Favored Flowers

Billions of fresh-cut flowers are flown into the United States every year, allowing Americans to choose from a broad array of blooms regardless of the season. Favored Flowers is a lively investigation of the worldwide production and distribution of fresh-cut flowers and their consumption in the New York metropolitan area. In an ethnography filled with roses, orchids, and gerberas, with dirt, new hybrids, refrigerated trucks, and loud international auctions, Catherine Ziegler illuminates the interconnected economic and cultural factors shaping the global flower market. As she points out, cut flowers serve no utilitarian purpose; they reflect consumers' social and cultural decisions about how to show love, indicate mourning, or decorate a living room. Ziegler considers how consumer choices have changed over time and how they are shaped by the media and by the flowers made available to them. Most of her focus, though, is on others in the commodity chain: exporters, importers, wholesalers, and retailers. She follows their activities as they respond to competitors and changes in supply and consumer behavior from within a market characterized by risk, volatility, and imperfect knowledge. Ziegler interviewed more than 250 people as she followed flowers along the full length of the commodity chain, from seeds in Europe and South America to vases on tables in and around New York. She provides an historical overview of the development of the cut flower industry in New York from the late nineteenth century to 1970, and from then forward, as what had been a domestic industry became a global one. She examines the daily experiences of flower growers in the Netherlands and Ecuador, two of the leading exporters of flowers to the United States. Considering changes in the wholesale and retail systems, she traces the development of two distinct commodity chains within New York during the 1980s: a high-end luxury market served by specialty florists and designers, and a lower-priced mass market served by chain groceries, corner delis, and retail superstores.