Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
preliminarypropositions.Perhapsthemostimportantpointtoemphasize
to readers living in an era when market institutions and discourses reign
supreme is that quality, as one scholarof coffee has observed, is a ''curious
thing.''
38
The evidence that I have reviewed for four important food com-
modities indicates that ''quality'' is a floating signifier subject to change:
there is no universally accepted ''best'' cup of coffee, banana, grape, or
sweetener.This is not to deny that social groups living in particular times
and places often possess similar tastes for goods. However, this tendency
has less to do with objective, measurable criteria than with the subjective
meanings that goods and their consumption acquire.
Moreover, there appears to be a link between quantity and quality:
as mass markets became saturated (i.e., as per capita consumption began
to level off), notions of quality tended to acquire a new sense of impor-
tance. Consequently, historians of agricultural commodities need to give
much more attention to how quality standards have shaped contractual
agreements (and disputes) between growers, buyers, laborers, and state
regulators.
39
Evidence indicates that marketplace intermediaries (roast-
ers, refiners, wholesalers, and shippers) have functioned as key arbiters
of taste and quality. Advertising campaigns, directed toward both busi-
nesses and individual consumers, may have had their greatest impact in
shaping quality discourses related to taste, appearance, and aroma.
40
This
is not to imply that the consuming masses did not exercise agency in
twentieth-century production/consumption dynamics: popular culture
mustbetakenintoconsiderationinordertounderstandwhy,forexample,
coffee and bananas were morewidelyconsumed than tea and plantains in
the twentieth-century United States. Nevertheless, analyses of consump-
tion should avoid idealized notions of market economies in which indi-
vidualconsumerpreferencesprevailand''superior''qualitytriumphsover
the ''inferior.'' Instead, much closer scrutiny should be given to the prac-
tical needs, economic interests, and aesthetic sensibilities of the ''middle-
men'' who worked in the nearly invisible spaces that lay between farms
and kitchens.
41
Finally, it is important not to view export markets as monolithic.
The commodities compared here generallyentered segmented mass mar-
kets. Standardization paradoxically contributed to market segmentation
by enabling distant buyers to acquire knowledge about the origins and
other features of commodities deemed to be important. For example,
many European coffee buyers have historically paid premiums for ara-
bica coffee beans produced at high altitudes. In contrast, mass markets
for coffee in the United States became the primary destination for Brazil-
