Real Food, Real Facts: Processed Food and the Politics of Knowledge

Abstract

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Welker 2018), and developed some of Kretek Capitalism's arguments in an article in Comparative Studies in Society and History (Welker 2021).I appreciate the unwavering support of my mother, Ann Welker, and my sisters Renata Welker and Carla Shumaker. I am especially grateful to my partner, Paul Nadasdy, and our children, Zoli and Andor, for accompanying me on this long journey and making each day special. spice (manis, pedas), and, especially in the case of the hand-rolled kretek and its smoke, qualities of thickness and heaviness (tebal, berat). The white cigarette, by contrast, is bland, tasteless, and light (rasa tawar, enteng) and tends to disappear quickly; once lit, the wind stealthily consumes it even if it's not actively smoked. A white cigarette takes about five minutes to smoke, compared to ten minutes for a machine-rolled kretek and a half-hour time commitment for a hand-rolled kretek. The latter weigh two grams, whereas machine-rolled cigarettes weigh a single gram or less. This book asks how kretek capitalism-understood as the accumulation of capital through the making, exchange, and consumption of clove cigarettes-enlists Indonesians to labor on its behalf in fields and factories, at retail outlets and social gatherings, and online. I focus on the efforts of Sampoerna, a Philip Morris International (PMI) subsidiary that claimed about one third of the Indonesian cigarette market during the 2010s. Kretek Capitalism charts how Sampoerna uses contracts, gamification, self-improvement logics, and class, gender, and age hierarchies to extract overtime, shift, seasonal, gig, and unpaid labor from workers, influencers, artists, students, retailers, and consumers.By centering labor, I develop an account of kretek capitalism that acknowledges but goes beyond the addictive hold of nicotine over individual smokers. Scientists have found that tobacco is harder to quit than alcohol, cocaine, and opiates, underscoring the lively and agentive potential of plants and their significant role in shaping human life (Bennett 2010; Galvin 2018; Langwick 2021; Myers 2017; Russell 2019). The younger a person is when they start using tobacco, the more likely they are to become addicted. Adolescent nicotine exposure disrupts normal brain development, changing how synapses are formed and harming the brain's capacity for attention and learning. Scientists have explicated the physiological mechanisms through which nicotine is absorbed, moving from the lungs into the blood and altering the chemistry of the brain and central nervous system by flooding the brain's reward circuits with dopamine and sparking an adrenaline rush that increases heart rate and raises blood pressure. 3 This kind of universal biochemical rendering of nicotine addiction is critical but insufficient to understanding kretek capitalism because it rests on an individualizing, internalizing, and often pathologizing logic that neglects "broader Marlboro Red Machine-rolled white 495 FF premium 13 1 Marlboro Black Men...