If you are driving along California’s Route 101 in the summer, there is a good chance that somewhere south of Silicon Valley you will begin to smell the distinctive aroma of garlic. You are passing through the city of Gilroy, the self proclaimed “Garlic Capital of the World” and the site, since 1979, of the famous Gilroy Garlic Festival, an annual extravaganza celebrating the “stinking rose.” Pauline Adema’s new book on Gilroy and its garlicky identity is the first monograph to focus on this important festival. As such, it is an important contribution to the study of foodways, festival, tourism, and theories of community identity.
In the first chapter, Adema introduces the reader to Gilroy, a small city south of San Jose that has long been associated with agriculture and food production, especially the growing and processing of garlic—an association it has effectively nurtured over the last several decades. Adema grounds her historical analysis in a set of theoretical frameworks, developing key words such as “foodscape,” which, she explains, “implicates the multiple informative historic and contemporary personal, social, political, cultural, and economic forces that inform how people think about and use (or eschew) food in various spaces they inhabit” (5). In Gilroy, the foodscape inspired by garlic production becomes a means of branding, a way for the city to differentiate itself as a special location through a process Adema describes as “aggrandizement” (17).
Chapter 2 focuses on the festival itself, discussing its history and the way its current popularity (132,000 visitors in 2003) contributes to Gilroy’s aggrandizement and communal identity. With reference to folkloristic and anthropological texts on festival and performance theory, Adema also unpacks the festival as a “time out of time” in which visitors not only “partake in the festive fun,” but “literally and ideologically consume the Gilroy-garlic association” (33). We also meet several festival volunteers, local residents for whom the festival provides a sense of community renewed each year.
Chapter 3 steps back to consider garlic within a broader American historical perspective in which it was long associated with ethnic difference, with Italian immigration in particular, and construed as an un-American food. Various socioeconomic and cultural forces, including the emergence of early celebrity chefs like Julia Child, contributed to garlic’s gradual acceptance as an important ingredient for a range of cooking styles and eventually to its trendy popularity. In 1979, the first Gilroy Garlic Festival was both a culmination and confirmation of the burgeoning importance of garlic in mainstream American cultural life and cuisine.
Chapter 4 returns to the festival itself, focusing particularly on the Garlic Topping Contest. Adema critically points to the role of agribusiness and labor relations, demonstrating how this contest, in which farm workers publicly compete at a skill they routinely perform on the job, “is a microcosm of the labor, power, and race relations of garlic production” (71). In the ritualized space of the contest, “non-Anglo laborers are being judged by non-laboring observers” (71) and labor itself becomes spectacle.
In chapter 5, Adema explains the process by which city leaders worked to develop Gilroy’s “identity capital” (82). They overcame the negative associations of garlic, as a foreign food that produces bad breath, so that today all sorts of garlic-themed souvenirs and delicacies (including garlic ice cream) are available year round. Ultimately, Gilroy’s “image makers” (155) succeeded in creating a “food-place association…so embedded in the popular imagination that it seems organic” (104).
But such success is not a given, and by way of contrast Adema provides a chapter on Coppell, Texas, where city leaders attempted to create an identity based on a rather tenuous association with a pig-farming past. The Coppell PigFest, however, never became intrinsic to local identity and was cancelled after several years. This chapter adds a provocative counterpoint to the discussion of garlic in Gilroy, underscoring the complex dynamics of community, identity, and marketing that go into creating a sense of place.
As can be garnered from the above chapter summaries, this book approaches Gilroy from multiple angles and may be of value within a range of disciplines, including folkloristics, anthropology, history, and food studies. But this varied approach also sometimes gives the text an unfocused or unsatisfying feel, as promising avenues are opened up but not fully explored. In chapter 4, for instance, we learn about the Gilroy Garlic Queen Pageant, an annual contest in which the “Belle of the Bulb” is chosen through a combination of “personal interviews,” “talent,” “evening gown poise,” and “garlic themed speeches or skits” (63). Unfortunately, the intrigued reader never gets a chance to hear from the contestants themselves, to learn what garlic themed speeches they give or what their post-festival aspirations might be. In fact, while Adema has done an admirable job of tracing the history of the festival from old records, newspaper articles, and interviews with festival organizers, the voices of volunteers and tourists are rarely heard. To be sure, we do get a smattering of direct quotations, and Adema has clearly interviewed numerous participants, but more of their stories would help to fill out her text and connect theory with concrete example.
From a theoretical perspective, this book should be of interest to students of foodways, festivals, and community identity. The author’s focus on creating a sense of place through food is important. And her work suggests critical directions for further research; one wonders, for example, how the processes she outlines for American communities are enacted in Europe and Asia, where food and locale are deeply, if differently, intertwined. In sum, this is a slim volume, approximately 150 pages of text, and fairly easily consumed. Like a series of garlic-flavored appetizers, it provides food for thought and whets the appetite for more.
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[Review length: 955 words • Review posted on June 9, 2009]