Sending, Bringing, Consuming and Researching Food Parcels
This introductory chapter provides an overview of food-related meanings and practices in the context of international migration. Food parcels act as bridging items in contexts of physical separation and spatial discontinuity. They signal the desire to mai
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Sending, Bringing, Consuming and Researching Food Parcels Diana Mata-Codesal and Maria Abranches Introduction In 2008, on my first fieldwork visit to Andean Ecuador, I (Diana) encountered, hanging in the window of a carrier agency in the city of Cuenca, a picture of a roasted guinea pig stuffed with hominy and ready to be sent to the US. The sending of food parcels from this region—locally known as Austro—to the US has long been common practice for local families with members abroad. In particular, guinea pig—locally known as cuy—is a culturally loaded foodstuff throughout the Andes (Archetti 1997), widely consumed in festive and ceremonial events in Andean Ecuador, and which reportedly “travels well” (Abbots 2008). During my fieldwork (2009–2010) in Guinea-Bissau, a small country in the West African coast, I (Maria) helped to harvest, pack, transport, sell, buy, pack again and then send fresh vegetables and fruit in cardboard
D. Mata-Codesal (*) Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain M. Abranches University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
© The Author(s) 2018 D. Mata-Codesal, M. Abranches (eds.), Food Parcels in International Migration, Anthropology, Change, and Development, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40373-1_1
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boxes to Portugal every week, mostly through “informal” carriers found at the airport. “Odja i badjiki pa Europa!” (Look, here are roselle leaves to send to Europe) was the slogan often heard in the local food market in Bissau, announcing the freshness of the vegetables and their guaranteed safe arrival in Europe. In this announcement, the involvement of a complex, trust-based network of farmers, traders, carriers and a variety of other intermediaries in this common transnational practice was also implicit. The ostensibly anecdotal nature of the two vignettes above and their initial apparent expression of locality and exoticism soon vanish when confronted with the prevalence and importance of small-scale food-sending practices worldwide. For those Ecuadorians in the US who receive food parcels, the meaningless of food eaten daily—predominantly by irregular male migrants from the Austro—in order to just feed working bodies is complemented by the specialness of the contents of the food parcels which are routinely sent from Ecuador (Mata-Codesal 2010). Food parcels are essential in the relationship between migrants and their relatives back in Ecuador, just as they are for Guineans at home and abroad and for many others elsewhere, as the chapters in this book demonstrate. In Bissau, as the vignette shows, market food sellers are familiar with the final destination of the products they sell. They maintain a close relationship with all those involved in the food chain—from production in the urban smallholdings of Bissau’s periphery or further rural settings, to packing and sending the food parcels and final consumption in Portugal— revealing notably close networks and connections across borders. In the summer of 2014, the importance of food parcels in creating, developing a
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