Bringing People Together, Making People “Stand Out”: Honey Farms and Anthropology
Bringing people together, making people “stand out”: Oh dear
Almost everyone discovers that food unites and separates people. Bread and rice start medieval peasant riots, GMOs strain or heal international relations, family businesses for many people happen around the table, and in some countries, chocolate can win a girl’s affection for a day. In Charlottesville, VA, the city’s Saturday morning market clearly brings people together, but an interview with a local honey merchant shows that homegrown food can form community relationships while differentiating people. with each other within that community.
The Hungry Hill Farms stand is adjacent to the Popsicle Stand, the first stand in a long line of organic and homemade stands. The couple working in the cockpit first caught my eye when the kind man complimented my friend with the “I’m not a rocket surgeon” t-shirt. Other people who stopped to look at the honey often came by to chat; two ladies paused because, as they said, “I buy their honey at the Cville market.” The honey they had bought at the local grocery store had become an alliance in the conversation; It had created a social “debt”, albeit a very small one, between the person at the booth and the customer, and although the customer and the vendor did not know each other, they both recognized a small friendly bond. Colin Johnson, the friendly man who watches over the booth, said that regulars often come just to chat, not to buy honey.
Conversation and social ties started the Hungry Hill Farms business in 1968 when Glenn Clayton Sr. had a conversation with a friend from the fire department. The firefighter had had two bee hives as a hobby, but became allergic and gave them to Clayton Sr. as a gift. The two hives expanded to the current 500, and the hobby became a business as the honey became popular with friends and family, who received it from the Claytons on vacation and as a gift. The honey, then, brought the people together, and the fact that the people came together produced a surplus of honey. The Claytons soon discovered that they had too much honey to use year after year and began selling it. As they sold honey, they expanded their hives and social ties, and so the cycle continues. Colin Johnson, who told me the story of “his grandfather,” actually joined the business himself through social ties: he has a relationship with Mr. Clayton’s granddaughter, the confident-looking lady who sold us honey sticks. .
Basic food supply needs are still a very real part of why Happy Hill Farms exists. In addition to honey, the farm has ten acres of orchard that supplies much of the produce consumed by the Clayton family. The farm also grows shiitake mushrooms to sell. However, there is no question that social and community connections form a large part, if not most, of Hungry Hill Farms’ push and pull.
While honey brings people together, it also makes distinctions between people. When asked what kind of people bought Hungry Hill Honey, Johnson told us “a handful of people,” from the “crisp hippie types” to the “fresh off their yacht.” While the purchase of the same product seems to establish a kind of unified identity among these types of people, Johnson’s division of the customer group along socio-political lines, rather than racial, ethnic, or otherwise, reflects a mental division. general conversation about local foods. . There is a largely false stereotype for making sustainable, local food a liberal “hippie” theme; An additional stereotype, that conservatives have all the money for high-priced products, collapses as in Charlottesville, where it is an upper-middle-class liberal bourgeois who provides the purchasing power for agricultural products. Elsewhere, in more stereotypical and “conservative” rural areas, the price of local and sustainable food falls. Generalizations may not provide real pictures of a society abroad, but in the conversation about local food, they do show flashes of the harsh mental and social attitudes surrounding food consumption in the minds of consumers, vendors, and the public. rest of society. . The people of Cville distinguish themselves from one another by the food they eat.
A conversation with one of Hungry Hill’s customers further illuminated the way grocery shopping establishes uniqueness. He buys Hungry Hill, he says, because it’s walking distance from his house to the Cville market that sells it “and it’s local too,” but he goes to the farmers market because “everyone is here.” It’s where politicians campaign, people hang out, and you can buy local, sustainable food, he says. She described a community event that brings people together. As she progressed, she explained how sustainable, local food was a way of life for her, not “the latest social trend” because she grew up on a farm. The conversation, while demonstrating how food became a unifying event, succinctly demonstrated that my interviewee’s identity was shaped by her history with sustainable food. He distinguished himself not only from those who don’t buy local, but from those who have a different buying history with local food. I wanted that distinction.
Obviously, the food that people sell also sets them apart. Every company lives to point out why its food is different or better than that of others: that is simply a business factor. Hungry Hill Honey comes with an additional degree of supplier separation in addition to what comes naturally with commercial products. Vegetable and meat farmers work directly with the harvest they sell: beekeepers work with it second-hand from other living beings.
This distinction creates interesting environmental and political consequences for farmers. Johnson explains that large companies transport their bees across the country to try to reach all the different blooms. The first, almond blossoms, arrive in early spring, and when the bees have collected as much as possible, the companies transport them elsewhere, hitting southbound cotton blossoms, cherry blossoms, and everything in between. This journey weakens the bees’ immune system and understandably leads to the disorientation of their internal compasses. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a phenomenon that has rocked the bee industry for the past five years, occurs when bees simply stop orienting themselves, or fly off and leave the colony forever. Bees without a colony die and the suicide of the colony becomes a suicide for the bees. A year or two ago, Hungry Hill Farms also lost several colonies, even though most of its colonies remain stationary all the time. Johnson and Ms. Clayton attribute CCD primarily to bee diseases spread by large bee companies.
The CCD discussion shows that inherent in honey itself, and how it can be harvested and cultivated with practically minimal loss of bees, are social and economic distinctions and decisions. This happens, of course, with all products, but with honey, with its unique nature and origin, these options become especially pronounced and complex. The buying and selling of honey, then, says something about the people who buy and sell it. Honey unites people in community; it also shows us who we are as individuals.
