So welcome everybody to the 2020 so as food studies center distinguished lecture. My name is Jacob Klein, and I'm the current chair of the center. The food studies center is housed within the Department of Anthropology and sociology. So as University of London. The center is interdisciplinary in orientation and was established in 2007 to promote research and teaching in the field of food studies at so as. And to foster links between so as and other individuals and institutions with an academic interest in food studies. We run a weekly seminar series convene workshops and conferences, host postdoctoral researchers and oversee a master's program in the anthropology of food. Each year, the center invites a prominent figure in the world of food studies to deliver a distinguished lecture. The speakers in the series include Sidney mints, Melissa Caldwell, James Scott, your time with the language. Amita Bobby scar and Christian and do Ray. Several of the previous distinguished lectures have been recorded and can be viewed via the so as food studies center web pages and YouTube playlist. This lecture by professor sorry today's lecture by professor Hannah Garth will also be recorded and made available online. The lecture entitled between distribution and consumption on the social practices of food acquisition will be followed by question and answer session. If you have a question for Professor Garth, please write it in the Q&A box at any time. Please do not use the chat box for this purpose. Questions in the Q&A box will be visible only to the speaker and the hosts, not to the audience. I will read out questions. If you have a name to be mentioned, please write it at the end of your question. Otherwise, I will assume that you prefer to be anonymous. Tonight's today's distinguished lecture is being facilitated by the so as centers and institutes office. I wish to express my deep gratitude to that office, and specifically to its executive Charles. I would also like to thank Professor Melissa Caldwell of the University of California Santa Cruz and my so as colleagues, Dr. Elizabeth Hall, Dr. Catherine Dolan, and Professor Edward Simpson for their support and advice. And I would also like to thank Professor Nia Aviali of Ben Gurion University for introducing me to Hannah Garth and her work. Hannah Garth is a medical and cultural anthropologist specializing in the study of food. She holds a master's in public health with a focus on global health from Boston University and a PhD in anthropology from UCLA. Currently an assistant professor professor of anthropology at the University of California San Diego. In the autumn of 2021, she will be taking up a position in the Department of anthropology at Princeton University. Professor Garth has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Cuba's second largest city, Santiago de Cuba, and in Los Angeles, California. Her food centered research addresses addresses issues of inequality and structural violence, with a particular emphasis on race and gender based inequalities. She has published work in journals, including American anthropologist, cultural anthropology, social science and medicine, and food culture and society. A food and identity in the Caribbean, published by Bluesbury in 2013. Two major publications in 2020 have consolidated Professor Garth's position at the forefront of current debates in anthropology and food studies, not least in relation to food security and race. In Cuba, the pursuit of a decent meal published by Stanford University Press is a rich powerful ethnography of residents of Santiago de Cuba, a majority black city, and their everyday struggles to acquire desired foods in Cuba's complex post Soviet food system. In the monograph, she introduces the concept of the politics of adequacy in order to quote, account for what is necessary beyond basic nutrition, prompting us to ask, not whether a food system sustains life, but whether it sustains a particular kind of living, and quote. In black food matters, racial justice in the wake of food justice co edited by Garth and Ashante Reese and published by University of Minnesota Press. The authors argue that food inequities in the United States are embedded in the afterlife of slavery. And they investigate how the American food system is quote, part of larger structures that by design were never created for black survival. The volume is a crucial intervention into our often race blind discussions of food security and food justice, one with relevance far beyond the borders of the United States. I'm excited and honored to welcome the 2020 so as food study center distinguished lecturer, Professor Anna Garth. Thank you. Hello. I'd like to start by thanking everyone for being here today. I'd like to give a special thank you to Jacob for inviting me to participate and to everyone and so as that's been involved with putting this event together. It is an honor to be giving this distinguished lecture, which is part of a series that began in 2007 with a lecture from Sydney Minns on food and diaspora. Minns began his lecture by stating that for a century the field of anthropology has been completely based on the study of the animal that eats, although many anthropologists do not focus on the eating in that involved in that at all. Minns grounded us in 40,000 years of deep human history, noting the role of fire in our development of as animals that cook, not just animals that eat. He noted that we then launched into a period of domestication of plants and animals, and the application of human genius for the desire for stable subsistence. Minns asserted that nothing human beings have ever done could match the achievement of domestication. He also noted that what distinguishes our humanity is not what people have, but what they do with what they have. Okay, I'd like to dig further into the first part of the aphorism focusing in on how people get what they have that that is food acquisition. Domestication and the use of fire were both human achievements that significantly affected the kinds of foods that humans acquire, as well as how and why they acquire different foods. And this accuracy is based on his revelations about the global nature of food production, distribution and consumption. In the lecture, Minns conjured up images on subsistence agriculturists, agriculturalists harvesting gardens and fish, the rise of the global food system, and the ways in which Caribbean plantations, sugar, tea and coffee consumption impacted the European work day. He also noted that when people produce their own foods, locality and the ways in which they grew harvested and otherwise acquired food was fundamental for understanding who people were. And Minns and those he drew upon illuminated many of the social and cultural dimensions of local food systems, and many aspects of understanding human life and these contexts can be applied more broadly. However, what I'd like to reflect upon today has been missing from our anthropological understanding of food and culture that of food acquisition. This is characterization once people stopped producing their own foods, the ways in which they access food was more bound to food distribution systems. But what I argue today is that food, food acquisition is a social and cultural process in its own right nestled somewhere between distribution and consumption on the production consumption distribution chain. Acquisition is the process through which we acquire food. In working to parse out our understandings of production, Jonathan Friedman made the case for separating out consumption as a sociological domain in its own right from only thinking about it as its role in the broader process of production. Daniel Miller has argued that consumption has has been the vanguard of human history, despite the little attention it has received from anthropologists. Just as food consumption itself was long ignored by anthropologists who saw it as innate universal and not particularly culturally interesting. In many societies across the globe where household level food acquisition is relatively straightforward. The process of acquiring food may not be understood as an important cultural activity. Rather, it is often seen as an economic issue that is more related to local channels of food distribution and food acquisition practices matter for how we use food and material culture as a lens to understand the social and cultural dimensions of food in our lives. So in this talk today, I'd like to draw upon my research in Eastern Cuba on household food acquisition and consumption. From 2008 to 2019. I conducted ethnographic research in Santiago Cuba second largest city located 500 miles away from the capital Havana. In my book, food in Cuba the pursuit of a decent meal published in January 2020 with Stanford University Press. I analyze the ways in which practices of food acquisition are entangled with various cultural, political and social dimensions of everyday life. This casts new light on how families respond to shifts in food access. In post Soviet Cuba, public services once guaranteed by the socialist state such as adequate food rations have now become the responsibility of individuals. Half of daily caloric needs guaranteed by the existing food ration households face the daily challenge of acquiring the remaining half, while struggling to find food that meets their local and personal cultural standards. Today, I will juxtapose my research in Santiago. This is another research project that I've been conducting in Los Angeles, California. Since 2009, I have been studying nonprofit city and county organizations that are part of a growing movement to improve access to healthy food in low income areas, such as South Los Angeles and East Los Angeles. I have systematically studied food at the food acquisition practices of residents. Today, I will draw upon the ways in which the organizations I have worked with, imagine and understand the food landscape of South LA. How they intervene in it in their efforts to entice residents of South LA to eat more healthy food, as well as some interactions and conversations I have had with residents about their food acquisition practices. The timing of this talk also calls for mention and contextualization of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has affected food supplies and in turn affected food acquisition across the globe. Therefore, I will begin with my own experiences of shifting my food acquisition practices in the first wave of the pandemic hitting Los Angeles where I live. So I'll begin there. On March 11, 2020, I went to my local neighborhood market to pick up one thing for a recipe. This is a practice I've grown accustomed to. I would often decide to make something for lunch around 11am make something for dinner around 4pm. Look at what ingredients I had at home and quickly pop over to the store a seven minute walk or one minute drive. Quickly walk through the aisles, which always held the same sets of ingredients produce dairy bread canned foods frozen foods ready made deli items, all in the same location in the store. I knew the store layout both because of my familiarity with my local neighborhood market and because the vast majority of supermarket chains were laid out and more or less the same fashion across the United States. That day, I went straight to the second to last aisle and located the section called international foods and quickly located a can of fried wontons. The one ingredient that I needed that I didn't have on hand for the Chinese chicken salad that I hoped to make for lunch that day. I had decided to make it for lunch that day only minutes prior to this experience. I also stopped in the cooler aisle and grabbed a can of Diet Coke as was my usual habit when picking up things from the store. Up to this point, everything about this experience was typical for me. Normally I would go to the checkout stand. At that time of day, there'd be very few people in the store, no lines, I would pay with a credit card, I never have cash on hand. Take my receipt, no bag, and either get back into my car or walk home. However, on March 11, 2020, it was not a normal day. It was the week when it was becoming clear to Californians that the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading in the state. Later that week, cities would lock down businesses and schools would close.  Some were filling up their carts to the brim to stock up on food ahead of the lockdown. Some were only there for the goods that people were panic buying. Toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and disinfecting wipes at the time. This was apparently one of the few markets in the city that had those scarce items on hand, and they were flying off the shelves, selling out faster than stores were receiving shipments, and therefore everyone had deemed them to be scarce in the early days of the pandemic. Although the wait to check out was long that day, I was committed to my Chinese chicken salad. So I waited it out only to arrive at the front of the line and realize that I had left my wallet at home. Also something that I do frequently. The cashier, who did not know me by name, had checked me out several times before and knew that I had a familiar face. I was frantically searching my pockets. The man behind me in line offered to pay for my wantons and Diet Coke. He, I let him pay for me, and I promised to pay it forward by buying something for someone else next time I was out making making purchases. thanking him I left the store with just what I needed and I went home to make lunch. And that trip to the store was part of my normal everyday practices of food acquisition, basically a practice of acquisition that simply involves walking a few minutes to a store that has almost everything I could ever need or want. It was essentially shopping, as Daniel Miller has theorized for Miller shopping is the activity we undertake nearly every day in order to be able to obtain goods for whom we are responsible. We eat, wear and employ in a multitude of tasks. He hones in on what are everyday typical and mundane forms of shopping for his interlocutors in north London, focusing mainly on middle and upper class women. He calls housewives. Miller's analysis centers on women's decisions between shopping at local stores or malls, as they shift between shopping as pleasure and entertainment versus shopping as complicated and frustrating. He analyzes their processes of making selections between items in stores as the practice of shopping. As Miller was trying to parse out the category of consumption into a sub category of shopping. I'm building on that by breaking down further the activities of acquisition, which include shopping, among other things. In addition to expanding consumption and shopping theorizations, I focus on the multitude of practices that people piece together to comprise practices of acquisition as a process of complex social and cultural dimensions. If Miller characterizes shopping as mundane, then the myriad practices that comprise acquisition might appear to be monotonous. Indeed, they might seem so humdrum that most people rarely pay them any attention, except of course in cases of a global pandemic or other forms of food scarcity. Yet even outside of these extreme conditions, these practices are there. If we were engaged in bulk buying or panic buying on March 11, already by March 13, I would regret not buying more at the market that day. Two days after that shopping trip, the virus had accelerated, and it was clear that we would have to quarantine in some way. It was not clear what quarantine would look like, how long it would be. And if we would only have to rely on the food that we had stocked up in our homes or if we'd be able to go to the store. After a few days, people in my area had taken to what we thought of as panic buying, going to the store, filling up carts with any and all non perishable food items, canned items in particular, buying cases of water, and the uniquely American toilet paper panic buy. I think it's uniquely American. In my area, we're not prepared for this phenomenon. Within days, the shelves in the center areas of the store were bare. There was however still plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, and at the time, meat and fish were still well stocked. With the shelves bare, by the time I set about stocking up my own household for the two week quarantine, the city of Los Angeles had officially told us to prepare for. I had to shift my food acquisition practices away from the standard forms of shopping that I was used to. I reached out to my social network to find out where people were accessing basic ingredients. I was able to sell me some yeast. The owners of our local pizzeria gave me some of their personal sourdough starter. I've resubscribed to a local community supported agriculture CSA box. I delivered to my house every Sunday morning for several months, and I ordered food from Amazon.com. The local restaurants that had to shut down their regular food service were selling off their ingredients. A local Italian restaurant was selling flour, sugar, yeast, as well as tomatoes, bell peppers, onions, garlic and herbs. A nearby coffee shop was also selling grocery bundles of eggs, coffee, tea, butter, milk, bread, fancy jams, while they determined if they would be able to keep selling prepared coffee under the new city regulations. Soon grocery stores started to shift their stocking practices, and more shelf-stable foods reappeared. But by the end of the day, grocery shelves were empty almost every day, so shopping practices had to be adjusted in order to be able to access food. When grocery shopping, as I had known it, was no longer possible, my food acquisition practices shifted for a brief period of time. These ways of acquiring food, different from what I was accustomed to, were not exactly shopping, but a variety of ways of acquiring food from my household. By piecing together a bit from each of these sources, I was able to put together what my family would need. At the same time across the world, food distribution practices were shifting, as were consumption patterns. Based on my own experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and my ethnographic research in Cuba and South Los Angeles, I argue that this broader category of food acquisition is more than shopping and involves an important social process in the chain from food production to consumption. Between distribution and consumption lie the myriad possibilities for acquisition, the practices through which people come to possess the food that has been distributed to them, the practices through which people acquire the food they will consume. In this case, beyond grocery shopping, people in my social circle, which I should note is a relatively socio-economically privileged one, were now using food banks, picking up free meals at the drive-through programs created by the Los Angeles Unified School District to distribute food to kids and their families, signing up for produce boxes from companies like Imperfect Produce and various local community-supported agriculture boxes. I joined many friends in planting what we've been calling a pandemic garden in April, something akin to the Victory Gardens of World War II, one and two. I would use the herbs that I planted right away, and months later I would harvest potatoes, onions and tomatoes from the beds that I tended during the first few months of quarantine. I have had a home garden for the past 10 years or so, but with changing obligations on my time, I've since let the garden go for now. Others were foraging for food in the city, picking up, picking fruit from trees on public land or what had, what appeared to be unwanted on private property. People joined food sharing groups to share that foraged food or to share goods from produce boxes that they didn't want or harvest from their own garden. Community pantries and refrigerators were placed outside of businesses around my area of the city, and these became important places for those without enough food to access free food from the community. These practices of acquisition were more visible once the items in the grocery store became scarce, and the rise of these practices during the pandemic involved new connections within existing social networks and the development of new social networks, as well as myriad micro social practices. My research in Cuba over the last decade or so has also been an in depth analysis of the social and cultural dimensions of food acquisition, and I'd like now to turn to that work. My own process of theorizing food acquisition was first developed through my ethnographic research in Santiago de Cuba. In the Cuban context, I found that when access to food shifts and acquisition of ingredients that people love to eat becomes difficult, strained or impossible. Then acquisition comes to the forefront of people's concerns. Increasingly, it is essential to consider how we acquire food, where our food comes from, and how the social, economic and political aspects of obtaining food impact our lives. The Cubans I work with actively asked themselves, how am I going to get the food that I need for today to feed myself and my family, as they think about their daily plans for food acquisition each morning. And as it has become more difficult in Cuba, the economic aspect of food acquisition is deeply connected to intimate forms of sociality and the ways in which people negotiate their social positions. In the following vignette, I draw on the household food practices of one family from my research in eastern Cuba. Ray live in a small village about five miles outside of Santiago, where they are what a few families that I studied that do not live in the city. Sula was born in the early 1980s in Santiago, her mother is black her father is Chinese racially she identifies as China. She went to the university directly after high school and graduated with a bachelor's degree in English. In other words, she started working in the tourism industry. She currently works for a tour company in a hotel, and she uses her English on almost a daily basis. She works every other day and stays at home with her son on opposite days. According to Sula, she married late in life when she was 28. So she felt the urgent need to have a child right away. When she was trying to have a child they lived with her in-laws in a house that they built on the on the rooftop of her in-laws home. It took them three years, and they had a baby in the middle of it all. Their son was two years old when I met them. And Ray had another son from a previous relationship who was 12 and lived with his parents in the home below. Although the two households were separate, there were many shared elements of their food practices. For instance, Ray's 12 year old son lived downstairs with his grandparents, but he would take his meals upstairs with his dad and Sula. Both families raised and tended pigs and chickens in the yard outside their home, sharing the costs of feed and the work to care for them as well as the eggs and the meat that they yielded. On my first night studying her household in 2010, she decided to show off her favorite and best done dinner, poyotino, Chinese chicken. She had chicken from her food ration picked up at the ration station just a few blocks from her home the day before. She decided to cook all three leg and thigh pairs. She started the poyotino in the pressure cooker. And since I had just started studying her home and had not yet ventured out to get food with her, she launched into an explanation of where she had sourced each ingredient. With both hands, she held a very large bottle of soy sauce, salsachina, which she felt was difficult to acquire in Santiago, so she regularly asked a friend who travels to Havana to bring her a bottle from Havana's Chinatown. That friend also brings her frijoles chinos sprouted mung beans, which were also more regularly available in Havana's Chinatown. Although these ingredients were sporadically available in Santiago, because she used them so often she didn't rely on searching for them in the city. Instead, she would sometimes pay the friend for picking up these items, other times she would exchange her homemade pumpkin flan, flan de calabaza, or homemade pizza, pizza casera, both of which she had garnered a reputation for making very well. Her practice of acquiring these two ingredients that she felt were essential to making her familial and cultural cuisine did not involve shopping, because shopping was unreliable. Instead, she established an exchange that was sometimes monetary and sometimes a gift exchange. That night as she, she also made flan de calabaza, which calls for milk, sugar, and salt. All ingredients she accesses through her Cuban government food rations. These are virtually free to all Cubans, although there is a small payment. She purchased off the ration a cut of a piece of pumpkin from a state subsidized agro market in her neighborhood. The cinnamon had to be purchased at the unsubsidized agro market in Santiago, because there was none to be found in her village. She had purchased it during a break from work while she was in the city. The final ingredient cornstarch, though likely to be available at markets in the city, was purchased on the black market from a man selling small portions of it on a street corner. Sula felt that his prices would be better than the market. Well, in all that went into the acquisition for the food to make dinner that day, she had moved between a variety of food acquisition practices and forms of exchange informal sectors, unofficial, unofficial and official sectors, shifting her approach to food acquisition as needed. One aspect of Sula's life that might make her process of acquisition different from others is the peri-urban location of her home. She felt that she missed out on opportunities to learn strategies for food acquisition, whereas in the city friends and acquaintances would likely visit her and share stories of what foods they found in different places. Out there she had no visitors. And she said that she felt lonely and isolated, but she was grateful for her job in the city, which is where she was able to see friends on her breaks, or they would stop by and visit her. She was also able to go shopping before and after her shift and on her breaks. While she longed for shopping and social exchanges that would alert her to forms of food acquisition, those in the city might have pined over all of the space that she had to raise chickens and pigs. Her seemingly endless supply of eggs, steady supply of meat, without having to wait in line or worry about shortages or lack of funds, might be an enviable form of food acquisition from their city perspectives. This was also the case for another rural family that I studied. However, as farmers living in El Monte, they did not come into the city every other day for work, but instead only came in to acquire food approximately bi-weekly. Although they received their rations and bread from the rural ration station, just a horse ride away from their farm, they enjoyed and they enjoyed fresh eggs, fresh liquid milk, homemade cheese and butter, yogurt and meat fresh from their farm. They fretted over their ability to find food that they did not have access to on their short trips to town. Cooking oil, coffee, onions, garlic and peppers, when those weren't in season in their garden. When these rural families had access, while these rural families had access to some foods they produced on their own, most families I worked with in the city produced almost no food of their own, with the exception of the practice of raising pigs on the rooftop and save the occasional egg laying hen on the patio. These families relied only on what they could acquire in the city. Their rations, purchases at sparse peso markets, purchases at unsubsidized markets, purchases at stores were what they referred to as la shopping. The only type of food acquisition they think of as shopping referred to in English and thought of as a foreign or American act. They acquire food on the black market through social networks, they learn where things are available, how they can seek them out and through social networks they also have connections to to the black market in and of itself. In my recent book food in Cuba the pursuit of a decent meal I detail the food acquisition practices and strategies of several families in the city of Santiago. In most of the households in my study, one member of the family dedicates themselves full time to food acquisition preparation planning and cleaning. This is often in connection with childcare or elder care and it is often taken on by a woman. People spend hours every day searching for food in the city. This arduous task, this arduous search for food requires investments of substantial time and energy at the expense of other activities including work and leisure. Moving beyond only thinking of production, distribution and consumption, this difficulty searching for food illuminates the need for an analytical focus on acquisition as a process. By focusing on consumption broadly we can see the connection to self definition and other social projects. However, as Bordeaux has taught us, all societies are built upon infrastructures that guarantee an unequal distribution of not only economic but also symbolic capital. So looking at these practices and the way as actors inhabit bodies and live domains, they're happy to see that we see how unequal distribution of power and wealth are invisibly reproduced. As Bordeaux has said, everyday activities, the practice of quotidian unconscious unconsciously guarantees the continued existence of an unequal distribution of power. By focusing out even more and focusing on acquisition in its own right, we can better understand the uneven amounts of time and energy that go into practices of consumption. The ways in which the tone of the experience shifts from pleasurable to frustrating, as well as the ways in which acquisition itself is a social and cultural process. It becomes particularly salient when food access becomes difficult. In Cuba, as food acquisition has become more strained, the economic aspect of food acquisition is deeply connected with intimate forms of social connection and the ways in which people negotiate their social position, both to access food and they use food to reflect their social position back to themselves and to others. So in the book, I show how difficulties in food acquisition are always shaped by political, economic and social forces external to ourselves. But they can also cause shifts in our subjectivity, which is negotiated through our discourse or actions, such as the insistence on eating in a particular way or endlessly searching for desired foods. Food acquisitions have continuously adopted new tactics and strategies for food acquisition. However, despite their efforts, their ideals are rarely achieved. Because food, specifically particular foods and ways of eating is so important to identity, when food becomes scarce, families engage in tactics of acquisition that are not considered ethical. And regardless of their legality, indeed, as Amartya Sen has noted, the compulsion to acquire enough food may force vulnerable people to do things which they resent doing and may make them accept lives with little freedom. The role of food in fostering freedom can be a very important one. And I show that as the state provisioning system wanes in Cuba, Santiago's must increasingly rely on social networks to access food, and yet scarcity within those networks can lead people to turn to practices of food that undermine the very social connections that they rely upon to survive. This difficulty becomes a personal and social bind that demonstrates the ramifications of an inadequate food system. Giving close attention to the lived experience of food acquisition illuminates the ways in which class differences persist in Cuba today. I argue in the book that with careful attention to people's practices of acquisition, we can see where the inadequacies lie. Some struggle to eat from meal to meal. Others, however, have the resources to pay for help, employing someone to wait in line for them or scour the city for food, offsetting the time and energy and stress of food acquisition for themselves. By centering my analysis on acquisition, I expand our understanding of the process of food production, distribution and consumption, turning our attention to acquisition also troubles our understanding of food security versus food sovereignty. As I reveal the difficulties people face in acquiring food, even in an environment like Cuba that is often thought to be food secure and thought to have food sovereignty. However, when we see the process behind food acquisition and the centrality of the link between particular foods and identity, we can see that food security is not black and white. Food acquisition easily taken for granted in full service grocery stores thus becomes an extremely complex social process in Cuba today. Waiting in lines at ration stations chatting with friends and family members about what is available where and at what price is woven into the daily practice of everyday life in Cuba. However, turning our attention to acquisition rather than food security highlights the hours of labor and stress that actually go come behind the heaping plates of rice and beans that Cubans often enjoy at their table. So connecting my research in Cuba to my ongoing research in the United States I'd like to turn back to Los Angeles now. Food acquisition looks different in various contexts across across the globe, but it can also look different in the same city. I open this talk with a reflection on my own acquisition practices in the city of Los Angeles the community where I live. In 2009 I have been researching the ways in which Los Angeles based community nonprofit and governmental entities have developed programming to improve access to healthy food among lower income residents in areas such as South Los Angeles and East Los Angeles. Food apartheid characterizes the food scape of Los Angeles where there is essentially a separate and unequal system of food distribution. Different parts of the city have different kinds of grocery stores which have varying price points and varying types of food foods that they stock. Lower income areas such as South LA have fewer supermarkets per capita than areas with more affluent populations. For instance, grocery stores that are common in beach communities, West Los Angeles, Hollywood and areas near where I live in Los Files, such as Whole Foods, Trader Joe's and Gelsen's do not have store locations in South LA where instead we find chains like food for less, the super superior, numero uno market and smaller neighborhood markets. There are chains that have locations in both areas, Ralph's and Vaughn's for instance, but they have few locations in South LA and they tend to be located on the edges of the area near more affluent areas. The landscape for grocery shopping presents problems for those that live in South LA in similar areas. And that is part of why the many food justice organizations that I study want to intervene and attempt to improve food access there. However, one of the things that I have found in doing this work is that many organizations assume that the people who live in South LA shop for food in the same way that people in West LA and other parts of the city do. The assumption is that they simply walk or drive to the nearest market and they rely on what is available there, just as I had to make my Chinese chicken salad. However, what my research has found is that food acquisition practices are not straightforward, although I have not systematically studied household food acquisition in South LA. From my work with the organizations I've spoken to many residents who tell me of the variety of ways that they acquire food. Some shop at the markets nearest to their home as the activists that I work with assume. However, others never shop at the markets nearest to their homes, instead driving to other neighborhoods to shop at places like Costco, Whole Foods or Trader Joe's. Some drive out of their areas to shop on weekends, but many of the people that I've spoken with have the routine of shopping at a particular favorite store on their way home from work. Since many Angelenos commute anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes on average and are said to have some of the longest commutes of any city in the United States, passing by a grocery store anywhere in the city on the way home is feasible. Residents of South LA are likely to own a car. Almost every area in South LA has an average of two vehicles per household, according to a survey from the University of Southern California. However, for residents of South LA who do not access food on their commute, there are full service grocery stores all over the area. There are smaller markets and specialty markets as well. From my conversations with residents, people often piece together their food acquisition, buying certain items at certain stores where they feel they get the best quality and prices for those items. A resident may buy shelf stable goods at a store like bargain market grocery outlet or smart and final each week. They may buy fresh produce and milk each week at food for less where they get the best prices for the best quality. And they may stock up on higher quality meats at Costco once a month while buying fish at a small neighborhood fish market as needed. There are also street food vendors such as fruteros that sell fresh cut fruit on street corners across the city. There are those who acquire food items in other forms as well, such as a woman that I have spoken with on several occasions, who participates in a food exchange with women from her church, where they each make a large batch of food divided into portions that serve a large family for two or and exchange with others so that they have a diversity of bulk prepared food from scratch that they eat and serve each night during the week. So we can see that households all over Los Angeles live within different distribution systems. Not only their food consumption patterns that differ, but also their food acquisition patterns, and these food acquisition patterns also have implications for how they're interacting with different people across different parts of the city. In both of my research settings participants engage in a variety of practices for for acquiring food shopping is one among many. And within shopping there are myriad practices tactics and strategies beyond the simple trip to the neighborhood supermarket. You piece together their household food supply by going from market to market buying the things they deem to be the best quality for the best price in each place. There are those who simply shop at markets that they feel loyal to those who shop at markets only with the best prices. There are those who only buy what is on clearance, and there are those who only buy what is most fresh. Now, we also have the question of whether one shops for themselves in person, or uses an app or a service to make a series of selections that are then acquired by a shopper who delivers them to their home. As I did in the early days of the pandemic when I ordered food online. This phenomenon has expanded with the coven night coven 19 global pandemic. People wish to decrease their risk of acquiring the virus. They turned alternatives to shopping and stores themselves, instead paying others to take on that risk. This is happening both in Los Angeles and in Cuba and various forums in Cuba, people have paid others to queue for their rations for many years. So, via WhatsApp and other cellular phone apps Cubans can order food from state owned stores, as well as individuals who are reselling food that they purchase in bulk. So, based on these examples of shopping, people also acquire food through other ways of purchasing food. They may purchase through a weekly or monthly produce box subscription, either with a corporation or a smaller community program through innovations and acquisition during the coven 19 pandemic rather than shopping in the traditional sense, people began purchasing pantry goods at restaurants that divided their bulk supplies into smaller portions suitable for home use purchases made on the black market are common forms of acquisition in Cuba, which are absolutely necessary for households to have sufficient food supplies. Food acquisition may also require a purchase, as in the case of may also not require a purchase, as in the case of of the church members who exchange prepared foods, and those who access food and community pantries refrigerators forage food growing through online buy nothing groups and other giveaways food sharing and exchange is a well documented practice across the globe. It is part of food distribution. And if we think of it from the vantage point of those receiving it also becomes an important part of food acquisition. We begin with what is arguably the most simple form of human consumption, the breastfeeding of a child food there is produced to feel lactation and consume directly by a suckling infant direct production to consumption. In many decades scholars of food have been interested in documenting the increasing complexity of human food consumption. As men's did in his opening lecture, tracing out the ways in which are human innovations with things like fire and domestication and cultivation have shifted, not only our consumption practices, but myriad other aspects of our social lives, where we live, who we live with and how we live. So this is rapidly circulated across the globe, understanding the role of the global industrial food complex and food distribution took center stage. Therefore, within the anthropology of food, early work focused on illuminating the importance of food distribution in the production distribution consumption chain. What I've outlined here today from my research in Cuba and the United States, the link between distribution and consumption is not a given food acquisition should be considered an important step in the chain from production to consumption. So the link between food acquisition reveals how people go about spending their days, how they interact with different people at different times. It reveals a set of cultural norms around accessing food, what is thought to be socially appropriate or socially inappropriate and reveals the dynamic ways in which people negotiate their social positions through food. And I have inquiry that a food acquisition analytic illuminates are the increasing ways in which inequality in the food system, characterized by uneven distribution on local national and global levels results in differing amounts of time effort cost and opportunity cost for acquiring food. I also might see that different forms of food acquisition have varying degrees of sociality built in, for instance, my own experience with the cashier at my local market, who has a vague awareness of who I am because I've shopped there multiple times. Thus, creating a relationship of trust between us that probably inspired the man in line behind me to pay for my meal to pay for my food when I forgot my wallet. And when I have food dropped off by my door from an online shopper, aside from the small photo on the app, I do not get to know them on any level, we do not interact or come into social contact. This difference is just one among the many ways in which our practices of food acquisition impact the social intimacies of our everyday lives, something that is felt particularly acutely during the quarantines of the COVID-19 pandemic. So just as our practices of food consumption can serve to reinforce self identity, connect us with ancestry or cultural traditions, link us to family, friends and community, our practices of acquisition are entangled with all of the ways in which we interact with each other in our everyday lives. And the ways that we acquire food also represent our moral position on the food production and distribution system. Our process of acquiring quality food at low prices can be a practice of virtue for each individual or for a family. And those who struggle to acquire food, whether or whether it is certain foods or any foods at all, know well that the social, emotional and cultural dimensions of food acquisition matter greatly in each instance of food acquisition. In any case, for many people in different positions across the globe, food acquisition is a deeply meaningful activity of everyday life that is both reflective of and reflects upon who they are as individuals, family members, community members and consumers within our global food system. Thank you. Great. Well, thank you so much, Hannah, for an absolutely fabulous talk. I really, I really appreciated that talk. It was so rich and thought provoking. And I think it's so important. I mean, a lot of us, not least those have worked in socialist and post socialist societies have written about food acquisition in different ways, but I think a few if any have theorized it in any in the richness that you have and I thank you for that. And I take great inspiration from it. In fact, my question kind of has to do with that.  I'd like to know if I wonder if you could reflect a little bit for us on the extent to which your research in in in Santiago has influenced your understanding of food acquisition practices and social labor in Los Angeles. I'd also like to know to what extent or what ways your experiences from the United States have shaped your approach to an understanding of food acquisition in Cuba. Well, thank you for that question and then thanks so much for for being here and helping to coordinate all this I know I said that at the beginning of the talk but I'll say it again. Yeah, I certainly my experience with food acquisition in Cuba has been deeply influential for for being able to conceptualize it as as an important object of study in its own right. And, and I think one reason for that is quite simple. It is that in Cuba the word shopping means something very specific. It only means going to the hard currency store to buy mostly imported goods. And so, initially, from the very moment that I started doing my research in Cuba Cubans were telling me oh no no you can't call this shopping. This is not shopping shopping is only this one specific thing. So that helped sort of like cue my brain into thinking about food acquisition more broadly, but also in in the socialist context. There is an assumption that the state is responsible for food distribution, and that food acquisition should be relatively straightforward, but it is not. And so, you know, people have to spend a lot of time, whether it's idle time simply waiting in line for their food or whether it's running around all over the city looking for different food items. They're spending a lot of time on food acquisition. And so, because of the you know the amount of time it takes during the day it made me really start to think about it as a broad cultural and social phenomenon, which, is a lens. So I have done my research in Cuba and Los Angeles in overlapping ways since 2009. So I've always toggled back and forth between these two field sites. I started to realize that actually the people in South Los Angeles that the food justice organizations are trying to intervene upon are also spending a lot of time acquiring food, and they're also going from market to market, and they're piecing food from free sources versus paid sources in ways that I think a lot of researchers and a lot of people in general would take for granted. Like I said in the talk if you assume that everyone shares the practice of simply popping over to the local market to buy whatever it is they need. So if you don't think about all of the ways that food acquisition sort of takes over some people's lives. So yeah it's definitely been for me. I have an explicit comparative lens in my published work because I find it very hard to compare the United States food system with the Cuban food system. But in my analytic I use it as a way of comparing how I understand the situations. So let me remind all of the members of the audience that if you have any questions to please write them in the Q&A box. And if you want me to include you to mention your name when I read up the question, then please also include your name in the box. And if you don't write your name in the in your after your question that I will assume that you wish to remain anonymous alright. So let me take a few questions then there's loads of questions coming in as I as I speak. Maybe if we could take a first question from someone who maybe wants a little bit more clarification about the distinction between food access on the one hand and food security and access on the one hand and food acquisition on the other hand. I think I thought that was fairly clear but maybe you could maybe elaborate that on that a little bit more. Okay. Well, so I guess I understand I think of the concept of food security in the way that the United Nations food and agriculture organization does the FAO, or maybe some of the ways that the World Health Organization defined it as people who have consistent access to foods that are healthy and culturally appropriate so that's like the more updated definition. And that the FAO definition tends to be more focused on people that have access to food that's nutritionally adequate. And what I find is that people's concerns around food acquisition tend to be more dynamic than their concerns around food security. So someone can be food secure, but still have food acquisition needs or food acquisition desires that are unfulfilled. So that might mean, as I was talking about in the part about Los Angeles people who are going from market to market to find foods at the right price point. Right. So you might be food secure you're able to buy a gallon of milk for $2.99 and a dozen eggs for $1.99. But you could also go to a different market and find a dozen eggs for $0.99 and a gallon of milk for $1.99. And so those processes of how people, how people use their own logics and desires for acquiring food, the food that makes them food secure is sort of one of the reasons between acquisition and security. And you can also have you can have food security without worrying about acquisition like for instance if you live in an institution you have your you know you have some food security because food is served to you. But outside then you're not sort of thinking about all of the various cultural and social dynamics of what goes into acquiring the food and that's more the angle that I'm interested in. Thank you Hannah. So, Anne Mercott and by the way I'm going to edit some of these questions, just in just because of time issues. I'll edit some of the questions a little bit, but Anne Mercott asks us, or asks you rather, she says her question concerns the use of the expression panic buying that you mentioned earlier on in your talk. And she says it was widely used in the mass media here as well. And it carries a kind of kind of condemnatory overtones. And yet she says surely it is rational in that whoever is in charge of household provisioning is faced with a adults working from home where possible, and children being homeschooled, and thus eating five lunches at home, coupled with no opportunity to eat out together with be an unknowable future, which may involve potentially unreliable retail outlets, which hitherto could be treated as predictable. Yes. Yeah, I mean, in my own experience with purchasing food in the early parts of the pandemic here I definitely experienced all of the things that and Mercott is talking about. So, you know, we, I purchased more than I normally would purchase, but I, we had by the time I went to the store stores here had implemented purchasing limits. So I wasn't, I wasn't privy to the panic buying that people are describing right like I couldn't buy all of the chicken in the store. I could only buy one package of chicken. I could only buy one with toilet paper, eggs, milk and other things that were essentially rationed here. But even though I bought as much as I possibly could, I still underbought for my family because I, you know, wasn't really aware of how much my children were consuming outside of the household and how much I was consuming outside of the household. The entire process was about constantly readjusting the types of food acquisition that I had grown used to in order to be able to accommodate the new conditions. In, in Los Angeles, the problems with panic buying were only early on. And the reason that I would call it this particular part of it panic buying is that people seemed to be buying things that they predicted would be scarce, but may not have been things that really would help them. Toilet paper being one of them. So it, people also, this is not the fault of the consumer but it's really the fault of government. People didn't understand what would be available under quarantine. One of the things that people panic bought was panic people panic bought a lot of shelf stable things, assuming that they wouldn't be able to access fresh produce right so people are buying all kinds of canned goods, powdered milks, things that have things that would last a long time and do not expire. So, so the panic buying, if you, if, if you will, was really, I don't think the fault of the consumer but the fault of the government and not sort of explaining what quarantine would look like. So sort of our own American fault for not understanding what quarantines had looked like in Europe and just sort of accepting that our quarantines would probably be quite similar to what had just happened before in Europe. I hope that clarifies. Thank you so much for that, Hannah. We have a question here from one of our MA students and the anthropology of food, Dora Taylor, who would like to know whether you could reflect on any observations you've made about how race interacts with food acquisition practices. I guess I hope it opens up a, you can probably go on and give another lecture about that or several. Yes, I also study the intersection of race and food acquisition or race and food security. In the context of my Cuban research. The context of race has, you know, some, there's, there's several ways in which race interacts with food acquisition, I would say the first and most important thing is also related to the context of the United States states which is that people live in essentially segregated areas of the city. And both in Cuba, and in Los Angeles, there is a system of what we might refer to as food apartheid, where in lower income communities that tend to be people with darker skin. There are fewer markets, there are lower quality markets and their, the markets also tend to have that this is not always true, but they tend to have less variety of foods available. And so people who live in those communities either have to sort of make do with the markets that are near them or they have to travel further to get their food. And so this, because of the way that areas of cities are segregated this creates a sort of racialized difference in the food system. The other way that race affects food is thinking about. This is also related to ethnicity I should say thinking about the ways that the food system is sort of dominated by a white centric lens about which foods are predominantly consumed. And when people who come from other cultural paradigms desire to consume food in a different way from that it, there's sort of extra hurdles and processes of food acquisition. They want to eat a particular culturally salient item meal that requires a particular item you may have to travel further or you may have difficulty acquiring it at all. I also encounter people who talk to me about explicit forms of racism when they shop for food so they talk about being kicked out of stores because people assume that due to the color of their skin they're only there to steal things or they don't have money to steal things. This is a racist assumption. Or that they, they don't feel comfortable shopping in particular stores because they've had so many experiences with being racialized in this way that they no longer even want to enter stores for fear that they will be, they'll have a racist encounter. So there's more than I can say but I'll leave it there. Thank you so much. Olivia Barnett Naksine asks, has there been anything from either of your research projects that has you thinking about the increase in non communicable diseases and CDs and how we can look at acquisition as a key element of this. And if so, in what ways has this shown itself in your work. Yeah, I mean, in both of my research sites. I am thinking about in the back of my head and in both contexts, other scholars are very concerned with obesity related diseases right so things like diabetes hypertension cardiovascular disease. And in particularly in Los Angeles there's been a lot of attention from media sources and from different kinds of scholars about the ways in which the food system perpetuates obesity related diseases. And I do think that in contexts where as I was describing in the prior question, people have to go through extra hurdles to be able to access healthy food. It's easier for people to access unhealthy food cheaper for people to access unhealthy food and these sort of things certainly exacerbate the incidence of these kinds of non communicable diseases. It's in Cuba. Something that sort of plays out differently because it tends to happen across socioeconomic status or class. Even if you have enough money to buy fresh fruits and vegetables they may not be available so you may be turning to eating. And it's not shelf stable foods in Cuba but it's things like pizza homemade pizza or baked goods, things that are heavy in carbohydrate and fat content. Thank you. So my colleague the so as food study center deputy chair, Lizzie hall writes, thank you for a wonderful talk. It was ethnographically rich and persuasive. And do Cubans make social claims on one another as an acquisition strategy. In other words, during time of food shortage. Is it socially acceptable to ask neighbors and friends for food, and does this produce tensions social hierarchies are similar. Yes, that's a great question. And I mean the short answers. Yes. So the question during times of food shortage in Cuba is there's basically always some sort of food shortage in Cuba so that's always. The social acceptability of asking neighbors for food is something that I talk about in my book. It's, it's complicated and it's, it's difficult to see ethnographically people will. People will ask others for food, not necessarily as not necessarily because they absolutely need food, but as a just a way of seeing whether or not they have food. So it becomes a test to see what people have in comparison to what you have. And, and people know that that's being done to them. So there's often an exchange where the person that's being asked for food will respond and say oh no I don't have anything I have absolutely nothing, our cupboards are bare, but but really they have plenty of food. And it's a way of not not showing that you have too much not showing that you are hoarding food in any way, but also sort of protecting any of the ways in which you're acquiring food that you either don't want to share with people, because you don't want other people to know your sources in general or because you're acquiring food in an illegal way. So, there are tensions, but because this is a common practice and people sort of understand what's going on, I wouldn't say that the tensions are very serious tensions like people aren't usually getting into fights or anything over this. So, let me just let the audience know that unfortunately I'm going to apologize unfortunately we won't be able to get to all of your questions. I'm doing we're doing our best, but in some cases, I might ask a question and if it overlaps as other questions I'll just ask the one question, rather than asking all three or four of them. There's loads of questions here so again I do apologize in advance. Here's one question which is quite different from all the others. The question is, I was struck by the casual references to Chinese food in both your example your own example of Chinese chicken salad and canned wontons, and in the description of the Chinese chicken dish made by your informant in Cuba. Could you reflect more on the relative position of Chinese food made in the home in both locations. It is, is it seen as something special and fancy in the Cuban context, or was it because your informant identifies as partly Chinese. Briefly, how is this Chinese food understood in each context. That is a great question and I, I didn't intentionally put those two examples in there but I did notice that I was talking about Chinese food or quote unquote Chinese food and these two different examples. In the context of Cuba, Chinese food is very common. I would say that it's understood as the most common non Cuban food that's consumed, although quote unquote Italian food actually is probably the most common non Cuban food that's consumed. However, in my experience, people people Cubans of Chinese descent tend to be the ones that regularly cook Chinese dishes in their homes and Cubans that are not of Chinese descent are, you know, they may add a little bit of soy sauce to a dish and say that it's that makes it Chinese. But in general, they're not regularly cooking dishes that they understand to be Chinese. And Cuban Cuban Chinese food is sort of its own complete genre of food here in the United States, you can go to a Cuban Chinese restaurant. They, they've made their own adjustments to the dishes, but Cuba's China town is the main place that Cubans themselves go to eat Chinese food and and Cubans of Chinese descent think of that place as a sort of, you know, a place to almost pilgrimage when you're visiting Havana if you're not from there, and to be able to acquire ingredients that are only available there because it is where the largest concentration of Cubans of Chinese descent live. Thank you. That was very interesting, not least for for for me as well as a as a somebody who studies Chinese food ways. So, there's a couple questions here about the class system in Cuba or socioeconomic differentiation Cuba, and I think they'd like to have a further kind of clarification expansion on what that actually consists of and how it relates to food acquisition strategies. Okay, yeah, I'm, I'm in the midst of writing an article on class of food in Cuba right now. I think it. So, from, you know, there's many Cubans and Cubanists that would say that we shouldn't talk about class because it's a, you know, of Marxist society and we classes not a proper lens to be understanding the everyday realities of Cubans. However, the Cubans that I interact with on a regular basis classify themselves across three classes, low class middle class and wealthy class, or gente humilde gente normal and gente con posibilidades. And when I, so I did a sort of complicated class classification system where I had people classify themselves and then classify others against themselves. And people tend to have, there's an incredible amount of agreement about which types of people and which types of material culture, basically put you into each different class category. And a lot of where this derives from is the historical class category of the family. So in Cuba property is inherited. So people who have, you know, for generations lived in very large beautiful old houses, and have cars and have all kinds of furniture and goods in their homes, tend to inherit those and pass them down to their children and so class sort of remain socioeconomic status I should say, remains within the family. And then there's also myriad food related class practices that people spoke to me about, and people understand as being part of what board you would call tastes of luxury. They talk about tastes of necessity. But, you know, there's an understanding that Cubans that come from higher socioeconomic status and higher class tend to appreciate the finer things, even though they cannot access them. So things like champagne or capers Cubans tend to really like capers and it's something that they long for that they no longer have access to. Yes, class is definitely something that people understand as a salient social category and it's it's deeper deeply related to food and and what's available in the household. There's a question here that actually kind of relates to that directly and I'm going to ask this is a question from Chris Davis Davis which kind of builds on that. They ask specifically. Are there other communities with distinctly different methods for food acquisition with potentially higher levels of adversity, such as LGBTQ communities and how does their case differ from others in the context of Santiago. Yes. So I also read about this in the book. I had one to 1.5 queer families in my study. And they talk about all of the ways in which they basically have to be closeted in order to be able to access food.  So that is because it's complicated because it's both that there's a homophobic idea that queer people can't be trusted, but also that, you know, if someone has been closeted and then they come out, then there's also the idea that you can't trust them because you can't be trusted and withholding something from you. So if someone can't be trusted that then you don't want to sell them food on the black market, because you have to it's a, it's a system of a relationship of trust and secrecy. So this has a huge impact on queer people's ability to access food. We are kind of running out of time technically, and there are loads of brilliant questions. Are you okay I know it's very early where you are as well so you must be. I hope you're not too tired by now. Would you be all right to maybe take another 1010 to 15 minutes of question of Q&A. Are you, are you, let me know. I'm awake now. I do appreciate the time difference and that you've been, you know, working really hard here so just let me know anytime. Next question here from Katharina Graf, who is a former PhD student and postdoctoral fellow at the SOAS Food Study Center. And she says, thanks for an inspiring talk from my own research in urban Morocco, I've become interested in the bodily dimensions of acquiring food. I'm curious to hear what role bodily engagement with acquiring food plays in your in your cases, and how this might relate to choosing or rejecting certain acquisition practices. Yes, that is a great question. It makes me think so one of the first methods that I tried to employ in Santiago was getting people to map their community and where the places within their community where they acquired food. My activity did not go well, because Cubans do not orient spatially to their communities in a in a sort of two dimensional map way. And instead, the people that I tried to get to do this activity insisted that we walk to to find our food. So that sort of cued me in early on to the idea that food acquisition is always deeply embodied in Cuba.  And so one in one encounter I was with a Cuban who I call alone so who is always very interested in finding the absolute cheapest food items. And that entailed us walking miles in one day I would I don't at the time I didn't have a pedometer so I don't know how many steps we went but we definitely walked miles. We also took a horse drawn carriage. We also took a bicycle carriage. And we also took a bus and walked. And so the ability to sort of get our bodies into all of these different positions have our bodies like shaking around on all of these different modes of transportation was essential to the ability to acquire food. So for people who are unable to engage in these embodied practices, it means that they must rely on someone else to acquire food for them, which is a whole other as a whole other set of problems and difficulties. But also can be sort of can can alleviate some burdens as well. So I'd like to combine a couple of questions now if that's all right, asking specifically about the, the, the California context. And one question, I guess I took rather different questions but honey on California, one who thanks you an anonymous attendee asks you. A fantastic lecture and asks, please can you say a bit more about the food justice organizations in LA and another member of the audience, Professor Melissa Caldwell at the University of California Santa Cruz asks or says thanks Hannah for a great talk. I especially appreciate the comparisons between California and Cuba. And how that helps think us think about shortage in terms of shortages of food, money, and connections. But what are the other shortages that might be important. So here I'm thinking about one of the unique features of our California quarantine where the shelter in place meant that there were time shortages. For instance, the time that one might use to go to the store was now required for minding children who were at home. Are there other shortages that go into rethinking acquisition practices. Yes. Okay, I'll answer both of those. So the food justice organizations are organizations that are either nonprofits, or city based county based, or LLCs that have the mission of trying to increase access to healthy food. Or trying to increase access to food that's better prices, or more equitable in areas like South Los Angeles and East Los Angeles that are understood as having deficient food systems basically. And so I track these organizations, I study how they discuss how they're going to implement their interventions, the ways in which they come up with their various missions, visions and plans for intervening in these areas. And I asked the question of whether or not they take into account racial and economic justice as they think about food justice. And there are many, many organizations that do this work. There's some that only focus on food and then there are others that focus on several different areas including food. As far as the shortages, other shortages I like this question. The idea of time shortage is interesting in the pandemic and it's been something that I've, I've been in like ongoing dialogue with different people about people, some people having an abundance of time and some people feeling that they have no time. The, the actual, I think the shortage that Lisa is talking about is a child care shortage, which then creates a time shortage for those of us with children. But the other, I mean, there's other issues that really relate to food acquisition. So, so, you know, a lot of people with children feel that they shouldn't bring their child into the market because they shouldn't expose their child to the virus so they, they want to either, you know, shop early hours in the evening or late hours at night when they could possibly leave a child at home, or they are shopping online if they have the means to shop online. Other things that cause shortages and shortages that cause problems with acquisition are our time transportation shortages. So a lot of the people I know that are used to getting around the city on the bus or the train, either because they don't want to ride on the bus or the train anymore because of the virus, or because the routes have been limited, are have to have to completely shift the ways that they acquire food. Now, so now the kind of person that might have taken the train to access food is instead shopping at their, at a market that's more nearby and it's more reasonable to walk to you, and thus having to completely shift either the way that they eat or how often they shop. But there are, I'm sure, myriad other shortages to think through how shortage relates to food acquisition. There's a couple of questions here that I'm going to take that are quite similar that refer to questions of community. So Sheila Scoville from Florida State University asks, how would you define the relationship between food acquisition and the formation of social or community bonds? And similarly Anna Kahoon, also a PhD student here at SOAS asks, the question is about, she asks about how does food acquisition practices relate to feelings of social belonging and imaginings of community. And again, I apologize, I heavily edited those questions just because of time. Yeah, but yeah, those are good questions and I think that I've at least alluded to them in this talk. And I do think about them more explicitly in the book on Cuba. And one of the things that the piece of scholarship that stands out to me in this regard is a Shantae Reese's book Black Food Geographies, she talks about the, the importance of the market encounter. And specifically she's talking about a small locally owned and run market where one where the shopper really gets to know not only the person that checks them out but the person that owns the place who is essentially the the purveyor the person that acquires the things that they're going to distribute in the store and that those social bonds are what really connect us with food distribution. So, when, you know, depending on the type of setting in which you're acquiring food you have different possibilities for creating social bonds different possibilities for having a feeling of social belonging, or a lack of possibility for So one of the things that I think about with how some people in South LA acquire food by stopping at a market on their commute home from work is that they are, they're creating a social bond with someone outside of their community, or potentially a social bond, but how that's so different from creating bonds with as I have done with the people that work at the market near me. So where I see the same people every day. And I, well, I live in this community I assume they don't live in this community. It's sort of the inverse of if you shop far away from where you live. Yes, but basically social bonds and social belonging are very important and critical to our processes of food acquisition. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Hannah. I think we'll probably have to end there and I do apologize for those who didn't get a chance to ask their question. It's simply, it is simply the nature of the beast. And of course, I mean, I find it really exciting that there are so many questions that have come to Hannah. And perhaps there may be other some other mechanism for getting your questions to her would that be possible somehow, Hannah, if the for those who haven't managed to haven't had a chance to ask their question. Yes, yeah, anyone that wants to continue dialoguing about these things can email me. Maybe I'll type my email into the chat to make it easier. I think we'll go to everyone. Yeah. And I will try my best to respond to any inquiries that I get. Thank you so much. Once again, Professor Hannah Garth. I'm going to give you a big round of applause. I can, we'll just have to imagine that everybody's doing this and I know that they are it's been a wonderful talk and thank you so much once again. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for all of you for attending and for your wonderful questions.


Okay, so as most of you know, we're here tonight to shine the spotlight on James Von Prague, this celebrity psychic medium who says he can talk to dead people and that dead people talk back to him. We say he's taking advantage of the believed. He's not helping people overcome their loss, but he's getting them stuck in their grief. So we at the James Randi Educational Foundation issued James Von Prague a million dollar challenge if he could just prove that his stuff is real. He won't take our calls. He won't talk to us. He won't talk to the media who have asked him about this. So if he won't talk to us and he won't talk to the media, we wonder if he won't talk to some dead people. We want to speak to James Von Prague. He said he can talk to dead people. We brought some. He won't talk to us. Damn. Access to him. If you'd like to talk to somebody, I can get somebody for you, but I don't think we'll see. That would be fantastic. Appreciate that. We assumed we were invited because James Von Prague says he could talk to dead people. He hasn't responded to our million dollar challenge. Okay, but do you have anything to have plastic on it? Okay. James Von Prague. So yeah, and he doesn't want our million dollars, so.


From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. Intel's big announcement this week underscores the threat that the United States faces from China. The US needs to lead in semiconductor design and manufacturing, and that lead is slipping because Intel has been fumbling the ball over the past several years. A mere two months into the job, new CEO Pat Gelsinger wasted no time in setting a new course for perhaps the most strategically important American technology company. We believe that Gelsinger has only shown us part of his plan. This is the beginning of a long and highly complex journey. Despite Gelsinger's clear vision, his deep understanding of technology and execution ethos, in order to regain its number one position, Intel we believe will need to have help from partners, competitors and very importantly, the US government. Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll peel the onion on Intel's announcement of this week and explain why we're perhaps not as sanguine as was Wall Street on Intel's prospects and we'll lay out what we think needs to take place for Intel to once again become top gun and for us to gain more confidence. By the way, this is the first time we're broadcasting live with Breaking Analysis. We're broadcasting on theCUBE handles on Twitch, Periscope and YouTube and going forward we'll do this regularly as a live program and we'll bring in the community perspective into the conversation through chat. Now you may recall that in January, we kind of dismissed analysis that said Intel didn't have to make any major strategic changes to its business when they brought on Pat Gelsinger. Rather, we said the exact opposite. Our view at the time was that the root of Intel's problems could be traced to the fact that it was no longer the volume leader because mobile volumes dwarf those of x86. As such, we said that Intel couldn't go up the learning curve for next gen technologies as fast as its competitors and it needed to shed its dogma of being highly vertically integrated. We said Intel needed to more heavily leverage outsourced foundries, but more specifically, we suggested that in order for Intel to regain its volume lead, it needed to, we said at the time, spin out its manufacturing, create a joint venture with a volume leader leveraging Intel's US manufacturing presence. This we still believe with some slight refreshes to our thinking based on what Gelsinger has announced. We'll talk about that today. Now specifically, there were three main pieces and a lot of details to Intel's announcement. Gelsinger made it clear that Intel is not giving up its IDM or integrated device manufacturing ethos. He called this IDM 2.0, which comprises Intel's internal manufacturing, leveraging external foundries and creating a new business unit called Intel Foundry Services. It's okay. Gelsinger said we are not giving up on integrated manufacturing. However, we think this is somewhat nuanced. Clearly Intel can't, won't and shouldn't give up on IDM. However, we believe Intel is entering a new era where it's giving designers more choice. This was not explicitly stated. However, we feel like Intel's internal manufacturing arm will have increased pressure to serve its designers in a more competitive manner. We've already seen this with Intel finally embracing EUV, extreme ultraviolet lithography. Gelsinger basically said that Intel didn't lean into EUV early on and that it created more complexity in its 10 nanometer process, which dominoed into seven nanometer.  But since mid last year, it's embraced the technology. Now, as a point of reference, Samsung started applying EUV for its seven nanometer technology in 2018 and it began shipping in early 2020. So as you can see, it takes years to get this technology into volume production. The point is that Intel realizes it needs to be more competitive and we suspect it will give more freedom to designers to leverage outsource manufacturing. But Gelsinger clearly signaled that IDM is not going away. But the really big news is that Intel is setting up a new division with a separate P&L that's going to report directly to Pat. Essentially it's hanging out a shingle and saying, we're open for business to make your chips. Intel is building two new fabs in Arizona and investing $20 billion as part of this initiative. Now, while Intel has tried this before earlier last decade, Gelsinger says that this time we're serious and we're going to do it right. We'll come back to that. This organizational move, while not a spin out or a joint venture, it's part of the recipe that we saw as necessary for Intel to be more competitive. Let's talk about why Intel is doing this. Look at lots has changed in the world of semiconductors. When you think about it back when Pat was at Intel in the 90s, Intel was the volume leader. It crushed the competition with x86 and the competition at the time was coming from risk chips. Now when Apple changed the game with iPod and iPhone and iPad, the volume equation flipped to mobile and that led to big changes in the industry. Specifically, the world started to separate design from manufacturing. We now see firms going from design to tape out in 12 months versus taking three years. A good example is Tesla and it's deal with arm in Samsung. And what's happened is Intel has gone from number one in foundry in terms of clock speed, wait for density, volume, lowest cost, highest margin to falling behind. TSMC, Samsung and alternative processor competitors like NVIDIA and ARM. Volume is still the maker of kings in this business. That hasn't changed and it confers advantage in terms of cost, speed and efficiency. But ARM wait for volumes we estimate are 10x those of x86. That's a big change since Pat left Intel more than a decade ago. There's also a major chip shortage today.  Semiconductor consumption is entering a new era and new use cases emerging from automobiles to factories to every imaginable device, piece of equipment, infrastructure, silicon is everywhere. But the biggest threat of all is China. China wants to be self-sufficient in semiconductors by 2025. It's putting approximately $60 billion into new chip fabs and there's more to come. China wants to be the new economic leader of the world and semiconductors are critical to that goal. Now there are those that poo poo the China threat. This recent article from Scott Foster lays out some really good information, but the one thing that caught our attention is a statement that China semiconductor industry is nowhere near being a major competitor in the global market, let alone an existential threat to the international order in the American way of life. I think Scotty is stuck in the engine room and can't see the forest of the trees. Wake up. Sure, you can say China is way behind. Second example, NAND. Today China is at about 64 3D layers, whereas Micron they're at 172. By 2022 China is going to be at 128. Micron is going to be well over 200. So what's the big deal? We say talk to us in 2025 because we think China will be a parody. That's just one example. Now the type of thinking that says, don't worry about China and semis reminds me of the epic lecture series that Clay Christensen gave as a visiting professor at Oxford University on the history of and the economics of the steel industry. Now if you haven't watched this series, you should. Basically Christensen took the audience through the dynamics of steel production and he asked the question, who told the steel manufacturers that gross margin was the number one measure of profitability? Was it God? He joked. His point was when new entrants came into the market in the seventies, they were bottom feeders going after the low margin, low quality, easiest to make rebar sector. And the incumbents, they pulled back and their mix shifted to higher margin products and their gross margins went up and life was good. Until they lost the next layer and then the next and then the next until it was game over. Now, one of the things that got lost in Pat's big announcement on the 23rd of March was that Intel guided the stream below consensus on revenue and earnings. But the stock went up the next day. Now when asked about gross margin in the Q and A segment of the announcement, yes, gross margin is A, if not the key metric in semis in terms of measuring profitability. When asked Intel CFO George Davis explained that with the uptick in PCs last year, there was a product shift to the lower margin PC sector and that put pressure on gross margins. It was a product mix thing and revenue because PC chips are less expensive than server chips was affected as we're margins. Now we shared this chart in our last Intel update showing spending momentum over time for Dell's laptop business is from ETR. And you can see in the inset, the unit growth in the market data from IDC. Yes, Dell's laptop business is growing. Everybody's laptop business is growing. Thank you, thank you COVID. But you can see the numbers from IDC, Gartner, et cetera. Now, as we pointed out last time, PC volumes had peaked in 2011 and that's when the long arm of Wright's law began to eat into Intel's dominance. Today arm wafer production, as we said is far greater than Intel's. Well, you know the story. Here's the irony. The very market that conferred volume advances to Intel PCs has had a slight uptick last year, which was great news for Dell, but according to Intel, it pulled down its margins. The point is Intel is loving the high end of the market because it's higher margin and more profitable. I wonder what Clay Christensen would say to that. Now, there's more to this story. Intel's CFO blamed the supply constraints on Intel's revenue and profit pressures. Yet AMD's revenue and profits are booming. So are TSMCs. Only Intel can't seem to thrive when there's this massive chip shortage. Now let's get back to Pat's announcement. Intel is for sure going forward, investing $20 billion in two new US-based fabrication facilities. This chart shows Intel's investments in US R&D, US CapEx and the job growth that's created as a result, as well as R&D and CapEx investments in Ireland and Israel. Now we added the bar on the right-hand side from a Wall Street Journal article that compares TSMC CapEx in the dark green to that of Intel in the light green. You can see TSMC surpassed the CapEx investment of Intel in 2015 and then Intel took the lead back again and in 2017 was hanging on in 2018, but last year TSMC took the lead again and appears to be widening that lead quite substantially, leading us to our conclusion that this will not be enough. These moves by Intel will not be enough. They need to do more. And a big part of this announcement was partnerships and packaging. Okay, so here's where it gets interesting. Intel, as you may know, was late to the party with SOC system on a chip and it's gonna use its packaging prowess to try and leapfrog the competition. SOC bundles things like GPU, NPU, DSUs, accelerators, caches on a single chip. So better use of the real estate, if you will. Now Intel wants to build system on package which will disaggregate memory from compute. Now remember today, memory is very poorly utilized.  This is a huge innovation and we'll come back to this in a moment. Now as part of the announcement, Intel trotted out some big name customers, prospects, and even competitors that it wants to turn into prospects and customers. Amazon, Google, Satya Nizella gave a quick talk from Microsoft to Cisco. All those guys are designing their own chips as does Ericsson. And look, even Qualcomm is on the list, they're a competitor. Intel wants to earn the right to make chips for these firms. Now many on the list like Microsoft and Google, they'd be happy to do so because they want more competition. And Qualcomm, well look, if Intel can do a good job and be a strong second source, why not? Well one reason is they compete aggressively with Intel, they probably don't like Intel so much but it's very possible. But the two most important partners on this slide are one, IBM, and two, the US government. Now many people are gonna gloss over IBM in this announcement but we think it's one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. Yes, IBM and semiconductors. IBM actually has some of the best semiconductor technology in the world. It's got great architecture and is two to three years ahead of Intel with power 10. Yes, power. IBM is the world's leader in terms of disaggregating compute from memory with the ability to scale to thousands of nodes. Sound familiar? IBM leads in power density, efficiency and it can put more stuff closer together. And it's looking now at a 20X increase in AI inference performance. We think Pat has been thinking about this for a while and he said, how can I leapfrog system on chip? And we think he thought and said, I'll use our outstanding process manufacturing and I'll tap IBM as a partner for R&D and architectural chops to build the next generation of systems that are more flexible and performant than anything that's out there. Now look, this is super high end stuff. And guess who needs really high end massive supercomputing capabilities? Well, the US military. Pat said straight up, we've talked to the government and we're honored to be competing for the government slash military chip boundary. I mean, look, Intel in my field is going to have to fall down into face not to win this business. And by making the commitment to foundry services we think they will get a huge contract from the government as large perhaps as $10 billion of more to build a secure government foundry and serve the military for decades to come. Now Pat was specifically asked in the Q&A section is this foundry strategy that you're embarking on viable without the help of the US government kind of implying that it was a handout or a bailout. And Pat, of course, said all the right things. He said, this is the right thing for Intel independent of the government. We haven't received any commitment or subsidies or anything like that from the US government. Okay, cool, but they have had conversations and I have no doubt and Pat confirmed this that those conversations were very, very positive that Intel should head in this direction. Look, we know what's happening here. The US government wants Intel to win. It needs Intel to win and its participation greatly increases the probability of success. But unfortunately, we still don't think it's enough for Intel to regain its number one position. Let's look at that in a little bit more detail. The headwinds for Intel are many. Look, it can't just flick a switch and catch up on manufacturing leadership. It's going to take four years and lots can change in that time. It tells market momentum as well as we pointed out earlier is headed in the wrong direction from a financial perspective. Moreover, where is the volume going to come from? It's going to take years for Intel to catch up for arms if it ever can. And it's going to have to fight to win that business from its current competitors. Now I have no doubt it will fight hard under Pat's excellent leadership. But the Foundry business is different. Consider this, Intel's annual CapEx expenditures, if you divide that by their yearly revenue it comes out to about 20% of revenue. TSMC spends 50% of its revenue each year on CapEx. This is a different animal, very service oriented. So look, we're not pounding the table saying Intel's worst days are over. We don't think they are. Now, there are some positives and showing those on the right hand side. Pat Gelsinger was born for this job. He proved that the other day. Even though we already knew it, I have never seen him more excited and more clear headed. And we agree that the chip demand dynamic is going to have legs in this decade and beyond with digital edge AI and new use cases that are going to power that demand. And Intel is too strategic to fail and the US government has huge incentives to make sure that it succeeds. But it's still not enough in our opinion because like the steel manufacturers, Intel's real advantage today is increasingly in the high end, high margin business. And without volume, China is going to win this battle. So we continue to believe that a new joint venture structure is going to emerge. Here's our prediction. We see a triumvirate emerging in a new joint venture that is led by Intel. It brings x86, that volume associated with that. It brings cash, manufacturing products, R and D. It brings global resources so much more than we show in this chart. IBM as we laid out brings architecture, it's R and D, it's longstanding relationships, it's deal flow, it can funnel its business to the joint venture, as can of course parts of Intel. We see IBM getting a nice licensed deal from Intel and or the JV and it has to get paid for its contribution. And we think it'll also get a sweet deal in the manufacturing fees from this Intel Foundry. But it's still not enough to beat China. Intel needs volume and that's where Samsung comes in. It has the volume with ARM as the experience and a complete offering across products. We also think that South Korea is a more geographically appealing spot in the globe than Taiwan with its proximity to China. Not to mention that TSMC, it doesn't need Intel. It's already number one. Intel can get a better deal from number two Samsung and together these three we think in this unique structure could give it a chance to become number one by the end of the decade or early in the 2030s. We think what's happening is our take is that Intel is going to fight hard to win that government business, put itself in a stronger negotiating position and then cut a deal with some supplier. We think Samsung makes more sense than anybody else. Now finally, we want to leave you with some comments and some thoughts from the community. First, I want to thank David Floyer. His decade plus of work and knowledge of this industry along with this collaboration made this work possible. His fingerprints are all over this research in case you didn't notice. And next I want to share comments from two of my colleagues. The first is Sarbjeet Johal. He sent this to me last night. He said, we are not in our grandfather's compute era anymore. Compute is getting spread into every aspect of our economy and lives. The use of processors is getting more and more specialized and will intensify with the rise in edge computing, AI, inference and new workloads. Yes, I totally agree with Sarbjeet and that's the dynamic on which Pat is betting and betting big. But the bottom line is summed up by my friend and former IDC mentor Dave Michela. He says, this is all about China. History suggests that there are very few second acts, you know, other than Microsoft and Apple. History also will say that the antitrust pressures that enabled AMD to thrive are the ones, the very ones that starved Intel's cash. Microsoft made the shift because its PC software cash cows proved impervious to competition. The irony is the same government that attacked Intel's monopoly now wants to be Intel's protector because of China. Perhaps it's a cautionary tale to those who want to break up big tech. Wow, what more can I add to that? Okay, that's it for now. Remember, I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. These episodes are all available as podcasts. All you gotta do is search for breaking analysis podcasts. You can always connect with me on Twitter at dvolante or email me at david.volante at siliconangle.com. As always, I appreciate the comments on LinkedIn and in Clubhouse, please follow me so that you're notified when we start a room and start riffing on these topics. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR, be well and we'll see you next time.