts symbolically. Next to helping enumerate the price tags of commodities, money is also a social glue which structures our meaning-world.
In recent years, economic anthropologists have shown that money has two interconnected roles. On one hand, it acts as a symbol of what society values as a whole. On the other hand, it is also
tangible value itself. For example, when I hold a coin, I understand that it carries a shared meaning or purpose with people I may not even know. At the same time, if I have enough coins, I can exchange them for something I need. This dual nature becomes clear when you look at both sides of a coin. The heads side with a national figure or emblem shows that the coin represents something important to society. The tails side, often displaying its monetary value, reminds us that it can be used to buy goods or services.
However, this double nature of value is not something exclusive to money. If you think about it, we treat other tokens in life similarly. For example, the stickers awarded in kindergarten in return for good behavior: kids covet to acquire the valuable stickers, which represent the greater meaning of being a good boy/girl (and depending how critical you are, the authority of the teacher). Similarly, think of military medals, religious offerings, or adornments incentivized by some youth subcultures, such as pins or tattoos.
Food, too, can function in this dual way. It can be a token of hospitality when welcoming guests, a sign of cultural sophistication in fine dining, or even hold religious meaning—all while being something we physically need and desire. For example, the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia, have used their main produce, yams, as a means to create kinship relations or exchanging it for magical secrets. In Christianity, bread eaten during religious ceremonies symbolizes God. In fact, recent archeology suggests that Neolithic peoples’ adoption of early farming may rest not on maximizing the amount of calories produced but on social and religious reasons. Mesoamerican and Egyptian early grain cultivation were both motivated by making beer for ritual purposes, while Mesopotamian farmers seem to have mostly done it for establishing connections with their neighboring settlements.
Over time, money in the form of minted coins grew in importance as kingdoms expanded and began taxing their populations. First, the currency of countries had little importance in people’s lives, mostly only required to pay taxes to the tax collector. Through the reign of some empires, official currencies started defining value within regular people’s lives as well, starting in urban areas. However, it wasn’t until the expansion of European empires that money became the dominant symbol of value we know today. Everywhere, but more in so-called developed countries, money has eclipsed other forms of value that were described above. So, it is hard for other tokens, such as food, to promote other values broadly in society. It is in this very reduction of all other values to secondary importance that money becomes exchangeable with everything, including food.
Food has the potential to create and sustain non-commercial forms of value because it’s a universal need and something that can’t be hoarded or accumulated like money. It easily allows for reciprocal exchange, it can almost universally be recognized as a gift. That is why food distribution is a crucial avenue of social change, although it should undoubtedly be coupled with changes in food production. This brings us to the spaces where food is shared and consumed.
If “a man is what he eats” as the German proverb has it, then the places where people eat might as well be society itself. Whether we eat in a chain restaurant, small or big family home, food kiosk, or alone at home, tells something about how people relate to each other. The places where people eat are both places where people reproduce each other as biological but also symbolic beings. Places where food is shared with a reduced role for monetary exchange can become hubs for creating new kinds of social values. These places can take the shape of public kitchens or cooperative cafeterias. They could involve not just sharing meals but also cooking together, facilitating solidarity and awareness that we share the same struggle.
Another issue in our money-dominated world that is beyond the scope of this text is the generalization of wage-labor. But this has meant that food preparation has largely been pushed into the private, domestic sphere, often falling on women. In most parts of the world, women do the reproductive work of preparing food and feeding family members. Public kitchens can also bring women together and out of the domestic sphere. Since it brings all genders together on a potentially egalitarian platform, it can also challenge the gendered division of labor in regards to food.
So, what might these alternative food spaces look like, especially in the hostile terrain of contemporary cities? History offers some examples. Some utopian socialists advocated highly regulated mass kitchens, where every citizen would be entitled to their pre-made rations. Anarchist revolutionary Peter Kropotkin acknowledged the economic advantage of mass preparation of food-stuffs, but criticized them for missing the importance of cooking meals for varying personal tastes. He suggested that basic food-stuffs could be mass-produced in communal kitchens, such as potatoes and stock, which could be used in turn by households or larger groups of friends for cooking. That arrangement would exist next to public kitchens serving already made meals, which would replace restaurants.
Workers movements in the last two centuries developed mutual aid centers connected to the emerging trade union movement, such as the Bourse du Travail in France, and its equivalents in Germany and England. During strikes, they would set up soup kitchens to feed each other. The workers movement also set-up food cooperatives. One of these was La Marmite (‘The Pot’), founded in 1868 by the revolutionary Eugene Varlin and anarcha-feminist Nathalie Lemel. At its height, they had four branches across Paris and 8000 members. Membership would cost a one-time fee, and after that members could eat and spend time at the establishments as they like. Under the food shortages of Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the Paris Commune of 1871, La Marmite continued to feed the people of Paris. Musical performances and philosophical debates were also common. It would probably not be an exaggeration to say that lunch tables have played a larger role in the origin of revolutionary ideas than study desks.
Today, groups which organize Food Not Bombs or Vokus as they are called in different regions continue this tradition. They collect food that would otherwise go to waste from markets and restaurants and distribute it for free or on a donation basis. These initiatives form a decentralized network practicing such an activity, with perhaps hundreds of instances of it worldwide. Across Europe, there are also squatted social centers which function as donation based cafeterias. Moreover around the world cooperative restaurants and cafeterias continue to exist despite the recent onslaught of big chain-restaurants. Unsurprisingly, such places are also often venues for making and enjoyment of art, neighborhood activities, and social connection in general.
Past and current experiences provide us with a variety of examples on organizing sharing of food with minimal role of monetary exchange. All of them show that sharing food goes beyond the mere act of eating together and encompasses a wider social world. Thought this way, finding empowering ways to share food and constructing better societies which desire other values might be two necessarily inseparable tasks.