Changing Chains - Change in Value(s)?Marketing Food in Transitioning Timișoara

(1)

Changing Chains - Change in Value(s)?

Marketing Food In Transitioning Timi

șoara

On the left, producers are marketing the products of their labour at a farmers’ market, where they are waiting for customers - some tables are already deserted.

On the right, a newly opened Carrefour market offers a large parking space for its customers.

Laura Edelmann (s107033410)

Contact: jedelmann95@gmail.com

Supervisor: Tina Harris

Second Reader: Luisa Steur

Research Master Social Science

University of Amsterdam

(2)

The Entrance into the Markets

If you come walking with me across the Serbian border toward the Romanian Foeni, we will be hiking in the midst of large sunflower and corn fields until we reach the village where we can stock up on food at the Profi - a store belonging to a multinational supermarket chain. With some luck, we will catch a ride toward Timișoara and just before entering the city we will drive across factories belonging to multinational companies. Since the transition to capitalism in 1990, industrial production has moved from the centre to the peripheries which has transformed Timișoara’s urban landscape. The abandoned factories and warehouses feature as leftovers of the past - both communist and capitalist ruins. The lousy breath of transition has kept those spaces in a vacuum waiting for their future, which a Timi_{șoarean art collective has photographically captured calling them Waiting}1 Spaces. The artists (and social critics) present one perspective on the transitioning city. When I entered

Timișoara, however, I didn't see the abandoned factories. Instead, I was astonished by the density of multinational supermarket chains. They are performing the present, they are telling tales of transition toward a consumer society. These supermarkets are not waiting, they are actively marketing their value as modern distributors of food, in fact, they are _{performing places.} Like the factories in the peripheries, they are controlled by multinational capital which has benefitted from the flexibilisation of labour - a process that significantly featured throughout transition and EU-accession (Iloiu et al. 2015: 650, Shield 2011: 95).

Here, I will present a case study about the unequal power relations between EU-states manifested in the transitioning food market(s) of “post-communist” Romania. While the unequal power relation between capital and wage labour will feature in the background, I choose to discuss another dynamic that illustrates the tensions of transition and EU-accession. Evidently, the supermarkets didn’t enter into a vacuum, instead they (partly) replaced former channels of food distribution, such as the farmers’ markets (FMs) that have existed throughout 2 communism and that are now increasingly deserted by consumers and vendors. The remaining producers and intermediaries are waiting for customers, they are the _{waiting actors}. Here, we can observe tensions between various actors within the transitioning food economy. I will argue that it is key to explore these relations through the act of marketing that sheds light onto dynamics between long and short chains, between corporate capital and producers, between distributors/producers and the product, between consumers and all the above .

1_{http://www.hartagroup.ro/}

2_{While the permanent urban markets also include a section with intermediaries, I will refer to them as farmers’ markets}

(4)

First, what is being marketed? Food is not for nothing called means of life in some languages (e.g. Dutch: levensmiddelen), while the Romanian hrană may also refer to nutrition (i.e. biological necessity) and diet (i.e. “lifestyle” choice). Moreover, it is also a means of pleasure and sociality, deeply embedded into human culture, whose value cannot be expressed in price - and according to the poet Antonio Machado: “only the fools confuse value and price” (Vivero-Pol 2017: 183). Food has been approached as human right (due to its

necessity) and as commodity (due to its entanglement in the markets) - two contradictory constructs that bear witness to the dissociation of its use value from its exchange value (ibid. 185). The food economy could be considered the most essential pillar within the political economy of this world, as the historical overview of chapter 1 will show and as the ongoing Covid-19 crisis has illustrated:

Supermarket employees, whose labour is structurally undervalued, had to keep working at the frontline of food provision (where food provision has been monopolised by supermarkets) - at the frontier of infection. Activists wrote a message of gratitude and a demand for higher wages in front of a Dutch Albert Heijn XL, whose management posted a picture on social media, leaving the words of gratitude while erasing the demand for salary increase . Agricultural workers - a perhaps even more undervalued workforce - were flown in from 3 Romania and Bulgaria to Western European countries - defying the travel restrictions in order to enable the 4 ongoing production of food and surplus, and bearing witness to the international division of labour. In Germany, Romanian workers started protesting, as their health was not protected as promised (they had to sleep in small rooms with four persons) while not being paid . This shows that corporate producers and distributors of food 5 extract and translate the value of food in a way that undervalues labour.

Second, who is marketing? Marketing is a quite curious word, if one thinks about it – an action related to the market, but who acts? In the 16th_{century, marketing simply referred to buying or selling at the market, thus} acting within the market, only in the 19th_{century it came to signify the "process of moving goods from producer} to consumer with emphasis on advertising and sales" , thus acting to “win” the market. The FMs’ vendors still 6 practice the “original” marketing by presenting their produce as the product of their labour. They have become the minority, however, as supply chains - the distance between producers and consumers - has grown

significantly. Marketing has thus become a method for middlemen to convince consumers of their superior value – both of their role as provider and of their produce. As Graeber (2001) has noted, 'marketing is often a matter of creating symbolic distinctions between products that are otherwise virtually identical' (16). The products’ value is constructed while the labour inherent in their becoming may have been undervalued.

Value is a quite ambiguous term, so let me clarify how value(s) have been approached: sociologically, values are what is conceived of as good or desirable in (human) life – conceptions that may influence the choices

3_{https://www.doorbraak.eu/groeiend-aantal-krijtacties-voor-solidariteit-en-14-euro-minimumloon-fotoreportage/}

4_{https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2020/apr/16/western-europe-food-east-european-workers-coronavirus} 5_{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPWtYAegBF4}

(5)

humans make, what I will call _{conceptual values}; economically, 'the degree to which objects are desired, particularly, as measured by how much others are willing to give up to get them' [a definition which may grant too much power to the consumer, as we will see that corporate actors exercise most power in defining the economic value of food and, potentially the consumers' desire]; and linguistically, value implies a 'meaningful difference' (Graeber 2001: 1), what I will call _{differential value}. The latter could also be considered ‘the construction of qualitative value — value produced in a system of differences’ (Forster 2006: 290), this system of difference will be perceived differently based on the conceptual values of the involved actors. 'Value thus emerges not only through the movement of commodities, but also within the social relations, material linkages and images that connect producers to consumers' (Derks et al. 2020: 5). These three conceptions of value(s) seem to be interlinked, and the analysis below will clarify how they interact within the Romanian food economy. It is guided by the following questions:

How is the differential value of food and its producer/distributor created, translated and recognised through physical and conceptual marketing?

How are stages (different spaces of food distribution), actors in the food economy and products (de)valued in a structural and conceptual way?

Due to its unquestionable use-value, food may be ideally suited to reveal the absurdities of marketing and commodification. As food takes on different forms and values throughout the supply chain, I will seek to explore the different scales throughout its commodification, and I hope to thereby make macro-economics more tangible in their effects on the social reality of involved actors. FMs have historically been spaces for social gatherings (cp. Douzinas 2013) and their gradual devaluation also implies changing social relations. It is important to understand the consolidation of supermarket chains in a context where more alternative food distributors are present as compared to the Netherlands, and where more semi-subsistence farmers still exist as opposed to almost exclusively industrial agriculture. In Romania, the relations of production/distribution are still more polarised but transitioning toward the standards that dominate Western European food market(s).

Therefore, it is essential to understand not only this transitioning process but also the standards/values that steer it into a certain direction. It is both academically and socially relevant to trace the value chain and herein the creation, translation, recognition and extraction of value.

Differential value, particularly, plays a central role, as humans are nurtured to differentiate places, people, and things - to make value judgements that also assist the creation of conceptual values. Marketing could be considered the process in which the marketers performs the differential value of their produce - in long chains, consumers encounter the produce alone, while short chains feature the producers and their produce performing together. The expanding chains have not only modified the economic value of food but also its differentiation/perception by consumers and its connection to labour and land.

(6)

The analysis below builds on an ethnography of markets that continuously interacts with literature going beyond anthropology and sociology, such as economics, geography, and market research. The political economy of food markets cannot be discussed separately but must be analysed as holistically as possible - from as many angles as possible. Below, I give an overview of the different scales that shall attempt to do so.

Chapter 1 will trace the commodification of food and the creation of long chains globally and historically in the “macro-market”, and thereafter discuss the liberalisation and standardisation of Romanian agriculture throughout its accession to the “free market” and the EU. While fragments of interviews appear, this chapter is predominantly based on literature research.

Chapter 2 will argue that supermarkets may be fetishised as providers through their marketing efforts that may co-opt conceptual values and that alienate consumers from both (human) ends of the supply chains. Here, data has been obtained through digital ethnography, interviews and participant observation.

Chapter 3 will demonstrate the structural and conceptual processes of (d)(e)valuation at the

agroalimentary markets by focusing on the experiences of market vendors - particularly of small-scale producers. Here, the analysis is based on interviews and participant observation.

Chapter 4 will zoom onto one product - the tomato - and discuss its commodification and fetishisation that have pushed into the background the social relations inherent in its production and distribution. This chapter derived its data from documentaries, articles, interviews and participant observation.

Chapter 5 will point out diverse ways in which actors have resisted and defied the values of the macro-market by creating alternative relations of production, distribution and consumption that fit their

conceptual values and de-commodify food. The examples of resistance are largely based on the interviews with two activists, but also on participant observation.

I. The Macro-Market

(7)

commodification and standardisation maintained global power structures that still dominate regimes of production, distribution and consumption today. I will demonstrate that this process has prioritised the exchange-value of food over its use-value in the global food economy. This is significant because Romania’s entrance into the global market caused the value/valuation of food to change. I will trace this alteration by first looking at the land reform that changed not only property relations but also regimes of agricultural production, and then considering the conditions and consequences of EU-accession that are intrinsically linked to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the EU. This institutional body consolidated the Romanian agricultural market by enforcing compliance to its standards and norms – its procedures of (e)valuation and its values. The CAP is evidently not an isolated institutional body and its policies comply with agreements made in a “global” context through the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (cp. Shields 2011: 84). Their approach to food has been tailored by how food has been marketed historically and globally.

Marketed Food, Marketed Value: Crossroads of Commodity Chains

Ever since markets have existed, food has been marketed. The silk road facilitated the exchange of food products across geographical distances (cp. Schafer 1985), so food has always been part of global trade relations. Since imperialism/colonialism has become more systematic, however, scholars have distinguished different patterns in the _enclosureand _{commodification}of food; both concepts indicating ‘human-induced social constructs that deprive food from its non-economic attributes just to retain its tradable features, namely

durability, external beauty and the standardisation of naturally-diverse food products’ (Vivero-Pol 2017: 185), as we shall see below.

In the period that Araghi (2003) refers to as _{first colonialism} (16th_-19th_{century), “new” lands and their} “old” inhabitants were systematically and structurally enclosed, which was the 'condition of the rise of European industrial capitalism' (51) . The “new” lands were valuable in their potential for the generation/extraction of 7 economic value. Mintz (1996) argues, for instance, that the British empire was significantly sustained by the large-scale production of sugar cane in colonies and by the marketing of sugar as an indispensable commodity to the English working classes. According to Mintz, this was the first instance, in which mass consumption of a food product was stimulated in order to maintain the empire’s economic and political power. The marketing of sugar’s differential value was key in maintaining regimes of production, which was dependent on raw material from colonies - similarly to industrial production. Let us briefly consider the difference between agricultural and industrial production - both are steered toward the production of value and the subsequent accumulation of profit. Accumulation requires capital-as-money to be transformed into capital-as-commodities that then

7_{Lowe (2012) suggests similarly that capitalism and liberalism have been born from racism – the oppression and}

(8)

generates surplus value (more capital-as-money) - a process that is more challenging with agriculture than with factories, as the former requires large surfaces of land, on which the production takes much time and may be endangered by natural forces (Howard 2009: 1267). ‘Because the accumulation process requires expansion into new economic frontiers, however, large-scale capitalists have had a strong interest in reducing these risks and refashioning agriculture toward a factory model’ (ibid. 1268).

Large-scale capitalists aka European colonists crossed new frontiers between 1870-1930s by

standardising agricultural production of staple food in (settler) colonies (McMichael 2009: 141). According to Araghi (2003), this period was the 'consequence of the rise of European industrial capital' - the _second

colonialism, when colonisation intensified due to growing competition between industrialising European countries (53). This process consolidated global power structures – an unequal distribution of surplus food and capital, as colonisers produced raw materials on colonial land extracting their value either through processing or simply their marketing, thereby creating dependency on export and on import of manufactured goods (54). The colonisers exploited the potential of value that the colonised fertile/resource-rich lands offered, and extracted economic surplus-value for their benefit – disregarding non-economic valuations of the land/resources by the colonised inhabitants.

The competition between European empires and the stumbling world economy resulted in World War II, after which priorities shifted – the US directed food aid to 'its informal empire of postcolonial states on strategic perimeters of the Cold War' in order to ensure 'loyalty against communism and to imperial markets' (McMichael 2009: 141). In these acts of “aid”, food became a common good to be distributed rather than a commodity to be marketed, so that its scarcity would not encourage a popular uprising (as had often been the case in history). Meanwhile, the path was carved for ever-growing supply- and value chains, and for an enclosure of food

(economies) by agribusiness, such as seed companies. Seeds are the precondition for the production of food, and their commodification clearly illustrates the underlying politics of the food economy.

Transformation of Seeds into Commodities

Until the 1980s, seed companies had predominantly been smaller scale family-owned businesses (Bijman 2001: 85), and the first biotechnology companies were initiated by scientists who 'realised the commercial value of their research' (ibid. 83). Indeed, they attempted to respond to the demand of high

productivity by perfecting hybrid seeds that derive from human intervention in the pollination process to 'create or emphasize characteristics such as disease resistance, flavor, size, or early harvest' (Smith 2014: 1). Their counterpart (produced by natural pollination) is called open-pollination or heirloom seeds . A study about the 8 end product of heirloom and hybrid tomato seeds emphasises the difference in output: the former 'produced less

8_{heirloom seeds either refer to their respective age (e.g. more than 50 years) or to their history within a family or}

(9)

marketable fruit, both in number and weight', which the authors don’t consider unusual, as the latter are 'bred for consistency and productivity, where heirloom varieties are prized for their distinctive quality attributes' (Rogers & Wszelaki 2010: 461). Companies have specialised in increasing the quick profitability of those seeds whose markets may generate most value (Bonny 2017: 17). Therefore, producers (of a certain scale) tend to prefer hybrids ensuring consistency and bigger size, while 'heirloom varieties are becoming more popular at farmers markets and some consumers will pay more for them' (cp. Wise 2005). Here, we can see how producers' economic evaluation would make them choose the hybrid seeds, but the differential value of heirloom varieties may now in fact produce higher economic value. But how have hybrids become hegemonic?

The consolidation of the seed economy occurred in a very politically charged context (that authors such as Bijman 2001 fail to mention) – the Cold War. Opposing ideologies and economic systems were competing for loyalty of the so-called Third World – of the nations that had been created and exploited through colonialism, and that were now facing food shortage and vast poverty, as their economies had been made dependent on the world market that the (former) colonisers still controlled.

In 1968, a spokesperson of the _{United States Agency for International Development}suggested a 'green technical revolution in food production as counterposed to a red political revolution' (Yapa 1993: 257), thereafter the congress accepted green technology (machinery, pesticides and seeds) as strategic foreign policy (ibid.). Instead of exploited people rising up to the means of production, they would be handed different “manners” of production. Effectively, the Green Revolution became a major pillar in the capitalist countries' mission to develop and modernise the countries whose autonomy they had severely harmed. The usage of hybrid seeds did however require increased irrigation, and pesticides – additional investments that raised the costs of production (especially for small-scale producers) thereby conferring the benefits of higher yields unequally to different classes (ibid. 260, 263). Yapa (1993) points to the danger of hybrid seeds, as they contribute to an emerging 'mode of production that is destroying the productive base of subsistence' (262) – the productive base being the soil itself (degradation through pesticides) and the seeds. The hybridization technique enabled seeds to be transformed into a commodity, as the hybrid seeds' fruits do not produce seeds that will reproduce the same (profitable) kind and the farmers thus have to purchase new seeds every year – the author considers the social construction of scarcity to be 'built into the very development of hybrids' (ibid.). Indeed, multinational

companies did not only successfully standardise seeds, but also enforced loyalty of their customers – loyalty that stems from necessity which was constructed by engineered scarcity. Biotechnology companies have separated the two basic functions of seeds – reproduction and food provision, thereby destroying the 'actual and potential use values created in nature' (264) and creating a valuable commodity (269). Yapa also argues that hegemonic culture (including academia) has contributed to the devaluation of 'the production of subsistence' and of the 'principle of local reproduction by creating a need for external inputs' (267). As we will see in chapter 3,

(10)

capital in production and distribution. Here, we can see that the transformation of seeds from self-sustaining carriers of life into commodified carriers of value have created worldwide dependency on and submission to multinational capital. The Green Revolution tells the story of how seed technology promised to increase

producers' surplus, how unequally the benefits of high-yielding seeds were diffused (i.e. seed companies increase their value, large-scale producers generate higher economic value) and how certain values (“traditional”, “local” knowledge, concern for ecology) were devalued by the standardisation and commodification of seeds.

The loss of subsistence and land-grabbing (cp. below) caused 'rural displacement and super-urbanization expressed in the absolute decline since the 1980s of the world's rural populations and in the formation of a massive global army of migratory labour' (Araghi 2003: 61). In the case of Romania, the countryside does get emptier, losing especially its younger population who indeed goes to the city or abroad. The mass exodus of Romanians is noteworthy - having the 5th largest diaspora relative to its total population . As Romanian salaries 9 are 4-5 times lower than in other EU countries (Hurjuri et al. 2019: 84), 2,5 Mio Romanians emigrated to predominantly Italy, Spain and Germany during the ten years after EU-accession (2007-2017), while another substantial amount temporarily went to work abroad (ibid. 85). This seasonal labour may very well be found in industrial agriculture of Western European countries (cp. the Covid story in the introduction), as the standardised and industrialised regimes of production are based on a 'new international division of labour' in the production and distribution of food (cp. Raynolds et al. 1993).

These genealogies of the _globalfood economy only hint at the missing parts of the globe - the isolationist “communist” countries who in principle sought for agricultural self-sufficiency. In the Romanian case, however, the 1980s already entailed an integration into the global food economy, as Ceausescu decided to pay the foreign debt partly by exporting high quality foodstuffs, while lower quality food was used for domestic consumption (cp. Hitchins 2014, Massino 2012, Gilberg 1990). While research on food consumption was forbidden (Petrovici & Ritson 2000: 290), the period of 1960-1975 was one of ‘relative consumer abundance’ with available luxury food products, but the above-mentioned policy created an increasing scarcity of food items, which led to meat, oil, wheat, milk, eggs and sugar being rationed (Ghita 2018: 147).

After “communism” crumbled, these countries joined the common market with a very different past experience compared to the “capitalist veterans”, and the following section will investigate how the political economy of food has been transformed throughout the transition to capitalism. First, we very briefly look at those elements of economic organisation that had to be erased for freedom to enter.

The Steered Journey from CAP to CAP

When freedom aka capitalism was initiated in Romania, the new politicians followed the typical liberalising patterns through the (hyper)valuation of private property and the formalisation of the market (cp. Shields 2011 for an overview on liberalising waves in CEEC). This first required a radical land reform, and then

(11)

the compliance with EU-standards in order to become part of (or subjected to) the second CAP – the Common Agricultural Policy.

Let us first understand however the two models of food production that dominated the period that has been called “the communist times”. The first was based on state farms (Intreprinderi Agricole de Stat) that were maintained through wage labour – funded by parts of the profit (Roger 2014: 737). They controlled 30% of the agricultural land in 1989 (Dawidson 2005: 619). The cooperative agricole de productie (CAP, agricultural cooperative of production) – consisting of 60% of farmland – was organised differently: the cooperatives' members didn't control the production and distribution of surplus while nominally owning the land (in 1989, 60% of farmland belonged to a CAP) (Dawidson 2005: 619). Here, the land had collective value serving (partly) domestic production and consumption, while food was valued as commons rather than as commodity - at least in theory. Members of cooperatives and other rural households were allowed to manage individual plots of max. 0,3 ha independently from the state, and the surplus of these individual farms may very well have been circulated via informal networks or markets (cp. Roger 2014: 738). In this case, their individual land may have had a special value in preserving minimum autonomy from the otherwise all-encompassing state.

At the beginning of the “transition”, only 9% of farmland was used by individual farms – a number that grew to 95% in 2005 (Vidican 2009: 1080). This transition from collective to private ownership is grounded in a wide-reaching land reform, which began with the 1991 Land Law (Dragos et al. 2007: 292). Landowning villagers could now enlarge their land from 0,3ha to 0,5ha, while landless ones could request a plot of 0,25ha (Verdery 2003: 96). One can thus speak of the reconstitution of land ownership (e.g. to the pre-WWII owners) but also of a constitution – for instance to landless farm employees or young families wanting to start farming (Dawidson 2005: 620).

In order to understand the changing power dynamics in land property relations, one must analyse which actors have effectively been controlling 'the nature, pace, extent and direction of surplus production, distribution and disposition' land resources (Boras 2007: 50). Clearly, in communist times, actors within the state or their associates were controlling the surplus, now the protagonists were partly redefined. Romania has an

exceptionally high amount of land resources (with a total surface of 238,397km²), so who took and exercised control of those after 1990? Before discussing the policies related to the consolidation of the EU's “common market”, we will look at how the value of land has been translated and extracted through the enclosure of land by affluent actors.

Land in The Wild East

In capitalist times, land has acquired an economic value and the potential to generate surplus value. After the “transition”, freshly commercialised land was significantly cheaper than long-marketed land in Western Europe – the price gradually evolved from 100 Euro/hectare to 500 Euro/hectare in the early 2000s to 879 Euro/hectare in 2007 (compared to a Dutch hectare for 35.000 Euro) (cp. Ciutacu et al. 2017: 147, 150). It is

(12)

thus not surprising that the opening of the Romanian market attracted interest in its fertile ground for surplus value, which led the reporter in this documentary to refer Romania as the “European El Dorado''.10 El Dorado was the myth of a city full of gold that colonisers used as justification to increasingly occupy South America. The promise of wealth, of monetary value, also creates the temptation of land, which has always been valuable whether gold was below it or could be grown (e.g. in the form of bio-fuel, or well-marketed food-products). A friend of mine referred to Romania as the “Wild West of Europe', which similarly implies the colonisation of new frontiers in the anticipation of wealth/value extraction. Indeed, after the Iron Curtain failed, an Eastern frontier opened and capitalist veterans discovered a new playing (or growing) field for profitable agricultural production. The consequential transactions often had a transnational character, even though they had to occur in partnership with a Romanian investor until the reform in 2014 (cp. below).

When discussing issues relating to the Romanian food economy, my interlocutors often complained that large portions of land were owned by big (foreign) investors. Still being somewhat fixated on individual choice, I often asked my interlocutors why people sold their land to big investors in the aftermath of the revolution. The answers didn't vary much and all pointed toward the thirst for novelty – residents of villages wanted to make quick money in order to buy a car, emigrate to the cities or abroad and didn't necessarily know the economic (or other) value of their land. As Ciutacu et al. (2017) theorise, sellers were judging by criteria from the past (the exhausting and confining characteristics of agricultural work), while buyers would judge by the future value of this land('s produce) (148). While sellers were formerly confined to work on the collective farms or in factories, the array of “lifestyle” choices seemed wider now and money was needed to taste these choices, so land was transformed into money. The purchasing investors merged many pieces of land and transformed it into capital for them. In order for land to produce capital (i.e. significant surplus), starting capital is required.

Of course, the condition for these transactions was the protection of private property rights, or rather the resurrection of private property – once collectivised land was given back to private hands. It might be useful to think about this process through the term of _enclosure which is elsewhere used to describe the transformation from the commons to the private property in the UK, the transition from small land holdings into large estates for private rather than common use – perhaps the first instance of privatisation. 'Enclosure is a central aspect of capital’s drive to accumulate, as enclosure reproduces the separation of the direct producer from the means of production and in so doing facilitates the reproduction of capital' (Akram-Lodhi 2007: 1453). The author has reframed the term to fit the current context as neoliberal enclosures which enact the principle of accumulation by dispossession and bear witness to the unequal starting conditions of participants in the free market.

When social scientists observe a recurring pattern, such as land enclosures, they are quick to coin a term – in this case, land grabbing. This has also been observed in Romania – a 'finance-poor, resource-rich' country, whose large agricultural terrain tempted investors from 'finance-rich, resource-poor' countries (cp. Borras &

(13)

Franco 2011: 37) – fitting into the “trend” of transnational land-grabbing that 'most evidently exemplifies the logic of contemporary capitalist development and its global patterns of production and consumption' (ibid. 41). The infamous case of the Dutch Rabobank's activities illustrate this: through its investment fund “RaboFarm”, it acquired more than 21.000ha in over 50 villages throughout Romania (Ciutacu et al. 2017: 149). These

transactions are being investigated by anti-corruption prosecutors for fraud (ibid.) and accusations of

blackmailing and bribing (cp. The investigation of journalist Luke Dale-Harris ). This is not an isolated case but 11 part of a wider emerging structure, as 0,5% of landholders own 51,5% of the utilised agricultural area (cp. EuroStat 2018) . In the counties of Timis and Arad (surrounding and including Timi12 șoara), foreign investors own 20%-50% of the land (Ciutacu et al. 2017: 149).

Convinced capitalists may shrug their shoulders and claim that these _{large-scale land acquisitions} or land consolidations are perfectly normal upon the entrance into the free market (cp. Borras & Franco 2011, Eco-Ruralis 2016). Von Braun and Meinzen-Dick (2009) from the World Bank even suggest ‘large-scale land investment’ to serve as a potential solution to rural poverty. Other actors, even the UN, have recognised this process as land-grabbing, however. A research paper by _{Eco-Ruralis summarizes how different corporate and}13 institutional bodies have discussed land-grabbing, bearing witness to corporate, financial and governmental amorality in their approach. They conclude the paper by proposing their own definition:

Land grabbing is the control (whether through ownership, lease, concession, contracts, quotas, or general power) of larger than locally-typical amounts of land by any persons or entities (public or private, domestic or foreign) by any means ('legal' or 'illegal') for purposes of speculation, extraction, resource control or

commodification at the expense of agroecology, land stewardship, food sovereignty and human rights.

Here, they hint at the fact that it is not only property, nominal ownership, that may transfer control over production and distribution of surplus value, but also contract farming or leasing. These two forms of control are referred to as vertical coordination by the corporate intermediary (as opposed to vertical integration, when the land is bought by the corporate actor), and has become increasingly common on a global scale (Mishra et al. 2018: 865). The former makes the farmers produce for and according to the corporate intermediary, while the latter transfers the responsibility and organisation of production to the corporate coordinator. In Romania, the first leasing law was passed in 1994 in order to provide an alternative for transactions of farming units (Vidican 2009: 1082). According to the author, landowners would choose to lease their land, if they are of old age and capital constrained, or if they have an alternative source of income (ibid. 1081). While they may then still retain the idea of ownership, the corporate coordinators benefit economically, as they have to spend less than in an

11_{https://thecorrespondent.com/3589/Tales-of-corruption-surround-Rabobank-dealings-in-Romania/790804243790-dbeb0905} https://thecorrespondent.com/3585/Think-land-grabbing-is-a-thing-of-the-past-Think-again/603298200945-e138b7f7

https://thecorrespondent.com/3772/Farmers-in-what-may-be-the-poorest-village-in-Romania-pressured-into-selling-their-land-to-Raboban k/831126666920-19635dd6

12_h_{ttps://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/9028470/5-28062018-AP-EN.pdf/8d97f49b-81c0-4f87-bdde-03fe8c3b8ec2}

13_{Eco-Ruralis is the Romanian branch of the international organisation Via Campesina that fights for the rights of peasants (i.e.}

(14)

acquisition. Therefore, it has become an increasingly popular method of gaining control over production and distribution of surplus-value from agricultural land. In 2010, the most strongly growing trend since EU accession was indeed the proportion of leased areas – having grown from 17% in 2007 to 27% in 2010 (Rosu 2015: 106). Of course, the prospect and process of EU accession entailed a wide range of consequences, especially in the agricultural domain. Below, I attempt to chronologically follow the so-called integration of Romania(n land) into the EU.

The “Integration” into the “Common” Market

The following account will clarify why the quotation marks in this subheading were necessary. After the two polar “worlds” ceased to exist, the “First World” proceeded to impose its vision of “development” and “progress” onto the remaining parts of the world - defining the terms for post-communist transition. As the attentive reader might have noticed, I continuously put quotation marks around transition, because transition has predominantly been approached as a technocratic process, whose details will be discussed but its direction won’t be questioned, while it should be re-politicised (cp. Shields 2011: 98). Shields (2011) considers post-communist transition ‘as seeking to bring into being a new global order in which states individually and collectively

maintain conditions for capital to remain hegemonic over labour’ (84). While the early 1990s were steered by domestic forces, the IMF and the WB, the CEECs remained ‘stuck playing catch-up with the West’ and the EU-accession did not necessarily ameliorate this unevenness (92). Nevertheless, the post-communist countries - those “laggards”14 _{- had to comply with conditions set by capitalist veteran nations in order to enter the common} market.

The EU spends most of its budget on projects (subsidies) within the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), making it a fundamental pillar in the EU economy in general and in the food economy specifically; in the period 2007-2013, for instance, this meant 42% of the total budget (Gorton et al. 2009: 1306). One may first be surprised at how much the EU values farmers, but a closer look will quickly reveal the real benefiters, for instance, the Czech PM Babis collected 42 Mio Euro through his (shell) companies in Czechia and additional 7 Mio Euro from holdings elsewhere in the EU thanking the subsidy/hectare policy. It thus seems as if the CAP 15 is part of a structure that predominantly benefits (and maintains) the economic power of the upper classes in the EU. The integration of new member states must therefore be handled carefully for the power structure not to crumble.

Romania started being prepared for its participation as early as 2000, when the EU allocated 150 Mio Euro annually (until 2006) through SAPARD (Special pre-Accession Programme for Agricultural Restructuring

14 _{As post-communist countries, particularly Romania and Bulgaria, are referred to in academic papers (cp. Noutcheva &}

Bechev 2008, Dallara 2014) without exploring the underlying assumptions of such conceptualisation. According to those authors' “diagnosis”, these countries are lagging due to a slow increase in modernisation, industrialisation and

concentration of ownership.

(15)

and Development) (Dawidson 2005: 629). These funds are nominally intended to 'enhance sustainable

agriculture and rural development and to improve production, processing, and marketing of agricultural products' (ibid.). As the following sections will demonstrate, buzzwords like sustainable agriculture and rural development may have various interpretations and implications in practice. Enhanced productivity and marketing, however, are straight-forward, requiring further liberalisation and modernisation (i.e. increased usage of technology for a reduction in labour force) (ibid. 631). This preparative period demonstrated that EU-membership and agricultural subsidies would only come under certain conditions and Romanian economy had to comply with EU standards.

Roger (2014) suggests that “Romanian peasants” became “EU farmers” by squeezing them into statistical categories that work on underlying assumptions and values. These statistics define standardised units that ought to be measured and that inevitably simplify reality, while imposing 'a definition of the legitimate economic organisation which favours some holdings but not others' (736). In 2002, the first General Agricultural Census was conducted under the coordination of the EU in order to see what had to be improved, adjusted, and imposed (ibid. 738). Categories were developed to conceptualise the farming landscape that was marked by small-scale producers and large-scale agribusiness; most notably, semi-subsistence farms were assumed to market their produce in commercial channels – and the creation of this category 'translates into subsidy mechanisms which encourage the consolidation of 'viable' agricultural holdings' (739). When calculations delivered dissatisfying results, for instance, that only 5% of farms would be eligible for subsidies (this wouldn't sound good in Romanian media), categories had to be reviewed – in this case, the category “professional” emerged describing those holdings of minimum 2ha and the commercialisation of produce (741).

Semi-subsistence still remains a vague category, as small plots of 0,5ha may still serve as 'main income for households in remote rural villages' (Vidican 2009: 1313) and the usage of the surface (e.g. intensity of agriculture) will determine the surplus-value.

At the time of accession, the average farm size was 3.2ha (Vidican 2009: 1312) and small-scale producers were disappointed if they had expected aid from the EU. When the first farming subsidies were allocated, the unequal distribution of the EU funds crystallised: in 2008, large farming units of over 1000ha (less than 0,5% of the total amount of farms) received 21% of subsidies (ibid. 1314). Therefore, the author predicts that the winners from CAP policies/subsidies would be 'large, corporate farms,and it is unclear whether transfers to such institutions will trickle down to small-scale land owners' (ibid. 1315). In 2011, 286,4 Mio Euro (39% of all subsidies) were allocated to 5000 farms – representing only 0,45% of all beneficiaries (Ciutacu et al. 2017: 147). These striking numbers have resulted from the first pillar of the CAP which permits concentration of subsidies and thus favours 'capital surplus in the old EU member states' (ibid. 144)

Roger (2014) concurs with the aforementioned authors, as 'the CAP has promoted the development of big farming and monoculture, to the detriment of small-scale family farming and polyculture' (734) – and to the benefit of capital-heavy actors within the EU economy that also have considerable political power either through

(16)

lobbying or direct political functions, such as the Czech PM. This process was intensified, when Romanian agricultural land got effectively liberalised on the 1st_{of January 2014. Consequently, foreign investors could} directly purchase land (before, this was only possible in partnership with a Romanian investor) – and

land-grabbing has significantly increased (Ciutacu et al. 2017: 144). Since Romania's accession to the EU, the price of farmland has grown from 100 Euro/hectare to 3000-5000 Euro/hectare – those are 'forbidding prices for Romanian citizens, and dim the prospects of young Romanian farmers who wish to develop a farm' (ibid. 150). Again, the increased value of land facilitates capital-heavy actors to accumulate more land and surplus-value. The authors also claim that the harvested produce is often exported to the countries of the investors, which is why food security is in fact harmed in the respective controlled areas, where 'an irreversible loss of jobs and of vital resources' has occurred (ibid. 148). While medium-scale farmers may have benefited from some subsidies, bio-diverse small-scale production has not. In order to illustrate these general dynamics, I will discuss the specific case of the subsidy programme for tomato production that has been initiated in 2017.

Whose production gets subsidised?

The programme has successfully increased the cultivation of tomatoes – in 2018, production had grown by 40% compared to 2016 . This is also reflected in a change in economic value of Romanian tomatoes: as more 16 producers chose to cultivate them, the price went from 18lei/kg in 2017 to 12lei/kg in 2018, and now fluctuating between 10 and 5 lei . If producers want to get rid of their tomatoes, their prices must compete with other 17 market vendors and supermarkets, or they must market the differential value of their tomatoes in order to make consumers pay more.

The subsidies are allocated only under certain conditions however. First, eligible candidates must own land, on which a protected space (greenhouse or polytunnel) of minimum 1.000m² is reserved for the cultivation of tomatoes . Second, they must produce a minimum of 3kg/m². Third, they must sell at least 3 tonnes per 18 1000m² (which has been increased from 2 tonnes in 2019) , so if they don't produce more than 3kg/m², this 19 would amount to 100% of their production. When I asked the economic director of the market administration about the subsidies, he told me: “if they sell 3000kg of tomatoes, they give them 3000 Euro”. He thus focuses on the minimum of sold quantities rather than the size of production or land. He further comments: “they do a calculation at the level of the EU to see what products they need […] if my neighbour receives 3000 Euro, I also want to receive 3000 Euro […] many tomatoes come from Spain, so they made a programme to cultivate them here, to stimulate their cultivation because we need tomatoes... everyone wants tomatoes...”. The cultivation of subsidy tomatoes is not possible for everyone however.

16_{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lFxrY_AdoQ} 17_{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sszYcH_FQo}

18_{https://agrointel.ro/122372/subventia-la-rosii-3000-de-euro-in-2020-decizia-guvernului-pentru-ajutorul-de-minimis/} 19_{https://agrointel.ro/130727/programul-tomata-schimbari-2020/}

(17)

The minimum amount of surface requires the potential producer to have a considerable size of land, the construction and maintenance of the protected space requires starting capital, in order to cover costs of material, seeds, irrigation, transportation and potentially labour. A producer at an AM asks: “Why don't they give half of the subsidies, if you have 500m²? That would only be fair!”. According to Lidia, most of EcoRuralis' members don't receive subsidies, as a greenhouse of 1000m2 is “an investment”, also because in the period of cultivation “it costs you, you need to have employees to harvest, many people”; an investment is something that requires capital which semi-subsistence farmers don't just have lying around. Lidia goes on to say:

“Let's try to open the eyes a little... Don't define the target so high any more, for small-scale producers the limit is too big…Even if you have only half a hectare, you can grow so much to feed many families, they depend on you for their vegetables and fruits, this is a very important function, this should be recognised. With time it [the recognition, the valuation] disappears”.

Here, she emphasises that small-scale producers may have a very valuable function that is directly felt by the families that are fed but that is not recognised by governmental institutions, as the subsidy programme won't financially support those with smaller surfaces (and without specialisation).

A documentary, on the other hand, attempts to show the success of the subsidy programme by telling the story of a young man who has worked abroad in construction work allowing him to save money, from which he bought terrain that now comprises of 4000m² of greenhouses for tomatoes. The reporter asks if it's worth it (in Romanian, the question is: “se merita”, literally translated “does it merit itself?”, the reporter basically asks if the producer values his chosen pathway), to which the producer answers: “Well I have to be here every day, there's no holidays and it's a lot of work, one has to care for the tomatoes all the time!”, thus referring to the labour required to translate the tomato into economic value (cp. chapter 3 on the labour inherent in small-scale

production). The subsidies may not surpass 20.000 Euro, but one can see that cultivation on 7000m² may become particularly profitable, which may enable the producer to acquire more land and to produce more subsidy-heavy crops (e.g. corn). This governmental intervention doesn’t decrease the economic hardships of small-scale producers but rewards already capital-heavy actors, thus maintaining power structures.

The EU’s Values in Action

According to Ciutacu et al. (2017), CAP policies bear witness to the neglect of the EU's own principles, such as protection of biodiversity, sustainable development, and equal opportunities. They demonstrate the structural injustice by the following calculation:

'If in Romania the price of one hectare of farmland is 5–10 times lower than in many of the old members states, and the annual average income (be it wage earnings, the annual subsistence revenues of a farmer or the

GDP/capita) is 5-30 times lower in Romania, it means that the chances for a Romanian farmer or any other Romanian citizen to prosper and those citizens of an equal social standing in other EU countries are blatantly

(18)

unequal' (150).

The relations of production in the EU moreover resemble those between colonies and colonisers as raw producer and marketing processor, respectively. Many interlocutors complained that now Romania only participates in the first step of the supply chain by, for instance, producing grain, which is then processed elsewhere (in Western Europe) and finally sent back to Romania as a commodity in form of biscuits, bread or pasta produced in the respective Western European country. The carrier of potential value (the grain) is grown by corporate extractors that process its potential by transforming into a commodity that is packaged and marketed for Romanian consumers. The Romanian origin of the grain will not be noted on the etiquette, as processed produce usually doesn't state the origin of its base value. The Romanian consumer is fed with the extraction of “their” land's value without this being marked as quality, or differential value.

This confirms Gorton et al.’s (2009) argument that the 'existing European Union legislative corpus reflects West European problems, interests and experiences’ (1307), as the “economic crisis” illustrated when Western European banks got bailed out while citizens of notably South European countries suffered from severe austerity measures (cp. Herzfeld 2016, Stavrakis 2015). The path had been carved long time ago with the Lisbon Agreement in 2003, when it was decided that the principle of competition would be enforced by the EU, while individual states would be responsible for the maintenance of social cohesion (cp. Alexandri & Souliotis 2016). In the context of the CAP, the process of accession has not been one of integration, or even mutual adaptation, but rather enforced adjustment, consolidation, and enclosure (Gorton et al. 2009: 1314). As we have seen, the allocation mechanism of subsidies prioritises investors over small-scale producers, which effectively led to longer chains, in which food has been standardised and commodified. Corporate capital didn’t only enclose the production of food, but also its distribution which has been marketed to consumers by praising the differential value of distributor and products, and appealing to certain conceptual values. The following chapter will investigate this process in depth.

II. The Marketing Markets

Corporate capital didn’t only enclose land in the countryside but also in cities like Timișoara, where supermarkets have claimed large surfaces in the urban landscape. When I would discuss the city’s

supermarketisation with interlocutors, they would frequently say that supermarkets are “pe fiecare colț” - at every corner. Market vendors in particular complained about their density in the centre contrasting it with Western European countries, where bigger supermarkets are usually concentrated in the periphery. This resulted from the ‘lack of certain Romanian regulations aligned with the intelligent development of the urban

environment’ and of the simulation of FMs’ location (Butu et al. 2019: 16). This expansion, this enclosure, doesn't seem to have come to an end yet – during my stay, I observed the ongoing construction works on a large terrain that was to become another branch of Lidl (competing within a 3km radius with at least five other supermarkets). Also in my neighbourhood, I could literally feel the expansion: I used to look for food in the bin

(19)

of a nearby Profi, which was then transformed into a 24h non-stop supermarket with security. This resulted in a change in my consumption behaviour; but, more significantly, in changing value relations between competitors in proximity – the independent small stores used to have the unique differential value of all-time accessibility, while this is now co-opted and standardised by supermarket chains. Also, Mr Ahmed (the owner of a

neighbourhood store I frequently talked to) explained: “Now, more and more small stores close. Bit by bit, everyone will have to close. We don’t have many neighbourhood stores anymore. The Profi over there has been there for three months, the other one there for three years. The Carrefour at the corner came two years ago. The mayor supports this, if he didn’t want a new one to open, he could just refuse to give permission”.

Their expansion is not only an effect of the free market, but it is also at least tolerated, if not supported, by the municipality, as new building projects or opening branches must be approved. The roots of these

ever-emerging branches of retail chains (e.g. Carrefour, Profi, Kaufland, etc.) are found in the homestead of capitalist veterans – in Western Europe, where ever-growing (supply and retail) chains have expanded since the 1960s. In Romania, the first multinational supermarket was opened only in 1994 (Dabija & Alt 2012: 339), and in 2000, Petrovici and Ritson wrote:

'As a result of privatisation of the retail sector, the proportion of purchases from the state-owned sector

diminished. This does not mean that large modern retail outlets account for a substantial proportion of consumer expenditure (..), the most popular retail outlets for consumers remain the open market and the small and medium private shops' (299).

Since then, times have radically changed. The ‘total selling space of global retail chains increased 10 times from 43,000m² in 1999 to 463,000m² in 2005’ (Javorcik & Li 2013: 12). EU-accession did accelerate the process, as ‘the removal of customs barriers to the merchandise brought from other member states represented for retailers the long-expected signal of progressive expansion’ (Dabija & Alt 2012: 337).

I asked all my interlocutors about when supermarkets had first arrived – receiving vague and diverse answers . Everyone was surprised at the question, and perhaps surprised at their lack of an answer – bearing 20 witness to what extent supermarkets had been integrated not only in the urban but also in the imaginary

landscapes of people - to what extent their existence had been normalised. Indeed, they have become landmarks that are used to describe a location in the city. Their omni-presence cannot be seen away, as the marketing strategists clearly use repetitive exposure (cp. Schmid & Eisend 2015) - not only by their presence but also by advertising alerts at every altitude, such as the

notorious Carrefour bag on the photograph. In this chapter, I argue that

supermarket chains have consolidated their

20_{Even scholars have written contradictory information - Javorcik & Li (2013) claim that the first multinational supermarket}

(20)

economic (and political) power by marketing themselves while devaluing those essential for their operations. First, the differential value of supermarkets generally has been marketed in order to redirect Romanian consumers from the agroalimentary markets and stores to the modern retail chains. Second, Carrefour

differentiates itself as the most suitable provider through marketing efforts, such as the Act For Food campaign, hereby integrating (and co-opting) potential consumers' concerns (conceptual values). Then, I will show how this consolidation of the macro-market depended on the supermarkets’ extraction of most surplus-value, which in turn effectively devalued labour in supermarkets, logistics, and production. I will discuss the affective labour by cashiers at the end of the supply chain and the productive labour at its beginning, which are (in)directly devalued by consumers.

The new “modern” markets (i.e. supermarkets) in Romania differ from the “traditional” markets, as they actively try to expand their customer base and outreach by promoting their produce and service provision – they engage in marketing, while traditional markets just exist. Marketing may be understood as emphasizing the superior, differential value of a product – in the case of supermarkets this process goes two-fold: on one hand, the distributor itself is sold as best available option to do groceries (e.g. emphasizing its particular convenience, or care for concerns), and, on the other hand, highlighting the value of available produce (e.g. its variety, its quality or its “localness”). These two processes go hand in hand: the supermarket advertises itself by its offer of produce and its facilities, while the produce represents, or performs, the differential value of the supermarket. Throughout my stay, I was puzzled about why supermarkets had gained such popularity. I kept asking interlocutors at FMs who would emphasise the differences between “modern” and “traditional” markets, attempting to explain why FMs have been abandoned in favour of supermarkets.

The Infinity of Choice and its Costs

In my second week, I decided to finally visit the Carrefour hypermarket out of curiosity and out of “necessity”. Until then, I had enjoyed the atmosphere of sociality in the small stores, but I thought I would feel more comfortable buying female hygiene products at an impersonal hypermarket. When I first entered, I was completely overwhelmed by the quantities on and of the shelves. While I am used to the Dutch supermarkets, I hadn't been initiated into the culture of hypermarkets. I was irritated by the size and the abundance of produce and found myself on a quest for the best deals getting completely lost in the masses and in hesitation of what I actually needed. Having arrived at the section

(21)

manoeuvre among humans. I experienced this journey through the shelves as mentally and physically draining. While the abundance of produce had an appalling effect on me, market vendors argued that this was a major selling point of supermarkets.

Firstly, they thought that consumers value the choice that the offered variety enables. This variety may be deceiving, however, as virtually identical products are made to appear different through packaging and branding (Cochoy 2007: 120), which creates the illusion of choice - performing the value of individual choice that is so dear to capitalism (cp. Menon & Nath 2019: 109). Choosing between consumer goods may 'provide a temporary, even if mostly spurious, sense of choice, of self, and thereby of freedom' (Mintz 1996: 16). Varman and Vikas (2007) suggest that 'consumer freedom was originally a compensation for the loss of freedom and autonomy in the sphere of production and having been evicted from production and communal self-rule, the individual self-assertion found its outlet in the market game' (122, 123). This may be the joker of capitalism: claiming that freedom (a conceptual value) is provided through quantities of consumable goods as opposed to, for instance, the empty shelves during communism that still serve to signify the communist past . 21

Secondly, the market vendors pointed to a practical component: “Nowadays, the people are very busy, they work a lot and they don't want to do groceries at several places. At supermarkets, they can buy everything – oil, sugar, bread, everything”. This is correlated with the maximizing of comfort by minimizing the time. While at first sight this argument may seem convincing, I suspect that the infinity of choice may prolong the activity of groceries significantly – if you can choose from five kinds of tomatoes, you may take longer than when there is only one kind of tomato, and the abundance of produce may cause you to get lost between all the shelves (cp. Cochoy 2007).

Thirdly, interlocutors at the market reminded me of many people’s dire economic situation due to low wages, which supermarkets built on through advertisements and action prices. Butu et al. (2019) write that ‘financially speaking, the supermarket is everybody’s market’ (16). We will come back to what plays in the background of the prices. Indeed, vegetables/fruits were slightly cheaper than at the FMs, and special offers may briefly console the wallet, but it may be safe to assume that the infinity of choice makes customers fill their shopping carts with more than the essential - engaging in conspicuous consumption, which is not defined by intrinsic need but one that is constructed via marketing (Humphery 1999: 64).

Convenient Car(t)s

“At the supermarket, they have a shopping cart and they can walk around and put everything from the shelves in it” - this was a common answer of market vendors, which was accompanied by a gesture of pushing the shopping cart and filling it. Indeed, supermarkets perform to perfection

the value of consumers’ convenience. The customers’ comfort is maximised

21_{I visited some discussions on “communism” by writers or artists (“intellectuals”), who focused on the shortage of food}

and painted the recurring images of empty shelves and long queues, while the audience was joining the discussion on waiting times and received quantities throughout the queues.

(22)

through the shopping cart, as their body has no weight to carry and fragile plastic bags (like those at FMs) don’t risk breaking.

The shopping cart has thus become a symbol of supermarkets facilitating big groceries at minimum physical exhaustion. An employee of the market's administration in Craiova told me that they had even

considered introducing a shopping cart in order to expand (or regain) their customers. He then admitted that, of course, logistically this was impossible, as the market had a very different design from a supermarket. To me, this seemed like a cynic’s story – trying to co-opt the symbol of the “modern” markets in order to repopulate the “traditional” markets, while the shopping cart is clearly not the only reason consumers choose supermarkets, and normally the process goes reverse – supermarkets trying to co-opt popular symbols of FMs (cp. below).

Returning to the shopping cart, one can also see that it is not only convenient for consumers but also for supermarkets, as the volume of shopping carts and its unperceivable weight enable the customers to fill them with great quantities. The economic value of the groceries may only be grasped at the cash register, as the shopping cart may hide the (financial) weight of the acquired produce.

After crossing the frontier of the cash registers, customers may continue their path onto the parking, which is another main selling point of supermarkets. Market vendors consistently mentioned the parking area as an advantage compared to markets. They kept saying how important it was for people to drive with their car to do groceries, especially if big quantities were acquired. This goes in line with the maximizing of comfort for consumers and it also takes into account the value that people place on their car . As discussed above, the 22 parking lots of supermarkets claim even more urban space (in the centre) than the buildings alone. Of course, the interior of supermarkets is also elaborately thought through in order to encourage maximum consumption for maximum extraction of surplus-value.

Manipulation by Design

Consider this extract of a health edition belonging to a political satire:

You surely know how hard it is to resist the alimentary temptations of hypermarkets. Everything is set up so that we buy more, so that we want to eat more. And everyone is okay with that, even though it's evident that we're being manipulated in a miserable manner. If any of us was to just slightly manipulate as hypermarkets do, we would probably go to prison. Not if we are corporations! The good news, brothers, is that it's not our fault. Yes, we are victims of consumerism that doesn't take into account public health. Brian Wansink explains in his book Mindless Eating: why we eat more than we think: “We eat excessively not because we are hungry but because of family and friends, packages and plates, names and numbers, labels and lights, colours and light effects, shapes

22 _{Owning a car has a certain cultural value (especially after the “transition” when it became much easier to acquire a car –}

no waiting times, immediate/instant satisfaction and exciting novelties in the form of Western brands); often when I asked why people sold their land to big investors, people almost always replied that they wanted to move to the city and to earn quick money to buy a car.

(23)

and smells, abstractedness and distances, shelves and containers.” So what can we do to not be victims when we arrive in the hypermarket? A golden rule is to not do groceries when hungry. […] Then it's important to tell yourself to not buy processed food. […] The food has to be as close as possible to its natural state. I don't know if you noticed it but in a hypermarket the path toward healthy food is full with obstacles of processed food. More so, this processed misery is put at the level of the eye, so that it seduces us, so that it steals us the eye, so that it convinces us. Don't forget to study the labels and the list of ingredients, if you recognize the ingredients, the food is good. […] Aliments that don't come with a list of ingredients are the best – meaning vegetables and fruits – are the best. 23

He foregrounds the elaborate strategies ingrained in the design of space and commodities while emphasising the sensual temptations, as the position of processed food “steals us the eye, … it convinces us”. This echoes Cochoy’s (2007) remark that ‘the distributor’s presence and action is constant even if very discrete and remote’ (113). The strategic (manipulative) actions must be discrete for the space to be fetishisable.

It is noteworthy that he recommends products with well-known ingredients or, even better, without a list of ingredients - vegetables and fruits. This demonstrates a certain trust in the “goodness” (i.e. healthiness) of vegetables and fruits, while, in fact, their process of production is less transparent than that of processed foods, where one is at least informed which ingredients are used. The vegetables and fruits’ origin will be noted on the label but not the kind and quantities of chemicals that were used in production.

While the presenter of the show admits that clients of hypermarkets are “victims of consumerism that doesn't take into account public health”, he doesn't necessarily criticize the concept of hypermarkets as such. Moreover, the production of processed food is hinted at but he doesn't travel back further in the commodity chain. His main concern is (the danger to) public health, but he doesn't question what is it that attracts people to choose hyper/supermarkets as their source of consumption. According to market vendors, conceptual

(use-)values such as convenience, vast choice and affordability are the main reasons. The presenter echoes concerns about health and processed food that have gained momentum in public discourse alongside other concerns surrounding values of ecology, locality, and social responsibility. Evidently, the marketing ambassadors of supermarkets don't just listen but they (re)act, for instance, through Carrefour's publicity campaign “Act For Food”.

Act, React, Distract: Carrefour's Self-Portrayal

This campaign is advertised on posters around and inside Carrefour’s stores, on its website and on the streets. Here, I will briefly analyse the campaign's presentation

23 _{This is an extract from a show that does political satire on a regular basis; here you can find the video and text:}

https://www.stareanatiei.ro/2019/09/fii-destept-hipermarket/?fbclid=IwAR3TwoO4QQg3pC8XBrmB-A31ei84gkn30e-P US_pZaiqI_MiGx38W4QPNCk

Changing Chains - Change in Value(s)?Marketing Food in Transitioning Timișoara