The Real Deal - 25, Issue 12
Hello, reader! Welcome to the digital release of Issue 12. When we first started work on this issue all the way back in October 2019, we never would have imagined where we are now. As the situation has continued to evolve—global lockdowns shuttering the doors of our printer and postal routes as well as necessitating changes to how we prioritize spends as a nonprofit association in the middle of a pandemic—we’re not entirely sure if, or when, this issue will ever make it to print. (And, to be honest, having seen the final design: It’s more than a little heart-breaking! You would have loved it.)
We’re excited to release these features digitally for now, months in the making, to showcase the hard work of our authors. And we’d especially like to take this moment to thank the companies who supported this issue of 25: Pacific Foods, Bellwether Coffee, BWT Water + More, Cropster, Wilbur Curtis, iFinca, Pentair, and TONE Swiss.
We may live in the age of the replica, but we’ve never been so preoccupied with authenticity—especially when it comes to what we eat and drink.
NOA BERGER explores some of the different ways packaging helps to construct different types of authenticity.
We increasingly look for (and are sold) food that expresses authenticity, be it highlighting the taste of terroir or the produce’s natural qualities; dishes that stay true to long-held culinary traditions; or products whose origin one can trace and verify with certainty.
The search for authenticity is also an arguably prominent feature of the specialty coffee market. It is expressed in the valuation of coffee’s terroir, which is, like wine, increasingly protected by designation of origin in producing countries like Brazil. Similarly, specialty coffee brands also tend to represent not only coffee’s geographical origins, but the name, face, and—sometimes—“story” of the producer who grew it.
Coffee’s identity can also be protected and inscribed in labels and reports attesting to its authenticity as organic, or as being traded “fairly,” “directly,” or “sustainably.” With the implementation of technologies and systems for traceability and price transparency (QR codes, transparent transaction guides, and increasingly blockchain technology), the term authenticity takes on a new meaning. From authentic as a somewhat subjective notion, something that can be tasted and felt, authenticity becomes authentifiability, a character of an object that can be traced, verified, or measured in a manner perceived as objective.
Authenticity as Everything, and Nothing
Authenticity can therefore signify and be signified through different things: a taste, a story, a number—but as we’ve become more and more obsessed with the notion of “real,” it can now be signified through anything. For example, we tend to place authentic people or things (particularly foods) in semantic proximity to ideas such as “local,” “artisanal,” “craft,” “raw,” and “unique.” But—as Michael Beverland and Francis Farrelly[1] have shown—even foods that represent the stark contrast of this imagery (think: fast food chains) can be qualified as authentic under certain conditions.
In fact, chains and products will be considered “authentic” when perceived to represent an inherent part of a local tradition or culture. This is the case with Vegemite, produced industrially by the Kraft corporation, but described as “authentically” Australian by some of Beverland and Farrelly’s interviewees as it is heavily associated with Australian popular culture. As consumers, even standardized, heavily modified foods can be perceived as “authentically” representing certain locales, with visitors choosing to consume them as a part of their experience of the local culture (for example, going to a KFC to experience the culture of Southern United States). In this case, authenticity is signified through anything—and therefore, nothing.
Behind what we think of as “authentic” food lie dichotomies: the artisanal and the industrial, the raw and the modified, the local and the global, the slow and the fast. This observation stems from the fact that authenticity in fact harks back to two separate ideas: nature and culture. “Natural” authenticity refers to the idea that an object or a person is true to their “nature,” origin, or core, be it the taste of the earth or the quality of the raw material. This type of authenticity has also been called “typical” authenticity.[2] “Cultural” authenticity signifies the methods, traditions, or culture defined for an object or a person. This has also been named “stereotypical” authenticity. For example, we might expect Turkish coffee to be traditionally brewed in a cezve or a Pizza Napolitana to include mozzarella cheese, not stilton. In fact, Pizza Napolitana is even protected as both a traditional specialty guaranteed (TSG) by the European Union and an intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO. This designation protects not so much the expression of “the taste of the earth,” but of the Italian culinary tradition and culture.
When Origin Is Out of Reach: Authenticity and Class
The different ways in which we describe a foodstuff as “authentic” can be linked to social class. Robin Lakoff[3], Dan Jurafsky[4], and others have shown that natural authenticity will often be associated with the menus of high-end restaurants or the packaging of expensive products, while cultural authenticity will be evoked in the menus and packaging of more affordable restaurants and foods. Hence, the menus of high-end restaurants will tell us the story of their ingredients (like Noma, a two-Michelin-star restaurant credited with the reinvention of Nordic cuisine) while "more affordable" restaurants may focus on the long-held family traditions behind their establishment and recipes.
This is also true when we consider the packaging of shop-goods. When exploring the types of authenticity used to sell potato chips, sociologist Joshua Freedman[5] noted that expensive chip brands tend to focus on “sea-salt” and “Yukon gold potatoes” while the more affordable brands speak of “old family recipes.” This is true in coffee, too: while a specialty coffee brand may tell us of the complex flavor profile resulting from the unique climate typical of the Yirgacheffe region, a “traditional” Italian brand is more likely to emphasize the company’s origin in long-held traditions.
This distinction, however, is far from neutral. Restaurants evoking natural authenticity often associate it not only with a higher price range but with complex terms and cooking methods derived from foreign languages (often French, Japanese, or Italian). This type of “gatekeeping” therefore practically relegates access to “natural” food not only to those with the financial means to consume it, but also to those with the knowledge (and confidence) to understand the terms and tastes that come with it.[6]
Here, “authenticity” is power. Derived from the Greek notion of authentikos, the term signifies “an original text” but also an “imposed and authoritative narrative.” This idea is clear in the case of high-end restaurants, but equally applies to the seemingly democratic “foodie” discourse that makes not only refined foods but also affordable, and particularly “ethnic,” ones as objects worthy of culinary curiosity and desire. Foodie discourse holds within it a tension between its democratization of taste (all foods are born worthy) and its tendency to turn “ethnic,” “exotic,” and “authentic” foods to simplified and consumable representations of an “other,” defined by what it is not—the Western norm of food that is not ethnic, nor authentic—to answer the expectations of consumer-tourists regarding what ethnic food should taste and look like.[7]
From Luxury to Specialty: What’s in a Package?
Highlighting the natural authenticity of food also marks the difference between “specialty” and “luxury.” As Elizabeth Currid-Halkett recently suggested, the way members of the elite distinguish themselves from the working classes has changed.[8] In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this was achieved through the consumption of expensive luxury goods and engaging in leisure activities, but today, these have become increasingly accessible to the working class through loans, credit, and convincing copies. As a consequence, goods that require effort, time, and education to enjoy or appreciate have come to replace goods that are simply more expensive (luxury goods) as a means for social distinction of the elites—or as Elizabeth calls them, the “aspirational” classes.
The goods consumed by these elites will often place an emphasis on the production sphere, geographically and symbolically distant from consumers in the Global North. I would argue that specialty products are—among other things—a manifestation of this trend. Take chocolate packaging, for instance. "Affordable" or "traditional" brands will usually present images related to the country in which the chocolate was processed into a consumable product (usually Switzerland or Belgium): flowing milk jugs, snow-capped Alpine mountains, happy cows. As the chocolate “moves” towards the specialty, or bean-to-bar end of the scale, these images will often transition towards the production sphere. Upper-middle-scale supermarket brands tend to portray faces of producers, generic “ethnic” people in traditional outfits or “exotic” animals, while bean-to-bar packaging might include illustrations of cocoa beans, for example.
These questions can and probably should be applied to coffee: What message do we choose to convey to consumers about our coffee? Do we want to emphasize the long-held traditions to make it accessible to a larger audience, or rather, emphasize its natural origins? What meaning(s) stand behind our description of a coffee as “authentic” and which of those meanings are made accessible to different consumers? The challenge is to portray coffee as authentic without discriminating between different kinds of consumers, while also avoiding a simplified and exoticized image of producers.
While coffee’s not exactly “ethnic” food, it does carry within it a similar tension. As it modeled itself on the wine world in 1970’s United States, the burgeoning specialty coffee market borrowed not only the 100-point system and the wheel of flavors and aromas, but also a visual representation of the production-scape and producers. However, coffee comes with a colonial past and an existing considerable inequality—on both an economic and symbolic level—between producers in the Global South and consumers in the Global North. The will to represent the production sphere, added to the specialty coffee market’s aspiration for ethical trading models and met with the inequalities rife in the coffee sector, generates a tension and a difficulty around the way it represents producers. In the age of social media, consumer scrutiny is more present than ever, and this makes it even harder for coffee companies to find the “right” way to represent coffee as “authentic” by talking about or showing its producers. There is always a risk of “pink-washing,” or romanticizing the difficulties, hard manual labor, and harsh working conditions faced by coffee producers in portraying “success” stories.
This tension may play a part, however small, in what seems like the current trend in the packaging of many coffee roasters around the world: moving away from presenting pictures and stories of producers to packaging that is clean, informative, and speaks of numbers instead of people. Perhaps then, a new type of authenticity emerges: coffee as authentic not because it was made by “authentic people,” but because it can be quantified, measured, traced back, validated, and “authentified,” and this translates in the way we package, present, and represent coffee to consumers. Just like the term “authenticity” itself, there is probably no “true” answer to the question of how to represent the “authenticity” of coffee. Authenticity, then, is perhaps not so much a "truth" but the search to know more about the products that we purchase and the places, people, or numbers behind them. ◇
NOA BERGER is a PhD candidate studying the social construction of quality in the French and Brazilian specialty coffee markets at the École des Hautes Études in Sciences Sociales, Paris.
Special Thanks to Our Issue 12 Advertisers
This issue of 25 is supported by Pacific Foods, Bellwether Coffee, BWT Water + More, Cropster, Wilbur Curtis, iFinca, Pentair, and TONE Swiss.
References
[1] Beverland, Michael B., and Francis J. Farrelly. “The quest for authenticity in consumption: Consumers’ purposive choice of authentic cues to shape experienced outcomes.” Journal of Consumer Research 36, no. 5 (2009): 838–856.
[2] Carroll, Glenn R., and Dennis Ray Wheaton. “The organizational construction of authenticity: An examination of contemporary food and dining in the US.” Research in organizational behavior 29 (2009): 255–282.
[3] Lakoff, Robin. “Identity à la carte: You are what you eat.” Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 23 (2006): 142.
[4] Jurafsky, Dan, Victor Chahuneau, Bryan Routledge, and Noah Smith. “Linguistic Markers of Status in Food Culture: Bourdieu’s Distinction in a Menu Corpus.” (2018).
[5] Freedman, Joshua, and Dan Jurafsky. “Authenticity in America: Class distinctions in potato chip advertising.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 11, no. 4 (2011): 46–54.
[6] Jurafsky et. al, 2018.
[7] Johnston, Josée, and Baumann, Shyon. Foodies: Democracy and distinction in the gourmet foodscape. Routledge, 2014.
[8] Currid-Halkett, Elizabeth. The sum of small things: A theory of the aspirational class. Princeton University Press, 2017.