Meat, meat, meat – a review
A review I just finished for Gastronomica.
The Sausage Rebellion: Public Health, Private Enterprise and Meat in Mexico City, 1890-1917
Jeffrey M. Pilcher
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006
x + 245 pp. Illustrations.
MMM… MEXICAN MEAT…
One could, in the manner of Slavoj Zizek, wonder if in contemporary society there could be such a thing as truly Mexican food. Whereas one obviously needs to separate Mexican cuisine from the global food phenomenon described as “Mexican”, it stands as both symptom and testament to the former that the mongrelized and bastardized latter versions often seem to retain some of the magic of authenticity – and perhaps this very thing forces us to question whether there is such a thing as authentically Mexican food. In a situation where the humble refried bean has been turned into a commoditized cultural signifier, is not the hunt for Real Mexican Food a sign of the very non-authenticity of the same? None of this is the subject matter of Jeffrey Pilcher’s book, but the general theme of the book – the manner in which the modernist project of Mexico City’s development 1890-1917 – awakens questions about what it means to be authentic and what it means to be “developed”, and these issues clearly link to our current state of wondering about our world and our place in it.
It should be patently obvious that any book dedicated entirely to meat will be treat and a half, and this book, with it’s focus on how cultural, economic, historical, scientific and various other trends and discourses affect the market for meat in a country, is no exception. In an engaging narrative which ambles through the often confusing socio-political context of Mexico City during the last years of the Porfirio-regime and the years that followed the Revolution of 1910, Pilcher tells a story of butchers and pigs, meat moguls and street vendors, chicharrones and global capitalism, and does so in a way that can only be described as loving. It is, in the end, a book that leaves one slightly bewildered. As it so clearly is a labor of love, the attention to detail and cultural subtleties is nothing short of painstaking. Thus the book is often a treasure-trove of piquant details, where what is merely an aside in a sub-story can get the reader engaged into thinking about a number of issues. For instance, although the book barely touches upon matters of gender, I often found myself lost in rumination through the ways in which the book presents the connection between meat, butchering and masculinity, and was further moved by the few descriptions of female meat sellers that occur in the book. This is perhaps the main strength of the text, the way in which it highlights how the humble and in a sense archaic business of butchering animals and selling their meat can show us the entire panoply of society and its many oddities. By examining meat provisioning in a major city, and particularly in such an unapologetically carnivorous one, Pilcher manages to show not only how an industry can simultaneously be modernized whilst holding onto traditions and ideals of craftsmanship, but in addition he manages to show how things such as globalized competition and the notion and debates regarding free trade are by no means modern inventions. In fact, the rollercoaster-ride of Mexico City’s meat industry could serve as a fine example of how economic history should be written, as there are so many connections to modern debates – as an example there is enough fodder in the book to keep a labor process theorist going for years, and I often found myself noting cross-references to current discussions in organization theory in the margins of my copy (I wrote down “Foucault?” more than once, but don’t judge me too harshly.).
However, this does not mean that the book is without flaws, and the contribution of the book is at the same time its major shortcoming. It is, no doubt, a rich book, but it is not a well-structured one. Unless one has a fairly good grasp of the history of Mexico, particularly during the period the book describes, one is constantly left bewildered and lost in its pages. The author seems all too confident that the reader can follow an often meandering story, and continuously keep in mind the historical backdrop, and thus leaves many a thing completely unexplained. I guess I should know the full story of Porfirio Díaz but I don’t, and Pilcher seems wholly uninterested in enlightening me. Important historical facts are taken as well-known throughout, making the book seem like it was written for an extremely limited audience of historians with a special interest in Mexico City. This is a shame, as the book could have a much wider range of interested readers, but now it is not written in a way to accommodate these. It contains much of interest, for those of us who soldiered through, but much like you can’t make a pollo pibil by throwing together some oranges and chicken, a book like this needs to be more than a collection of narratives.
