Last time, I wrote about the book Garlic Capital of the World:
Gilroy, Garlic and the Making of a Festive Foodscape by Pauline
Adema.
Last time, I wrote about the book Garlic Capital of the World: Gilroy, Garlic and the Making of a Festive Foodscape by Pauline Adema. Her book explores how our city’s garlic festival became a successful event, continuing to persevere for three decades, while another town’s festival celebrating pigs failed miserably.
I want to continue discussion of her book, especially since she makes some provocative arguments about the Gilroy Garlic Festival.
Adema praises the fact that 10 percent of our city’s population volunteers at the festival and that Gilroy has succeeded at creating a city identity. But not everything smells like a rose to her.
She argues about the festival’s use of the word gourmet: “It is debatable whether eating garlic bread or garlicky pasta with pesto sauce on a sun-parched patch of worn grass constitutes a gourmet experience … The fact that Gilroy Garlic Festival organizers continue to conceive of and promote their Festival as gourmet seems specious.”
But her real concern is with the racial relations surrounding the festival. Absent from the celebration are the people whose labor makes the garlic happen.
She explores in-depth the garlic topping contest which happens annually as a part of the festival. In the contest, competitors use sharp shears to trim the roots and stalks, and when time is up their baskets are weighed. The person whose basket is heaviest wins.
This is one of the places in the book where her anthropological viewpoint feels quite valid. (Adema is a culinary anthropologist.) She views the contest as a microcosm of the true, difficult labor involved in garlic harvesting.
The actual workers, “all of whom are of Mexican or Hispanic descent,” she say, perform their real task in a brief window of time, on their knees while festival-goers sit on hay bales in a circle around them watching.
“At the Festival, as in their daily work environment, non-Anglo laborers are being judged by nonlaboring observers … overseen by an Anglo managerial supervisor,” she writes. That supervisor is Bill Christopher of Christopher Ranch, who emcees the competition. The event may actually “reinforce social divisions,” argues Adema, while professing to do the opposite. She notes that the competitors are introduced to the crowd by their first names only, implying an unearned familiarity that objectifies them.
She points out that agribusiness laborers literally work at the same time the festival commemorating their work takes place. Chillingly, Adema tried one year to talk to the topping contestants after the competition, but they were rushing to get back to work.
She describes the post-contest scramble (among spectators) to snatch up the free garlic bulbs as a way to allow the competitors to laugh at the visitors’ greed and momentarily subvert the hierarchy.
In 1980, UFWA workers picketed the Garlic Festival. In a wage dispute with the garlic growers, they resisted organizers’ requests to acknowledge the difference between the Gilroy Garlic Festival Association and the growers – who after all did significantly benefit from the annual festival. Adema asks rhetorically, “Festival frivolity overshadows the agricultural connection, often to the point of erasure. Who wants to think about the details of agribusiness while walking around a food festival?”
On the lighter side, any book containing the words “hegemony” and “conflated” can be instantly pegged as academic, and sure enough parts of the book are reminiscent of my graduate school days when I “hung out” with Lacan, Derrida and some other really fun folks.
Just for your viewing pleasure, I looked for a particularly academic sentence to share, and found it in her definition of the word “foodscape.” She writes, “Affixing the suffix -scape to food assigns the terms with multidimensional layers, what contemporary social theory recognizes as ‘perspectival constructs, influenced by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors.’ ” Yes. That is why she simply needed to eat some fried artichoke hearts with parmesan-dusted shrimp and let her manuscript sit for a minute.
Anyway, her style is forgivable because she does raise some really interesting points (and after all, her audience is academia, not an opinion columnist in Garlictown).
Plus, it’s fun to read about your city from an outsider’s perspective. She refers to Eagle Ridge as “Eagle Pass” and jokes about the half-chewed garlic jelly beans spat onto the ground at the 2004 festival.
Gilroy is certainly the go-to city for garlic festivals, but did you know we weren’t the only ones? Obviously, Arleux, France’s festival was part of founder Rudy Melone’s inspiration, but others in Delray Beach, Florida, where staff wear T-shirts that say, “Volunteer Stinker,” and in Shawnee, Pennsylvania, and Saugerties, New York, to name three, like to assert their garlicky dominance.
