Deborah Gewertz - Cheap Meat: Flap Food Nations in the Pacific Islands

Our story is about a fatty, cheap meat eaten by peoples in the Pacific Islands, who are among the most overweight in the world. Lamb or mutton flapssheep belliesare often 50 percent fat. They move from First World pastures and pens in New Zealand and Australia, where white people rarely eat them, to Third World pots and plates in the Pacific Islands, where brown people frequently eat themand in large amounts. As fatty and cheap meat, they are a kind of food implicated in the global epidemic of eating-related lifestyle diseases: obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. Many also implicate them in structures of inequality. The sale of lamb and mutton flaps to seemingly remote Pacific Islanders, we argue, involves political, ethical, and health issues of importance to us all.

In effect, our story about lamb and mutton flaps is both similar to and different from other accounts about food that have been told recently.These tend to be of an if you only knew genre in their focus on how those in the First World are often ignorant ofindeed, often misled if not duped bythe corporate and industrial food system. In one variant, these accounts reveal that the foods we enjoy lack innocence by virtue of the circumstances of their production; in another, by virtue of their ingredients and environmental effects. Bothand they are often combinedare intended to provoke disquietude about injustice or ill-health (both personal and environmental) that might cause us to change our food choices or to protest in other ways.

Figure 1. Lamb cuts

The first variant, that revealing injustice, shows that the foods on our plates are often obtained at the expense of the foods not on other peoples plates. Examples of this concern the tomatoes, green beans, broccoli, papayas, pineapples, and coffee produced for export by disadvantaged farmers and farm workers living in Mexico, Zambia, Guatemala, Jamaica, Mexico, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea.

It also relies on environmentally dubious practices formulated to maximize yield with the help of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, hormones, and antibiotics. Pollan and others provide sobering discussions of the physiological and environmental effects of transnational food corporations in their hunger for profit. In demonstrating the exploitation of our health and our environment, they too shake up our complacency.

There are, of course, Pacific Island examples that could lend themselves to the if you only knew renditions of both variants. Many of these are known not only to us, but also to a range of activists and health professionals, both from the Pacific Islands and elsewhere, who have written about the deplorable conditions under which many Pacific Islanders labor to produce foods for export to First World countries and the adverse environmental effects of this industry. An especially egregious case is that of RD Tuna in Papua New Guinea, which, under the guise of providing much-needed development, pays workers badly, strips the local seas clean of tuna and other fish, and dumps factory effluent. which contain wheat flour, vegetable oil, salt, wheat gluten, mineral salts, vegetable gum, and artificial colors; the flavor mix that accompanies them is extremely salty and contains artificial flavor enhancers (specifically, monosodium glutamate and disodium 5 ribonucleotide), anticaking agents (specifically, sodium aluminum silicate and calcium phosphates), hydrolysed plant protein, maltodextrin, onion powder, vegetable fats, parsley flakes, and flavor extracts.