Following news about the EU, one is perplexed that political personalities as different as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson give so much rhetorical importance to seemingly insignificant things, like fruits and vegetables in their “fight for national sovereignty” against the EU. In his 2016 national holiday speech, Orbán used regulating the curvature of cucumbers as a symbol of what is wrong with the EU. Similarly, as part of his Brexit campaign, Johnson claimed as an example of “pointless EU regulations” that “you cannot sell bananas in bunches of more than two or three.”Footnote ¹ There are indeed minute regulations concerning all vegetables and fruits to be sold fresh, which stipulate that in addition to being “intact, sound, firm, clean, non-bitter, and free of foreign smell,” extra and first class produce have to meet the “arc criteria”: they “must be well shaped and practically straight (maximum height of the arc: 10 mm per 10 cm of length of the cucumber)” (No 1677/1988). There are also marketing standards for bananas (No 1333/2011) that deal with their presentation (in wholesale, not in retail as Brexit campaigners claimed). Politicians are not known for investing much in getting their facts right, and these cases were no different. After reading Paprika, Foie Gras, and Red Mud, however, one immediately understands that even though they were not precise, Orbán’s and Johnson’s rhetorical acts captured something fundamental about the EU.

The fixation on material things—veggies, kettles, and toasters, as seen in the Brexit campaign—is symptomatic of the new modality of power the EU represents, according to the fundamental thesis of Paprika, Foie Gras, and Red Mud. Footnote ² The devil is in the details, one could say, as the attention to material detail is what marks this power, which Zsuzsa Gille claims has three main elements: 1) rescaling the state by moving to the transnational level of the EU many things that hitherto were considered the business of the nation-state, such as food and industrial safety; 2) a regulatory shift as laws are replaced by standards and certificate schemes; and 3) the materialization of politics. As a result, Gille argues that discussions seem to be mired in bureaucratic definitions and belong to the world of experts; they are less transparent and less political. Meticulous interest in the curvature of bananas and cucumbers, to put it bluntly, looks like the “the bagatellization of the European Dream”—a peaceful, affluent, environmentally-sustainable, unified Europe that is governed by the rule of law, respectful of human rights and difference, whose citizenry is actively involved in discussing public matters (94). Gille captures it more precisely as the materialization of the European ideal. With the accession of new member-states, discourse on Europe has gained an additional dimension: it has become operationalized to the delight of empirical social scientists and to the dismay of intellectuals, idealists and even politicians who react precisely to such developments. It is especially striking for east Europeans as the comparison with “Europe”—a utopia of sorts—has always lingered in the background when it came to programs, ambitions and criticism. Yet, the regulatory trivialization of European ideals should not be ridiculed, warns Gille; the material civilization of unified Europe is shaped by these regulations and their application is a crucial means of the civilizing mission the EU exerts on new member-states (110).

Gille is not caught up in the analysis of uninspiring bureaucratic texts; she reveals how the new modality of power emerges and operates in three excellent case studies. She makes a case for politicizing the analysis of this diffuse and impersonal power, and demonstrates that the formation of standards and regulations is a historical process driven by not only “watertight science,” as the European Council insists, but concrete economic and political interests that are very much shaped by the important member-states.

The book is all about stuff. The cases deal with three items of processed stuff—two food items, both delicacies, and a poisonous industrial material—and three scandals in EU-member Hungary—a ban, a boycott, and a disaster. Scandals are important as points of breakdown that reveal the normal workings of a system particularly well, so Gille examines the stories of a) the 2004 Hungarian paprika ban; b) the 2008 foie gras boycott; and c) the 2010 red mud spill.

Aflatoxin—a mildly harmful mycotoxin not found in Hungary—was detected in Hungarian powdered paprika in 2004. The mystery was solved by establishing that Hungarian paprika contained a pepper imported from Brazil and Spain. Gille’s analysis reveals the complex web of transnational connections, trade liberalization, and the price pressures of competition faced by processors and producers. Spanish peppers did not count as an import any longer, and were not checked, while Brazilian spice peppers were not on the list of outside EU items to be checked at their point of entry into the EU, and they were also cheaper than Hungarian peppers. Interestingly, the discovery was made by the national state authorities as a result of habits formed by stricter pre-accession standards. Even more interestingly, following the scandal, there is still no mandatory control on Brazilian pepper.

In 2008, German and Austrian animal-rights activists initiated a boycott of Hungarian foie gras based on the inhumane treatment of geese, including the practice of force-feeding them (gavage) and their barn conditions. As a result, most German and Austrian chains stopped selling not only Hungarian foie gras, but all Hungarian poultry products. Still, the boycott did not lead to a complete ban on gavage. What looked like a campaign for ethical consumption was heavily entangled with the political economy. While Hungary was the largest exporter of foie gras to the EU, France is its largest producer, which has also declared foie gras part of its national heritage. The boycott failed not because foie gras was important for Hungarian national identity, but because it was equally important for France, thus a European-wide ban on its production stood no chance. There are wonderful descriptions of the two parallel expert discourses of animal keepers and activists, the latter not being able to tell the difference between a duck and a goose to the delight of the former, further complicating the analysis of expert knowledge (67).

In 2010, red mud—a toxic sludge and byproduct of aluminum production—flooded three villages in Hungary. The environmental disaster was not a mere accident due to the greed of producers, or the complicated ownership structure of aluminum-producing companies following privatization; it was also the result of regulation. Hungary religiously followed the EU’s regulation of waste. The EU, however, used a slightly different production process and waste disposal mechanism for aluminum that was widespread in western Europe, where red mud was not considered hazardous waste. What surprises the reader is that the classification of red mud did not change even after the disaster, and EU representatives proposed instead that the company should make technological changes to conform to the European model that underpinned regulation (87).

It is through these stories that the EU is revealed as a new power constellation; transnational, impersonal, and bureaucratic; busy with regulating material details but, as Gille points out, still driven by particular interests, thus qualifying for a political analysis. Gille successfully navigates the field between poststructuralist approaches and a more traditional political analysis and interrogates practices of governmentality as well as those of purposeful, potent actors. The techniques of power may not serve systematic and coherent interests but she convincingly demonstrates that they systematically benefit some more than others. Paprika was important only for Hungary, which was not enough to put its regulation on the table. Foie gras was dear also to French national interests, and regulations were formulated according to those, not changing in the face of scandal for the same reason. Waste disposal was regulated on the basis of west European production technologies before the disaster and remained unchanged afterwards.

The discussion of these cases goes beyond the EU and its relationship to its east European members. The book engages with larger debates concerning the nature of neoliberalism and explores through captivating examples the dialectic of free trade and regulation. The anxieties accompanying trade liberalization lead to increased regulation and standardization, as origin and quality—crucial in foodstuffs—are increasingly difficult to establish. Yet, regulation is uneven, in some cases EU membership amounts to the deregulation of safety standards, such as in the case of paprika (41). Standardization, while it makes free trade easier, also goes against how nature works, and producers and processors are often pressed by regulations to “make up for shortcomings in nature” (41), thus creating incentives for food fraud, as happened in the paprika case when import peppers were added to local produce in order to enhance color.

In a sense, one almost does not need the last chapters that follow the three case studies. Not because they are not thoughtful but because the application of theory is so successful in the case studies: they go well beyond being case studies and maneuver the weaving together of micro-macro and concrete-abstract levels of analysis. Their contribution is the spelling out of the theoretical and methodological debates that underlie the analysis. One such debate concerns scales and the study of globalization. With other critics of globalism, Gille asks: can globalization be studied through non-global means, and if yes, how?Footnote ³ In response she argues for disentangling the level of abstraction (concrete/particular versus abstract/universal) from social and geographical scale (micro/local versus macro/global) (16), and gives a perfect example of how the materialization of politics is best seen from a global perspective. She also joins a larger discussion in social theory on how best to integrate material configurations into the analysis of human activity, building on various “materialist” and practice-based approaches. She proves that attention to the material can not only make for better theory, but better politics and an original book as well.