Recently perusing the new books section at the Gilroy library, I
saw a book I knew I had to read, Garlic Capital of the World:
Gilroy, Garlic and the Making of a Festive Foodscape.
Recently perusing the new books section at the Gilroy library, I saw a book I knew I had to read, Garlic Capital of the World: Gilroy, Garlic and the Making of a Festive Foodscape.
Written by a culinary anthropologist – who knew there was such a thing? – the book is quite academic and is in fact the product of press affiliated with the University of Mississippi. The author, Pauline Adema, teaches at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and is staff folklorist (another offbeat career option) for Poughkeepsie’s arts council.
She writes about Gilroy’s garlic festival and Coppell, Texas’s PigFest, exploring why one succeeded and the other failed. She examines Gilroy with a scrutiny that is thoughtful and provocative; some of her assertions about the Garlic Festival will certainly raise some locals’ hackles (but I’ll get into that in the next column).
“While the association of Gilroy and garlic may seem organic, it is not; the process of its realization is a superb study in place branding through iconizing food,” Adema says in the preface, and goes on to describe exactly how Gilroy went about doing that.
She gives the history of garlic: in the early part of the 20th century, it was mistrusted as a foreigner’s food. The nonindigenous bulb was introduced to us by southern Europeans (especially Italians) who bore the brunt of racist attitudes towards immigrants. It was demonized as a food of a low socioeconomically-based population.
Adema quotes Harvey Levenstein, “The acrid smells of garlic and onions wafting through the immigrant quarters seemed to provide unpleasant evidence that their inhabitants found American ways unappealing; that they continued to find foreign (and dangerous) ideas as palatable as their foreign food.”
Garlic was also considered too sexy. Adema writes that it was considered “dangerous to the moral fiber of society because spicy foods were thought to stimulate the body, which in turn led to sinful sexual thoughts and excessive consumption of alcohol.”
We take garlic for granted today, but it really wasn’t a part of American kitchens over 100 years ago.
Fanny Farmer’s first 1896 cookbook didn’t include garlic in any of its five tomato sauce recipes (including an “Italian” sauce), Adema states. As the 1900s progressed, garlic became known, but not appreciated. She references a 1939 article on Joe Dimaggio which stated that, presumably unlike most Italians, “he never reeks of garlic.”
We can thank James Beard and Julia Child for helping Americans get used to the idea of garlic in the 1950s and ’60s. We can also “thank” increased restrictions on immigration in the 1920s that relaxed Anglo-Americans’ fears about national identity becoming diluted. By the 1970s, garlic was in full swing, with several cookbooks devoted solely to it as an ingredient. In 1974, the organization Lovers of the Stinking Rose was established.
Gilroy’s particular history of garlic involved, like many towns, introduction to the bulb by Italian immigrants in the 1890s. They were the main growers, for their own use, “until Japanese farmers like Hirasaki began growing it for commercial purposes … By 1940, Hirasaki’s Gilroy farm was the largest commercial garlic farm in the United States,” she writes.
The forced internment of Japanese during WWII caused a temporary stoppage, but many returned to Gilroy and picked up where they left off.
At the time of the first garlic festival, Gilroy was already known as a stinktown. Operating on the same principle as gay people reclaiming the word “queer” and giving it a positive spin, the festival organizers decided to capitalize on the city’s reputation as a place where garlic was truly in the air.
After several chapters exploring the nuances of Gilroy’s festival, Adema turns her attention to Coppell, Texas, and its short-lived PigFest. In the best sentence in the book, she writes, “While pigs are potentially as much, if not more, fun than garlic as an organizing theme, the event did not work.”
That festival failed for many reasons, including the fact that the city’s connection to pigs was not made entirely clear to visitors. It also suffered from a lack of volunteers to successfully pull it off, and the threat of rain which would cancel everything and result in a great loss of revenue.
The festival’s message was also convoluted, with pigs celebrated as pets, displayed as farm animals … and also cooked.
Gilroy’s success was due to our visible and olfactory connection to garlic, marketing, people’s readiness to attend a quirky, garlic-based festival, an involved volunteer force, and the plain good luck of timing.
Next time: Adema’s criticism of certain aspects of the festival.
Erika Mailman teaches novel writing through mediabistro.com and is the author of The Witch’s Trinity. www.erikamailman.com.
