2004 Annual Meeting - Abstract

The Demand for Diversity: Alternative Practices in Asian-American Agriculture

Valerie Imbruce

Doctoral Candidate
Department of Biological Sciences
City University of New York, Graduate Center
New York Botanical Garden
Bronx, NY 10458

Immigrants in New York City have always found ways to bring the foods of their home environments to the City. The culinary diversity of the City, from ethnic restaurants and green grocers to gourmet markets and celebrity chefs, is a source of pride, entertainment, and income generation for the City at large. The ‘old’ European immigrants of New York City, brought characteristic tastes that could be satisfied by local agriculture. Their demands were met by the surrounding temperate environment. Changes made in 1965 to immigration policy of the United States did away with nation of origin quotas and dramatically opened borders and encouraged people from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean to reshape the cultural landscape of the City. A significant commonality of these diverse peoples today is that they are increasingly coming from tropical places. This ‘tropicalization’ of New York City has brought agricultural demands that cannot be satisfied by the local environment and lead to the creation of new systems of production, distribution and consumption.

This paper will focus on the food systems that have risen from the tropical demands of Asian immigrants in New York City. I argue that Asian entrepreneurship has lead to the creation of highly dynamic and diverse food systems. Although these systems are becoming global in scope, they are not displaying the hegemonic tendencies of agro-food systems, and by the nature of the necessities that they rise out of are displaying some of the social and ecological attributes of independent and diverse local food systems. Southern Florida, the only tropical location in the continental United States, is the primary point of production of many tropical Asian fruits and vegetables for New York City. Farms are small-scale, family owned and operated, and employ highly diverse methods of production. Florida distributors (packers) play a significant role in shaping the food system, and rely on business relations based in trust rather than contractual arrangements to buy and sell goods. In this way, they are expanding their trade networks to production sites in the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America. Using a commodity chain approach, this paper will describe and analyze the genesis and evolution of Asian food systems that supply New York City consumers, focused around Florida as a pivotal point in the chain. This paper will discuss current pressures on the food system, coping strategies of the actors involved and their projections of future change. Differences in the production and marketing of products that have a wide ethnic base among Asian consumers and are produced large quantities (with mainstreaming potential), and products that are highly specialized and grown in very small quantities will be highlighted to show how these differences shape and define food systems.

The growing literature on alternative food systems in the United States has focused on organic, free range, fair trade and community or locally based food systems like community supported agriculture and other direct marketing scenarios. Studies on global food systems that support Northern consumption have focused on corporate integration, consolidation, the increasing scale of production and associated labor exploitation and land use. Ethnicity has been analyzed in context of migratory labor, but not as a factor that characterizes an entire system of consumption, distribution and production. By focusing on a multi-ethnic group like Asian-Americans that is unified by their consumption of similar foods, this paper will contribute to food system studies by describing an alternate system of provision that does not follow the logic of corporate modernization or ‘local’ modernization. In the broader anthropological context, this study addresses the global-local binary by examining how the dynamic interplay between global and local forces manifests itself in diverse ways.