Reading today "The gourmetization of poor's people food", a scholarly criticism to the Slow Food Movement
In 2007 a scholar published "A gourmetização da comida da pobreza", and its impact reverberates till now. Meanwhile, gastronomy has evolved - but how and where to?
Beware!
This is a very long read.
Perfect for an idle summer day, poolside with some iced rosé and some time to yourself - and my article.
With the gentrification first, the idolization then, and now the slow but steady normalization of gastronomy in everyday life, we are living in a paradox where every idea can coexist.
If at the beginning gastronomy as an interest was perceived as the occupation of the wealthy, soon after there has been an idolization (Bourdain-ization, Ferranadria-ization, Noma-ization etc) of the makers (chefs).
Now, everyone with a camera phone and a social media account can create their narrative.
But years ago, it took relatively more effort and hurdles to get an idea out in the wild.
Let’s start with a reading
Here we read together an essay by a Portuguese researcher, PhD Nuno Domingos: “A gourmetização da comida da pobreza. O presidium Slow Food do queijo Serpa”.
It was published at a time when foodism was yet to come (2007 seems aeons ago, in terms of gastronomic communication) and it presents a very antagonist thesis to the initial introduction of the Slow Food movement in Portugal.
Surprised, right?
I was too.
I always thought that SlowFood was inherently good, and a force of change to be supported, and yet…not here, apparently.
The essay says that “Our main objective in this work is to document the social history of Serpa cheese - a history that we consider to be much more complex than the version presented by the Presidium organizers. By situating Serpan cheese in a reconstructed socioeconomic history of the region and its inhabitants, we seek to de-aestheticize this food and its producers. The history proposed here is a deromanticized history of Serpa cheese defined by the constraints of poverty, hunger and class struggle. It is a story in which Serpa cheese has undoubtedly played an important role, but a role that, in our opinion, demonstrates how misleading Slow Food today celebrates it as a traditional, timeless and classless food.”1
This essay is probably the harshest criticism I have read of SlowFood as a movement, from the perspective of a country that would have benefited so so much by hooking up with this initiative.
We know how the story went afterwards.
There is no trace of the Slow Food Movement and its beneficial spillovers in a country that would desperately need them.
No Slow Food, no Slow Fish, no Eataly.
A small country in terms of land, population and IGP, a still almost unchartered territory for gastronomic tourism (that flattens between sardines and pastel de nata, with not much else), having a strong, internationally recognised series of products would have made the difference.
Alas, when Slow Food arrived in Portugal, it was way too early.
Even the author recognizes it: “While Italian praesidium often took advantage of a dynamic national market niche for "quality" regional food, this niche practically does not exist in Portugal (Maia, 2008), one of the poorest countries in Europe.”2
We have to remember that Portugal of 2023 is a completely different country than the Portugal of pre-2010 when the author was writing.
Back then, the niche the author refers to didn’t really exist.
Today however the situation is different. We have more tourism and more money circulating. More foreign residents. More awareness and culture.
Today we have an explosion of gastronomy that is being built around the exponential growth and influx of wealthy foreigners - everything that newly opens between the Rossio Square, Chiado and Cais do Sodré is targeting foreigners and their money.
The local foodie communities, safe for some wealthy elderly, still struggle and face almost the same issues as in 2008: the disappearance of the “old good places” where to eat for 5 euros.
The essay states that “most of the population shop in cheap supermarkets. Few can pay more for their food.”3
Little seems to have changed for the locals, who struggle constantly between the food habits of the general population and the pushes towards improving it from the chefs and communicators - like the spinoff of the Matéria Project, the Residências Project also by Chef Rodrigues, that from Michelin restaurants tries to bring back cultural gastronomy to the masses.
Or so most of the foodie community says aloud, ignoring the fact that there are affluent Portuguese and affluent residents, and none of them has the slightest chance to be able to purchase quality food, as there is nothing around where quality products can be delivered from farm to fridge (like Peck in Milan, or Eataly).
A serious gap.
The article argues that “the praesidium agenda is a way for Slow Food to appeal to poor people to work harder to produce delicacies for the riches. Slow Food to these accusations responded always: "We don't pay enough for our food". With this objective in mind, Presidiums set out to raise the prices that producers can obtain for their products by selling them as "quality" food. Praesidium status is highly sought after by producers in Italy, where Slow Food's distinctive trademark is widely respected and where recognition by the organization can immediately boost demand and price.”4
The essay we are reading is a harsh criticism of the ambition of (one particular producer of) Serpa Cheese in Alentejo to become a Presidium, during the Cheese event organised in 2007 by Slow Food.
However, the author’s biased outlook reflects in sentences such as the one above, fruit of his own time and environment. A decade later nobody would question the assumption that it is RIGHT to pay more for a fair production. Fair to the environment of course, but also to sustain the expenses of the small production.
I find it absolutely interesting to look back at what this scholar of anthropology and gastronomy thought in 2007: “It is true that nowadays, SlowFood, (...) has often been seen as upper-middle class dinner clubs, composed of members who can afford to taste and celebrate foods”.
The adversiariality present in this paragraph, then, has reverberated into Portuguese foodism for the past decade: “We believe it is essential to look at Slow Food's elitist tendencies in light of the organization's clear ambivalence towards consumers. In our opinion, SIow Food is defined by a fundamental paradox: it sees itself as an opposition movement to global consumerism, but at the same time it is an essential part of this same phenomenon; calls on its members to intervene in the commodified world of food, but through consumption, albeit a more conscious type of consumption.”
Alas, even today most of the foodies operating in the Instagram sphere of Portugal food and gastronomy are antagonists, or ignorant, about the Slow Food project, which they mainly dismiss as “an Italian thing”.
So whilst in Morocco and Spain, both neighbouring countries, there are thriving praesidium ecosystems, Portugal is bare.
The focus here in Portugal is all on the producers, which is the constant obsession of Portuguese gastronomy.
Instead, with time the focus of the Slow Food movement has shifted to the products - and with it, away from both the producers and the consumers of said products.
By focusing on the products, more producers have entered the arena, thus enhancing the quality and availability of the products and better reaching the customers.
Simple math.
Power to the producer
Instead, Portugal remained anchored around the centrality of the producer, as the Matéria Project (very successfully) demonstrates.
The drawback of this approach is clear: a total dependency on the producer to create quality products, a barrier to entry, lack of competition, and low production that does not create momentum for distribution and thus does not reach the consumers.
As a consumer, I have to go through several hoops to find the products in the Matéria list, and in most cases, there is no place where I can purchase them.
Surely, presently there is no place where I can reach all these products to be delivered to my doorstep.
Here in this essay, it is clear how this approach was born back in the early ‘00, and based on the fact that “Portuguese are poor, therefore they just buy low-quality products in a mass-made supermarket outlet”: “The producers praised by Slow Food are often described as "peasants", discursively construed as timeless (linked to a pre-consumerism past that is imprecisely defined but which survives or is reborn today) and classless (not so well-to-do as to prevent the sympathy of the members of SIow Food, but not so poor that they cannot eat well, since they are not only producers but also members of a community that consumes its own "quality" products). In the imagination of the organization, Slow Food, these peasants who make good food and eat good food do not have sociological "others", whether they are rich or poor, today or in the past; their "out" is consumerism itself, a force they are constantly fighting - a fight that Slow Food asks its members to join.”5
No, not all habits are good ones
The essay ends with the conclusion “that if we want to make food better, cleaner and fairer in the future, we have to start with a more careful understanding of the true motives, experiences and actions of real people like these.”6
I am astonished.
Popular and traditional do not necessarily conflate.
Here the conclusion is the same, and it is - curiously - absolutely in antithesis with the spirit of Slow Food and its Ark of Taste/Praesidium concepts, as well as all the efforts aimed at returning the consumption of products to a time before massive industrialisation and supermarkets.
This is so ingrained into every process that it is impossible for laudable initiatives such as the Matéria Project or the A Praça supermarket (again, something created to be kind of the Eataly of Portugal, from what it seems) to take off.
“Without a romanticized tradition as a point of reference, the aestheticization of food by SIow Food cannot overcome temporal and social divisions (Miete and Murdoch, 2002:325), limiting itself to being a niche consumption, within which its members "create identities" through the conscious purchase of Slow Food approved products. only to a limited number of privileged people”7
This is however precisely what happened with local projects and initiatives and their emphasis on the relationship of gastronomy mediated through an expert (be it a chef, or a gastronomist).
Why is it so eradicated in Portugal that the idea that what is popular - because it is widely available through supermarkets - is good and desirable?
The essay says that “what is now described as the locals' "preference" for harder and more aged cheeses is something (over)determined by historical contingencies. Hard cheeses allowed landless workers to preserve this food for longer and therefore extend the consumption of this vital source of fat and protein for more months in summer and autumn.”
Whatever happens in “gastronomical Portugal” has no impact whatsoever on the general population. Its initiatives and creations remain in a sphere that is distant from everyday consumers.
This is exactly the opposite of the process that happened in Italy.
If we look at the history of the Serpa cheese, it is crystal clear, and yet the author interprets it in a completely different way, reaching the opposite conclusions as us here.
“When they didn't have refrigeration, these cheese makers were often unable to age their cheeses to ideal shape in the ever-changing conditions in which they worked. A significant percentage of their cheeses actually ended up spoiling. When ASAE started implementing EU legislation, very few cheese makers were still ageing their cheese the old way; only a few manufacturers that still did were actually forced to abandon this practice.
From 1987 onwards, DOC Serpa cheese consolidated changing taste preferences. One of its main objectives was to make Serpa cheese more competitive beyond its region of origin. As we have seen, in the growing national market, Serpa had to compete with other Portuguese cheeses, namely Serra da Estrela, with which many consumers were more familiar or had known for a longer time.
In the national palate that was being formed, Serpa was too spicy - too different from Serra da Estrela, with its soft and creamy texture - to satisfy their expectations (Bettencourt, 2008). ADOC Serpa sought to reverse this situation, to a great extent imitating Serra da Estrela, not only in mørketing strategies but also in production methods. In this sense, the DOC "defined" Serpa cheese as buttery and established its minimum ageing time at 30 days.”8
Do you see what we see here?
The flattening of the taste, caused by the supermarket-available mushy cheeses, shaped the preference of the entire country, flattening regional and local differences. And instead of being identified as an issue to be resolved and eventually overturned, the author chastises the Serpa producers for wanting to stick to a taste that predates the existence of homogeneous cheeses.
In a fight against queijo flamengo, the authors would shoot to protect it, as “it is the cheese that people ask for and want”.
The author says in fact that “the organization has been averse to recognizing "culinary languages" or food "cultures" or "tastes" of middle-class consumers, such as post-war Portuguese urban dwellers, suggesting instead that these people need an "education of taste".9
Seriously?
I am so dramatically on the opposite spectrum of understanding the gastronomic reality that I wanted to shuffle all the papers up in the air and scream.
The ubiquitous flattening of taste to average-to-bad supermarket food is what has and is still killing Portuguese gastronomy - gastronomy so rich in the past that if we look at the last hundred years, it could be a different county altogether, especially in the urban middle classes.
The ones of bifinho with arrozinho e batatinha, one of my greates pet peeves.
But it is not enough for the author: “In today's job market (…) few if any would be willing to wake up at 3 am to milk merino sheep by hand.”10
No shit Sherlock.
This is why you need networks that connect producers and consumers. A network that is built, you guessed it, around the products.
By taking away the focus on consumers and producers, and focusing solely on the product, Slow Food managed to socialize them to the supermarkets, so much so that nowadays one can find Slow Food trademarked products everywhere: both in specialised gourmet shops and fine dining, as well as in humble eateries and mass supermarkets.
The education of the consumers to be proud of their local products and “ask for it” has revolutionized Italian consumerism.
Without it, we would be in this same, paradoxical situation where someone can say that the “praesidium de Serpa bases its alleged authenticity on the statement that "local populations prefer" Serpa Velho. However, as we have already seen, the change in consumption patterns that occurred in recent decades points in another direction. (…) These "preferred" hard cheeses, not only because they were familiar and "appropriate" but also because, given their need to conserve milk fat and protein during the summer and autumn months, it was unreasonable for them to prefer hard cheeses. softer. Owners, who depended less on cheese as a source of fat and protein, and who had greater "power of choice" over what they ate, actually chose to eat softer and younger cheeses.”11
When I started gravitating around the Portuguese gastronomic environment, I was very surprised that Slow Food was not a reality there.
One after the other, all petiole of the industry I’ve been talking to throughout these past many years I’ve always received the same feedback: they felt that SlowFood was an Italian thing, and had nothing to do with Portugal.
The idea of ensuring a quality framework able to safeguard local, typical and ancient food and product traditions, as is the spirit of Slow Food International, was felt like an alien thing, to be dismissed and to stay away from.
In this environment, only the enormous efforts led by the Matéria Project resulted in something concrete: a list of producers, producing quality products. In a sort of artisanal version of Slow Food that reminds me of what the movement was like at its beginning, the Matéria project is at the time the only project in the area of valorisation and safeguarding of traditional Portuguese products.
Why is that so, that the Portuguese are so proud that they have to go their own way all the time?
It’s happening again, this time with the Michelin guide.
After years and years of nagging and complaining that they were being pushed around by their larger and richer and more populous neighbour, finally Portugal will have their own Michelin guide, individual, and their own ceremony.
Besides the obvious small economic effect (someone will reap the benefits and the money offered by Michelin, and it will be local consultancies instead of Spanish ones to organize the events and the works), I do not really see a lot of benefits.
For Portugueses, Portugal is everything: the centre of their world.
A bit like France for the French and Italy for Italians, they think that whatever is theirs, will necessarily be best.
But alas that is not the case.
The country is small, the gastronomic market is even tinier. And the market for those with acquisitive power who could buy quality food for their restaurants or homes, a fraction of it.
For some things, there is a need for scale and scalability that Portugal doesn’t have.
And basing what is gastronomically valid on the last half century of gastronomy is an intellectual fallacy that brings necessarily to wrong conclusions: “Our conclusion is that if we want to make food better, cleaner and fairer in the future, we have to start with a more careful understanding of the true motives, experiences and actions of real people like these.”12
My conclusion is that if we want to elevate Portuguese gastronomy, we need to start relativizing the last 50-80 years of it, to try to recover traditions as they were before the great supermarket groups.
Before people were convinced that “poor people’s food” like a beldroegas soup was less worthy than the bifinho com batatinha e arrozinho.
And start realising that there is an increasing slice of the resident population (foreigners and natives alike) with disposable income, education, and interest in filling their pantries with quality food.
Further reading
Araújo-Rodrigues H, Martins APL, Tavaria FK, Santos MTG, Carvalho MJ, Dias J, Alvarenga NB and Pintado ME (2022). Organoleptic Chemical Markers of Serpa PDO Cheese Specificity. Foods. 2022, 11(13), 1898. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods11131898
West, Harry G., Domingos, Nuno (2016). A gourmetização da comida da pobreza. O presidium Slow Food do queijo Serpa. In Ágoas, Frederico, Neves, José (Orgs.), O espectro da pobreza: história, cultura e política em Portugal no século XX, pp. 173-205. Lisboa: Mundos Sociais http://hdl.handle.net/10451/27711
“o nosso principal objetivo neste trabalho é docu- mentar a história social do queijo Serpa - uma história que consideramos ser bastante mais complexa do que a versão apresentada pelos organizadores dopresi- dium. Aore-situaro queijoSerpanumahistória socioeconómicareconstruída dare- gião e dos seus habitantes, procuramos desestetizar este alimento e os seus produtores. A história aqui proposta é uma história desrom antizada do queijo Ser- p4 definida pelos constrangimentos da pobreza, da fome e da luta de classes. É uma história na qual o queijo Serpa tem sem dúvida tido um papel importante, mas um papel que, na nossa opinião, demonstra como é enganadora a forma como a Slow Foodhoje o celebra como um alimento tradicional, intemporal e sem classes.”
“Mas enquanto os presidiø italianos aproveitaram muitas vezes um nicho de mercado nacional dinâmico de comida regional "de qualidade", esse nicho praticamente não existe em portugal (Maia,2008), um dos países mais pobres da Europa.”
“A maior parte da população faz compras em supermercados baratos. Poücos podem pagar mais pela sua comida.”
outros defendem, na senda de sara- lnugo, que a agend a do presidíum é uma forma de a slow F ood apelar a pessoas po- bres para que trabalhem mais para produzir iguarias para os riêos.3TAiespost;da slow Food a estas acusações tem desde há muito sido: "Não pagamos o sùficiente pela nossa comida". Tendo em conta este objetivo, ospresidiøáesiinutr,-se a subir os preços que os produtores podem obter pelos seus produtos vendendo-os como co- mida de "qualidade" . Algunspresidia alcançaram de facto este objetivo. o estatuto depresidiaé muito procurado por produtores em ltália, onde o seio de distinção da SIow Food é amplamente respeitado e onde o reconhecimento pela organização pode fazer disparar a procura e o preço de forma imediata.
“Os produtores louvados pela Slow Food são em geral descritos como "campo- neses", construídos discursivamente como intemporais (ligados a um passado pré-consumismo definido de forma imprecisa, mas que sobrevive ou renasce hoje) e sem classes (não tão abastados que impeçam a simpatia dos membros da SIow Food, masnáo tão pobres que não consigam comer bem, já que não são apenas pro- dutores mas também membros de uma comunidade que consome os seus próprios produtos "de qualidade"). No imaginário da organizaçã,o Sloza Food, estes campo- neses que Íazemboa comida e comem boa comida não têm "outros" sociológicos, sejam eles ricos ou pobres, hoje ou no passado; o seu " outÍo" é o consumismo em si mesmo, uma força contra a qual lutam permanentemente - uma luta à qual aSlow Foodpede âos seus membros que adiram.”
“A nossa conclusão é que se queremos fazer comida melhor, mais lim- pa e mais justa no futuro, temos de começar por uma compreensão mais cuidadosa dos verdadeiros motivos, experiências e ações de pessoas reais como estas..”
Sem uma tradição romantizada como ponto de referência, a estetização ãa comida pela SIow Food náo consegue ultrapassar divisões temporais e sociais (Miete e Murdoch, 2002:325),limitando-se a ser um consumo de nicho, no quadro do qual os seus membros "criam identidades" através da compra consciente de produtos aprovados pela Slow Food.semum contexto que confira "autenticidade" õ no qual pode "inscrever" a comida que Promove, a SIow Food limita-se a criar mercadorias mais restritas, mais apetecidas, acessíveis apenas a um número limitado de pessoas privilegiada
“Quando não tinham refrigeração, muitas vezes estes fabricantes de queijo não conseguiam envelhecer os seus queijos até à forma ideal, nas condições sempre variáveis em que trabalhavam. Uma percentagem signi- ficativa dos seus queijos acabava aliás por se estragar. Quando a ASAE começou a aplicar a legislação da UE, muito poucos fabricantes de queijo ainda envelheciam o seu queijo com o método antigo; só os poucos fabricantes que ainda o faziam foram na realidade obrigados a abandonar esta prática. (…) Apartir de1.987, a DOC queijo Serpa consolidou as preferências de gosto em mudança. Um dos seus objetivos principais era tornar o queijo Serpa mais competivo para lá da sua região de origem. Como vimos, no mercado nacional em cresci- mento, o Serpa tinha de competir com outros queijos porfugueses, nomeadamente o Serra da Estrela, com o qual muitos consumidores estavam mais familiarizados ou que conheciam há mais tempo. (…) No palato nacional que estava a formar-se, o Serpa era demasiado picante - demasiado diferente do Serra da Estrela, com a sua textura macia e cremosa - para satisfazer as suas expec- tativas (Bettencourt, 2008). ADOC Serpa procurou reverter esta situação, em gran- de medida imitando o Serra da Estrela, não apenas nas estratégias de mørketing mas também nos métodos produtivos. Neste sentido, a DOC "definiu" o queijo Serpa como amanteigado e estabeleceu o seu tempo mínimo de envelhecimento em 30 dias.”
“A organização tem sido avessa ao reconhecimento de "linguagens culinárias" ou "culturas" alimentares ou "gostos" dos consumidores de classe média, como os habitantes urbanos portugueses do pós-guerra, sugerindo pelo contrário que estas pessoas precisam de uma "educação do gosto".”
No mercado laboral atual, disseram-nos, poucos ou quase nenhumistaria dispãsto a acordar às 3 horas da manhã para ordenhar ovelhás merino manualmente.
“ Opresidium de Serpa faz assentar a sua alegada autenticidade na afirmação de que "as populações locais preferem" Serpa Velho. No entanto, como já vimos, a mudança nos padrões de consumo ocorrida em décadas recentes aponta noutro sentido. Estes "preferiam" queijos duros, não apenas porque eram familiares e "apropria- dos" mas também porque, dado que tinham necessidade de conservar gordura de leite e proteínas durante os meses de verão e do outono, não era razoável que prefe- rissem queijos mais moles. Os proprietários, que dependiam menos do queijo como fonte de gordura e proteínas, e que tinham maior "poder de escolha" sobre aquilo que comiam, optavam de facto por comer queijos mais moles e jovens.”
“A nossa conclusão é que se queremos fazer comida melhor, mais limpa e mais justa no futuro, temos de começar por uma compreensão mais cuidadosa dos verdadeiros motivos, experiências e ações de pessoas reais como estas.”
Great essay over another essay, and great job in quoting the passages!