Origin – USA – followthethings.com

“How Sushi Went Global“
A popular academic research article by Theordore Bestor published in the Foreign Policy journal.
Image of paper journal printout embedded above. Click image to access the .pdf version here. Click here to read the online version (which includes only the article’s text).

If you want the best bluefin tuna for your sushi, it has to be graded in the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. But the fish are farmed and caught in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and elsewhere. And the restaurants where you can eat it are all over the world. So whose lives are connected through this intricate global trade? How did it develop? And what can sushi tell us about globalisation? That’s what an American anthropologist Ted Bestor wants to find out. He travels to different places in this tuna supply chain – a fish dock in Maine, USA; a Mediterranean fishing town in Spain; and Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market. He sees tuna caught and off the US and Spanish coasts being graded in Tokyo to sell in the fanciest sushi restaurants around the world. They travel, iced, in containers called ‘tuna coffins’ in the bellies of Boeing 747 jets. Years ago, except in Japan, these fish were only suitable for sports fishers or cat food manufacturers. But what’s developed as sushi has gone global is a sophisticated international trade feeding the popularisation of Japanese cuisine. These fish cross cultures and following their movements helps Bestor to vividly explain the concept of globalisation. Commenters say his article provides a view of globalisation that’s embedded in and between social relations in specific places. It’s a well old story, a gem of a ‘follow the thing’ study that’s widely used in classrooms around the world.

Page reference: Olivia Hoffman and Erin Teich (2012) How Sushi Went Global. followthethings.com/how-sushi-went-global.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 23 minutes.

Posted on December 12, 2024January 8, 2025 by Mark

A Global Positioning System

followthethings.com
Electronics | Home & Auto

2006

UNBRANDED

GPS NAVIGATION ASSISTANT

SOURCED IN THE PHILIPPINES

SOURCED IN SOUTH KOREA

SOURCED IN SOUTH AFRICA

SOURCED IN ANGOLA

SOURCED IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

TAKE IT TO PIECES

TRACK & TRACE

FOLLOW THE THING

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

“A Global Positioning System“
A art work / animated film created by Melanie Jackson, first exhibited at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, UK.
Two screengrabs from the film are featured above. Watch it in full on the artist’s website here.

If you’re interested in finding out who makes your stuff, it’s important to make a strategic choice about what stuff is best to follow. Artist Melanie Jackson makes an excellent choice – what better to guide your way than the technology that helps to guide your way. An in-car GPS Navigation Assistant. The kind of device you could buy in the 2000s to stick to your dashboard. Type in the destination, and it would help you on your way, showing the route on screen. She gets some funding for a trip to China to visit a factory where they are assembled. But this isn’t anything like enough of the story of this thing. She looks into its in many many ingredients, and finds out where and by whom they are sourced. She reads news stories, collects photographs, and turn to drawing to bring all of these connections together into a 12 minute animated film. There’s something magical about animation. It’s obvious that animation is not an objective account of the life of a thing, but something that’s been imagined and made. Animation allows the complexities of trade to be conveyed in a way that would otherwise be impossible either because the scale of the task would be too enormous, or because permission would not be granted to access the industrial sites that matter. There’s a powerful argument that’s made about ‘follow the thing’ research that things can be – for these reasons – ‘unfollowable (see Hulme 2017). But animation – and other creative approaches to thing-following (click the ‘make the hidden visible’ tactic button) – provide means to work around this. This is a mind-blowing film. Its amazing what you can learn in 12 minutes!

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) A Global Positioning System. followthethings.com/a-global-positioning-system.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 20 minutes.

Posted on December 11, 2024January 28, 2025 by Ian Cook

Inside Job

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Money & Finance

EXPERIENCED WORLDWIDE

DOCUMENTARY FILM

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

FOLLOW THE MONEY

FIND THE CHARACTERS

INCLUDE EMOTION

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

BRING REGULATORS INTO VIEW

BRING ACADEMICS INTO VIEW

JOIN THE DOTS

JUXTAPOSE EXTREMES

INVOLVE A CELEBRITY

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

BLAME, SHAME & GUILT

“Inside Job“
A documentary film directed by Charles Ferguson, produced by Charles Ferguson, Audrey Marrs & Jeffrey Lurie & narrated by Matt Damon for Mongrel Media & Sony Pictures Classic.
Official trailer embedded above. Search online to watch the full movie here.

In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, filmmaker Charles Ferguson sets out to find out how and by whom it was caused. This involves understanding and explaining complex financial instruments (like sub-prime mortgages and collateralised debt obligations), the governance of international finance and its deregulation (and its consequences), eye-watering banking losses (over $20 trillion), the organisations and individuals responsible for this happening (in financial services, government, academia) and the people plunged into poverty and homelessness after defaulting on their mortgages. The complexity is explained clearly in the film by narrator Matt Damon. And by the talking heads who Ferguson recruits to talk about what happened, their role in it, how they see their responsibilities, why so much public money was spent bailing them out, and why none of them went to jail. For many audience members, it’s shocking to see executives explaining how business works on camera. The logics and passions that drive their work, and the values that they express, can seem removed from the world, callous and dehumanising. But the experts who come out of this film looking worst are the academic economists. One of the biggest impacts of this film is the way that it encourages university business schools to look more closely at their ethics. Who are economists working for, and how responsible is their education of new generations of economists if their ideas remain unchanged after the Crisis? This is another example showing how important and how difficult it is to ‘follow the money’. But like any following study, it’s also about the ways that responsibility – in this case, for a colossal economic injustice – is understood, shared, taken. And where it isn’t. The solution sees obvious to many – regulation! But it’s not happening. If one film was going to cause a revolution, one commentor states, it would be this one. And this is just a taster page for this film. We’ll add much more detail later…

Page reference: Dom Ebbetts, Dave Simpson, Michael Brent, Mickey Franklin, Tommy Sadler & Charlie Timms (2024) Inside Job (taster). followthethings.com/inside-job.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes.

Posted on December 9, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Barracetamol’s Family Reunion

'Hi, I'm Barracetamol.'
'This is my old friend Benson. I never knew whayt we was talking about until I read this.'
'Me, back with my half broither talc!'
'Multivitamins and iron contain maize starch and talk just like me... I was separated from the talc in those vitamins many years ago in a talc mine'.
Barracetamil put on some neon face paint. Guess what? It contains talc.
Boozy Barry 'just chilling with my maize starch pals x.'
'I LOVE UNCLE COSTA CUP. We are made of the same materials! xxxxxxxxxxx.'
'Everyone I meet says I look a bit pasty so I decided to reunite the Talc in me with another product using talc-bronzer!'
'This royal red paint may contain talc'.
'I heard my friends in people's suitcases.'
'I stopped using toothpaste as it contains talc.'
'With my American cousins in Providence, R.I.: June 2013'.

followthethings.com
Health & Beauty | Home & Auto

“Barracetamol’s Family Reunion“
A cartoon character created, brought to life, placed, photographed and posted online by Elaine King, Nancy Scotford, Rosie Cotgreave, Katie Lewis, Jack Ledger, Alice Wakeley, Olivia Rogers, Dennis Yeung, Isabelle Baker and Hannah Willard.
Original interview with Barracetamol below. Family reunion photos available on Flickr here. Barracetamol’s twitter feed here. Download Barracetamol’s Family Reunion Action Pack here to print and place your own Barracetamol.

In 2012, students start the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ by researching different examples of trade justice activism to add to the followthethings.com website (not all of them made it). Next, students who have researched different examples come together to create their own original examples of trade justice activism. They pick up some important ideas from their own research and what has already been published here on followthethings.com. They know the importance of taking commodities to pieces by looking through their ingredients and searching each one for mining, factory, farm and other human stories from their origins. They know the importance for filmmakers and activists of finding or creating a charismatic character for their audience members to relate to and empathise with. They’re familiar with literature arguing – and examples showing – that commodities have their own agentic power, can teach us things, and can be imagined coming alive and teaching us a few things. One group of students chooses something they all carry around with them: paracetamol. They look through its list of ingredients on the box. And look them up online. They find stories about talc and its miners and magnesium stearate and its connection to palm oil workers. These ingredients aren’t even in the pills, but they do help to make them. They use news stories to follow these two ingredients to their possible origins, and then turn around and look back towards their consumption. Yes, these workers and these ingredients help to make the paracetamol they carry around with them. But they start looking at the ingredients in other products, and find that talc and/or magnesium stearate are loads of other commodities too: toothpaste, paint, bronzer, beer and more. The task of the paracetamol cartoon character that they create – Barracetamol – is to go shopping with them, to find his missing relations, and to have his photo taken with related commodities with a little caption to post on his socials. He’s trying to tap into the vibe of those tear-jerking family reunion shows on TV. A familiar genre. The group’s creative process seems silly. The students enjoy it. They find it funny a lot of the time. But there’s a serious message about commodity-following behind this. At a teardown-level, countless commodities have the same ingredients sourced from the same places, mined and made by the same people. So a simple ‘this comes from there and therefore I should or should not buy it’ narrative obscures the complex interconnectedness of things in the global economy. Not everything is made for its final consumer. Barracetamol tries to convey a more complex story in a relatable way. Group member Nancy imagines that these moving reunions have made Barracetamol a minor celebrity. So he’s profiled in a magazine. Below you can read the interview.

Page reference: Elaine King, Nancy Scotford, Rosie Cotgreave, Katie Lewis, Jack Ledger, Alice Wakeley, Olivia Rogers, Dennis Yeung, Isabelle Baker & Hannah Willard (2012) Barracetamol’s Family Reunion. followthethings.com/barracetamols-family-reunion.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 27 minutes.

Posted on November 22, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

The Luckiest Nut In The World

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Grocery

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

TEACH ECONOMICS

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

KNOW YOUR HISTORY

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

BRING REGULATORS INTO VIEW

JUXTAPOSE EXTREMES

TELL A STORY

MAKE IT FUNNY

“The Luckiest Nut In The World“
An animated film written, produced & Directed by Emily James for Fulcrum TV, broadcast in the UK on Channel 4’s Alt-TV series.
Film embedded in full above. Search online for shorter versions and versions with subtitles here.

Who better to explain the rules of international trade than a commodity that has seen it all? An American peanut who wears a stetson hat, plays the guitar, and sings songs about the rules of world trade that work in his favour. Along the way he enlists help from experts and from public information films. Yes, he’s the ‘luckiest nut in the world’ and, as he learns about other less lucky nuts around the world (groundnuts in Senegal, cashew nuts in Mozambique, and brazil nuts in Bolivia), he finds out that it doesn’t have to be this way. All of the world’s nuts – and the people and economies that could benefit from growing and selling them – could be just as lucky is the rules governing world trade weren’t stacked against them. Filmmaker Emily James uses animation to do the impossible: to make these rules, and the inequalities they help to create, not only understandable but entertaining. The film becomes a hit with school teachers. Some of their students say they’re bored with its content, but others say they can’t help humming the songs, mouthing their WTO lyrics. It’s a catchy way to learn some pretty boring but important information about hope the world works (and years before Horrible Histories began). This is an early example of animated film doing what and academic cook or a documentary films cannot. In this case, making abstract content accessible, making the hidden visible, and explaining trade injustice to wider publics in an engaging – funny, weird, you name it – way. ‘What would commodities tell us about their lives if they could talk?’ is an intriguing question that’s answered in some of the earliest follow the thing ‘it-narrative’ writing [see our page on a 1760 travel novel written by a coin here]. ‘What would a commodity sing about its life if it could … um … sing?’ is a question answered, in our experience, only by this film. Thank you Emily.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2011) The Luckiest Nut In The World. followthethings.com/the-luckiest-nut-in-the-world.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 19 minutes.

Posted on November 15, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

King Corn: Your Are What You Eat

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Grocery

APPLE & CRANBERRY JUICE

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THINGS

TAKE THEM TO PIECES

FLIP THE SCRIPT

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

CULTIVATE RELATIONSHIPS

BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

MAKE IT FUNNY

STREISAND EFFECT

“King Corn: Your Are What You Eat“
A documentary directed and starring Ian Cheney & Curt Ellis for Mosaic Films (US)
Official trailer embedded above. Search online to watch the full movie here. Movie website here.

What better way to find out where your food comes from than growing it yourself and following where it goes? That’s what college friends Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis do by growing an acre of corn in the US state of Iowa. This isn’t the corn you’d eat on the cob, though. This corn tastes horrible. It’s inedible. It’s a starch crop that ends up as an ingredient in countless other industrial foods: like burgers, twinkies, apple juice. Corn is ‘the raw material for an overweight society’, a major cause of obesity diabetes. You can’t get away from it. Americans are all part corn (test your hair!). But who controls this trade? And who is if good for? The consumers who eat all that junk food? The corporations who dominate its growing and processing? The government who could (maybe should) change the nation’s farming policy? Ian and Curt’s ‘grow your own’ approach to supply chain activism is innovative. They present themselves as a couple of naive, funny ‘guys’, just out of college. They have no farming experience. They move from Boston to Iowa and buy some land. Plant some corn. Watch it grow (not much work is required). They ask for help from other farmers. They follow corn from production to consumption by producing and trying to sell it to processors. But they don’t want to help, so these two guys try to process it themselves, making High Fructose Corn Syrup (the sweetener in so much junk food) in their kitchen. The film is a hit. It exposes a truth about US agriculture which the ‘Corn Producers of America’ trade body does not appreciate. They hope it will inspire audiences to act politically to chabge the health of their society for the better. Its not about shopping for different products, because corn is in everything. To counter the film’s message, the CPA invest in an advertising campaign – including an iconic TV ad – about the harmlessness of corn. The filmmakers produce a parody ad about the harmlessness of tobacco. Then iconic satirical US TV show Saturday Night Live gets in on the act, making its own parody ad about the harmlessness of corn. So much sarcasm! This is another example we have found of an industry’s attempts to silence – in this case quite a mild – critique of how things are made. As we might expect, this critique draws so much attention to the original film, that it means more people know about it. For the filmmakers, it’s free publicity.

Page reference: Yahellah Best, Melanie Garunay, Melissa Logan & Andrea McWilliams (2024) King Corn: You Are What You Eat. followthethings.com/king-corn-you-are-what-you-eat.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 40 minutes.

Posted on September 20, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Hard To Follow Things: Natural Gas

Field photograph, taken in 2015. A Northern Gas Networks repair team responds to a reported gas leak in County Durham. The way gas drew actors such as these in to respond to its escape provided a valuable opportunity for me to talk to practitioners and to observe the practices they employed to visualise and govern natural gas.
Field photograph of a section of low-pressure distribution pipe, taken in Middlesborough in 2015. This pipe has been excavated as part of a nation-wide programme of pipeline replacement.
Field photograph taken in 2015 during a visit to a meter calibration facility, owned by DNV-GL.

followthethings.com
Home & Auto

SOURCED FROM THE NORTH SEA

USED IN THE UK

FOLLOW IT YOURSELF

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

FOLLOW THE THING

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

“Hard To Follow Things: Natural Gas“
A blog post by Peter Forman originally published on the followthethings.com blog.
Available in full below. Originally published here.

PhD student Peter Forman wants to follow the thing, but his thing is natural gas. That’s a difficult thing to follow. Most of the things that people follow could be held in their hand, placed in their shopping bag. But it’s difficult and dangerous to do that with gas. Most of the things that people follow clearly come from somewhere. This banana was grown in this country. This phone was assembled in that country. But natural gas molecules from different sources get mixed up, so you can’t follow this commodity from source to destination, from production to consumption. It also gets from A to B underground, along pipes whose exactly network is a closely guarded secret. So how do you follow gas? For Peter, you find the places where it comes to the surface, in infrastructure, where it leaks, where the gas company vans and workers are digging holes, mending and replacing piping, that kind of thing. Thing-followers know that their thing is going to be a co-author of their work. It’s going to shape the way they work, and how they can study it. Nothing is impossible to follow, you just need some creative thinking, theorising and fieldwork strategies to work it out. As Peter says a the end of his post, ‘Every “thing” introduces its own challenges for study, and as thing-followers, we must be attentive to these specificities, continue to develop novel strategies for dealing with these difficulties, and continue to share our experiences of the challenges encountered.’ He’s sharing his experiences below.

Page reference: Pete Forman (2024) Hard To Follow Things: Natural Gas. followthethings.com/hard-to-follow-things-natural-gas.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes.

Posted on September 2, 2024January 26, 2025 by Ian Cook

Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt

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Fashion

MULTIMEDIA JOURNALISM

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

CROWDFUND YOUR WORK

HAVE IT MADE

MAKE IT META

“Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt“
A podcast series, webdoc & YouTube playlist in NPR’s ‘Planet Money’ series produced by Alex Blumberg.
YouTube playlist embedded above. Listen to the Podcast series here. Visit the webdoc here. Visit the NPR store here.

The USA National Public Radio’s ‘Planet Money’ plans a series of programmes on the international cotton industry, from seed to t-shirt. But they’re not interested in investigating who makes K-Mart or Walmart or H&M t-shirts. Instead, they launch a kickstarter campaign. If enough people pledge $25, their reporters will travel the world to find out who makes a T-shirt that they commission. This means that they can talk directly to farmers, factory owners, workers, shippers and others involed in bringing that shirt to the market. If they find stories of environmental or labour exploitation, it’s their own brand that will be damaged. 25,000 are made. Each features a squirrel hoisting a martini glass (a jokey reference to what economist John Maynard Keynes referred to as capitalism’s ‘animal spirits’). Each pledger was sent a t-shirt as a reward for their investment. Other people could buy one from NPR’s online store.

Page reference: Emelia Price, Steph Small, Sophie Blakstand, Maisie Jenyon, Catt Suttie, Hannah Cookson, Laura Johnston & Abigail Spink (2025) Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt (taster). followthethings.com/planet-money-makes-a-t-shirt.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.

Posted on August 28, 2024January 8, 2025 by Ian Cook

T-Shirt Travels

followthethings.com
Fashion | Recycle my waste

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

START SOMEWHERE DIFFERENT

FOLLOW THE THING

“T-Shirt Travels“
A documentary film produced & directed by Shantha Bloemen for Grassroots Pictures.
Watch on Alexander Street here (with institutional login). Search for other streaming options here.

Filmmaker Shantha Bloemen is working as an aid worker in a village in Zambia. She is surprised to see Western band t-shirts being worn by people who could never have heard their music. She wonders how they got there, why people are wearing them. It turns out that they were donated to thrift stores in the USA, were shipped overseas in bundles and bought by garment traders in Zambia to sell in street market stalls. By following the afterlives of thrown-away clothing, she connects good post-consumer behaviours in the West – like charity donation and recycling – with the disruption of economies in the underdeveloped world where they are cheaper to buy than locally-made clothes. She finds that an AC/DC or Chanel t-shirt can connect the life of the Zambian child who is wearing it to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s shaping of global trade’s ‘economic colonialism’. Bloemen’s film also makes a point that’s important to our collection – that ‘follow the thing’ work is not only about where things come from, but also where they go.

Page reference: Hannah-Rose Mann & Rebecca McGoldrick (2011) T-Shirt Travels. followthethings.com/t-shirt-travels.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 28 minutes.

–

Posted on August 28, 2024February 20, 2025 by Ian Cook

University Lifestyle: Fabulously British

followthethings.com
Fashion | Grocery | Electronics | Home & Auto

“University Lifestyle: Fabulously British“
Undergraduate coursework designed & written by Charlotte Brunton.
Available in full in slideshow above. High resolution download available here.

After researching examples of trade justice activism to add to this site, students taking CEO Ian’s ‘Geographies of material culture’ module at the University of Exeter are tasked to make their own. Charlotte Brunton’s inspiration comes from the junk mail arriving at her student house. Instead of getting interesting letters, she and her housemates get student fashion catalogues. In particular, Jack Wills catalogues – six or more every season. They’re selling students an ‘aspirational’ lifestyle, tempting them to buy the commodities they feature. The people in them, the things they have, the carefree, stylish and connected lifestyles they picture – the designers want students to want them. Charlotte and her friends imagine themselves using this, wearing that, experiencing the lifestyles these things can support, together. But who made these things? What about their lifestyles? Charlotte asks herself how she can create a catalogue that highlights how personal these things are both to her and to the people who made them? In real life, she has an interdependent, culture-crossing, ‘British’ life which they are very much part of. So she designs a ‘lifestyle catalogue’ that you can browse to imagine and buy into with her.

Page reference: Charlotte Brunton (2014) University Lifestyle: Fabulously British. followthethings.com/university-lifestyle-fabulously-british.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated browsing time: 15 minutes.

Field photograph of a section of low-pressure distribution pipe, taken in Middlesborough in 2015. This pipe has been excavated as part of a nation-wide programme of pipeline replacement.

Field photograph taken in 2015 during a visit to a meter calibration facility, owned by DNV-GL.