Follow the Thing

Abstract

In food studies, there are few examples of multi-site ethnographies exploring the hazy relations between commodity producers, consumers, and those in between (see Cook et al., 2006). This article attempts to add to this literature by tracing relations between one North London family cooking fishcakes on a Friday night, and the changing fortunes of a group of farmers in a rural Jamaica town ripping up sugar cane to grow hot peppers: a key ingredient in a bottle of Pepup `West Indian Hot Pepper Sauce` that connected their lives. (The names of places, people, and companies have been changed in this article to preserve the anonymity of those taking part in our research.) This article maps out a constellation of people, plants, bugs, diseases, recipes, politics, trade agreements, and histories, whose multiple, complex entanglements and disjunctures animate this `thing` and its travels. And, in doing so, the article draws upon and contributes to political/academic debates about: (a) conducting `follow the thing` ethnographies in which commodities and their biographies are the organizing principles of post-disciplinary research (Sayer, 2003; Marcus, 1995); (b) producing detailed case studies that illustrate how capitalist relations not only could be, but are, diverse, different, surprising (Leyshon et al., 2003; Miller, D. 1998); (c) presenting evocative, engaging, affecting but jarring accounts of connected lives that readers can hopefully identify with and get wrapped up in as they read (Agger, 2002; Heyman, 2000); and (d) theorizing together, between the lines, marxist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial approaches to food and its globalized, uneven geographies (see Castree, 2002; Cook & Harrison, 2003; Kirsch & Mitchell, 2004).