Politics and the Asturian Diet

"Fat Cows" and Autarchy

The years during and just after World War I were lived in Spain under a failing monarchy and the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.

During this period, efforts were made to raise both the standard of living and of education in remote areas. For rural Asturians, these were the years of the "fat cows," vacas gordas , when demand for livestock in wartorn Europe raised prices.

This was followed by falling prices, the world depression, the return of villagers to autarchia, and the closing of doors to New World immigration. Asturians who had been abroad for years or even decades returned home or were repatriated, and young men who had expected to go off to find their fortune remained at home, severely stretching the absorptive capacity of villages.^[39] People responded to this unprecedented increase by extending cultivation into meadowland.^[40] Villagers eager to emphasize this point claim to remember that even steep, shady meadows were planted in potatoes or corn. These bad times meant that the food supply was "relocalized."^[41]

In 1931, the Republic was voted in, though it soon became clear that the expectations with which it was proclaimed could not be met. Disappointment brought on social and political unrest, to which the government overreacted at least twice. Rural uprisings such as Casas Viejas in Andalusia (Mintz 1982) polarized the nation. The Asturian uprising of October 1934—considered the only authentic workers' uprising in the history of modern Europe (Jackson 1984, Elorza 1984)—drew harsh reprisals from the government. Forces called in to lead the suppression were led by the future caudillo, General Franco, whose decisive response exacerbated tensions even further.

The Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936, inaugurating a period of autarchia for the nation. The Nationalists—opposing the Republicans or Loyalists, the government party—received military help in the form of aircraft from Germany and won the Civil War in 1939 just as World War II was breaking out in Europe. Whether or not Germany's help affected the outcome decisively, the collaboration served historically to ostracize Spain from postwar Europe and exclude it from participation in international associations and economic exchange. Franco, who had become head of state and was to remain in that position until 1975, thus established his grim personal style in the years of autarchia of the 1940s when wardevastated Spain tried to pull itself up by its bootstraps. It was for most Spaniards a decade of great scarcity, if not of famine (Grande Covián 1940, 1943; Calderín 1942) and also of tension. Censorship

was decreed, publications closely monitored, unions outlawed, and mass meetings prohibited, damping, for example, the flow of information on dietary supplements (see chap. 7). Elsewhere in the Western world, such information is considered of broad public interest.

In Asturias, the return to autarchia was doubly harsh, for Nationalists cut off trade between it and the central plateau. This punishing restriction weighed heavily on Asturian urbanites, who had become accustomed to basic imports from Castile. Women from high-lying mountain villages then began to black-marketeer across the passes,^[42] resuming the delocalization of their own food supply that was begun decades earlier.

Niacin had meanwhile, during the Civil War, been synthesized in a U.S. laboratory, and Americans, hearing of an outbreak of pellagra on the front, sent it as a gift to the beleaguered Loyalists (Shapiro 1982). This meant that the communications breakdown during and after the war did not prevent Spanish health officials from learning in a timely manner of this scientific breakthrough, a breakthrough Casals had anticipated but had not had the means to achieve. Indeed, soon after the war, the national journal of public health reported that state clinics were using the "anti-pelagra factor"—the Spanish name for niacin—to treat an outbreak of pellagra (Peraita 1940, Grande Covián and Jiménez García 1941). There is no mention in the Spanish literature, then or later, of niacin being used preventively.

Since neither ignorance nor oversight can explain the use of niacin for exclusively therapeutic ends,^[43] one can infer that the Franco government, fearing prohibitive expense and loss of foreign exchange, hesitated to use niacin as a nutritional supplement. Indeed, Spain's national journal of public health in 1942 published a detailed code of censorship regarding matters of public health, medicine, and pharmaceuticals (Comisión Central de Censura Sanitaria 1942)—a code that suggests the governments's tight control over health information and spending.^[44]

Rationing controlled the production, milling, and distribution of grain during postwar autarchia. Shortages were such that a dark "official bread" was put out, presumably intended to stave off caloric and nutritional deficiencies, whose ingredients included bran and grain of an inferior quality imported from Argentina,

Spain's principal trading partner during the 1940s. Rural and urban people alike maintain that this official bread contained serrín , sawdust. So despised was it, and so intensely loaded with negative associations, that until the 1980s, dark bread of any kind in Spain was generally considered unfit for human consumption. The remark may seem anecdotal until one considers how, throughout Spanish history, wheat and leavened bread have been esteemed while other more lowly staples have been denigrated.

External Influence and Outreach

Autarchia gave way to the austerity of the 1950s, a time during which the West cautiously began to open up trade with Spain. Spain agreed then to lease out military bases to the United States, buying from it in return certain agreed upon American agricultural products: feeds and livestock selected specifically for either meat or milk production. The cows imported into Asturias were Carolina holstein, which, unlike the hardy native casina stock, required stabling, gentle terrain, and feed supplements that also had to be imported. The new livestock forced Asturians to become increasingly dependent on the world market and vulnerable to its fluctuations, but it also enabled Asturias to respond to a rising demand for dairy products, becoming, in a later decade, Spain's number one dairy producer (García Dory, Miguel Angel, and Silvio Martínez Vicente 1988).

This obligatory exchange with the United States marks the beginning of a dietary revolution that has radically increased the proportion of animal fat and protein in the Spanish diet and for the first time in Spanish history, has depressed the consumption of bread. In other words, the United States proved capable of exercising great influence on the Spanish economy and diet. But as we shall see (chap. 7), the United States refrained from exercising such influence in matters of health.

Spanish domestic policy, even under 1950s austerity, guaranteed shoes, bread, and wine for everyone, "to keep Asturians like us from becoming too restless." The policy was so successful that the regional beverage sidra , a mildly alcoholic apple cider, was replaced by wine.^[45] In the wake of this relative affluence, Asturian alcoholism rates soared to one of the highest in the nation.^[46]

When it chose to act decisively, the Spanish government could wield a very significant influence on Spanish health and consumer behavior.

Despite the provisioning of these Spanish basics, restlessness increased, however, and culminated in the late 1950s in illegal strikes, at the forefront of which were Asturian miners. Uneasy, the government was pushed to further set aside its policy of austerity and isolation and took measures to support the integration of Spaniards, largely as guest workers, into an industrialized Europe. An outflow of young villagers thus responded to the European opportunity. This was offset by an inflow of government-sponsored mass tourism, primarily to Spain's Mediterranean beaches. Foreign exchange from tourism, combined with worker remittances from Europe, primed the capital pump and allowed Spain to become, by 1969, the world's tenth most industrial nation (Anuario Estadístico Oficial 1970).

Invisible Deficiencies amid Abundance

By the early 1970s, in the waning years of Francoism, Spain had become a consumer society. Significant among the imports in 1970 were infant formula, pharmaceuticals, and pharmaceutical patent purchases (R. L. Fernandez 1979, 1980). By 1980, the Asturian lactic industry was producing infant formula of a quality that competed with Swiss imports. Spaniards had become Europe's largest per-capita consumers of pharmaceuticals (El País 1981b , Dec. 16), yet no domestic or imported iodized salt had by then come onto the market.

In summer 1983, Grande Covián, the Asturian physician and internationally distinguished research physiologist and national health adviser, declared himself surprised to learn, at Madrid's International Thyroid Conference, that iodine deficiency was still a national problem.^[47] Author of a postwar article on pellagra, he was then about to launch a nationwide educational health campaign aimed at reducing cholesterol consumption and preventing heart disease, diseases brought on, at least in part, by overnutrition (Grande Covián 1975, 1988). His surprise at learning only in 1983 of the continued persistence of IDD in Spain and especially in Asturias, his home province, suggests that (for reasons discussed

in the chapters following this ethnography) chronic, endemic, nutritional diseases can remain invisible to medical experts. Indeed, diseases and disorders of nutrition to which one is habitually conditioned can remain invisible even to the internationally renowned nutritionist/physiologist who is himself a native of an afflicted region.

A brief nutritional ethnography drawn over time, such as has been presented here, shows us historic processes by which ethnic character and caricature are established. Such processes serve in significant ways either to screen and make invisible or to view as hereditary defects those pathological conditions that are in fact chronic or endemic, of nutritional or environmental origin. As long as these conditions are screened or made invisible in this way—by a process of ethnocentric and prejudicial image creation—effective management is either prevented or truncated. But much more is to be said about this process of neglect, benign or otherwise, than can be culled from ethnographic history.