Thinking race through corporeal feminist theory: divisions and intimacies at the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market

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Thinking race through corporeal feminist theory: divisions and intimacies at the
Minneapolis Farmers' Market
Rachel Slocum a
a
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, MN, USA
Online Publication Date: 01 January 2008
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Farmers' Market',Social & Cultural Geography,9:8,849 — 869
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Thinking race through corporeal feminist theory:
divisions and intimacies at the Minneapolis
Farmers’ Market
Rachel Slocum
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, MN 56301,
USA, rachel_slocum@hotmail.com
Race is, in part, made and remade through the practices of growing, selling, purchasing
and eating food. Consequently, some food practices are also ‘racial practices’. Drawing on
a study in progress of the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market, the paper covers two sub-themes
of embodiment: racial division and intimacy. The corporeal feminist theory of Elizabeth
Grosz offers the view that the body has explanatory power. This framework enables a
discussion of the materiality of race rather than its representation or performance. Race
emerges through the movement, clustering and encounter of phenotypically differentiated
bodies. Through small segregations in which bodies move toward some vegetables and
not others and through attractions that propel bodies to touch bitter melon and talk with
growers, bodies shape the Market’s meaning. This reflection on tendencies connecting
phenotype, space and leaves is meant as a step toward a politics of bodily practice.
Key words: embodiment, race, farmers’ markets, food, feminist theory.
Introduction
The Minneapolis Farmers’ Market is simul-
taneously constituted by connections made
through difference as well as multiple forms of
exclusion, by bigoted ideas but also clear
curiosity and pleasure. A theory of race that
rests on the raced body’s practices in connec-
tion to food, market space and different
visitors needs to recognize racial inequality,
non-racist acts and anti-racist encounters.
Drawing from an ongoing ethnography, this
paper explores the divisions and intimacies of
everyday practice that produce the embodied
racial geography of the Market. It does so in
order to explain how racialized bodies emerge
through this food space.
Opening in 1876 as a wholesale market
with over 400 growers, the Minneapolis
Farmers’ Market (hereafter the MFM or the
Market) is now a retail enterprise scaled back
to 240 vendors, including both producers and
‘dealers’ who resell goods purchased whole-
sale. The Market’s three red-roofed, open
sheds stand opposite the interstate. When not
in full swing, it is a desolate location absent of
Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 9, No. 8, December 2008
ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/08/080849-21 q 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14649360802441465
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pedestrians, dwellings or shops; its sounds-
cape, the hiss of cars rushing by on the
highway ramps above. The Market provides
space for vendors through permanent places,
some of them handed down through gener-
ations. ‘Dailies’, vendors without a permanent
spot, get assigned different locations depend-
ing on the availability of temporarily unused
stalls. The market manager answers to the
board consisting of ten older men and two
women who govern the MFM. The majority
European-white population of growers, some
of whose families have been at the market for
five generations, was augmented by the arrival
in the 1970s of Hmong immigrants.1 Hmong
people now constitute almost 1 per cent of the
Minnesota population, but approximately
40 per cent of the vendors, and two of the
twelve board members.
To some, the Market is a crowded, bustling,
confusing urban space on the weekends. It
serves a diverse group of urban and suburban
customers. In this diversity are Latinos,
Russians, Eastern Europeans, Scandinavians
and various other white ethnicities, Vietna-
mese, Hmong, Chinese, South Asian, Somalis,
East Africans and American Indians.
On summer weekends up to Labor Day, in
addition to being a shopping place, the MFM
is also a tourist attraction during which time
the throngs of people are noticeably more
white. But prices at the MFM for local and
non-local goods are typically not high and the
fact that the MFM is not a growers-only
market makes it more inviting to a greater
race- and class-diverse population.
This space is also constituted by the
globalization of food production, transport
and consumption that pushed the MFM from
wholesale into retail and which today makes it
more difficult for some smaller vendors to
market their goods. In the context of the
neoliberal discourse of personal responsibility
(for one’s body size, health and welfare),
the new urbanism and alternative food,
the Market’s presence is awkward. The Twin
Cities is home to newer immigrant commu-
nities, arriving under different terms,
including peoples from Laos, Somalia and
Latin America. The nostalgia for quiet, safe
‘American’ communities meets the Market: a
rambunctious place for Minnesota, with
diverse customers and, for some publics,
strange vegetables. The Market troubles the
pervasiveness of hyper-commodified, sanitized
and segregated public spaces (which is not to
suggest it is not itself sanitized, commodified
and segregated).
This paper contributes in three areas. First,
the literature on embodied geographies has
tended to focus on representations of bodies,
revealing how bodies are inscribed by society
or has relied on the concept of performativity.
In contrast, this paper deploys corporeal
feminist theory in which the body’s materiality
is foregrounded. Second, the paper enhances
scholarship on race by claiming, through this
materialist framework, that it is important to
speak of race through phenotypic differen-
tiations, connections, tendencies and what
bodies do. Third, by focusing on embodied
racial geographies in a farmers’ market, this
study contributes to a growing body of work
on such markets in the Global North.
Farmers’ markets, corporeality, race
Farmers’ markets
To the sites of the dinner table, the kitchen,
recipe books and supermarkets (Bell and
Valentine 1997), this paper adds a less studied
area: the farmers’ market. Farmers’ markets
have recently experienced a renaissance in the
USA and their numbers have burgeoned
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(Brown 2002). A valuable public space, the
market is a crossroads for different foods,
bodies and discourses that shape the city and
the agro-ecological region. Spatial processes
and varying mobilities of people and goods
converge to constitute the MFM within
uneven relations of power (Massey 1994).
Here, there are brief, pleasurable meeting
points that need to be recognized along-
side the comparatively invisible violence of
systemic processes.
Farmers’ markets have been constituted by
discourses of quality and nationalism as well
as consumer distrust of the state (Ilbery and
Kneafsey 2000). Ideals of localness and quality
become conflated as consumers assume some-
thing local is more authentic or healthier
(Futamura 2007; Holloway and Kneafsey
2000). Some research suggests that these
markets may encourage social networks
(Gerbasi 2006) through the ‘relations of
regard’ that develop (Sage 2003) or via
consumer requests for sustainable practices
(Hunt 2007). While the farmers’ market could
enable practices that change social relations,
they may also reaffirm entrepreneurialism and
individualism (see Gregson and Crewe 1997).
Markets should not be seen as only the
location of celebration and community; such
nostalgia renders invisible the conditions that
shape the market (Stallybrass and White
1986). This nostalgia is deeply racialized
(Watson and Wells 2005).
The alternative food movement uses farm-
ers’ markets as vehicles to improve food access
and encourage sustainable farming. Organiz-
ations and consumers interested in local food
and sustainable farming tend to be wealthier,
more educated and white (Allen 2004).
As vehicles to augment grower incomes
through better prices, some markets cater
implicitly (organic-only, location, music,
classes) to a well-off, educated and often
white demographic, which I have argued
(2007) produces white food space (see also
Alkon 2008; Guthman 2008). These accounts
undertake important analyses showing how
farmers’ markets are formed through various
discourses and what work these meanings do.
This paper is concerned, instead, with the
bodies, things, movements and clustering, that
are necessary to meaning.
A sensual space where connections among
particular natures and certain foods are more
deeply valorized (Kirwan 2004; Parrott,
Wilson and Murdoch 2002), farmers’ markets
are spaces of intimacy. Considering intimacy
between the human and more than human
brings the materiality of both into focus. Sarah
Whatmore (2002: 162), for instance, writes
that ‘the rhythms and motions of . . . inter-
corporeal practices [growing, provisioning,
cooking and eating] configure spaces of
connectivity between more-than-human life
worlds; topologies of intimacy and affectivity
that confound conventional cartographies of
distance and proximity, and local and global
scales’. Similarly, Emma Roe (2006) suggests
attention to the visceral relations and embo-
died practices involved in eating and being
eaten as a means to understand food fear or
interest in organic. The biochemical and
physical properties of vegetables sold at the
MFM intimately shape human bodies and the
city. The gut, after all, ‘allows the outside
world to pass through us’ and in so doing, it
maintains relationships with others (Wilson
2004: 44). In this public space, ‘negotiation is
forced upon us’ (Massey 2005: 114). The
paper is interested in those spoken and silent
negotiations and even more so in the frisson of
contact,2 the mix of fear, surprise and wonder.
Embodiment, to which I turn next, is
indispensable to this analysis of race, division
and intimacy. Sensory exchange constitutes
much of the sense of place of the Market.
Thinking race through corporeal feminist theory 851
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Different bodies brush against one another,
smell tomatoes, exclaim with curiosity and
lean with heavy bags. Bodies respond differ-
ently to the properties of foods—their taste,
smell, color, consistency, temperature, vitamin
content, calories and ripeness. What counts as
embodied in this paper encompasses what
people do, say, sense and feel as well as how
they do any of these things.
Embodiment in feminist materialist theory
Geographers have expressed great interest in
the body, contributing to feminist philosophy
by showing how space and embodied differ-
ence are co-constitutive processes (e.g. Ainley
1998; Bell et al. 2001; Butler and Parr 1999;
Teather 1999; Nast and Pile 1998; Pile 1996;
Rose 1995). Bodies become gendered through
activities in place and the place itself is active
in the production of capacities. But despite the
apparent enthusiasm for the concept of
embodiment, Robyn Longhurst (1997, 2001)
proposes that in geography bodies continue to
be represented while their fleshiness is held at
bay. Yet the ways bodies fit snugly into
airplane seats (Longhurst 2005), throw a ball
(Young 2005) or are leaky, messy and rubbery
are important to consider as part of a political
as well as a conceptual argument.
A contentious point within feminist theory
has been the question of how to talk about
physically different bodies without reifying
that difference (Williams and Bendelow 1998).
One means was to focus on how society’s
norms shape bodies. But social construction-
ism understood matter as pre-existing and
unintelligible and had not theorized how
sexual oppression occurs at the ‘level of the
constitution of bodily materiality as sexed’
(Cheah 1996: 111). The importance and
sophistication of performativity as a response
to these inadequacies cannot be overstated.
But as it has been articulated by Judith Butler
(1993), the matter of bodies is mediated by
discourse and therefore comprehensible only
through that mediation. Pheng Cheah (1996)
finds that Butler excludes natural materiality
and instead confines matter to human mor-
phology which the latter understands as
already cultural. For Butler, ‘materiality
becomes present, is given body, . . . only in
being . . . signified in language’ (1996: 116).
Yet, asks Jacinta Kerin,
If we insist on conflating ontological inquiry per se
with the way in which it has worked historically
within dominant knowledges . . . then the possibility
of thinking otherwise is foreclosed . . . How can we
decide what it means to affirm an array of
materialities unless we are permitted some, however
contingent, ontological concept of what those
materialities are? (1999: 99–100)
Kerin points out that feminists cannot afford
not to engage with matter—its existence, its
necessity and its bearing on interpretation. For
Elizabeth Wilson (2004: 8), engaging with
matter means not sidestepping the neurologi-
cal and biochemical, as she claims many
humanities and social science accounts of the
body have done. Exploring what may, at first
glance, appear essentialist or reductionist is
useful, she argues, to the feminist project.
Far from being a tired topic, the discussion
of nature and culture has only just begun.
Some of the most interesting contributions to
that conversation have come from Elizabeth
Grosz. Her philosophical positioning of nature
and culture provides the ground from which to
speak of the body’s mattering.3 No dismissal
of work concerned with epistemology occurs;
the question for Grosz (2005: 5) is the debt
representation owes to ontology. Culture, she
writes, drawing on Darwin, is not the
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completion of an incomplete nature. Instead,
nature ‘enables and actively facilitates cultural
variation and change’; the biological incites
culture, but nature does not limit the cultural.
Culture and representation have an outside
that impinges on the plans of the living
(see Clark 2005). The competing forces of
this outside induce subjectivity and make
culture act and change (Grosz 2005: 30–31,
43, 47–49).
Earlier, Grosz (1994) had argued that all
aspects of the subject can be just as adequately
explained through bodies as through the mind
or consciousness. Bodies are biological and
sensory, not merely blank slates for inscription
by society and not biologically-given entities
with particular destinies. Generating ‘what
is new, surprising, unpredictable’ (Grosz 1994:
xi), bodies are the ‘passage from being to
becoming’, thus what bodies do is to
continually form themselves (‘positive becom-
ing’) (Colebrook 2000: 86–87). Bodies
become through what they do, the relations
of which they are a part and the formations in
which they act. Corporeality, then, refers to a
dynamic capacity of human bodies to emerge
in relation to each other and to things, within
social and physical limits, and thereby to form
sexual and racial identities (Grosz 2005).
While these differences are not limited to those
forms we currently acknowledge, they are not
‘open to self conscious manipulation, identi-
fication or control by subjects’ (2005: 89). A
body’s capacities, finally, are always enabled
or limited by the socio-physical space in which
they are located (Saldanha 2007).
In geography, an interest in ethics and
particularly affect and emotion has emerged
to focus attention on material bodies. For
instance, Sarah Whatmore (2002) argues
that without the body being understood
in terms of its corporeality, it will be
difficult to develop ethical relationships
within more-than-human worlds. Some of
this work has emerged from nonrepresenta-
tional theory (see Harrison 2008; Obrador-
Pons 2007) and some is explicitly feminist
(Ahmed 2004; Bondi, Davidson and Smith
2005; Tolia-Kelly 2006). The paper draws on
the latter’s work, which Grosz refers to as ‘a
phenomenology of everyday life’ (Kontturi
and Tiainen 2007: 252). Thus the examples I
provide can be situated in both the realm of
the intentional (disdain for those who bargain)
and the unintentional: ‘the impersonal or pre-
personal, subhuman or inhuman forces . . .
competing microagencies’ beyond the control
of the subject (Grosz 2005: 6).
The feminist materialist scholarship that
provides the inspiration for this paper can be
read as arguing for an appraisal of race as
embodied, non-essentialist being, not only that
which is discursive or performed. I am not
making the claim that this theory is useful
because I think that what is true for sex/gender
is also true for race. Sex, even though it is
many, differentiates people biologically and
socially in a way that is not true for race.
But the point is that these feminist theorists
have taken the important step of engaging
with the body’s matter rather than dismissing
such an interest as pre-critical and dangerously
essentialist.
The materiality of race
Race tends to be understood as a consequence
of societies’ ideas that become productive
truths about people. Significant work has
gone into underscoring the racist history,
genetic irrelevance and arbitrariness of racial
categories. From this, many have argued ‘there
is no such thing as race’ (Nayak 2006, his
italics) and further, that the fiction that is race
must be abolished (Gilroy 2000). Different
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approaches to race and racism rely on these
ideas. From sociology and legal studies,
critical race scholars argue that racism has
been perpetuated by institutions of law and
emphasize deconstruction to undermine racist
narratives, relying on personal experience and
storytelling to build others (Delgado and
Stefancic 2001). Drawing on the concept of
performativity, Anoop Nayak finds that in
some critical race writing, racial groups are
positioned as at once fictional, relational
and tangibly irreducible . . . [unable to]
‘escape the body politic’ (2006: 416). He
argues that figures such as ‘white women’ have
to be understood as part of historically and
geographically specific processes (see Kobaya-
shi and Peake 1994) ‘that constitute this
subjectivity as intelligible, and [as part of] the
symbolic regimes of language that summon
this representation to life’ (Nayak 2006: 417).
Whether using the language of construction
(Jackson 1998) and reconstruction (of white-
ness) (Gallaher 2002), memories and perform-
ance (Hoelscher 2003), or performance and
space (Thomas 2005), there is an emphasis on
the social, on representations of the real and
implicit or explicit use of the work of Judith
Butler. Even a work dedicated to ‘making race
matter’ (Alexander and Knowles 2005) is still
primarily about performance and the dangers
of linking race in any way to biology.
Building on these important contributions,
the paper argues that it is not enough to talk
about constructions or performance, leaving
the body’s matter out of the analysis (Saldanha
2006; see also Moore, Pandian and Kosek
2003). Indeed, fictionalizing race makes some
of the most interesting aspects of race
disappear, whether the focus is an affective
historiography of race (Anderson 2007), the
embodied experience of displacement and
segregation (Delaney 2002) or the embedding
of race in the body (Wade 2004). Writing on
white hyper-sensitivity to smell in the Ecua-
dorian Andes, Weismantel claims:
It is in the interactions between bodies and the
substances they ingest, the possessions they
accumulate, and the tools they use to act on the
world [that] we can really see race being made, and
making the society around it. This kind of race is
neither genetic nor symbolic, but organic: a
constant, physical process of interaction between
living things. Little surprise then that it has a
distinct smell. (2001: 266)
I turn now to the emphasis of this paper: the
tendencies and actions of raced bodies.
Race becomes material through the body.
Groupings of bodies do things and are ‘done
to’, becoming racialized in the process (Grosz
2005). From this perspective, bodies are not
only inscribed; they actively participate in the
material production of themselves and other
bodies. Race takes shape out of the physical
gathering of bodies in which phenotype
matters in its connection to material objects,
practices and processes (Saldanha 2007).
The term phenotype does not indicate any
essential connections, but it and other visible
characteristics (e.g. clothes) are recognized in
real, everyday interactions and so play a role in
what people do. Bodies stare at each other, or
are glimpsed or ignored; they are moved or
forced to stop; some meander, others stride;
giving way and standing ground, they prevent
and enable. In this sense, what happens to
bodies, what they do and the fact that they
tend to be white or brown in certain places are
all important to consider with the aim of
understanding how and why that happened.
Race, then, is a process, made and remade not
just by exclusions and erasures, but by its
ongoing connections (Saldanha 2006).
Skin is ‘a site of subjectivity, crisis, desire,
instability’ and thus has productive potential
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in day-to-day practices (Ahmed 1998 cited by
Johnston 2005: 112). In Lynda Johnston’s
example, beach space and the activities that
take place there produce bodies with specific
desires and capacities. Skin changes color,
confusing one’s sense of ‘who’s who’. Some
white bodies lying on beaches became darker
and were taken for Maori. Phenotype, of
course, should not be understood as referring
to the visible form of an interior essence.
Phenotypic differences produce mobile and
gradual groups, made through processes that
change these groupings of bodies—their color,
shape, size and health. Such change may occur
over a lifetime, with inter-racial offspring,
through generations or because of wealth or
poverty. Equally, bodily changes may be a
consequence of not having enough food or
enough of certain foods and it may be due to
how bodies are physically implicated in and
shaped by capitalism, patriarchy, neocolonial-
ism and so on. People are phenotypically
different and structurally organized into
populations that are endlessly disrupted, and
therefore temporary, contingent upon class,
sexuality, nationality, age and gender. The
materiality of race does not refer to innate
differences nor does it map phenotype, pos-
ture, clothes, language, accent, gestures or gait
to ‘a race’, because there are no ‘races’, but it
does refer to bodies.
The ways people sense worlds is part of how
differences are shaped. Mark Smith (2006)
proposes that restoring hearing, smell, touch
and taste to an understanding of racial
difference might shed some new light on how
unthinkingly race is made and racism learned.
In his account, white southerners had ways of
determining whether someone was ‘black’ by
smell, touch, taste and sound—because vision
was not always reliable. Yet it is clear that
‘seeing remains . . . extraordinarily important
for locating racial identity’ (Smith 2006: 3).
Rather than posit the visual as an ‘all
determining foundation of race’ (Brown
2005: 273, n14–16), the claim I make is that
(observed) bodies are one part in a series of
intersections. These bodily differences are
noticed (in particular ways in this racist
society) and they enable what occurs at the
Market, in ways that limit and open avenues,
supporting ethical engagement, mobilizing
confusion, activating prejudice or reinforcing
inequality. Though I acknowledge sound,
smell and touch, vision remains central to
this account. I also use vendor and customer
vision because it is unreliable, contributing to
raced imaginaries and productive uncertainty
about raced bodies. That a physical knot of
whiteness around some foods, for instance,
happens is something that should be discussed.
Equally, when diverse bodies encounter each
other through leafy greens when they ordina-
rily might not, race should not be left out of
the analysis.
When I use the term ‘Hmong growers’,
rather than suggesting that this group ‘has’ a
discrete and pre-formed identity, I understand
‘Hmongness’ as a process of becoming.
Instead of an argument that makes uncritical
use of descriptive demographic facts, I propose
using the term ‘white farmer’ or ‘Hmong
grower’ as something dynamic that includes
phenotype and land ownership, clothes and
speech, types of vegetables sold and gener-
ations at the market. I recognize that Hmong
farmers are seen as different by some
customers and known as Hmong by many
vendors. Emergent ‘Hmongness’ is embodied
through, for instance, the sale of bitter green
and collards, facial features, wearing
‘traditional’ dress or a tie, having a CIA
identity card. It becomes through the sugges-
tion that I watch The Fast and the Furious:
Tokyo Drift to understand Asian/Hmong fast
car culture. ‘Hmong’ means vending for fifteen
Thinking race through corporeal feminist theory 855
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years compared to four generations, renting as
opposed to owning land, and, according to
some white vendors, it means ‘under-pricing
the market’. Race is an active process in which
Hmong emerges as the object of white liberal
interest which wants to help Hmong people
through land donations. Hmong becoming at
the Market is active in a question about my
‘racial background’ which arises because
I have ‘such blue eyes’.
The aim here is to be able to talk about the
material tendencies racially differentiating
bodies without making racist statements or
authorizing essentialist identity politics.
Understanding how racially different bodies
emerge through practices provides different
insights into race. What follows is an attempt to
work through the particular challenges that
arise in talking about racial embodiment and to
demonstrate how the Market makes sense
through this lens.
Methods
Observation, inclusive of vision, sense of
smell, hearing and touch, is a method
necessary for this paper’s argument. I draw
on participant observation as well as informal
and formal interviews conducted from May
2006 to March 2008. The research has moved
between naturalistic observation and partici-
pant observation—in other words it has
ranged from conversation, interview, periph-
eral membership and active membership in a
social crowd (Adler and Adler 1998).
My observations have noted routines, rituals,
spaces, organization, interactions, behavior
and clothing (Denzin 1989). I took photos to
study later and tried vegetables unfamiliar to
me. I undertook naturalistic observation of the
Market on most weekends in 2006 during
the late spring, summer and fall months from
6 a.m. until 2 p.m. as well as during the week
at different times and on different days. I have
attended one board meeting, at which I
discussed the research and one annual
membership meeting in March 2008. The
research also involves making sense of over-
heard exclamations and questions.
I have done structured interviews with the
market manager, several vendors, a member of
the Minnesota State Department of Agriculture,
the Minneapolis mayor and a close associate,
four local nonprofit leaders and a researcher
working on Hmong agriculture. Additionally, I
have followed Twin Cities food activism and
visited other markets. Unstructured interviews
took place at the Market with resellers, growers,
customers and custodial staff as well as by email
and letter with some vendors over the 2006–
2008 seasons and off season as well. Typically,
I speak to several of the same people each week.
All told, I have done informal interviews
with about sixty people (vendors and custo-
mers). Some of the quotes in the paper are from
handwritten notes taken while vendors talked to
me or while I listened to others’ conversations.
Others are from taped and transcribed
interviews. The interviews and observations
that I draw on are illustrative of themes that
have emerged so far in the research. The paper is
not an exhaustive statement on the Market but
instead offers a way of thinking about these
collected observations.
Race as bodily practice
Racial difference in the context of the Market
is a corporeal relationship to growing, selling
and eating food. It emerges through what can
be called ‘racial practices’: the production and
marketing of certain plants, the location and
quality of someone’s land, ideas about ‘good’
food and the gathering of racially identified
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people around some vendors and vegetables but
not others. Thus food practices that may not
usually be associated with race can be called
racial practices, but not any fixed sense. At the
market, bodies are not just inscribed by food
practices; they are materially produced through
what people buy, who they talk to, where they
grow vegetables, as well as through phenotypic
differences (Saldanha 2007). The materiality of
practice does not deny that meanings circulate
through these actions, but wants to show how it
is the matter of race and operating policies, land
ownership, vegetables, laughter, pesticide use
and touch within the space of the Market that is
necessary to meaning.
In the following two sections (racial divisions
and public intimacy), I attempt to show how
bodies moving around the Market, attaching
themselves to some foods, brushing shoulders
and being propelled by curiosity are all ways of
talking about race as bodily practice.
Racial divisions at the Market
Race emerges at the Market through four spatial
processes: the clustering of bodies around
tables; the avoidance of markets with resellers;
dress and comportment; and racial imaginaries.
As a zone of encounter in a racist society, it
would be surprising if race did not emerge in this
market space through prejudice and separation
and so I first consider racial divisions.
Roots and leaves
Race emerges spatially as bodies ebb and eddy
around vendors’ stalls. Some bodies search for
organic eggs, others move towards amaranth
leaves and still others cluster around basil in a
neat bunch, without roots, shut inside a hard
plastic container. Clear cohesions of white
people are evident around the enclosed herbs
laid out on a red and white checked tablecloth.
Opposite this permanent stall is often a Hmong
daily vendor selling much larger bunches of
basil, fastened with a rubber band. Desiring
food in plastic indicates a particular expectation
of how food arrives and what quality means.
Other customers come because they have
established a relationship with these growers,
whose produce also appears in area super-
markets. These clumps of white people are also
visible around the locally grown asparagus laid
in short, upright, brown paper bags that sells at
$6 for one pound, and later, the heirloom4
melons and potatoes (six dollars for about eight
finger potatoes). The expense plus the
relationship of these particular foods to the
desire for local, fresh, non-conventional food is
part of why white people are evident here.
Finally, some trust and comfort may come from
engaging with a white vendor.
There is something to be learned about race
through plants. Racial divisions occur through
greens and roots. Hmong tables carry cilantro
and onions with bristling roots. These growers
have learned that there are Asian and African
populations who come to the Market seeking
certain vegetables and demanding roots
attached. Race emerges through connections
among visible difference, a plant, its nutrients
and politics, the soil it requires, the
land used and the care given its growth. Thus
one could say that race is in the leaves.
Hmong growers have verdant cascades of
amaranth, black nightshade, sweet potato
leaves and pigweed. Most white growers
do not leave the roots on and they do not
supply amaranth or pigweed (‘no I don’t sell it,
it’s a weed’).
In the third shed, white vendors are clumped
at the western end, while most of the rest are
Hmong permanent or daily vendors, hence
among vendors, it is called the ‘Hmong shed’.
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There are white vendors here who enjoy the
company of nonwhite people and also those
who refuse to be situated next to Hmong
vendors. In the third shed, as well, are the two
Hmong resellers, the only African American
vendor and a white flower reseller who
employs two African American men. This
grizzled reseller spends the morning shouting
at customers, one minute cajoling them with a
bouquet, and the next, daring them to look
away from his aging blossoms. In 2006 a white
wild rice daily vendor was situated next to the
sole African American vendor in the third
aisle, but in 2007 moved to a place in the
middle shed. Regardless of how vendors have
come to be positioned in the sheds, the
cohesions of bodies among the three reveals
a racial division of the space.
Caring where your food comes from
The movement of people at the MFM is also
toward other food spaces and this is partly due
to the presence of six larger food resellers at the
MFM. While vendors of asparagus, certain
herbs and meat receive greater concentrations of
white customers, a markedly diverse gathering
of racialized and classed populations is evident
around reseller tables. Some MFM vendors
I have spoken with accept the resellers in their
midst but some customers do not. Nationwide,
farmers’ markets are typically for growers only.
Alternative food consumers denigrate the resale
of non-local foods, going so far as to shop at
other markets to avoid the MFM because it
allows the practice. One middle-aged white man
at the local-only St. Paul market explained to his
friends that unlike St. Paul, the goods at the
MFM looked like they had ‘fallen off the truck
on the way to the market’. On the Nicollet Mall
downtown (Thursday’s MFM location), an
older white man in a suit asked a strawberry
vendor if he knew where pineapples grew in
Minnesota, indicating, with his head, the
Hmong-owned reseller behind them. The
vendor replied, shaking his head, ‘yeah, I call
them banana sellers’. This vendor was working
for a fairly large-scale conventional farmer—
but a more local one.
What I am describing is not as simple as a
distaste for resellers or prejudice against the
more mixed (class and race) clientele that
comes to the MFM, drawn, in part by resellers.
Whiteness emerges through the thinking that
local is necessarily best and that the St. Paul
market is ‘more local’ as well as through the
fact that alternative food tends to be a white
movement. It comes into being through the
spatial separation of a more white and more
middle-class (socially and economically)
group from more brown and more working-
class people.
There is a sense that the products available
and the prices at the MFM bring people who
do not recognize the close-to-the-edge profit-
ability and the work involved in sustainable,
organic or smaller-scale farming. The fierce
demand for cheaply priced food has been
observed by some customers and vendors as
coming particularly from newer immigrant
nonwhite populations. Indicating toward the
flow of people around a reseller, another
vendor told me, ‘they don’t care where their
food comes from’. White growers claim that
Hmong farmers encourage ignorance of the
difficulty of farming by typically charging one
dollar for ample bunches of vegetables. But for
some it is the established members of the
Market whose habits participate in the
preference for cheap. Referring to the white,
longer-term vendors, one grower remarked,
‘they shop at Cub [a local, conventional, low-
cost supermarket] and eat at McDonalds’.
Finally, a white grower recounted how a
white, woman customer told him ‘I don’t
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know if I feel like peeling potatoes tonight’.
The grower said to me, shaking his head, ‘if
people don’t even want to peel potatoes, that’s
it, I’m finished’. It should be pointed out here
that the gendered division of labor is a factor
that should not be discounted in discussions of
such shopping practices.
Baby strollers and latte´s
Bodies present themselves differently at the
Market. Few shoppers I have seen charge
through the Market intent on getting through
in minimum time; the experience tends to be
more exploratory. Some Asian and African
visitors wear high heels, skirts, dress pants or
wax prints. Others go to the Market in shorts,
sneakers and oversized t-shirts, with coffee in
one hand—and these people tend to be white.
This same group tends to stroll through the
market as they talk with their companions.
Advises Beth Dooley (2001), ‘Nearly twice as
big and much busier than St. Paul’s, [the MFM]
can be downright daunting. My strategy is this:
First, go to Neon Coffee in the northwest corner
for a latte´ . . . ’. White people can be differ-
entiated as middle class because they have a
canvas bag from the expensive organic chain,
Whole Foods, over their shoulder. Elderly
bodies are also here, but I have seen only a few
with wheeled baskets to tote food. Women
originally from an African nation in bright
cotton prints come at 5:30–7 a.m. to negotiate
for large bags of greens, moving these to the
trunks of cars and coming back for more. In a
quantity sufficient to last the winter, these greens
will be cooked and frozen. This group may come
so early because it suits their schedule, because
the leaves are more fresh or it may have
something to do with the increasing presence of
white bodies the later it gets. Regardless of the
reason, the composition of bodies changes and
changes the meaning of this space over the hours
of the morning.
Children are brought to the Market as part
of a shopping or a tourist experience. Strollers
pushed by men and women of color tend to
have bags full of produce slung over the
handles of strollers and under the seat.
Strollers are evident even during the busiest
part of the day when the aisles are nearly
impassable. One white middle-class father,
pushing his child in a baby carriage, said,
‘We’re going to see lots today’. He falls into
the tourist category. Vendors call tourists
‘basket kickers’—people who come to look
but not to buy. While not always a white
practice, basket kicking is the domain of those
who have the leisure time and no need or wish
to purchase anything from a farmers’ market.
Market tourism is also associated with
cooking demonstrations and musical guests.
Having fun at the farmers’ market is encour-
aged as one of the key aims of the Mill City
Market. Last year its website called on
residents to ‘[j]oin local healing art prac-
titioners for health lectures, demos & mini-
sessions exploring mind and body work such
as Qi Gong, Tibetan medicine, Thai yoga
massage, herbalogy, homeopathy, meditation,
acupuncture, dance, boot camp fitness and
eating like food matters’.5 The Eastern
emphasis often associated with the new age
movement can be loosely linked with a white,
middle-class demographic.
Comfort zones and confusion
Constituting this space are racial imaginaries
in which the perceived clarity of race is
brought into relief through observations that
are sometimes prejudicial. Vendors mistaking
East Africans for African Americans appears
to be the norm, but a woman vendor observes
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that she can clearly pick out features of
African American, Somali and Ethiopian
customers. One vendor suggested, with con-
siderable enthusiasm, that the ‘Somali’ women
who come early to buy large bags of ‘okra’
(noted in previous sub-section) might be
engaged in something illicit. An older white
vendor, told me that there are lots of African
Americans who come to the Market, contrary
to what I had noticed. When I said as much, he
told me, ‘if you turn around, I think you’ll see
they’re here’. I did and there were people
standing further down the aisle, but they were
from an African country. I could tell because
of how they were dressed (button down shirt,
tucked in, slacks), what they were buying
(bitter green) and the quantities they were
purchasing. Had I been closer I might have
discerned differences in gestures, stance or
accents. There is no point calling this
ignorance. Instead, I am intrigued by the
wish to see, the act of seeing something else
and the inexorable fuzziness of race.
People of color from global non-US cultures
are said to disturb the ‘comfort zone’ of white
customers and thus the lower sales volume can
be attributed, in part, to their presence. This
(racist) comfort zone is placed with equani-
mity alongside other reasons for fewer sales
like gas prices, the weather or construction.
A young white vendor with whom I was
talking about the purchase of greens by
Africans asked me if I saw whether they used
cash. He proposed that I would ‘see a lot of
them using food stamps’. His statement is
familiarly prejudiced as it connects skin color
to something opprobrious in the mainstream
national imaginary—the use of government
support. Some white farmers claim that
Hmong growers get special assistance, which
they do not deserve and are able to succeed
largely through this and the help of children.
A customer remarked, as she walked by some
Hmong kids behind a table, ‘I thought child
labor was illegal’. Other imaginaries mobi-
lized are claims made by Hmong people that
farming is something Hmong women and
elderly Hmong do. An African American man
complained that Somalis refuse to talk with
blacks (‘we got bombed by Somalis’), Asians
always want cheap produce and Latinos are
‘not invasives’, implying that others are.
One middle-aged white male farmer noted
that it is people from the Middle East who
bargain most fiercely. ‘Those people’, he said,
pointing in an obvious way to what appeared
to be a South Asian family walking past at
that moment. As he pointed, they looked
back at him.
This section has offered examples of how
racial division emerges through stereotypes,
movement, location and production of
plants—bodily practices. If embodiment con-
cerns the characteristics of bodies and
what people do, race is embodied at the
Market through attractions to vegetables
that segregate the space as well as the ways
some racialized groups think other racialized
groups act.
Public intimacy and encounter
So far I have discussed racial divisions and
essentialist productions of racial difference.
Now I turn to a public intimacy that also
constitutes the Market and could be pro-
ductive of other, non-racist ways of living and
doing race. Writing about race and domestic
intimacy, Ann Laura Stoler suggests that
‘strangely familiar “uncanny” intimacies . . .
may leave room for relations that promise
something else, that activate desires and
imaginaries less easily named’ (2006: 14).
Guiding this section is Stoler’s point that
intimacy provides a view into both structures
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of dominance and the promise of ‘something
else’. Race emerges through the encounters
I discuss below as well as through the
separations outlined above.
Intimacy, a spatial process of tense and
tender ties, does not require proximity but
needs to consider alterity (Thien 2005, see also
Fortier 2007). The world becomes intimate
with the gut through the alterity of food;
stomach problems indicate the breakdown of
relations with others (Wilson 2004). Echoing
this, a local food advocate at a Twin Cities
gathering to ‘build community and dismantle
racism’ suggests ‘we have two things in
common: food and isolation’. In this paper,
intimacy refers to the domestic, public act of
food provisioning. It is embodied through the
seemingly mundane yet critically important
acts of seeing, smelling, touching, anticipating,
wondering about food, all of which are shared
in public space by different bodies. A practical
politics of the intimate reveals the home in the
world, a realm of untidy, unruly bodiliness
(Fidecaro 2006: 255).
The Market enables an intimacy absent in
other spaces of consumption such as malls,
supermarkets and gas stations. Figure 1,
taken while I was observing the Market in
late spring 2007, is an intimate connection
made in public space that might not have
occurred in other spaces of consumption or
leisure. The Hmong musician, invited to play,
and the Market that sunny day, viscerally
beckoned this white woman to approach.
Race emerges bodily in his song, her steps
toward him and the intimate act of donation.
Alphonso Lingis (1998) writes of encounter
through travel (even to a market), which
people undertake to lose their identity. Travel
forces the imprisoning skin of privilege to
become recognizable to some. The more
meanings we ascribe to others’ ways, the
more bodies become hidden and the violence
of stereotype arises. It is the inexpressiveness
of the body, unconnected from the lines of
inscription that excites.
The intimacy present at the Market is one of
contact, connecting people’s lives outside the
Market to this food moment through small
talk, questions asked about food, seeing the
same farmer, the smell of earth on the wind
and touching vegetables. Pleasure, in this
context, is not only an individual experience; it
emerges among bodies and things in place.
Looking at pleasure shows the intimacy of
human contact in which race matters though it
may not be the only or primary organizing
feature. I will cover four types of public
intimacy: public eating and desire, curiosity
about foods, chatting and bargaining. These
minutiae are food practices that are also racial,
bodily practices.
Roasted corn and honey space
One of the most popular sites for public eating is
the roasted corn stand. On one end of the stall
next to boxes of Florida-grown sweet corn, an
eight-foot roaster stands, slowly rotating
unhusked corn up and out of sight until they
return, blackened on the outside and brilliant
cooked yellow on the inside. The corn is
removed from the roaster, a green ear taking
its place, the cooked corn moves on to be
husked, dry leaves pulled back to hug the stalk,
then to the butterer, a woman who also collects
your two dollars and thenfinally to the customer
who goes off to shake cayenne, lemon or just salt
on the redolent, dripping ear. The corn is sweet,
crunchy and hot. The workers are usually one
Latino man and two Latina women. Onsummer
weekends there is a line of ten to twelve people
waiting patiently. Standing in the scent of hot
butter and corn, people bite into their ears, or,
cob in hand they walk through the Market.
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Sharing in this pleasurable intimacy of eating
publicly, market goers make this stand the most
racially diverse place in the Market.6 Because
the stand ishereand because it is corn that is sold
(which appears to appeal to different popu-
lations), different bodies are concentrated and
thus come into eating contact when the other
spaces of their lives would probably not enable
such interaction.
Honey space is also more fractured: the
single-source raw honey vendor with the
more labor-intensive honey-collecting prac-
tice and the more expensive glass jars has
high racial diversity. Standing by his stall,
I heard people driven to seek honeys similar
to those from other places they called home.
I listened to conversations the vendor
initiates about the epidemic of bee deaths
and the low quality of heated honey sourced
from China and sold in conventional super-
markets. He knows about the shades and
tastes of honeys from other parts of the
world and suggests which of his honeys—the
dark amber Buckwheat to the lighter Bass-
wood—might be similar. He provides
samples to taste. With a good location, a
range of products (pollen, dried apples,
candles, honey comb) and a glass case full
of bees at a child’s eye level, this honey
vendor draws many older and younger
bodies. In 2006 I heard a woman from a
European country talking with the vendor
about how the honey is like that from her
country of origin. I recognized her again in
2007. We talked about honey, the coarse,
brown bread that is no longer available in
Figure 1 ‘There arises the permanent temptation to encounter the stranger’ (Lingis 1998: 185).
q Rachel Slocum.
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