Last night on PBS’ Bill Moyers Journal, Moyers talked with economic critic and author Kevin Phillips about this thoughts on recent developments and his book Bad Money (watch a 26:09 clip here); a troubled Phillips stated we were “a few innings” into what he suggested may be a disastrous game Wall Street has begun, facing off against bubbles from the past few US administrations.
Phillips mentions the rising price of gold in this week’s markets, and that made me think of local currency, which is backed by a community. In the innings to come in American economic stability, I think community is the new gold.
Like the first part of this project (see the previous culturemodding.com entry about food), I’m concerned with a social object—here, currency. And I want to focus on the thing itself, the watermarked bills in your wallet that can be tendered in a specific geographic area.
Like online networks of food, we can consider local currency an alternative visible to those seeking it out and largely invisible to those who do not. We may also consider local currency a complement to national currency; it can be used instead of national within an area, making it an alternative, and it can be used in conjunction with (and traded back for) a national currency, making it complementary.
I started thinking about local currency a few years ago when I lived in Carrboro, North Carolina, an area with high levels of participation in local governance, farm-to-table cycles, and flow of capital. It is comparatively easy (compared to large suburbs and many major metros) to be chain-free in Carrboro—buying and consuming products from local stores instead of from big-box retailers. I’m thinking especially of perishable products like food that need to be purchased almost daily, making the There is an abundance of farms that participate in markets held in multiple locations three days of the week, and much of the produce is also sold at the Weaver Street Market, a co-op that accepts the local currency, which is called the PLENTY (Piedmont Local EcoNomy Tender).
Many local currencies in the US (here’s the Wikipedia list) tie the currency to an hour of labor at the living wage rate for that community. The PLENTY does not, and was a good way for me to experience how local currency works in daily transactional use when I lived in Carrboro.
It was a few years ago, and I remember being in line at Weaver Street buying North Carolina catfish (caught in the Outer Banks), garlic from Peregrine Farm, some local lettuces. In my wallet, there were a few half-PLENTYs (worth $5–I find it interesting that there is the notion of a whole with PLENTYs) and a $20 bill. The PLENTYs wouldn’t be accepted at the chain grocery store across the parking lot, but then again, neither would the $20 dollar bill, if I used the automated checkout lanes—the computers operating the automated checkout lanes weren’t programmed to accept the new $20 bill when the bill was first released.
The interaction with the cashier at Weaver Street Market was sometimes markedly different using the two currencies. When I used the local currency, it triggered sort of a half-smile from the cashier as she slid it under the tray where the regular currency was lined up. To use the currency, even as a part-time member of the community (before I moved to Virginia, I commuted back and forth on the weekends), indicated a deeper-than-casual knowledge and engagement with Carrboro community economics.
Significantly, though, I didn’t take it with me. When I moved permanently to Virginia, I kept one whole PLENTY, one half PLENTY, and one quarter PLENTY, mostly to prove that the currency actually existed. I still have these notes, and I felt twinges of guilt it in ways that I don’t feel for, say, the Hungarian currency leftover from a trip a few months back in an area of the world I don’t know when I’ll visit again.
Taking local currency out of its geographic region can hurt the currency, as you have then effectively removed it from circulation and it becomes an empty object—one of novelty and beauty, but not of utility.
On September 9, 2008, the Lewes Pound was launched, and the Web site now says that almost all 10,000 “have been sold.”
The issue is that many have been taken out of circulation:
One of the reasons for this success is that the LPs are so admired and inspiring that everyone has wanted to get their hands on them, and not just in Lewes. That’s great, but for this initiative to succeed and benefit our community, people need to spend their Lewes Pounds, not frame them!
So, as a a member of this community, the best thing you can do to support this initiative is to spend, spend, spend your Lewes Pounds as soon as possible! This is getting easier every day. As of today we have over 85 traders on board, as well as the Lewes Farmer’s Market.
I’m curious as to how the consumption of this currency will play out in Lewes proper and online, whether we’ll see so widely supported (geographically) as to devalue it—for, like with food in online networks, the sustaining mechanism of the community is in trading the social object imbued with the resonances of community interaction.
Do you agree that local currency needs parameters to be viable as a complementary currency? Other thoughts?
Below is the working draft (it’s rough) of a presentation I gave at the University of Virginia September 12, 2008.
Comments are welcomed–
———- Wandering Supperclubs, Tastespotting, and the New Pornographers
Kristen Taylor
The other day I opened an email from someone I didn’t know.
The email was signed with a pseudonym, and the email address couldn’t be replied to.
The body of the email listed upcoming events–things like knife skill classes, foraging lessons–of the Underground Food Academy, a stealth food club in and around San Francisco, and it instructed me to sign up in various online places for the events.
As I live I Miami and travel frequently, I immediately logged into a social networking service called Dopplr to check my travel schedule and see if I would be in San Francisco for any of the class dates.
Dopplr also indicated who of my “friends” in this service would be in the Bay area on those days and suggested nearby restaurants and hotels.
Next, I pointed my web browser to AirBed and Breakfast, another social networking service where site members offer their airbed (the inflatable descendant of the futon) to potential guests for anywhere from $5 to $200 a night.
Owners usually also leave out breakfast, and some include lessons or activities related to their professional skillset or personal hobbies like weight training or gardening. The AirBed and Breakfast site lets you reserve an airbed online and encourages owners to fill out a profile with pictures of themselves, the space, the neighborhood, and details such as curfew and whether they own pets.
In under two minutes, I had sorted an invitation to an exclusive event, knowledge of where my digital tribe would be on the event dates, and options for places to stay–I had navigated public and private pools of information as a seamless part of a normal day where many such navigations take place.
This is what I call culture modding: modifying culture through online and offline networks. The full title of this dissertation project is Culture Modding: How We Play with Our Food, Money, and Beds in the Twenty-First Century, and today we’ll be talking about playing with food in online networks.
Before that, let me offer more context for culture modding. Modding is a term I am borrowing from game culture, and it refers to extensions of a given computer game made by a fan or by a game developer. A “mod”–short for modification–may add new characters, weapons, and levels to an exisiting game, and to distinguish it from the original the mod may take place in a different location.
In the dissertation seminar last year, my friend and colleague (and excellent guacamole maker) Sean Borton helped me realize that my interest in online networks revolves around the ways we use these networks to introduce cultural modifications. We will look at some of the new levels and playing options introduced by modding food today.
I will argue that online networks transform food, money, and shelter into social objects–objects that we socialize around–and this transformation irrevocably changes the consumption patterns of these necessary goods.
In the computer game world, a game mod does not replace the game. It sometimes extends the interest of players in a new game or causes a fresh surge of popularity for an aging game, but it more of an alternative flavor. When a game mod becomes more popular than the original game, gamers refer to the original as the ‘vanilla’ version. If the original game (base flavor) is vanilla, then, game mods might be mint chocolate chip, dulce de leche, or the new Haagen-Dazs vanilla honeybee flavor–a pint of which is a social object consumers consume, enjoy, and contribute to a good research cause by purchasing. We’ll return to social objects in a moment.
I do want to emphasize that I am offering an alternative architecture of online actions, and one that is largely both available to those who seek it out and invisible to those who do not. My term culture modding intentionally references the culture jamming movement, which often takes Naomi Klein’s impassioned writings troubling globalization narratives (especially her 2000 book No Logo) as inspiration for guerilla communications and activism pointing up absurdities and troubling trends in popular culture.
The sly street artist Banksy, whose graffiti is considered both art and vandalism is a good example of a culture jammer.
And beyond raising awareness, culture jamming has actions associated with it–boycotting a product, for example, from a company that doesn’t treat workers well.
Online, culture jamming looks like the Know More extension for the Firefox browser that offers information associated with a brand with you visit a company site.
While culture jamming trades in information, my concept of culture modding trades in social objects, that I think may offer a radical subjectivity for those who engage in this modding.
The term ’social object’ is usually attributed to Hugh McLeod, an online cartoonist famous for illustrating trends in social media and for convincing an unknown winery, Stormhoek, to send cases of wine to blogger gatherings a few years ago.
The delighted bloggers (free wine is free wine, and this happened before bloggers were regularly feted and pitched) posted blog entries about the Stormhoek wine, which became the social object–both the thing that bloggers socialized around, and around the authoring actions associated the bloggers. This specific example is also often referenced in the rise of social marketing as a trend, an example of the moment where companies began to think “the blog’s the thing, in which we’ll catch the consciousness of the kings and queens of the online realm.”
And the wine was sent to high-profile bloggers seen as potential key evangelists for the product–meaning, the blogger herself was valuable because she stood to influence her distributed audience of readers (her network was her net worth to the company). It makes sense as an initial model–translating traditional celebrity models of influence to online, but let’s turn now to more bottom-up approaches to social object distribution.
In recent months, traditional print media–the New York Times especially–has been awash in stories of alternative food. A bit late to a party they quite frankly weren’t invited to, the Times in particular has been anxious to label the movement, as the recent article “The Anti-Restaurants” attests.
The article chronicles a few food events–butchering a boar in Ithaca, a dinner party in Brooklyn, theorizing it so:
And underground restaurants have found their niche. Stringing together the farm-to-table movement and a bloggy kind of interactivity, they have gained a following among food lovers, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who have an opinion on local versus organic, prefer intimate and casual to grand and ceremonial, and are open to meeting people and building connections in new ways. No doubt a lot of them are members of a Facebook fan club for bacon.
Times writer Melena Ryzik indulgently grants those she makes sound like food swingers, really, a “bloggy kind of interactivity” when it comes to their food actions. And yet the language used to talk about members of what she rightly labels a movement is couched in passive terms, as if “bloggy” interactivity is a polite way to gloss inactivity or facile activity.
No doubt a lot of food lovers on Facebook are “fans” of bacon:
(as of last night, there were over 12,000, and I have little doubt that many of them also belong to bacon-of-the-month clubs, have visited artisanal smokehouses, and do, on occasion, make bacon or pancetta in their kitchens. If you’re interested, there’s a wonderful Saveur tutorial on home-cured bacon and a Chow.com one on pancetta).
Beyond simply sourcing obscure ingredients, there is a real DIY, or, really DIO (do it ourselves) energy in food circles lately. In his new book Here Comes Everybody, social media scholar Clay Shirky talks about the ease with which groups can now organize for collective action in online networks.
While online networks facilitate interaction, this is not to say the enabled actions are insignificant or passive. Further, the participants are often passionate and vocal, but to dramatically label underground food event spaces as “anti-restaurants” is laughable.
The anti-restaurant label presumes this new movement is in opposition to and seeks to import all the trappings of traditional restaurants. Many things remain the same–money is exchanged, strangers sit near each other, expensive ingredients are painstakingly plated in innovative combinations, often by individuals who regularly wear a white toque with a hundred pleats and are addressed as “chef”–but the guests may have brought their own pillows for the warehouse floor, received a text hours before with the location, and be sitting underneath a modified pirate flag. In other words, to be an underground eater, you must embrace organic location, menu creation, and ingredients.
One of the best known underground eating groups is the Ghetto Gourmet, a “wandering supperclub” that maintains a robust site, theghet.com, of such gatherings and interested individuals. Jeremy Townsend, the head of the group, added a Ning (a free social network that can be set up in five minutes) to theghet.com site, making it easy for members to organize events with their Ning profile, which can, of course, be a name and associated identity (perhaps entirely fictional) of their choosing.
There’s a reason for the pirate flag that is the logo of Ghetto Gourmet. The part of the anti-restaurant term that’s useful is that ‘restaurant’ references the space itself where food is served. Underground eaters can meet anywhere–this is a feast that must be movable, as this way of serving food is illegal. At one of these events, guests bring two hostess gifts: cash (unless they’ve paid beforehand online) and the implicit promise not to reveal the organizers or the organized. At many events, pictures of faces are not allowed and GPS tagging of images or persons in public online social network profiles is explicitly off-limits.
Two and a half decades ago, Benedict Anderson published the now-classic text Imagined Communities, linking (broadly speaking) the rise of nationalism to vernacular print publication. Anderson held that a “deep, horizontal comradeship” was possible between society members who might never meet. If we apply this horizontal comradeship notion to new online networks, a key difference is that members delight in meeting up offline and take actions to meet others in the network (this is not to say that their investment in the online community is predicated upon developing relationships offline, but that they feel empowered to, and do, reach out to strangers in the network and increase opportunities to meet digitally or in person–this is the imagined communities of Anderson made temporarily real, only to fade, recombine, and become real again).
And when these people do meet for underground food events, it is for hours on end, albeit in random locations. So these groups of nomadic food grazers arrive, engage, and disperse, but much less quickly than a phenomenon known as “flashmobbing” from a few years back. A “flashmob”–an subset of a “smart mob” as digital scholar Howard Rheingold termed them in 2002–is a group organized to converge on a specific location, perform a specific, unusual action (like pretending to worship the enormous dinosaur in toy emporium F.A.O. Schwartz), and then exit, usually within a matter of minutes, slipping out of the grasp of law enforcement that tries to assemble in time. The original 2003 flash mobs were organized anonymously by someone who later revealed himself to be Harper’s senior editor Bill Wasik, and he says they were designed to be meaningless and absurd. Recently, improv groups, most notably Improv Everywhere, have been building on this type of intervention by staging twin events in subways, musicals in shopping mall food courts.
Instead of the group action of a flash mob, improv groups sometimes practice choreography beforehand and tend to produce more elaborate performance art–in that more is required of participants.
All of these events–underground food meetings, flash mobs, improv events–hinge on participation from individuals who can disappear quickly if necessary. The sum of their actions drives the event, and the same thing happens online–when many small online actions from multiple people are gathered together, the aggregate can be a powerful visualization of emerging trends and ideas.
One site that functions as a hub of food news is Slashfood, where new blog posts are published every hour during the working day.
The entries are usually unrelated to each other, so the site is held together by the fact that different issues of food production, politics, and personal experience are all posted on Slashfood, in the same online place.
Slashfood is a group food news blog with multiple authors who post on different topics; the format for a Slashfood post is an image with a few paragraphs of text. Recurring post topics use a standard title at the beginning, such as the popular “food porn” posts that began a few years back.
These posts follow the format of an image with a few paragraphs of explanatory text.
And what is food porn? Here’s a slideshow with some of mine:
These images are posted on Flickr, which is a free photo-sharing service hosted by Yahoo!, and on Flickr, people form groups for similar photos. Over 11,000 people are in a Flickr called “Food Porn,” and the group administrator defines the group:
For those who can’t help but take pictures of food.
UPDATED PICTURE GUIDELINE:
All pictures should represent a moment of deliciousness in your life. A moment when you couldn’t wait to take a bite of the food, but waited an extra second in order to take a picture of your impending bliss. Hopefully you can communicate that desire for that dish with your picture, but I’m not going to penalize anyone if their pic is lacking in anyway.
All I ask is that you try your best.
And there are other groups opposed to food porn; the “Healthy Food and Community - No Food Porn!” group states in their group description, “This is not a pool for ‘food porn’ or food photography with no community oriented context [sic].”
Both groups post images publicly on the image-sharing site and group members leave comments and “favorite” enticing photos. The “Healthy Food and Community” group is concerned about community and context in photos.
So we might ask: how is context formed for amateur food pornography? How is online community constructed?
Earlier this year, a very popular food aggregation site, Tastespotting, was pulled down. Rumors flew online about copyright restrictions (members often take and post images from national magazines as well as from each other’s blogs) and editorial politics; a little while later, the site relaunched and, of this morning, was still up and running.
Tastespotting is a site where members can post images of food. The site has limited functionality–you can submit an image, favorite (”star”) images you like, “remix” (resort) the order of the images on the page, and peruse by topic.
The intriguing thing about Tastespotting is how large and devoted an online audience it built, very quickly. The site editor is Sarah of The Delicious Life blog, and she moderates images submitted before they appear on the site. There is room under each image for a brief description, and the image itself links to the blog post from whence it came.
The site is also known for the high quality of its images, and if someone posts an image from your food blog, you may see a dramatic spike in visitors to your site from Tastespotting.
Tastespotting still works, though, as a cohesive place for food pornography even if you simply view the images, as the group pool is constantly fresh, including new images submitted to the site.
Was this an online food community worth saving? Does this food pornography have context? Does it need to have context to be satisfactorily consumed?
I was walking through Charlottesville’s Main Street Market yesterday, and I picked up a copy of Flavor, a magazine about food in this area. Inside, there is an article by Joel Salatin, who operates Polyface Farm with his family near Staunton, Virginia. He talks about emancipating food from restrictive government regulations and ends by saying,
Yes, Virginia, we’ve come a long way. A long way to enslavement, I think. So buy some illegal milk and some illegal sausage. Go ahead and have your apple butter festival. Don’t comply. Drive the tyrants nuts.
Here’s to illegal feasting.
And I would echo that–in underground food events and seductive online photography sites, from amateur food pornographers to performative, improvisational food scenesters, here’s to illegal feasting.
You can find more of my food photography and musings on my personal site, kthread.com.
