Paprika, Foie Gras, and Red Mud: The Politics of Materiality in the European Union
180
Paprika, Foie Gras, and Red Mud: The Politics of Materiality in the European Union
180eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
In this original and provocative study, Zsuzsa Gille examines three scandals that have shaken Hungary since it joined the European Union: the 2004 ban on paprika due to contamination, the 2008 boycott of Hungarian foie gras by Austrian animal rights activists, and the "red mud" spill of 2010, Hungary's worst environmental disaster. In each case, Gille analyzes how practices of production and consumption were affected by the proliferation of new standards and regulations that came with entry into the EU. She identifies a new modality of power—the materialization of politics, or achieving political goals with the seemingly apolitical tools of tinkering with technology and infrastructure—and elucidates a new approach to understanding globalization, materiality, and transnational politics.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253019509 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | Framing the Global |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 180 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Zsuzsa Gille is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is author of From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary (IUP, 2007), editor (with Maria Todorova) of Post-Communist Nostalgia, and author (with Michael Burawoy et al.) of Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World.
Read an Excerpt
Paprika, Foie Gras, and Red Mud
The Politics of Materiality in the European Union
By Zsuzsa Gille
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2016 Zsuzsa GilleAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01950-9
CHAPTER 1
THE 2004 HUNGARIAN PAPRIKA BAN
Paprika is the key spice used in Hungarian cuisine, and Hungarian paprika is probably the best-known export product of the country. Paprika is essentially dried and finely ground red peppers, whether mild or hot. Because of its unique taste as well as its image as venerable, authentic, and traditional, it has been more expensive than spice peppers from elsewhere. Hungarians use a lot of it. It is in practically every Hungarian dish, such as in the roux of the various pörkölts, paprikashes, and goulashes; they sprinkle it on sandwiches, omelettes, and soups. On restaurant tables, the customary salt and pepper shakers are usually accompanied by one full of paprika. There are dozens of processed condiments and aromas, such as paprika oil, tubes of paprika cream, or jars of paprika spreads one can add to stews or soups, or just to decorate cold sandwiches. There is no Hungarian sausage or salami, or really any deli meat, that is produced without paprika. People just don't realize how often and how much they eat of this little spice until they are told they cannot have it. Which is what happened in the fall of 2004 in Budapest, when the government issued a ban on the sale and serving of paprika. I experienced this firsthand. Not only was I greeted by empty grocery store shelves where the paprika-containing products were usually displayed, I also found that all my favorite quick and cheap eateries across the city had crossed out half of their usual menu items because they required paprika, which was now illegal to serve.
On October 27, 2004, the Hungarian government shocked the public by prohibiting the sale of paprika powder and its use in restaurants and by issuing a warning against household use until further notice. The chief Hungarian public health authority, the Állami Népegészségügyi és Tisztiorvosi Szolgálat (ÁNTSZ) (State Public Health and Physicians' Service), found that of the seventy-two paprika-containing commodities regularly sold in Hungary that it had examined, thirteen contained aflatoxin B1, a carcinogenic mycotoxin produced by mold. The concentration was as much as sixteen times the threshold permitted by the European Union (five micrograms/kilogram). While one would have to eat half a kilo per week on a regular basis to be at risk of developing liver cancer, as experts repeatedly pointed out (Health and Medicine Week 2004, 433), the state had a legal obligation to act. Therefore, in order to extend the testing to all products containing paprika — which included many more products than the commodities used for flavoring mentioned above, such as various prepared and frozen entrees or potato chips — their sale was banned. The testing and thus the ban lasted three days, during which ÁNTSZ gradually released the list of products found to be safe. Ultimately, forty-eight products tested positive for contamination, some containing as much as 87.8 micrograms of aflatoxin B1 per kilo.
SAFETY AS PRACTICE
Practicing Paprika
Hungary produces annually an average of 8,000 to 10,000 tons of paprika (from six times that much of fresh peppers). In 2003, 5,300 tons were exported; the industry is strongly export-oriented. Germany tends to be the greatest importer, with a 30 percent share of Hungarian paprika exports, while other important buyers are Austria, Holland, Slovakia, and Romania. Hungary accounts for 10 percent of the world's paprika exports. Paprika's economic importance greatly exceeds its quantitative share of Hungary's exports. For a small and relatively resource-poor country, products that enjoy worldwide recognition are a great image booster: the Swiss and Belgians have chocolate, the Dutch have cheese, and Hungary has paprika. This spice is used in many other products Hungary exports, such as Pick salami and Gyulai sausage, which are also important image carriers. As a national symbol, it is an asset in promoting tourism. Not only is paprika production a so-called pull sector, giving boost to other Hungarian exports, its great visibility renders its success and failure consequential for several economic sectors.
Paprika in Hungary has been grown on relatively large farms (the largest about a hundred hectares) since agriculture was collectivized in the early 1960s. Other countries tend to produce peppers on small farms. In Spain, a relatively significant pepper grower, for example, the largest paprika plot is two hectares. Going against the dominant privatization trend after the collapse of state socialism, many of the Hungarian paprika farmers decided to remain in cooperatives rather than return to private cultivation. As we will see, this collective strength proved advantageous as trade was increasingly liberalized during the 1990s and early 2000s. Before the existing regulatory practices and the circumstances of the adulteration are described, however, some background on Hungarian agriculture and the impact on it of EU accession is in order.
Hungarian Agriculture in the European Union
Hungary was under communist rule until 1989, when, along with many other countries in the Soviet bloc, it ended state socialism. Agricultural land that under state socialism was mostly owned by large state farms or cooperatives was privatized — that is, handed back to individual owners. The year 1989 also saw Hungary inserted into new trading networks, mostly opening toward the West, to which the country exported agricultural products and from which it primarily bought high-value-added commodities, such as cars, electronics, and computers. Initially import duties were imposed on Western goods, which made them expensive and thus favored Hungarian products. Hungary, however, soon began to eliminate tariffs imposed on imported goods, and in return the countries to which it exported Hungarian produce also did away with their import duties; this trade liberalization was one of the conditions for joining the European Union. Free trade was beneficial for consumers of Western goods because those now became more affordable, but at the same time producers of Hungarian goods were no longer shielded from foreign competition through import tariffs. This had especially dire consequences for farmers, who had just reasserted their ownership over land, domestic animals, and machinery. Western Europe already had an oversupply of food, to such an extent that it had been paying its farmers to limit their output. The last thing western European farmers needed was cheap competition from eastern Europe, so one of the conditions on which Hungary was allowed to enter the European Union was that Hungary also limit its agricultural output. The key agricultural products for which quotas were implemented were dairy, sugar, beef, and grain. There were no quotas for garden vegetables and fruits. The quotas were determined in such a way that Hungary could not end up with much of a surplus — above its domestic consumption — to export. Meeting such quotas required, for example, that farmers who had previously raised cattle for dairy or meat now had to shift to new produce. This created a hardship, because new investments (in technology, seeds, storage facilities, etc.) could only be made by taking out loans, which were hard to get since the new farmers had no credit history nor much collateral, nor the required business expertise to convince banks of the soundness of their plans. Nevertheless, to the extent that Hungary could still export food to EU markets, it did so at an economic advantage because its labor costs were considerably lower than those of western European farmers.
What reduced this advantage was the imposition of new standards. Some of these standards had to do with quality (such as how knobby carrots could be or how big apples should be), some with environmental safety (such as the type of pesticides used), others with hygiene (such as the requirement that animals could only be slaughtered in rooms that were tiled wall-to-wall), yet others with animal rights (such as that animals had to be sedated before slaughter). Some of these were imposed by the European Union itself, such as the food hygienic standard, HACCP, discussed below, or EC Regulation 2257/94, which required that all bananas sold in the EU be at least 14 cm in length and "free of abnormal curvature." Bananas that were too short or were too bent could only be sold in lower quality categories that fetched lower prices. Others were designed and imposed by corporations, such as food processing and retail chains, or by nongovernmental organizations (NGOS). According to the European Union, as of 2010 a total of 441 food certification schemes operated in various EU member countries (European Commission 2010; Arete–Research & Consulting in Economics n.d.). There are a great variety of such schemes. They can apply to different nodes in the food commodity chain (from farm to retail); they can apply to different types of food (dairy, meat, fresh produce, etc.); they can regulate the relationship between businesses and consumers, or that among various businesses in contracts with each other. There has been an explosion of these schemes in the late 1990s and 2000s; according to a study commissioned by the European Commission, their number increased exponentially between 1990 and 2010 (Arete–Research & Consulting in Economics n.d.). They can define conditions in wide-ranging policy areas: out of the 181 (out of a total of 441 worldwide) actually analyzed by this study, 158 schemes applied to traceability, 124 to safety and hygiene, 98 to origin and specific environment, 84 to organic farming, and 80 to organoleptic qualities. But there are dozens in animal welfare and health, environmental management and sustainable use of resources, and traditional production as well (Arete–Research & Consulting in Economics n.d., 9). In the vast majority of the cases, the conditions prescribed and to be monitored exceed those required by national or eu law, but even when they are at what is called "baseline," retailers and processors can require the certificates, because this is their way of making sure that the relevant government regulation has indeed been implemented or implemented concretely in the way that best suits a particular operator's needs.
What is important to note about these divergent standards is that they all have to do with how humans engage the nonhuman world; they profoundly affect materiality. Changing the materiality of production, storage, and retail, of course, also requires new investments, and these have tended to create new economic uncertainties and dependencies for Hungarian producers.
Two circumstances were supposed to ease such hardships. One was the allocation of the farm subsidies that had been in place in western Europe for decades. As my interviews with farmers and their associations on the eve of Hungary joining the EU in 2004 revealed, applying for and then documenting the use of similar funds, such as pre-accession support for implementing quality and safety standards, requires know-how that they did not have, and as a result most could not take advantage of these subsidies. Another way the European Union has protected domestic producers from competition is the elaborate legal framework by which producers of traditional food and drink, especially those from regions famous for such commodities, can claim an exclusive right to use the name or geographical designation to guarantee the authenticity and alleged highest quality of the product in question. The legal regimes of "protected designations of origin" (PDO) and "protected geographical indications" (PGI) reserve the right to use these quasi-brand-names for products that are certifiably from that particular location or are produced according to strictly defined rules, and embody regional cultural know-how and traditions. This is also the case with the label "Traditional Specialty Guaranteed" (TSG). Parmesan cheese, for example enjoys the EU's PDO label as "Parmigiano-Reggiano"; that is, from the region near Parma and Reggio Emilia, Italy.
Although Hungarian farmers, their associations, and officials in the agricultural ministry wanted to take advantage of these EU-sanctioned certificates and quickly initiated the process of securing such protections for domestic farmers, the circle of products that can receive them is quite limited, so the vast majority of farmers could not claim such exceptions. For example, Hungary received PDO designations for the paprika of Szeged and Kalocsa, for the onions of Makó, for the spicy horseradish of Hajdúság, and for chamomile from the Alföld (Great Plains). It received PGI for a few brands of sausage and salami, but currently has no TSG designations (European Commission n.d.). These legal categories can only apply to regional or local specialties and not national ones, which further restricts the kinds of products and thus the circle of farmers and food processors that can benefit from them.
In short, after accession most Hungarian farmers found themselves facing shrinking markets, increasing regulation via standards, and limited protection from the world market. In this environment, there were only a handful of commodities in which the country could retain or increase its market share. Not surprisingly, such commodities were those that could be claimed to embody Hungarian national tradition and local or regional know-how. This book attends to two such goods: paprika and foie gras. Let me turn to the former now.
Adulteration Practices
Paprika adulteration is probably as old as paprika production. In fact, Hungarians' love for paprika itself was born, if not in sin, then certainly in illegality. After the spice made its way from the New World to Hungarian territory, thanks to the merchants of the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century, Hungarians were initially forbidden to grow it; in all likelihood they did so anyway (Halász 1987). Given this transnational origin, it is quite amazing that this spice has insinuated itself so fully into Hungarian cuisine and self-image. While I have not conducted a thorough historical search, the old Szeged Paprika Museum's records show that there had been adulteration in the 1920s and 1930s, and we have little reason to believe that those decades were the only ones when enterprising souls mixed in or passed off some kind of red substance as pure paprika. My search in the socialist-era archives of the various food safety authorities has not turned up any record of adulteration or contamination cases involving paprika. One would expect to find evidence of such instances in the archives, given that many other adulteration or contamination cases, most notably of dairy and meat products, were documented in confidential government documents. Of course, it is possible that such findings were hushed up in return for bribes or preferential treatment, as is the normal course of action in the types of patron-client relations that were endemic to central planning. It is also possible, however, that the absence of records reflects reality. After all, Hungary, a long-time exporter of agricultural products, had relatively strict food safety standards and a highly trained pool of food science experts, which, coupled with the high profile of paprika as an image commodity already under state socialism, could have resulted in stricter monitoring so that adulteration and contamination were indeed successfully prevented.
We have a more reliable record of the postsocialist era. The 1990s witnessed two paprika-related scandals. In the first incident, in 1994, lead oxide was found in paprika being sold mostly at open markets. Dozens of people were hospitalized with various symptoms of lead poisoning, and after finding one-third of the tested samples contaminated, the government banned paprika's use and sale until further notice. Though the tainted product was not found in supermarkets or grocery stores nor did it make its way into exports, such incidents have great significance for public health, since most people — though an ever-decreasing proportion of them — still buy their groceries at farmers' markets, street vendors, or at small mom-and-pop shops. The source of the contamination was a lead-containing paint that sellers mixed in with paprika. In another but smaller scandal around the same time, powdered brick was found in paprika. In both cases the obvious rationale for the adulteration was to make paprika look more colorful, and the culprits were alleged to be foreigners — Ukrainians and Romanians (Perlez 1994). Of course, this framing may just have been a case of defensive patriotism that could not imagine that anything that damages the image of a Hungaricum could possibly come from inside the nation. What is more important to acknowledge in these two cases, however, is that they represent an intentional act, rather than the kind of inadvertent contamination with aflatoxin that occurred ten years later. In the latter case there may have been an intent to mislead customers about the national origin of the spice, but not to taint it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Paprika, Foie Gras, and Red Mud by Zsuzsa Gille. Copyright © 2016 Zsuzsa Gille. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Hungary and the EU in the Political and Scholarly Imagination
1. The 2004 Hungarian Paprika Ban
2. The 2008 Foie Gras Boycott
3. The 2010 Red Mud Spill
4. Neoliberalism, Molecularization, and the Shift to Governance
Conclusion: The Materialization of Politics
What People are Saying About This
"Gille offers a highly original take on globalization processes in Europe, and in particular, on Eastern Europe's incorporation into the European Union. . . . [V]ery accessibly written and should thus appeal to a wide audience, including those who are interested in globalization, the European Union, Eastern Europe, contemporary social theory, and agrifood studies. . . . [A] very important contribution to scholarship."
Gille offers a highly original take on globalization processes in Europe, and in particular, on Eastern Europe's incorporation into the European Union. . . . [V]ery accessibly written and should thus appeal to a wide audience, including those who are interested in globalization, the European Union, Eastern Europe, contemporary social theory, and agrifood studies. . . . [A] very important contribution to scholarship.
Gille offers a highly original take on globalization processes in Europe, and in particular, on Eastern Europe's incorporation into the European Union. . . . [V]ery accessibly written and should thus appeal to a wide audience, including those who are interested in globalization, the European Union, Eastern Europe, contemporary social theory, and agrifood studies. . . . [A] very important contribution to scholarship.