Abstract :
As the last major food that is primarily wild-caught, fish offers unique perspectives on relationships among nature, quality, and agro-food production. Developing a case study of changing constructions of quality in the global surimi seafood industry, this paper explores how ideas about quality are not simply social constructions that have material effects, but are complex interactions between natural inputs and their environments, production techniques and technologies, and foods and their uses. Surimi is a fish paste made from a variety of fish species, including Alaska pollock, the largest fishery in the world, and is used to make a variety of seafood products, including both traditional Japanese fish cakes and imitation seafood products (e.g. ‘krab’), which is the most common form in the US and Europe. Drawing on recent approaches to relationality, the analysis treats product quality neither as a purely objective measure nor subjective judgment, but instead as an assemblage of interactions at multiple stages of commodity chains. Analysis of how quality in the surimi industry has changed as production and consumption have moved to new places, and how quality then affects patterns of production and consumption, reveals that physical characteristics of the fish, and the environments from which they come, play key roles in quality definitions. Yet at the same time, which characteristics count as quality is defined within the production networks. Rather than focusing on relationships between ‘nature’ and ‘society’, analysis of individual production networks elucidates how specific aspects of what we call ‘the natural world’ participate in specific interactions. The key is not whether natural processes put constraints on economic activities or whether economic actors are able to outflank nature through technical innovation, but rather how specific elements and activities within production networks define each other in their interactions.
