In the post-independence period India relied on Green Revolution technologies to increase production of staple cereals such as wheat and rice. This historical approach to ensuring food security has repercussions for contemporary conversations about hunger. Namely, my interlocutors considered national food insecurity to be an issue of the past. As an official in the Karnataka Department of Horticulture told me, India has now achieved food security due to the impact of Green Revolution technologies. He said that after independence, India was most concerned with becoming self-sufficient in food grains, and was unconcerned with the long-term effects of inputs like pesticides and hybrid seeds: India was “not concerned with [food] quality” because quantity was the most critical concern. However, in the 1980s, he suggested, the Indian government began thinking about how to provide “high-quality foods,” once the “rush to feed more people was lessening.” Between the production plateau of the 1990s and the increased knowledge about the effects of pesticides on human health, he said, India must now think more about food quality than quantity. This narrative—of achieving national food security and turning to other concerns—is linked with a broader understanding of the changing economic landscape in post-liberalization India. The majority of my interlocutors were preoccupied with two problems in this context: the “agrarian crisis,” and rising food safety and health concerns. While these problems affect diverse actors, they are primarily the concerns of the middle classes. Sociologist A. R. Vasavi has shown that the agrarian crisis—characterized by debt and economic insecurity that she attributes to the individualization of risk in the post-liberalization period—most severely affects small landowners. These forms of agrarian distress do not capture the insecurities of the poorest and most marginal members of agrarian communities,garden plastic pots including landless laborers and subsistence farmers .
Efforts to address the agrarian crisis are thus focused on addressing the concerns of landowners. Similarly, as I argue in chapter 3, the farmers who benefit from the creation of new intermediary forms are neither the most privileged nor the most marginal members of their communities. Just as the concerns about agrarian distress and the projects that they motivate are anchored in the middle strata of agrarian society, efforts to ensure food safety are rooted in middle class concerns and desires. In India today, fears about food contamination and adulteration are on the rise, and food safety scares generate intense concern about food quality and health. These concerns are not restricted to the middle and upper classes—the Maggi noodles scandal in which Nestle’s immensely popular packaged noodles were found to contain undisclosed MSG additives and above-threshold levels of lead caught the attention of a wide swath of the public, likely because these noodles are consumed across class, caste, and religious divisions . However, as I show in this dissertation, companies that claim to provide “quality” fruits and vegetables—a claim that is often conveyed through third-party certification programs like organic or GLOBALG.A.P—target the urban middle and upper classes. More accurately, they cater to consumers who are members of the established middle and upper classes. They are justified, however, along the narrative of the emerging middle class and its growing appetite for global foods and awareness about food quality and health. The conversation surrounding both of these problems—the agrarian crisis and food safety concerns—offer certain solutions in favor of others, and in so doing, address some challenges and audiences rather than others. Specifically, I show that the two interventions considered in detail in this dissertation—the creation of new intermediary companies and gardening among urban professionals—are class-specific answers to class-specific problems. This point is critical because these projects establish new forms of food distribution that will replace or reconfigure Bengaluru’s supply chains. In this way, these projects are part of the same patterns of exclusion and dispossession at the heart of urban development policies that privilege middle class concerns and desires .
This dissertation offers ethnographic insight into shifting food supply chains in order to understand how changing urban and agro-environments, class structures, production methods, and consumption patterns intersect in class-specific experiences of Bengaluru’s shifting food ecologies.This is in part due to the inextricable relationship between food, the body, and place. As scholars have long identified, food is a symbolic and material force that transcends and delimits particular places and communities.Appetites and aversions are inseparable from power structures . In his essay on “gastropolitics,” Arjun Appadurai details what he calls “the biophysical propensity of food to homogenize the human beings who transact through it” . In the South Asian context, this propensity makes eating a particularly powerful, and potentially transformative, practice. Food is at the center of South Asian understandings of self and other, and, as Appadurai suggests, the limits of this distinction. The “homogenizing” qualities of food lend a particular character to concerns about food safety and health that are closely linked with place. Harris Solomon argues that experiences of ingestion are central to how urban Indians understand and mediate risk in their daily lives. He uses the framework of metabolism to consider the porous relationship between bodies and the urban environment in Mumbai, suggesting that concerns about obesity and food safety are connected with the lived experiences of life in the city. The homogenizing and porous qualities of food are realized not only through ingestion, as Appadurai and Solomon each identify, but also through supply chains, as forces that link, for example, fields, delivery trucks, store shelves, and bodies. In the processes of supply chains, objects, environments, and practices blur. For example, as sites for production and processing practices that are undetectable to the end consumer, supply chains illuminate the intimate yet often invisible relationships between actors embedded in the food commodity. It is in this porosity that supply chains illuminate the inequalities, insecurities, and aspirations that characterize shifting food ecologies.
While the majority of existing analyses of food supply chains focus on global markets and commodity networks, this dissertation analyzes the regional fresh fruit and vegetable supply chain that connects urban consumers in Bengaluru with nearby farmers. Focusing on the regional fresh fruit and vegetable supply chain opens up a critical issue that speaks to larger questions about what makes food “good”: the proximity between producers and consumers. In India today, managing the circulation of highly perishable commodities remains a challenge—refrigerated transportation is rare, as are infrastructures such as ripening chambers, and basic utilities such as electricity remain sporadic. These limitations mean that highly perishable food is necessarily local. Given the rising influence of the local food movement that envisions local supply chains as an answer to the ills of the industrial food system , India offers an interesting case study to understand the potential manifestations and effects of highly localized supply chains. It also opens up new ways to interrogate the discourse of locality shaped by the local food movement: How do the geographic mobilities and temporal rhythms of the supply chain change between perishable and non-perishable food commodities? What different understandings of locality, quality,raspberry plant pot and authenticity are produced in a place where supply chains are largely restricted by the inefficacies of infrastructure rather than the desire to “go back” to localized food networks? What relationships between farmers and urban consumers emerge in this context? The last question gets at a key dynamic at the heart of this dissertation: the changing relationship between the country and the city in the context of a rapidly expanding cityscape. The relationship between the city and its outlying communities has consequences for ecologies and economies that transcend the categories of urban and rural. Supply chains help us envision the interconnections that complicate the urban-rural dualism. William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West sheds historical light on how Chicago’s hinterland was critical to its creation as a metropolis. By following wheat, lumber, and meat into the city, and tracing how urban markets in turn changed the countryside, Cronon argues that the distinctions between nature and culture and rural and urban are artificial. Rather, the natural resources of the countryside are instrumental to the city-building process. Similarly, this dissertation follows fruits and vegetables to trace the interconnections among agrarian and urban communities. I show that urban consumers’ insecurities and desires are inextricably connected with those of peri-urban producers, highlighting the spaces and practices of overlap between the city and its agrarian countryside. However, my goal in so doing is not to refute the lived reality of the rural-urban divide. For the people who occupy spaces categorized as urban or rural, the inequalities embedded in this distinction are very much real, with concrete manifestations in their daily lives. This dissertation engages with these categories and the lived experiences of overlap and divergence in order to explore how city residents and nearby farmers understand and experience the effects of the rapidly expanding cityscape on their present lives and possible futures.
For each, food offers a narrative locus, embodied experience, and site of intervention into the ambiguities of urban development.Alongside the shifting materialities of food ecologies are changing ethical understandings and practices of food and agriculture. In Bengaluru today, the term “market” is used extensively among English- and Kannada-speakers, villagers and city residents alike. For the majority of my interlocutors, the market represents both the problem and solution—access to the urban market provides an opportunity for higher incomes among farmers, but is also a source of widening disparities within and between agricultural communities. Among urban consumers, the market is seen as both the source of contamination and generative of better options. This attention to the market both reflects and informs a wide variety of changes to Indian agricultural commodity markets and their linkages . In India today, the market is understood to be anchored in the laws of supply and demand. However, this coexists with the belief that the government can and should intervene to make the market fairer and more effective. I heard from many farmers, for example, that the government should support them by better connecting them with the market. This approach to the market defies any easy separation between political context, social responsibility, and market forces. Despite the language of the “free market” that sets economic forces apart from the sociopolitical landscape, scholars have demonstrated that markets are in fact performed and produced . Rather than existing in a sphere separate from social norms, markets become sites to contest moral grievances .Grower attention has been focused on increasing orchard yields for decades and research efforts have been aimed at improving almond orchard productivity through the optimization of all variables involved in nut production. Fundamentally, almond tree yields are the product of the number of kernels produced per tree and kernel weights. Of these two factors, the number of kernels is the most important since kernel weight is generally not a factor of paramount importance for growers . The reproductive process in almond trees involves two years from flower bud induction to fruit set and fruit maturity. In this process the number of flowers borne and the number of flowers that set fruit determines the final kernel yield per tree. Fruit set in almond is strongly influenced by presence of pollinizer cultivars, insect pollinators and by climatic conditions affecting pollen viability, germination and pollinator activity in addition to general tree health. In 1959, Kester and Griggs stated that “the question often arises as to whether or not the fruit set for specific almond orchards could be increased by using more bees and pollinizers to effect more complete cross pollination”. Mean relative fruit set in almond has been reported to be about 30% but there is large year-to year variability that can make it range as low as 5% and as high as 40% . These relatively low fruit set percentages offer a potential margin for almond crop improvement. Accordingly, almond orchards are planned and managed to improve relative fruit set by planting pollinizer rows on either side of the main cultivar rows to increase availability of compatible pollen . The use of bees in almond orchards during flowering increases the likelihood of movement of pollen among trees .